Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (5 page)

— Seamus Heaney

Catch the Debit by This Tail

N MY HOMETOWN OUTSIDE BOSTON
, the good kids went to parochial schools. They wore crisp white shirts, blue plaid skirts, and striped ties, and their parents inevitably wore smug, morally superior expressions. It was common knowledge that the parochial school kids would be assumed into heaven like the Virgin Mary.

I was a public school Catholic. Therefore I was doomed. Optimists made advance reservations for a long stay in purgatory. The rest of us resigned ourselves to the express train to hell — decades before Gram ever had a say in it.

Realizing our moral inferiority, we public school Catholics took the only road left to us: we tormented the parochial school kids for their silly uniforms. From this experience I learned a principle that has served me well in life: If you cannot beat them in virtue, pull off your wickedness with more style.

My parents, God bless them, tried to redeem us. My siblings and I were sent weekly to CCD — Continuing Catholic Development — where we scribbled dirty words in the margins of shiny new texts full of uplifting stories.

Summers saw us packed off to Catholic camp, where we learned that if another camper jumped in the air to avoid a low throw in dodgeball, a second ball launched right after the first and aimed at the dodger’s ankles would cause him to flip upside down in a spectacular and potentially bloody wreck. From time to time, I was required to make a rote confession. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six months since my last confession. Since then, I have raped my mother, plundered a village, called my brother a fag, and taken the name of Gloria Gaynor in vain. Amen.

Anything more devout then purely ordinary Sunday churchgoing, however, attracted family-wide consternation. When my older brother suddenly took to attending Mass on a daily basis, our parents worried that it would go on his permanent record and keep him out of Harvard Law. The prospect of a hyper-pious blood relative nosing into my affairs for the rest of my life worried me.

Fortunately, my brother soon discovered liquor and girls. His churchgoing gave way to breaking into neighbors’ houses to make long-distance phone calls to his girlfriend and piloting our parents’ tank-sized 1972 Fleetwood limousine across the grassy median of local roundabouts. He showed no further signs of sanctity. Indeed, quite the contrary. He became a lawyer.

Despite our lukewarm piety, we had a real, genetic connection to the sterner pre-Vatican II Church — the Church of the Tridentine Mass in Latin, public condemnations of self-abuse, and knuckle-whacking nuns who forced my left-handed father to convert to right-handedness. My mother was Irish, born and raised. And in the 1970s, her native land had not yet embraced the world of folk masses, macramé guitar straps, and music directors with a passing physical resemblance to Jesus Christ.

On one early trip to the motherland, my grandfather dragged us to a nine-hundred-year-old stone chapel that was pure postcard Ireland. Celtic crosses lay uprooted on the front lawn, and gravestones had worn smooth with rain. It was a long drive from Dublin, so when the car finally stopped, my siblings and I shot across the churchyard, chasing each other, laughing and screaming.

My grandfather — a brilliant, beloved, erudite figure of endless dignity — sternly herded us together. We were breathless and giddy and trying to make each other laugh. We didn’t yet know it was wrong to be happy on holy ground.

“There’s a legend about this church,” my grandfather said.

“A legend?” my brother asked, taking the bait.

“If you run three times counterclockwise around this church, they say the devil himself will appear and take your soul.”

My brothers and I stared in awe at the dark, hoary structure. As my grandfather no doubt anticipated, we behaved for the rest of the afternoon. But as the hours wore on, a naughty excitement infected my awe. The devil was so close, and the soul so easily lost! One small slip, and damnation was mine.
Maybe I could run around just two and a half times and then stop
, I thought.
Maybe I could go close enough to see just a glimpse of his hooves, his tail. No more, I swear
.

The lesson I took back to the States was this: church is a place of confrontation. It’s where good and evil meet. Choices are stark and immediate; the boundary is thin. Every moment ticked with spiritual tinder. One small spark might cause an inferno of consequences. At any moment, I imagined, I might be annihilated.

Heady stuff for a six-year-old. Personal responsibility weighed on my shoulders. I understood that I had a direct hand in the outcome:
my
acts and
my
prayers could make all the difference in terms of salvation. And not just my own failings, but the failings of others that I failed to prevent, faults I failed to detect, correct, or scold. Forget to mention my beloved grandfather in my bedtime prayers? Next thing I knew, he had highly metastatic colon cancer.

My hometown parish had no hoary legends. Saint John the Evangelist, a thoroughly modern church, airy and bright, smelled of incense and candle wax. The lectionary, a book of daily readings, was heavy as a stone tablet. The pews were full. The music was, in retrospect, awful. Familiar brass bells marked the start of Mass and the various blessings. The parishioners’ signs of the cross were like the wings of a thousand butterflies. I was baptized at Saint John’s. I was confirmed at Saint John’s. I attended weekly mass at Saint John’s until I left for college.

My brother was married at Saint John’s. My first godson was baptized there. I still have both my baptism certificate and my First Communion card.

The spiritual hotspot, the locus of the confrontation, was up front — where the priest was, where the tabernacle and the book were, where wine changed to blood, and flatbreads became flesh, and the priest murmured sweet nothings to Jesus under his breath. The altar.

