Erin McGraw

True Believer

FOR ABOUT NINE MONTHS in the late 1980s, when I was in my early thirties and a graduate student, I shared a house with a stockbroker named Louise. She did not ordinarily take in roomers, but the market’s collapse had forced several unpleasant new realities upon her. Her few remaining investors telephoned at home around the clock, talking bankruptcy, talking suicide. If she and I happened to light in the kitchen at the same time, she told me about some of the calls, but I only gleaned a detail or two, since she generally had to hurry back to the phone.
     I was fond of Louise and wished no ill on her. Still, I felt grateful that most of her attention was spoken for. She did not have energy to ponder the activities of a roomer who once, during a bad spell, let frying pans and dishes sit in the sink for more than a week. She did not say a word when I finally got around to scrubbing the dishes, along with the kitchen floor, as a penitent gesture. Living with her I felt as close to invisible as I have ever been, pleasantly free, able to come and go without causing the least remark. Not that I came or went anyplace thrilling: I sat in classrooms or the library, wrote stories, jogged, and went to daily Mass. The last two activities, I had explained to Louise shortly after I moved in, were new and therapeutic, measures taken to help me recover from my divorce.
     Louise never pressured me to talk about myself, and if she thought it odd that divorce, which often drives Catholics from the church, instead threaded me into the tight fabric of daily observance, she did not say so. We lived side by side as cordial strangers, sharing an occasional cup of coffee or glass of wine. Only after we had lived in the same house for two months did I realize that she had, in fact, been paying attention to my habits and had made certain assumptions.
     One afternoon when we both happened to be home, Louise emerged from the laundry room and caught me closing the curtains across the living-room window. She looked on with a curious expression; I almost never fiddled with things around the house, and Louise liked to keep those curtains open. Before she could open her mouth, I said, “I’m doing you a favor. When I went out to get the mail, I saw two men and a boy wearing suits and carrying Bibles. They were just up the street.”
     She shifted the laundry to one hip and watched me fuss with the curtains. “All you have to do is tell them to go away,” she said.
     “You’ve never dealt with these folks, have you? A couple of Witnesses caught me once and started in on hell. It took me an hour and a half to get them out of the house.”
     “You’re the one who goes to church every day. They can’t really say that you’re going to hell.”
     “Sure they can. I don’t go to their church. The way they see it, the wrong church is as bad as no church.” I made a sour face. “They’re all set to tell you what’s what.”
     “Isn’t that what happens when you go to your church? You believe what they tell you to, right?”
     “No,” I said, embarrassed that she would even imagine such a thing. I reached to pull the curtains a millimeter tighter. “Not like you’re thinking.”

I NEVER INTENDED to become a person who might be mistaken for a true believer. Any career I might have had as a standard bearer for the faith ended early, after a brief phase in my Catholic grade school in California, when I often and ostentatiously recited the rosary on the school playground, lit a lot of candles in the church, and reminded the members of my Girl Scout troop that performing cardinal acts of virtue was more important than earning merit badges. Fits of religious ardor are not uncommon among preadolescent girls, but I was imprudently public about mine: I gave away, instead of swapping, my bologna sandwich at lunch, because I wanted to fast for the conversion of Soviet Russia. By the afternoon geography class, I had grown so woozy that I could not name the Great Lakes, and Sister reprimanded me.
     Eventually I got tired of being hungry and put my rosary away, but my classmates remained understandably skittish. I had no close, special friend, and once when a girl telephoned and invited me to a sleepover, I could actually hear her mother beside her, forcing her to make the call. Two years later, when my parents gave me the option of transferring to the local public school, I said yes before the offer was out of my mother’s mouth.
     Entering a new school was my chance to cut free from the shadow of the lugubrious girl who had recited Hail Marys beside the jungle gym. I could make friends, wear bell-bottoms and lipstick. So when my mother suggested that I join the church youth group as a way to stay in touch with other Catholic youth, I pretended not to hear her, then later set the table without being asked. Other Catholic youth were precisely what I wanted to avoid.
     On Sundays, in the pew, I did not join in the singing led by the teen folk choir, and I did not fill out the questionnaires that asked what activities teens would like to see the youth group offer. (Pizza nights? Sailing? ) I occupied myself by counting the fashionably dressed women in the congregation: never more than six. What was it about church, I wondered, that brought the dowdy out of their burrows?
