absolution

A few of my friends know this story, and so for those of you who have heard it already I'm sorry to bore you. However, since capital G God seems to be coming up frequently in conversations lately, I think it needs to be told.

Although my mother is Lutheran and my father was a devout born-again Pentecostal, my older sister and I attended a Catholic school. If you were to ask my mother why she sent us there, she will tell you because she felt we would somehow fare better morally, since she and my father were divorced.

First Communion, for anyone who wonders, and for lack of a better way of putting it, is the occasion on which you, the child, make a conscious choice to be accountable for your sins. Once you have learned the catechism and taken your first communion, you are thereafter responsible for clearing up your own debts to God. This is accomplished by going to Confession. When I was 6 or 7-ish, I remember preparing for First Communion alongside my classmates. Although I wasn't baptized and wasn't receiving the formal teaching of the catechism, I took the whole thing very seriously. In preparation for our first visit to the confessional, we were each handed a square of fabric and a grease pencil. We were instructed to make a mark on the fabric for each sin we committed in the week leading up to First Communion - each time we disobeyed our parents or teachers, fought with our siblings, fibbed, etc.

I was diligent in keeping tabs on my sins. By the end of the week my little scrap of fabric was almost completely black. As ashamed as I was, I had hope in my heart, because after First Communion I would have the means to be free from my sins. I was taking my relationship with God to the next level, and very excited about it, very excited at the prospect of confessing my sins and saying my rosaries and being absolved and one day being welcomed into God's great kingdom...

Now, I was pretty young, so some of my memory is fuzzy, but I have distinct recollections of being at the Basilica, rag in hand, dressed in my pretty brown dress with yellow and orange flowers. I remember the smell of beeswax and static electricity in the air, and feeling like I was surrounded by angels, literal and figuratively, all the pretty white dresses and ringlets and shiny, shiny shoes... I remember the rest of my classmates filing to the back of the church, and an enormous hand pressing down on my chest so that I would sit back down in the pew - not baptized, so no First Communion.

I was crushed. I remember feeling desperate, like a caged or drowning animal. I could barely breathe and a dense mass of terror welled up inside me. Why wasn't I up there with all of them? What had I done wrong? How could this be happening? Everything after that is hazy. Hands, hugs, congratulations flew around me, cards, and satin-lined velvet jewelry cases and white paper boxes with cotton batting containing sparkly crystal or milky opalescent new rosaries were opened and placed in eager outstretched hands, but not mine, which still contained a wadded ball of grease-pencil covered cloth, emperical evidence of my blackened soul.

Over the years my anger grew, and by the time I graduated high school, I was full of contempt and bitterness towards God, Christianity, and particularly Catholicism. Outside I was quite vocally opposed to organized religion, and was as bad for trying to turn Christians away from God as some Christians are at drawing you in. I know this hurt my father, and concerned most of my Christian extended family, but I didn't care - God and the devil were one and the same to me, and I simply didn't give a damn. Inside, I felt condemned. I was a sinner, a bad bad girl, and there was no hope for me. I tried to live a good life, and do the right thing, and of course when things went awry I felt I was just taking my punishment for being an unlovable loathesome little girl.

Fast forward 20 years. I'm 27. I'm in Italy with a wonderful friend and companion. I swore to him, if I was in Italy, I had to see the Vatican, HAD to get to Rome, and so we took the train down from Vicenza and spent a day meandering around on foot. The statues, the fountains, the piazzas, the pigeons, the architecture, the people. The winding cobblestone alleys and the scooters and tiny cars and bicycles. Wine, gelato, espresso, olive oil and vinegar on dark green salads with deep red tomatoes. I was light-headed for most of the day, vibrating, a bundle of tension. I thought it might have been the wine, or the heat, or the excitement - as a foreigner, it's pretty hard not to be on sensory overload in a place like Rome. In retrospect, though, I know now that it was fear. That same feeling of terror I had had sitting in the pew while all my friends went to be absolved of their sins.

I procrastinated, shooting 2 rolls of film of the angels alit on pedestals along the Ponte Sant Angelo before continuing towards the dome set off on the horizon. As we took the last stretch up to the Vatican, after stopping to buy a pile of rosaries for everyone back home, I was weak in the knees. Passing into St. Peter's Square, I went stiff. I didn't belong there. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach I felt positive there was a bolt of lightening waiting to come and zap me from that place the moment I crossed the threshold. My dear travelling companion must have thought I was in a trance or something - I remember trembling and forging on through the crowds and forcing myself to take a deep breath and walk up the stairs and go INSIDE St. Peter's.

I began weeping. Not sobbing, not bawling, just silently weeping, huge free-flowing streams of tears running down my cheeks and making it impossible for me to operate my camera. The mosaics and paintings, the statuary, the enormous marble baptismal font, and the intricately carved details on the confessionals, and angels. Everywhere the cherubs and angels. I stopped directly under the apex, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply. I'm pretty sure it was at that exact moment that I had an epiphany, literally. In that moment, the church went silent and I swear I heard those angels singing, and something in me was lifted, some great burden I had carried all those years like a cement casing around my heart was cracked.

