I Remember Sunday

When I was still in single digits and attending Catholic grade school, my soul was shaped like a pear. It had to be, since the only reasonable alternative was an apple, and my heart already had a lock on that.

Each organ in my body looked like one kind of fruit or another, and the nuns assured me my soul qualified in every physiological respect as an internal organ. Watermelons were too large, lemons were too sour. Oranges lent themselves too much to making juice. That pretty much left pears. Pineapples and mangoes might have served in other geographic regions, but if you attended Catholic grade school in north central Illinois in the 1960s and you needed a fruit to represent your soul, you settled on pears or else resigned yourself to amorphous abstractions.

Each time I committed a sin a black spot appeared on my pear. If I went to confession I could have the spot removed. Problem was, boys sinned more often than they confessed, and I was not made of the necessary stuff to buck the trend. The nuns warned us it was possible to blacken the entire surface of our pears. If that happened, they said, we belonged to Beelzebub.

They also warned us about the chief cause of blindness: "No fiddling while piddling in that bathroom, you hear me?"

Sometimes you could get away with being bad because there was somebody who was worse. Harold Noogins was the worst of all. Harold Noogins is now middle aged, same as me, and probably regrets all the times he peeked under a skirt or ripped a noisy fart. It gets to the point where no amount of scrubbing will restore your pear to its original hue. Harold Noogins can help little old ladies across the street till Kingdom Come, yet he'll always be the goon who threw rocks in the schoolyard and slapped erasers together to make dust clouds. Harold Noogins will burn in Hell.

The only spots you could fully remove from your pear were those deposited by sins you were willing to confess. If you were sure, as I was, that the priest reported to your parents via walkie-talkie from inside the confessional, you edited your laundry list selectively and allowed certain spots to accumulate—until you got the chance to confess in another parish. Maybe even in another country. By the time I entered fourth grade I was ready for an organ transplant.

To be fair, only very bad sins like murder and talking in church sent you to Hell. Small to medium bad sins like cheating on your arithmetic test and shooting rubber bands at girls sent you to a place called Purgatory. Purgatory was better than Hell, but there was a catch: the only way out was if living, breathing people prayed for you. The accumulation of intense and heartfelt prayer on your behalf moved you ever closer to the exit. I observed the lack of piety in my brothers and neighborhood friends and figured if I went to Purgatory I'd best stick close to the exit from the moment I set foot in the room.

I was always nodding off in church, but not because the experience was mind-numbing and endless. Granted, it was mind-numbing and endless, but the reason I nodded off is because I stayed up late reading. Any nun within arm's reach who observed my head sinking and bobbing would jab me with a pocketknife. Come to think of it, nuns didn't carry pocketknives, so it must have been a bayonet.

When I was too little to see over the heads in front of me I thought the sermon was delivered by God himself. Imagine my disappointment when I got bigger and discovered a frail old man speaking into a microphone. The booming voice echoing throughout the nave was the result of a vibrating coil rather than divine omnipresence. Bummer.

The nuns told us we all had guardian angels, and made us sit on the edge of our seats to make room for them. I had fallen into the creek too many times to believe an angel was guarding me. Then again maybe I had a dumb one. Then again, maybe everything the nuns told us was bullshit. I informed my mother I had questions about the existence of God. She made me go to confession to apologize to him. There was something wrong with the logic, but I couldn't put my finger on it. My parents then conspired with my teachers, and for an entire school year I had to attend church seven days a week. My brothers didn't have to. I guess they had smarter guardian angels.

My older brother, the one who practiced for years to become a priest, announced one day he was an atheist. He asked if I wanted to be an atheist too. "Sure," I said, "what's an atheist?" "Someone who doesn't believe in God." "Ah. Won't that send us to Hell?" He thought about it for a moment, then answered, "No, probably just Purgatory." "Fine, I'll join. But if you get to Purgatory first, save a place for me near the door."

Confession took place in a closet. You knelt on a wooden beam and spoke through a screen to a priest in an adjacent compartment. You organized your sins according to whether they were mortal (Hell) or venial (Purgatory), and if the priest disagreed with your taxonomy he corrected you:

"Smacking your brother upside the head is not a mortal sin."

"It's not?"

"No. Do it to your mother, however, and you'll roast until the end of time."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Do you fiddle when you piddle?"

"No, Father. I pee at parade rest."

"Good boy."

I couldn't reconcile how God could be both omnipotent and benevolent. There was too much suffering in the world. Anyone with the power to stop the suffering surely would, if he had a kind heart. God was either impotent and benevolent or omnipotent and malevolent. Or maybe he neither Could nor Cared. Whatever. The mutual exclusivity of omnipotence and benevolence was plain to me even as a child.

My daughter serves as an altar girl at a local Catholic church. I've never shared my personal beliefs with her, because I think indoctrinating children is the height of fuckheadedness. But one day when she was about ten I asked her what she believed, and she said she wasn't sure, except that this whole God thing the teachers were feeding her was crock. "There's too much suffering in the world," she said. "If God is love, there is no God."

I return to church now and then. I occupy a pew and go through the motions; I rise, sit, and make the sign of the cross like everyone else, to avoid standing out as an infidel. When they pass the basket around I put money in. I figure it's like buying admission to a performance.

I love the smell of incense. It takes me back to the old days. There's comfort in knowing that everyone sitting around me grew up more or less like I did; their pears accumulated spots, their guardian angels were busy tying their own shoes at critical moments, their nuns packed bayonets and truncheons. Sometimes I think I ought to join the church again and become more active, for the sake of community, for the benefit of belonging.

But then I watch everyone leave at the end of the service. They go home to one side of town or another, to one side of the tracks or the other. They don't mix, mingle, or mind biblical exhortations to love their neighbors. The Catholic community is a one-hour-a-week phenomenon. During that hour the rituals are mindless and routine; close observation shows that most people simply do what others are doing.

Their thoughts are elsewhere. Circus ponies could replace them. If God attends any of these services, he probably nods off.

I wait in my pew until everyone else is gone and the church is a hollow cavern. Then I get up and leave too.