     Myself, I copied the clothes worn by actresses and said God damn a lot. I was hardly able to conceive of any virtue more important than being well thought of by my friends, and my friends did not think well of religious kids—youth-group members, scrubbed and overfriendly teens who ironed their Levis and sang the soundtrack from Godspell, summer-camp volunteers who liked to touch people’s hands. I did everything I could think of to pull myself apart from the Holy Joes: I listened to sexy music that alarmed my parents, read trashy novels, adopted cynical opinions and delivered them in tired, worldly tones.
     Still, I was uneasily aware that my fund of worldly knowledge reached no further than attitudes I cribbed from The Graduate, a movie I thought sophisticated. I was not taking drugs or having sex—I seemed always to miss the party, and I had no boyfriend—although my friends were doing these things, and I assumed that I would soon join them. By the time I graduated from high school, I was best defined by what I was not: not quite a rebel, not quite on the honor roll, not quite headed in any particular direction. But not religious, that was for sure.

NOT RELIGIOUS, BUT NOT WITHOUT FAITH. As my socially disastrous early attempt at sainthood indicates, I took seriously the habits of thought taught in my religion classes and the many sermons I heard, even though I would later learn to ridicule those sermons. Secretly I accepted the idea of a divine hand that could shape human experience. I cherished the promise that I was part of a story that would have not just a happy ending, but a triumphant one. It was not simply that I wanted to be part of a triumph, although of course the notion appealed to me. I needed to believe in God.
     The need was absolute, like a vitamin deficiency. Even as a small child I was timid, frightened by the world, upset by surprises. If a new toy was set in front of me, I had to stare at it for a while, get used to its shape, and sniff and quiver like a high-strung dog before I was ready to touch it. Life was always clipping along faster than I could keep up: no sooner had I learned one song than another came along with new words, new notes, new demands. No sooner had I met one grown-up than another took her place. I longed for things to stand still, but ideas and words hurtled like projectiles.
     At age six I was diagnosed as having progressive myopia, a diagnosis that cleared up some of my fear but not all of it. Even now, thinking about my youth makes me reflexively start to squint, since my major endeavor in those days was to see, to understand, to make sense of what was happening around me. My life was far from turbulent. I did not live with the results of divorce or chronic disease, never raced to hide from gunshots. But the simplest, plainest facts could throw me off balance. If a neighbor had a baby, if a news commentator started talking about a civil war in a country I had never heard of, if my teacher assigned unexpected homework, my first response was confusion. What did each new event mean? How would I be expected to change? Faced with novelty, I froze, surveying the landscape for other changes. Even though I had never been hurt, change seemed perilous.
     I held back from forming opinions, since I frequently lacked some essential piece of information. In grade school once, when I admitted that I liked the looks of a new boy in the class, the girls around me glanced at each other and smirked. “He was expelled from his last school. He flunked four classes and put a cherry bomb in the teachers’ bathroom,” one girl finally told me. The blush that crawled up my face stayed there all afternoon. I still do not know how they learned the boy’s history.
     I felt like Mr. Magoo, pinballing off the hard surfaces of the world, but while Mr. Magoo met adversity with cheerful aplomb, I met uncertainty with gracelessness, distress, and constant unease. The threat of being overwhelmed by an unpredictable world seemed very near, and so I clung to the promise that someone—Someone—was keeping me safe.
     But to cling to a promise is not the same as taking pleasure in it. I was no Térèse of Lisieux, spending rapturous afternoons in contemplation of the baby Jesus. The whole idea of God quickly got me into deep water, because as far as I could tell, the whole idea of God raised some upsetting questions.
     Anyone, even a kid, just has to look around to know that God does not create a predictable world, or a fair one. My timid glimpses showed me that much in spades. Every day, loving parents were stricken with cancer and cherished spouses were mauled in freakish accidents. Alcoholic mothers slammed along for years, their husbands uncomplainingly replacing the cars their wives demolished. The principal of my school, Sister Anna Cecilia, a woman of great devotion, suffered a nervous breakdown when I was in sixth grade and had to be carted away.
