childhood home was a lovely place to grow up, and I was well loved and cared for. But because we didn’t talk about God, I felt no pressing need to search for him. In reality, of course, God was always right next to me, but when you’ve grown up as I did—and as my parents did before me, and their parents before them—unbaptized and uncatechized, what does spark an interest in him? What would make a girl raised in a secular home even begin to care?
Though I didn’t realize it as I was growing up, I watched believers. Subconsciously, I recorded the actions, behaviors, and sincerity (or lack of it) of those who professed belief in Jesus Christ. The witness of Christians, for good or ill, left a deep imprint on my psyche, forming my ideas about Christianity.
Being Nothing
My earliest memory of organized religion is of a Sunday school classroom: paper dolls dressed in robes and sandals, and me, at a loss as to what to do with them. A teacher who seemed unwelcoming, unengaged. I remember only sitting alone that day. The visitor, the stranger. A few years ago, I asked my parents about the experience, and they said they tried going to church once or twice but didn’t continue.
Religion didn’t come up again until junior high school. A break in French class found a few of us sitting around chatting. Someone asked what religion everyone’s family was. Classmates around the circle confidently ticked off their answers. Catholic! Methodist! Baptist!
I panicked. Clearly, everyone was something, but what was I? I didn’t have an answer to that question. It had never seemed particularly important, and no one had ever asked me before. I vaguely perceived that Christians were divided into two big camps: Catholics and Protestants. I knew we weren’t Catholic, because those people were really strange and extreme. Were we some kind of Christian? We celebrated Christmas, right? And Easter. We must be something.
“Umm, we’re Protestant,” I mumbled, when my turn came around.
“Yeah, but what kind?” someone persisted.
“I don’t know,” I bristled, “we’re just Protestant.”
“That’s not how it works,” someone muttered in disgust. “You have to be something.”
A few smirks indicated that my classmates were unimpressed with my lack of religious clarity. It was the first time I genuinely grasped that my family and I were “nothing.”
My next encounter with religion came when my friend Cathy started dropping notes in my locker. “Jesus loves you,” the notes said. I was irritated. Cathy and I had never talked about religion, so why was she bringing it up now? Didn’t she know I was officially “nothing”? I went with my gut reaction: I didn’t know Jesus, and “love” implied too much intimacy for the nonexistent terms I was on with him. I ignored her note-dropping.
Then one day Cathy invited me out for pizza with her family. Never one to turn down anything involving pepperoni, I accepted. Cathy and her family picked me up that evening and we headed out, but not in the direction of any pizza place I knew. When we pulled into a church parking lot, I stiffened. What was going on? Cathy had not mentioned a church. What was wrong with Pizza Hut or Pizza Inn or anyplace else that was not a church? On high alert, I scoped out the premises as I gingerly followed Cathy and her family inside. Witnessing nothing but the conspicuous consumption of pizza, I relaxed. I had overreacted.
We ate our meal in a cafeteria-style room, and I thought, “Whew, it is just a social thing, it is just pizza.” But after dinner, my initial suspicions were confirmed as the night morphed into something surreal. I didn’t know the term “altar call” at the time, but I knew something entirely outside of my experience was happening. I was captive in a church, listening to a preacher exclaim, “If you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, come on down!”
As I sat in the middle of this crowd, my eyes scrunched shut, something odd happened: I felt slightly drawn to the offer. Wait, what? For a fraction of a second I imagined myself responding, pictured myself running forward, as others did, weeping and gasping, “Yes! Yes!” What would happen if I did it? What if I flung myself into the wave of humanity at the front of the church?
I had to admit that the euphoria and peace they promised sounded enticing. But I didn’t understand how I could automatically, magically receive such gifts. If I were going to say yes to this, I needed to understand what “this” was, how the package was to be delivered. There was no logic in the claim that my life would change overnight after running down an aisle, flailing my arms, and shouting, “Count me in, God!”
And then there was the anger. Oh, the growing, swelling anger! I seethed. Cathy lied to me. Lied to get me to her church, lied to get me into this whatever-it-was. My fury at her trickery was stronger than the flickering spark of the moment. So I sat frozen, glued to my seat until the whole thing ended. The emotion died down, the people around me drifted back to earth, and it was time to gather our things and go. I don’t even remember the conversation on the way home; I closed in on myself, shut down, enshrouded in my wrath.
Cathy’s family dropped me off at my front door, unconverted and defiant. They had not persuaded me of their dogma, but they had convinced me of one thing: Christians were untrustworthy fakes who lied and schemed to get you into the club. If the club was worth joining, I thought, they wouldn’t resort to such pathetic recruiting tactics. I was done with them.
Fasting and Feasting
High school brought another Christian into my life. In my junior year drama class, I performed a scene from Neil Simon’s Star Spangled Girl and my impression of a southern ingenue caught the attention of a tall, skinny boy named Jack. After class, he followed me down the hall to my next class, chattering all the way about what a great actress I was. I approved of his taste in actresses, and as it turned out we also shared a love of books, movies, and nonstop talking. In no time we were best friends. I became a permanent fixture at Jack’s house for the rest of my high school career.
Jack’s family was Catholic, the first Catholics I ever really got to know. Jack’s mother, Loretta, was bigger than life, a Philadelphia girl who married an Air Force guy and landed in the heartland where she was completely out of place and yet somehow perfectly, exactly where she should be. I didn’t realize it until years later when I learned the term, but Loretta was a corporal work of mercy in action. She befriended strays and welcomed anyone and everyone into her home. Lonely, middle-aged man? Come to dinner! Misfit teen hiding behind overgrown bangs? Get thee to the party! Priest? Join us! She threw dinner parties and holiday feasts, inviting the lonely, the gregarious, the cool and uncool, the kids who had loads of friends, and the kids who had none. And she made the best chocolate pound cake this side of Philadelphia.
Loretta had strict “Crazy Catholic Rules” as I called them: Sunday morning at the Donnelly house was for Mass, no exceptions, ever, under any circumstance. Boys and girls were not allowed behind the closed doors of a bedroom, no exceptions, ever, under any circumstance. The Donnelly kids joked that there may as well have been a Hays Code stating that if you were in a bedroom with a member of the opposite sex, merely sitting on a bed chatting, at least one foot per person had to be touching the floor. And Donnelly children, upon arriving home on a Saturday night, awakened their mother immediately to tell her they were home and safe. Rules were nonnegotiable. No exceptions, ever.
But if I thought these crazy, rigid Catholics had to fast from a certain amount of freedom, they also proved that Catholics knew how to feast. On the 6th of January every year—I didn’t know it was called the Epiphany—the Donnelly Christmas tree was still up. My family, like normal people, kept our tree up until New Year’s Day, but what kind of crazies kept a tree
