jesus, mary and god

i have a blue notebook made out of an old hymnal with an imprint of jesus on the front, you know standing on a pedastel pointing to his shining heart. all beatific, as he usually is. this is the notebook i write in when i'm at work or on the bus. it's spiral bound and hard backed so it's good for bus writing. i use it to keep score when we play dominoes at the pub, and i take notes in meetings when i forget my work notebook. i don't show off the jesus in professional settings but i am otherwise prone to giving people a flash of the jees. he'll brighten your day.

i have a green hoodie that i bought in 2000 in las vegas. about 3.5 years ago i embroidered the virgin of guadalupe on the back of it using an iron on pattern from sublime stitching. she has a blue robe and a pink scarf, black hair and she is surrounded by an orange glow. she is slightly crooked, but i chalk this up to the fact that she's floating, seeing as she is a spectre of sorts and all. i don't know a whole lot about the virgin mary, other than the fact that she was jesus' mom. i didn't grow up catholic, we're lutheran, and she doesn't play such a big role in the lutheran world. i suppose praying to her amounts to a form of idol worship according to luther and his followers. but i like the image of mary, i like how many images of her there are. i used to collect all the different mary candles from the polish / mexican grocery store around the corner from my old apartment in chicago. my roommate, dana, never liked having them around. she thought they were creepy and weird. i liked them though, i liked the prayers in spanish on the backs and the images of all the saints as well as mary and jesus. i liked the smell of the wax. i liked that i could find something so pure for only 50 cents on any given day.

when i was a kid i thought god was the light coming through the clouds on a rainy day. i know, most kids thought that. i also thought of him as a bearded chin seen from underneath, because he'd be so huge and so shining that that was the only detail i could imagine being able to take in. i went to church school until i was 8, every day i memorized a new verse. then my parents were asked to leave the church because the admitted that the pastor was an alcoholic. even though my mom was a sunday school teacher and we were really active in all the school groups. andy played basketball, i was in the brownies. public school was a shock for both of us. we went to a new church every sunday though. sunday school too. i still believed very deeply. my belief in god, as defined by my church was the thing i was most sure of. i went to confirmation camp when i was 12 and they did the stages of the passion. following jesus from palm sunday to the ressurection. the role of jesus was played by a handsome counselor who wore a trench coat held together by safety pins when he wasn't playing jesus. i was moved to tears.

When i got home my tears felt almost imagined, the whole experience began to feel hollow in my memory. i had a hard time believing that that counselor who played jesus could separate from being the counselor in the trench coat. i began to notice the way certain people at our church talked to me and to my parents. the way they treated us differently because we lived on the other side of town. because my brother and i didn't go to the more affluent school (i hesitate to even say wealthy, because no one where i come from is terribly wealthy, which somehow makes money and geography all the more important) and i still prayed about it. i still believed in prayer, but the act of praying no longer calmed me. i no longer found respite.

at 15, after my brother had joined the army, after we had been treated to the gossip and sidelong glances caused by the premarital birth of his daughter and the rushed wedding a week before he left for basic, and after a few months of people thinking that i was my niece's mother because they had never taken the time to figure out who i was, i sat down on the stairs at home one sunday morning and refused to go back.

i haven't been to church at all since i was 19, i think, i would go on christmas and easter without fuss, out of respect for my mom, even when we hated each other during my bad years. but she stopped going after awhile too. she thinks i don't believe in god at all now. i've never said that. i've tried in a vague way to explain to her that i just don't believe in that god. the god of churches and muddy confirmation camps.

i started to doubt pretty seriously last november after the cat died. people kept telling me he was in cat heaven and all i could think was that there was no way i believed in sucha stupid thing as cat heaven. which led me to think, well if there's no cat heaven then why would there be a people heaven? the one makes just as little sense as the other. and if there's no heaven, then why would there be a god? and all this on the district line at 9 in the morning in the middle of one of the worst runs of luck i've ever had in my life (eviction, death of cat, major fuck ups at work followed by 'voluntary' loss of job, and then the salmonella that brought the arthritis) and maybe that makes me weak, maybe it makes me honest, i don't know. i still haven't totally given up on the idea of god. i can't let go of it. i still keep my highlighted version of the good news bible that i was given by pastor clark when i was 9. i still have a favorite apostle (thomas, the doubter. i am also partial to mary, sister of martha, who refused to clean and instead asked questions) but i have not been moved to tears in a long time.

i don't know why i hold onto the images of the faith that i've walked away from, or really never even had, so much of what i cling to belongs to the catholic world. maybe i miss believing.