     None of these events was sufficient to shake my faith, because my faith centered squarely on a deity who knew more than I did and whose actions shone with divine merit, even if I thought they stank. “My ways are not your ways,” God assures anyone who cares to read Isaiah. So I had no trouble believing that God could, if God felt like it, explain the celestial purpose for Sister Anna Cecilia’s trip to the bughouse. While God was at it, God could also proffer a reason for every rotten biopsy, split marriage, and wrecked car.
     But whenever I tried, on my own, to discern such a reason, a hunch that frightened me grew stronger. If this world reflected God’s purpose, then the divine way of doing things had very little to do with rewarding goodness or even providing goodness with a little decent protection. Jesus, I could not help remembering, had been crucified. The divine way of doing things seemed indifferent to safety, the one quality I craved. If God could not keep me safe, who could? The question more than unsettled me; it terrified me. And so I shut any serious thought of God away.

IN COLLEGE I STUDIED ENGLISH, the subject I loved best. I wrote reviews for the school newspaper as a way to go to a lot of rock and roll concerts. I also continued, mulishly, to go to Mass.
     This attendance required elaborate psychological self-deception: week after week I drifted into the church as if I had just happened to arrive there without planning or intention and decided to stay out of good-humored curiosity. Once seated in the folding chair and holding the paper missalette, I thought about classes or breakfast or boys until it was time to leave. Rarely did I think about God and never at all what my presence in the little campus church indicated about my faith. Whatever the force that pried me out of bed Sunday after Sunday, I sensed that it was pretty frail, a thread that too-close inspection could snap. Though I could not have said why, I did not want it to snap. So instead of thinking about faith or God, I pondered my friends, who viewed my churchgoing as so aberrant that it pushed out the far side of conventionality and gained for me the desirable status of nonconformist.
     In a triumph of stubbornness over reason, I managed to hang onto this perverse spiritual balance until my senior year. I might have maintained it even then, but I was starting to feel restless, confined inside the tight box of a severely unexamined life. So—typically, without examining my actions—I blew out the sides of the box. When I was twenty years old, I decided to become an intellectual.
     The trail had already been blazed for me by a friend, a housemate who had taken a long, difficult history course the year before and had emerged transformed. Sharper edged, flinty in her opinions, she prowled around the rest of us, as elegant and predatory as a cat. At the laundromat she read tiny books translated from the French. At parties and coffee shops, she asked needling questions about assumptions, a word she used a lot. I admired these changes and tried in small ways to imitate them—tapping my fingers together as she did, cornering a housemate in the kitchen to ask about the ideological basis for his appreciation of the Grateful Dead.      Naturally my friend soon noticed that I was stealing her lines, and she cornered me. What was I assuming when I imitated her? What posture did I expect to appropriate? If I meant to change my attitude, she said, tapping her fingers, I would have to change what lay behind the attitude. Above all, I would have to learn how to think. I would have to grapple with difficult ideas if I wanted to become an adult in the intellectual world.
     I winced, feeling like a grade schooler. My brain, whose attitudes had been shaped by grappling with Mansfield Park, looked in my imagination like a ten-year-old’s bedroom, pink and cheery and rumpled. I longed to have a brain like my friend’s, sleek lines and black leather.
     So I enrolled in Modern European History, a somewhat misleadingly titled course in Western philosophy since 1700. Even in a university with sixteen thousand undergraduates, the year-long course was famous for its demands. Assignments began with Locke and Kant and moved through Freud, Durkheim, and Marx. The reading list alone made me feel like a citizen of the intelligentsia. In the shower I found myself murmuring Critique of Pure Reason as if the title were talismanic, which, of course, it was.
     In the end I never actually took the class for a grade. The discussion section undid me; after three meetings with the chain-smoking teaching assistant who mumbled obscure jokes, talked at length about Eastern European movies, and emitted body odor that hung in the tiny room like a film, I bailed out.
     Nevertheless, for the whole year I attended three lectures a week and stayed abreast of readings that often seemed bent on expressing a truth too rarefied for mere human understanding. The writing was circular and clotted, the subjects so abstract that I sometimes had to spend fifteen minutes making sense of the study questions at the back of the critical editions. I looked up epistemology every time I came across it, and some nights, overcome with frustration, I methodically slammed my open hand against the side of the kitchen table where I read.
