Eating God

When I was a little girl, I used to walk up and down the side aisles of our Catholic church, under the hushed, enormous arched ceiling, and examine the plaster reliefs that illustrated each station of the cross—there are fourteen, enough for the story stretched all the way around the edges of the church, in a horseshoe: Jesus picking up the cross; Jesus falling; Jesus meeting his mother; Veronia wiping his face.

The reliefs had the same appeal for me as dollhouse scenery, or comic books, except that these told a type of story usually kept away from me as a child—something violent and serious, reserved for adults. But I didn’t even need to read to understand this. I could get as close to it as any adult could.

It was, in a lot of ways, the start of why I wanted to be a writer. I wanted what I perceived adults to have — no doors closed to them, their minds able to gallop across any idea, their ability to find the answer to any question that plagued them. As a kid I felt constantly that doors were swept shut as soon as I asked questions. The frustration of this was enormous.

From my child perspective, this rule didn’t seem to apply when it came to the Catholic Church. We were allowed to read books of saints that were filled with very adult horrors: a full-page illustration of St. Sebastian speared through with arrows, blood dripping down his leg, mouth open in a desperate moan, or martyrs getting crushed to death on spiked wheels. We weren’t even supervised! These were books we could keep in our bedroom, hold in our laps and stare at as long as we wanted. When we went to church on Sunday, a bloody, tortured Jesus hung over our heads as we made our way down the aisle to our seats. It was an R-rated movie we were admitted to without question.

Not even just admitted — as early as first grade, we were the center of a holy, somber ritual. We learned to accept the eucharist in our left hand, pluck it up and place it in our mouths with the right, and mutter the correct words, like an incantation. We were entrusted with what all the adults said was the literal body of Christ. It had transformed, they told us, right there in front of us.

In the Eucharist, we consume God, and become that which we consume.

That’s really what they say! You EAT AND BECOME GOD.

This heady swirl of gore and suffering, alongside magic, transfiguration, and ceremony made innate sense to me as a child. In fact, I think they are natural for most children, despite our desire to think of childhood as an innocent, pastel pink sort of time. Children have a different relationship with their bodies, one that can be hard for us to remember or access as adults — when I was a preschool teacher I was struck by their obsession with wounds. As though they were surprised, encountering for the first time the fascinating limits of the body.

Violence hovers just on the other side of this — the surprise and the horror of all that you cannot predict as a child, all that lies beyond your control or even, the adults tell you, your comprehension. They tell you that what is going on is between your mother and father is not your business, but your whole body thrums with the feeling that something is wrong, the click of your mother’s tongue or the ringing silence of a living room as clear—maybe clearer—than any explanation someone could offer. You are inside everything. Threat and fear are right up in your throat. There’s a reason some children see monsters everywhere. It’s because there are monsters everywhere.

So the church offered the one place in my young life where it seemed like we all admitted that children could see and understand these things, and there was a profound relief in that for me. If they weren’t hidden, I could inch up to them and examine their shape and size and smell. And even more than that — the church also promised that there was some power in understanding them. That on the other side of these rituals, these images, lay a way to hold power, be strong, wield my own magic.

You can guess how this story ends.

Alongside the dizzying, radical possibilities church seemed to open up for me as a kid, I was simultaneously accruing a worrisome pile of conflicting information. For example, I learned that I could not be a priest because I was a girl—despite the fact that I had just played the starring role of Jesus Christ in a recent Sunday morning children’s production, to thunderous applause. This made no sense to me. (It still makes no sense to me.) I learned, too, that we needed priests to translate God to us, that holding a ceremony at your house, for example, was sacrilegious. Over the years, of course, I’d learn about the much, much worse things the Catholic Church has done, and continues to do. It turned out that this had not been a place, after all, that I thought it was — certainly not for children, certainly not for girls. Certainly not a place that made a habit of speaking radical truth about violence.

Like so many people raised Catholic, I haven’t been to church in years, and I won’t ever go back. But I know what I glimpsed there, as a child, and I know what was denied me. It has something to do with power, yes, but more to do with the soul.

When my namesake, St. Catherine of Siena, was eight years old—the same age I was when I read her story in that book of saints — she ran away from home to become a hermit. In my book there was a little ink illustration of her kneeling in an empty cave, her face calm and unafraid. This tiny girl, so full of conviction. A ferocity I recognized, but which in my own spirit felt mixed in a dirty bathwater of fears and confusion and shame. Her own ferocity was clean, singular of purpose.

St. Catherine would grow up to become one of the great saints of her time — she’d visit popes, perform miracles, and bear the stigmata (hands down the Church’s most punk rock distinction). She also famously refused to eat, claiming to be sustained by the communion host alone, despite her mother’s frantic pleas to stop starving herself. In a letter, she replied to her mom: I think that if you loved my soul more than my body, all exaggerated tenderness in you would die.

Absolutely brutal shit to say to your mom, but this was the kind of thing I was so hungry for as a girl. What if I had a soul, and what if it was bigger and mattered more than all the things people seemed so concerned with, like bodies or popularity or even power? What if I was vast, beyond self, cosmic in my complexity, tied to a God none of us could really understand?

Of course, I would have never put it in those words as a child, but looking back now, I still feel that same hunger, along with enormous tenderness for what that little girl was looking for. It’s the same part of me that grows quiet in libraries, that sits down at the writing desk before the sun is up. The part that believes in something larger than my body, vast and mysterious. The part that wants to reach for the door, and swing it wide open.