The tears stopped. The shaking stopped. A huge smile spread across my face. What I had realized, in that instance, was that although I had for years carried around an enormous amount of guilt, and huge emotional burden, the God, being God, could not, WOULD not, have sent me to hell for not carrying a membership to the Catholic Church, not even the Catholic God Himself. 20 years of my life had I spent feeling doomed, and flippantly denouncing the church and hating God. As I sat there with my beloved companion sharing a last late-afternoon glass of wine, I was flooded with memories of girls in white dresses with ringlets in their hair, and white paper boxes with cotton batting and opalesent rosaries, and that night when I closed my eyes, I saw nothing but angels.

When I returned home to Canada, I needed to verify something. Having a supressed memory resurface, for anoyone who hasn't experienced it, is pretty surreal. You remember the events, the details, the smells, the way you felt - but because it hasn't been a part of conscious memory for so long, you question if it's real or imagined. I went into the basement and dug out a box from the storage room. From beneath a pair of pink and purple dresses and the Raggedy Ann costume my Mom sewed for me when I was 8, and amidst an assortment of dolls, toy teacups, and other such memorabilia, I unearthed my music box, which had long since stopped playing music. I screwed the winder off the back, opened the lid, and carefully pried the music box dancer forward. The dancer's little stage came away from the edge with little effort, and there in a wad, was that damned piece of grease-pencilled cloth.

I shook my head and opened it up, feeling more than a little silly and random. In my mind's eye, I'm sure that cloth was about 18" square, at the very least, and blacker than soot. But there it was, not much bigger than a cocktail napkin and bearing 10, maybe 12 stripes. I put the music box dancer back up, screwed the winder back on, and wound it. I had forgotten it played, "Jesus Loves Me."

Later that night I burnt that rag. I had made peace with God, and peace within myself, and was able to let go of all the tension I held in regards to Christianity. I think that was the first time I truly experienced the beauty of forgiving. I forgave the owner of that massive hand that pressed me down in that pew, I forgave myself for the wrongs I had done, I forgave the neighbour's dog for pooping on my lawn... Forgiveness flowed from me and through me and I felt completely at peace for the first time in over 20 years.

Sadly for my Dad and those family members who fear for my mortal soul, making peace with God didn't bring me back to the church. In fact, it was what freed me to embrace taoist principles, while taoist principle allows me to embrace Christianity in a way that would not otherwise be possible. Because I harboured so much guilt and tension, and still have that tendency, I often refer to myself a a recovering non-card-carrying Catholic. That 'lifting' feeling that came to me in the Vatican is what I presume the desirable connection feels like, almost like a hum that resonates in perfect harmony with everyone and everything on and in and around the universe. I have learned to accept and respect the channels each person takes to experience that lifting where they are in touch with their spiritual self, whether that is through God, or god or Buddha or Allah, or the trees and leaves and flowers, or Zeus and Hera... I don't have an appropriate label or name, so I refer to it simply as the Powers That Be.

I don't think organized religion is required to experience that lifting, and I don't think any one religion has it all right, though most (barring cults and other weirdness as such) have a fairly similar mandate. I like the Ten Commandments myself - they are a great concise summary of how to behave - though it is my understanding that every religion has similar guidelines. I often disagree with people's interpretation of scripture, ritual, and tradition, regardless of which set of writings they ascribe to, and in the same token find people's ignorance and intolerance unbearable. That 'lifting' is what each of our spirits craves, and there are many paths. I personally have several channels that have and do get me to that 'lifting' including my children when they laugh so hard they can hardly breathe, doing yoga, taking pictures, listening to native drumming, singing Christmas Carols, my body fitting together like puzzle pieces with my husband's no matter how we flop into bed, inhaling that humid earthy smell just before a good rainfall, and feeling thunder rumble in the pit of my belly. I feel connected, and part of something greater than I have words to describe.

I told my sister about this last summer after my Daddy died. As his body coooled in a bed not 10 feet from me, my stepmom got on her knees and told me my Daddy was going to watch me burn in hell if I didn't accept Jesus into my heart right now. Although I had already accepted Jesus, on my *own* terms, and felt well-established on my own spiritual path, it threw me right back there, and I was 7 years old again, denied absolution, unworthy, bad. It tooks me weeks to shake it. My sister asked, "Why?" I said, "I guess I've just always wanted someone to tell me I'm a good girl." She was shocked, and had no idea I had carried that with me all my life.

My Dad would probably have liked to imagine that God Himself gave me this path to walk, parallel in virtue and nature, since I refuse to follow in his footsteps. I've also had to reassure my Stepmom (though I'm sure she doesn't believe me) that me and her God are OK. Maybe I'm going about it all wrong, but I like to believe that if I do have it all wrong, whoever it is who's in charge of things on Judgment day will at least give me a merit award. And a friend of mine said yesterday that she doesn't care to know if that 'lifting' is simply a neurological blip or not - it's much nicer to just experience and enjoy it without dismantling it. I kind of like that I was born before science had all the answers. Imagine how boring life would be without any wonder.