     Ultimately only the lectures of the professor, Frank Munt, hauled me rung by rung up the ladder of post-Enlightenment philosophy. “I can’t overemphasize the importance of this, people,” he would say, prowling back and forth across the front of the room, raking his thick hair back from his face. “This is the foundation of all that we know. This is revolutionary!” Thirty college seniors bent to take notes.
     He was a burly man, dark and bearded, with a voice so huge that people in the halls could hear his lectures even when the classroom door was closed. Energy snapped around him, and he had the habit of posing swift, complicated questions to anyone who approached. Partly for that reason, and partly because I was embarrassed to be merely auditing, I rarely joined the crowd of students around his desk after class. Still, I came to the lectures early so I would not miss a word. “Can’t you see?” he would cry, jabbing his finger at a sentence he found enlightening. “This is the foundation of our very lives. Nobody can afford not to listen. Nobody.”
     At the time it did not occur to me that I was listening to a sermon, delivered with a good preacher’s force. The sermons I heard on Sundays were tepid, flaccid, self-evident examinations of topics such as tolerance. The Catholic Center was respectful of spirituality, which it seemed to perceive as fragile and rare, like orchids. The priest there would not have dreamed of telling his congregants how to think, feel, and live.
     At Mass I twitched in my folding chair while half-articulated opinions collided in my brain. None of the initial readings for Munt’s class contradicted church teaching—indeed, Kant presented powerful new rationales to shore up my immature faith—and yet I felt as if my new ideas stood in mute conflict with my church attendance. The wispy young priest simply articulated our inherited faith, our many données. He did not contain a speck of Munt’s intellectual relish, Munt’s ability to entertain new paradigms with ferocious, convincing confidence, to test and taste and discover the world for himself. The priest, lucky guy, had inherited whole, perfectly shaped, a priori truth, and all he had to do was remind his congregants of that. He did not have to set us on fire, though I wished he would.
     I was twenty years old, but I still—accurately—felt myself unformed, unsure of my desires or beliefs. Frank Munt seemed magnificent to me because of his absolute certainty—his clear view of the world and his clear sense of his place in it. His many calls to change my life both thrilled and appalled me because of his explicit assumption that I, by my own actions, could change my life. A fully engaged existence—one attainable, he said, through study, reflection, and action—would finally harden and forge my deepest self, a self free of indecision and pointless fears. So I studied and tried to reflect, preparing myself for action that I was afraid to contemplate.
     The class slammed into Nietzsche at almost the precise midpoint of the academic year, when we were sunk in the California central valley’s February drizzle. By then I was accustomed to reading books whose logic was dark and often obscure; I stuffed my head with words, holding to my familiar, unexamined faith that someday I would understand what seemed so unclear now.
     But Nietzsche presented an unforeseen problem: I did understand what he wrote. Not for him the carefully modulated, balanced, nuanced claims of a Kant or a Spinoza. Nietzsche was brutally clear. “Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual and stupid.” From my grappling with Critique of Pure Reason, I knew only too well that my thinking was anything but swift, and I knew too how far I was from happiness. Slow, gradual, and stupid. I underlined the words.
     For the first time since I had begun Munt’s program, I started reading outside material on my own. I whipped through Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Anti-Christ, and then, in a garage-sale paperback I took home for a nickel, the collected essays and letters. At varying levels of intensity, each book brought home the same point: the world belonged to the few who were fearless and strong, and strength was determined by the ability to gaze, unaided, into a cosmos that held and promised no meaning.
     A college senior majoring in English, I was not an unsophisticated reader. I understood the use of drama and rhetorical overstatement; I had read, to give a dreary example, Dreiser. Nevertheless, Nietzsche sent me reeling. The books felt like prosecutorial summations directed personally and loudly at me. They could not have hit more precisely my weak spots: my unexamined, middle-class upbringing; my unexamined, middle-class aspirations; above all my unexamined, nervous faith in a God whose eye I hoped not to catch.
     My lifelong church attendance was not, I now recognized, a testimony to mere irrational faith, but evidence of something far more shameful: mingy, humiliating superstition. Churchgoing such as mine—tentative, halfhearted, blind—lacked even the small dignity of genuine devotion. I was afraid of the demands of a truly observant life, I realized, afraid of paying real attention to the God in whom I professed belief. Certainly I was afraid of a faith that held up suffering as a value. I attended Mass merely in order to be counted among the faithful, to check in with the home office, to keep alive a relationship that I might need one of these days. A spiritual insurance policy, for which I paid one hour every Sunday, and about which I thought, willfully, nothing. My contemptibility in my own eyes was vast.
