Crying in a Catholic Church

This week started off fine, right? A stressful staff meeting, a new gas station, things were relatively normal. Friday morning I woke up to a Facebook message from my father. This wasn't out of the ordinary as it was basically the only way we communicated, and I use that word very loosely. Like most children of divorce, I have an extremely complicated relationship with my father and, in turn, his entire side of the family. When I go to check his messages I realize it's actually two I have to read from him. The first, from many weeks ago, about him wanting to see me that I couldn't bring myself to answer at the time. The second letting me know that his mom, my grandmother, has colon cancer. At the time of writing this blog I still haven't been able to open up the message and respond, I'm going entirely off of old notifications and message previews. I don't know how to answer a message like that after ignoring him for so long, and I'm not sure when it will be too late to reply. 

Death is weird. I used to want to be a mortician in hopes I could view death from a more logical lens along with it also being an incredibly interesting career path. Spoiler alert, I was too dumb for mortuary school. Those who can't do, major in writing. The worst part of death is the limbo you're stuck in with the dying. We all know what's happening, it's going to happen to all of us at some point, but to know the person across from you has a finite expiration date is hard to grapple with, at least for me. I did the same thing with my grandparents on my mom's side; as soon as they were moved into the nursing home I stopped coming around as much. I couldn't stand to be there while the life is slowly sucked out of the room. You think that cutting off family members makes watching them die easier, it's never easy to live amongst death. I spent the better part of Friday crying on and off. I went to a local high school football game so my butch could play with the marching band for alumni night. Things felt off, dreamlike and unreliable, and I desperately needed to do something I was familiar with. So for the first time maybe fifteen years, I went to church.

Now let's get one thing clear, I was raised Catholic. My relationship with religion as a queer woman in the midwest is strained at best. The tarot cards on my desk and the hex jar in my freezer would also like to draw attention to themselves. I hate modern, hip churches. I hate young preachers at the front of refurbished movie theaters playing acoustic guitar. I hate making God out to be this friendly pal. I hate the casualty of most Christian churches these days, leggings and a running on coffee and Jesus tee. But Catholicism expands beyond all of that. Nothing about mass is fun, it's a serious event. There is chanting and praying and bells, skulls painted on the walls, stations of cross portraying each gory step of crucifixion, bones in the altar, organ music that rattles you in your pew. Besides the updated call and response changes that I refuse to acknowledge, fire and brimstone doesn't change, and for some reason I needed to be grounded there.

I didn't want to go. I drove around the block a few times and parked in a public lot a few streets away so I could calm myself down before I got inside. My heart was beating up into my throat and I couldn't breathe by the time my fingers hit the holy water at the door and I made the sign of the cross for the first time. Old men greeted me and handed me the weekly bulletin, old couples coughed in their seats, wood creaked beneath me as I took a seat in an empty pew in a way I hadn't felt in years. A stunning mural painted at the head of the sanctuary with a life size wood carving of Jesus on the cross. Something about the incense mixed with old wood and the ladies' perfume surrounding me was so comforting and so familiar. It smelled like my grandmother. I cried the entire time.

The way I felt when I walked out of that church an hour later was how I would feel when I walked out of therapy. I'm always crying. Thankfully weeping in church is not an uncommon thing, especially for Catholics, so no one paid me any attention. I don't think that this will be a regular thing for me, as much as my mother would love for me to go to church again. But it felt like a factory reset for my brain, almost like reverting me to childhood to process the death of a family member the only way I know how - crying in a Catholic church.