There's no avoiding it: I'm just one of the many 20-somethings who've fallen into that slump of not practicing, not really adhering, but still believing and, thus, suffers from the occasional wave of guilt. And my current state of "belief" is just about as confusing and contradictory as growing up Catholic; nothing has changed there.
Technically, I'm a fullout baptized, communion-ized and confirmed Catholic, raised from the very beginning to take Jesus' blood and pray to the Virgin Mother. I got the double-whammy upbringing from both parents, and on top of that, my even more Catholic grandmothers (who still go to confession, to confess God-knows-what). I remember that everything needed to be perfect on my First Communion: my mother gave me her tiny, white pocketbook where I stored my Catechism book (perfect size for little hands) and my plastic rosary (also white). I was seven, skinny, and content to take Christ's body into my own. And He tasted like paper.
A couple of years later, my parents were divorced. I recall mother describing the annulment process as "too expensive, too complicated, and takes a long, long time". Yikes!
My mother taught Sunday School for several years, and we went to church throughout my early teens. At my Confirmation I wore a sexy dress, tight around my new-forming curves, when I was sweet 16. In High School, I made friends with the offbeat metal-heads and skateboarders, who were baffled at my strict adherence to Sunday mass and crucifixes, which decorated my room. My choir teacher, a loud, large, dogmatic traditionalist, never failed to lecture us on the "hard times" his Catholic schoolboy past, and encourage us to sing the Ave Maria with tears in our eyes.Then came sex, birth control, and college in that respective order. At Sarah Lawrence, Catholicism was a direction of study, not a belief. It was okay to take religion courses, but it was NOT acceptable to think that stuff was actually real. At campus art shows, poetry readings, lectures, and even in class, the topic of Catholicism was slurred over as a silly childhood superstition. It was on par with political conservatism (probably rightly so).
I wasn't offended - I took it as a sign to move on. You have to remember, by that time I'd committed at least one carnal sin, and wasn't on the way to make an honest woman of myself. I took a course on Medieval Christianity and the cosmos (really) and wrote theses on heresey and inquisition. I took Latin and read the Aeneid. I took a Russian novel class and fell desperately in love with Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (Google it, then read it).
When I spent time in Italy and studied abroad in Florence, I experienced mega-basilica-overload. I saw enough statues, icons, and mosaics and triptychs of saints and angels to fill another Catholic girl's lifetime. Though they weren't just objects. Every piece filled my heart with fascination of their beauty, mystery, and pain. I felt a return, in some way, to my faith. I went to Assisi and saw Saint Francis' tomb (that's what they said it was!). I climbed the fucking cuppola on the tippy-top of Saint Peter's Basilica. I read Dante for the first time, chuckled at his Hell, and loved his version of what Heaven could be. It was a journey into the world that carried the origins of a beauitful Catholicism; wherever you turned there was a sign that this was the mother land of it all. Though, interestingly, the Italians I met couldn't really care less about being surrounded by chuches.
I know, this glimpse really doesn't say enough. But, like I said, coming to terms with my beliefs takes a while, and to be honest, might not ever completely happen. In the meantime, I'm going to keep living in delicious sin with my boyfriend, watch Pope Benedict on TV and shake my head, and spell God with a capital "G".
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