     I read until late at night, sick to my stomach, fascinated. A challenge was being set before me, and its terms were unambiguous: Either live my faith and accept its demands, understanding that I would never join the ranks of the Übermenschen, or live without the sham of faith. Either way, get serious. The choice, I thought, was mine, and so I made it.
     With tiny, tight steps, I practiced walking into a world that had no God. Breathing carefully while I ate breakfast and read the newspaper, I reminded myself: no immanence, no promise of ultimate meaning and release. Every incident, every scandal or murder, was merely itself—scandal, death. Surely the events were wrenching enough, without a long tail of supernatural meaning attached to them.
     They were, of course. But as I sat at the breakfast table morning after morning, shaking my head and feeling my heart hammer, I was not reacting to these wrenching stories. I was encountering my own stubborn self, who could not, for all my prodding, accept the idea that terrible acts could be a matter of cosmic indifference. A woman had been murdered outside a shopping mall. Police had no leads, little hope. Cases like this, I knew, often shriveled and blew away. Nevertheless, I believed, as wholly and calmly as I believed in cell division or gravity, that somewhere, at some level, justice would occur. Even with all my force of will, I could not think otherwise.
     I was grappling with a force deeper than the superstition of which I had so witheringly convicted myself. My utter faith in ultimate meaning was like a separate circulatory system, a secret network that operated in me without my awareness or assent. I could not rip the network out, though I tried.
     How had I, such an uncertain student, become so steadfast? Every time I caught myself relying on faith, on a God bent on the salvation of all humanity, I hammered at the walls of my certitude with Nietzschean logic. I tried to carpet bomb my own system of beliefs, pointing out that my assurance of a divine plan was based on nothing but habit and wishful thinking, but my beliefs were not budged. I could entertain the notion that the universe existed without God, without intentionality, without a supernatural meaning that fixed itself to human affairs, but never with conviction. In much the same way, I could imagine an earth with no sun, or without the color blue. I could imagine it, but I could not believe in it.
     What I believed in was a plan. In ways I had difficulty articulating, I believed that all human action knit together into a fabric too immense and subtle for me to comprehend. In that fabric, existence would become coherent, and a single, magnificent narrative would give purpose to suffering and disaster. I did not believe in a cheerful, apple-checked, we’ll-all-be-together-in-heaven-and-gosh-won’t-that-be-grand resolution; I did not know what kind of resolution I expected. But everything would add up. In the words of St. Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
     The words sound consoling, but I did not feel consoled. The lessons of my childhood still glowed inside me—how many insignificant human lives would be sacrificed before all might be well? How many timid personalities like my own would be annihilated? I felt chained to a faith I had never meant to have. To “slow, gradual, and stupid,” I added “pigheaded.”
     I went to Munt’s classes even earlier, waiting for him to show me how to find a way into a philosophy that my system threw off like an illness. Sometimes I listened to an entire lecture with my head on the desk. Finally, after two weeks of this, and on the advice of my housemates, who were tired of putting up with me, I went to see Munt during his office hours. “I wondered when you’d come,” he said when he looked up and saw me shadowing the doorway. Then he added, in the great phrase of teachers who dread what is coming, “Something seems to be troubling you.”
     Although I had been afraid I might, I did not cry. Instead, hunched over in the straight chair opposite Munt’s desk, I began to recite passages of Nietzsche, one after another. It must have been weirdly like listening to an unhinged street-corner apostle. “I don’t think Nietzsche had you in mind,” Munt started at one point, but I barreled right over him with Zarathustra. I had gone on for two or three minutes before he said, “Whoa, now. Hold on. You don’t need to take this so personally.”
     If memory is trustworthy, I stopped in mid-phrase. Munt leaped into the silence to talk about the nature of rhetoric and about Nietzsche’s mental instability until my humiliation crested. I apologized and bobbed my head and grabbed my books and bolted out of there, stunned and feeling cheated. Why had Munt cried out before us, a voice in the wilderness, if we were not supposed to take the ideas personally? He had roared, repeatedly, that these books were the foundations of our very lives. Nietzsche had slammed me against my foundation; now Munt was telling me I should not have taken the experience personally.