Where the Hell Am I? A Guide to Church Geography

For those who have been absent a while, finding your way around a Catholic church presents a challenge. Here’s a handy guide:

• Narthex: The vestibule of the church — typically as far as sinful folk dare to go, and a handy place for priests to dispose of unwanted literature sent from the local bishop.
  

• Nave: The center aisle and surrounding pews, where you can best see and be seen.
  

• Chancel: Area at the front of the church where the altar is, typically raised a few inches to show that the priest is a much better person than you can ever hope to be.
  

• Altar: Eucharistic dinner table located in the chancel, or sanctuary.
  

• Reredos: Fancy backdrop behind an altar, often of stained glass.
  

• Tabernacle: An ornate bank safe for storing consecrated hosts under lock and key. Typically located within shouting distance of the altar, so eucharistic ministers don’t have to wear their hiking boots to Mass.
  

• Pulpit, lectern, and ambo: Names for the podium from which priests and lay ministers proclaim the Gospels and other readings.
  

• Sacristy: Priest’s dressing room. Don’t disturb the starlets before they go on stage. Typically located adjacent to the chancel.
  

• Ambulatory; Hall between sacristy and sanctuary; not a great place to pick up tricks.
  

• Transept: For churches with a cross-shaped floor plan, the part to which Jesus’s arms would have been nailed,
  

Just a few years after Vatican II, when I was four or five, a low rail along the chancel separated us from the altar. Parishioners kneeled on one side of the rail. The priest and altar boy moved in tandem on the other. They worked their way along the railing from the far left of the church to the far right and back again. The altar boy placed the brass plate beneath the communicant, and the priest held up a host that looked as big as the moon.

The recipient crossed herself and returned to her pew. She did not touch the host with her soiled fingers. She did not chew. She swallowed whole, and Enforcement Nuns stood sentinel for telltale movements of the jaw. Someone new took her place and waited patiently for the priest and altar boy to make their way back from the other side of the sanctuary.

The altar itself was forbidden territory. Only a few holies could breathe the rarefied air. Prom the altar came words like
dire
and
grave
and
mortal
that made it seem as if a thundercloud loomed above your head twenty-four seven. Prom the altar flowed a whole series of rules that could be broken, rules I had not known existed, but of which the parochial school kids were no doubt fully aware. I never imagined I might someday be called to speak from the altar. I never imagined myself as a priest. That, too, was reserved for parochial school kids.

Ultimately, that sense of personal responsibility and all that scolding made me feel that whatever I did, I couldn’t possibly do right. Sure, we Catholics sound off about confession and reconciliation, but the Irish-blooded among us know certain sins lie beyond forgiveness. Hardcore priests still tell us we’re going to hell. The gentler ones assure us that God can forgive us, but because we are Irish, and we are full of sin, and our sin is colossal, we side with the hardcore priests: He
could
, but He
wouldn’t
. Best to take communion and hightail it out before lightning strikes.

Psychologists call this phenomenon “learned helplessness.” In a famous experiment, they put a dog in a cage with a partially electrified floor. A buzzer sounded before a shock was delivered. The dog learned to move from the electrified part of the cage to the nonelectrified part after hearing the buzzer sound. In the second phase of the experiment, the entire floor was electrified, so the dog could not escape the shock. When the buzzer sounded, it cowered helplessly. This behavior persisted even when half the cage was de-electrified. In other words, the dog still cowered even when it had a chance to save itself. That’s how I felt at the altar.

On a dark New England evening, a single streetlight shone down from the roof of Saint John’s. In the back seat of my mother’s car, I played shadow games. Up front, my mother was interrogating my older brother about the words of the Hail Mary and the Our Father, on which the kids in my brother’s CCD class were scheduled to be tested.

My brother didn’t need her help. But to me, the prayers seemed fantastically long, truly biblical. Wars took place and people died and eons passed before my brother finally reached the end. “Amen,” we all said. That someday I, too, would be forced to endure the trial my brother had faced paralyzed me. There were only so many grandfathers I could afford to lose.

Years later, after a long absence from churchgoing, I returned. Not only the Our Father and Hail Mary, but also great big chunks of the liturgy, had stuck in my brain. I stumbled only where gender-neutral language had crept in since I was a kid.

Marking Territory

Irish-American guys are dogs. It’s not simply the learned helplessness, but the primordial instinct that compels us to mark our territory when we move to a new place:

• Find a bar.
  

• Find a church.
  

• Get laid.
  

Shortly after I graduated from law school and moved to Boston, I jumped to bullet point three. “Michael” was a couple of years younger than I. His online picture showed him wearing a black leather coat. He lived in a lovely Victorian brownstone that I suspected he could not afford on his own, but my gay vocabulary didn’t yet contain the phrase
sugar daddy
.

I had prepared for the awkward, husky-voiced, precoital conversation (“So … what do you like to do?”) between arrival and lust. I had packed condoms in my backpack. I had even bothered to shower and shave. But the first naughty thing Michael did to me was to mention his hearty dislike for the writings of Christian philosopher C. S. Lewis.

Needless to say, this opening gambit startled me. But because I had written via e-mail that I was “game for anything,” I played along. Michael thought I was humoring him. To him, my responses sounded like disingenuous intellectual foreplay, the sort of dubious behavior you would expect from a public-school boy insufficiently versed in spiritual matters. An honest, God-fearing parochial school boy would have gone straight to the sex without pussyfooting around.