Chasing God

Ok, that’s a heavy title. To be honest I find most of this s**t to be kind of hilarious at this stage of my life. I’m not exactly an old guy but I am old enough that I see through horseshit pretty easily. I mean, most of the time. There are moments of willful ignorance like when you ignore your gut because you really want to do that thing that you don’t want to know is bad for you. Those moments are all self-inflicted, though. So I’m not counting those. Anyway, that first quote in my description for this work. It comes from one of my earlier memories in the Catholic Church. Dorchester, Massachusetts was worse than the armpit of Boston back in the 1980’s. It was a place simultaneously under the grip of street gangs, corruption, alchololism, and Irish Catholics. We shared a border with “Southie” and in many ways were practically the same town. It was cold, gray, ugly as hell and that was just the space around my life. Some version of these thoughts was pervading my eight-year-old mind during third grade religion class one day. Well really it was math class, but in Sister C’s class everything was religion at some point. I’m not paying attention too closely to the discussion going on. My socks are freezing cold and wet, I can feel how pruny my toes are and my legs are aching because of it. I hate wet socks to this day. I tuned back into the discussion going on. The class bully’s henchman, Eric, asked something like “What happens if you don’t get the chance to say you’re sorry to God before you die?” Sister C, seated at her big oak desk, folded her hands and c****d her head to the side a little bit. She had a patient smile, a very odd expression for a face that was definitely built for scowling. It was in this moment that my brain was doing that thing where my thoughts wander and my eye caught the math problems on the chalk board partially obscured by her ridiculous hat the nuns wore. I wondered why we weren’t just getting math done and dreading being reminded that I was born pure evil and going to die in a lake of fire. “Well, Eric, if you do not confess your sins before you die, demons tear you apart over and over again and you burn in a lake of fire. It goes on forever and ever.” She said it with that patient smile, her head slowly shaking back and forth as though to express what a shame it was that little boys get mutilated for all of eternity. It was so quiet in the room at that point that I could hear the blood rushing in my ears loudly enough that I thought everyone else might hear it too. I tried to imagine what it looked like down there. You know, in hell. I pictured large, faceless humanoids with their images blurred in the waves of heat violently rising off of the surface of the lake of fire. I visualized these demons holding up screaming, terrified people and ripping them apart like one would tear an old rag in half. The flesh would quickly reattach itself and the demons would furiously tear it again in relentless, persistent pursuit of the desired level of agony. “f*****g bullshit!” Came the thought-shattering whisper from behind me. Another kid, Dennis, always the class disruptor, drew Sister C’s attention away from Eric. So, after clapping chalkboard erasers for half an hour after school along with all the other hell-bound male children of third grade, I had a long walk home in the snow with my already wet shoes and socks to think about what was discussed in math class that day. I decided that there were some inconsistencies in our religious teaching. Tomorrow, I was going to ask some goddamned questions.