     Of course there was no way he could have known that I, a student not even enrolled in the course, was prepared to take his words—never mind Nietzsche’s—so to heart. Probably few students anymore discover the depth of their religious faith while reading The Anti-Christ.
     I would like to find Frank Munt again, to tell him that I was not killed but made stronger by my collision with Nietzsche, and that my heart goes out to that professor trapped in his office with a sunken-eyed student who chanted Zarathustra at him. If I felt bold, I might suggest that the hand of God had led me to Munt’s class, although I know that that kind of joke makes a lot of people nervous.
     I would also like to remind Frank Munt that the year was 1979, and an awful lot of people seemed to be taking things personally. The Soviet Union was on the verge of invading Afghanistan, and Iranian students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-three hostages. In response to both events, and to my unspeakable astonishment, the kindest and most soft-spoken of my housemates enlisted in the Marines. During the self-conscious month that he continued to live in our shabby, rented house, he would go into the kitchen and hold up jars of mayonnaise and peanut butter. “This is what my head will look like,” he would say amiably. It was the most he talked about his decision.
     At the same time another housemate, Edie, was attending meetings of a new organization she had joined, the meetings stepping up from twice a month to twice and three times a week. She came home late and angry, and when I asked what she did, she snapped, “Organize.” New vocabulary started to come out of her mouth: her coworkers were members of cadres and cells. Edie had taken Munt’s class too, so maybe she expected me to understand the implication when she explained, in a gentler mood, that she had joined a group that wanted to help the poor. For several months after that conversation, I baked loaves of lemon tea bread for the organization to sell at its bake sales. I also wanted to help the poor.
     Edie finally moved out to HQ in the spring, and a friend explained to me, over coffee, that “organizing” meant enrolling people in different levels of opposition to the United States government, that the organization was stockpiling arms, and that when Edie had said “come the revolution,” she had not been just using an expression I thought had been worn out ten years before.
     For months after this conversation, I kept pulling it out and reviewing it, trying to understand what Edie had done. Unexpectedly, I found myself in Munt’s position: she was not supposed to have taken these ideas so personally. Certainly Munt had not intended, when he told us that an understanding of Marx was crucial to our lives, to impel anyone to sell tea bread and buy guns with the profits. But Edie had revealed herself to be cut out of the same cloth as I: true believers, both of us, inclined to take ideas seriously and work them out with our lives.

A FEW YEARS AGO I dashed off a letter to my friend Robb, a chum from the year I spent as an exchange student in England. We are once-a-year, Christmas-letter friends, who give each other bouncy, foreshortened versions of our doings. I told him what had been lately occupying me—teaching, writing, a fine new recipe I had discovered involving eggplant. I mentioned that I was acting as a sponsor for a woman who wanted to join the Catholic parish I attend. Robb’s response was one sentence: “Do you . . . believe?” Ellipsis his.
     Anyone can hear in those three dots his alarm and embarrassment, his fear that he should have cleaned up the language of his past letters. I had revealed myself as Other, a holder of illogical beliefs, capable of any kind of lunacy and harsh judgment. I repressed the urge to write back to him and say, “Oh, for crying out loud. I drink. I swear. I tell stories about people. I am not some kind of Martian.”
     Because I dread reactions like Robb’s, I am usually discreet about admitting my practices. Many of my friends, particularly academics, left established religion years ago. To them, overtly religious people are the ones who bomb birth-control clinics, who believe AIDS is a punishment from God, and who think that if a movie cannot uphold family values, it should not be made. These attitudes set my teeth on edge, but it is hardly surprising that people outside the flock assume all Christians are represented by their most vocal and visible, if self-elected, spokespeople. Rather than try to explain my distance from Ralph Reed, I simply keep my beliefs quiet. No crucifix in the office. No pilgrimages to Rome.
     But beliefs have a way of making themselves known. For one thing, the life of a practicing Catholic has a public aspect—the many holy days on which to attend Mass, the smudged foreheads on Ash Wednesday, the silent retreats that, most years, I make during the week before Easter. Anyone who cared to pay attention to my habits could note these practices and draw inferences accordingly.
     More important than the practices, of course, is the spirit that draws me to them. Once I finally accepted the stubborn presence of my faith, I began to attend Mass mindfully. Once I began to attend Mass mindfully, I began to pray. Way leads on to way. Without ever intending to, I now find myself living in a world that is filled, every day, with the shadow of God’s hand. In normal human decisions I see supernatural implications, what might be the movement of grace. I am no kind of mystic, and most of the time I do not pay close attention to those movements. Still, I feel them in place around me, making the world shimmer with promise.
     The sense of living in a meaningful universe hardly sets me apart, I know. Surely most of us seek patterns, symbols, answers to the questions posed by our existence. But the particular answers I have found often put me at odds with people, even those I love best.
     Listening to a friend keen over the end of her marriage, my heart throbs. Although I have no real right—it was not my marriage, after all—I cry with her. Nevertheless, underneath my tears, I believe that her loss brings the beginning of her joy. Faith has taught me that when a person is brought low and sees her single desire ripped from her hands, there follows a deep quiet. Willingly or not, she dwells in the absence of what is longed for. That quiet, which removes a person from the world, might be termed peace. It might also be termed God.
     I would not be so foolish, nor so cruel, as to voice this belief to my sorrowing friend. Nevertheless, I know that it colors what I say and the confidence with which I promise her that happiness will return. I am not promising pie in the sky, by and by. I am promising a happiness that contains sorrow, since I believe that human freedom and joy have, at their center, a crucifixion. Faith as I experience it does not make life simple; it makes life complex, and I want both to give voice to that complexity and to shut up about it.
     Recently a nice woman, a fellow parishioner, spotted me at the grocery store and ran over. She was eager to share how she had just remembered to get cheese, even though it was not on the list, because God’s own sweet voice reminded her. “Maybe you just remembered,” I offered, and she looked at me with hurt eyes.
     “When you know these things, you know,” she said. “I expected you to be glad for me.”
     I apologized and expressed gladness, but I went home uneasy. Why did the woman have such a clear expectation that I would rejoice with her over the remembered cheese? What on earth pulled her across the Kroger to share her cozy God moment with me, of all people? Could she not see that I believe in a God of irony, one who intends to lead us to happiness, yes, but who is not necessarily going to make us comfortable, or supplied with cheese, during the journey?
     Maybe she could not. This is, of course, my lifelong dread come true. Maybe people do not see me as I see myself, and I am becoming exactly the dreary, pious person I have always avoided. Not long ago a friend repeated to my priest a mildly blue joke I had told. He responded, “I can’t believe Holy Erin told you that.”
     Idiotically, I related this anecdote to my husband, who has, with relish, told it to several of our friends. They all think the nickname is sidesplitting, and I know enough to roll my eyes and laugh along with them. Holy Erin! What a hoot. The priest would not be calling me holy anything if he had seen me shoot the bird at the kid who would not let me into the line of cars waiting to leave the church parking lot. But my laughter is clearly strained. Now I am nervous about meeting my priest’s eye, afraid that I am somehow deceiving him and much more afraid that I am not. “I am not holy.” The statement seems self-evident.
     Whatever I am becoming, I am helpless to stop the process. Like the clay in the hands of the potter visited by the prophet Jeremiah, I am being shaped to fill the outlines of my faith. Every time the pot takes on a distortion, Jeremiah observes, the potter breaks it and begins anew. Just so, God promises, will I be broken and re-created every time my shape goes awry. It does not take much imagination to hear in this promise both consolation and threat.
     And yet I do not feel very different from the young woman who wanted to be an intellectual or from the teenager who made fun of Catholic youth. Whatever changes have occurred in my nature and outlook are mostly invisible to me. I am still readily irritated, lacking in patience, often selfish, often willful. Those famous gifts of the spirit listed in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians are taking their own sweet time surfacing in me. The best I can say is that the fear that used to surge through me like an electrical current is largely still now. It has not been replaced by blissful certainty about Last Things or by the certainty in action that Frank Munt preached. In place of my lifelong, highly polished fears now exists the conviction that all life, in ways I cannot begin to predict, will pass through sorrow and pain into joy.
     It is, of course, a terrifying thought. And I have no choice but to believe it.

ERIN MCGRAW teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Her most recent book of fiction is Lies of the Saints (Chronicle Books, 1996). Her essay “Bad Eyes,” which first appeared in our Spring 1998 issue, was reprinted in The Art of the Essay: The Best of 1999.

“True Believer” appears in our Autumn 2000 issue.

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