What was it like growing up as a Catholic?
I wouldn’t know.
I wasn’t there.
Someone who wasn’t me was there, a chemo patient who doesn’t recall who he was before the uncomfortably nameable started cannibalising him. If you believe in a soul, this situation is a distinct possibility. If you believe in the ability or possibility of losing one, then it becomes a certainty. I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t left my soul at the atrium of a Church. I don’t believe in a diminished human, just different, further along the spectrum.
I would have prayed my last at the Asp, walked down the aisle with a bowed, reverent head, brushed the small copies of “The Lives of the Saints” stacked indiscriminately in the Nave, and then heard a meek tearing sound when my soul decided to stay with its maker and let my mind and body wrench themselves free.
I walk around with the memories of another stuck in my head, lodged in some crevice that someone had cloven with a theological hammer.
At the age of twelve – Nascent sexuality and feeble erections. I had probably been masturbating for a lot longer than that, but it was at the age of twelve that hell was the predominate fantasy. Not technically, but criminally. An intruder into fantasy. Hell is eternal, at the age of twelve you come in about 1.2 seconds.
I didn’t know the meaning of the word “disproportionate” at that age.
At the age of ten – you find a wallet and find a single dollar coin inside. A Spanish doubloon, a sparkling wealth when you have nothing, when money is something that you hear rumours about but never possess, rumours in percentages scribbled across a blackboard. You hand in the wallet but hold onto your treasure. Popcorn as bounty, bought at the dingy hole-in-the-wall tuckshop. It didn’t last long, but even then, neither did a dollar. Remember that word - Eternity.
As a matter of health a ten year old should never miss three nights sleep looking under blankets and beds for creeping damnation.
At the age of 9 – Fragility is proportionate. Little fists can hurt little faces. Blood streams in miniature, bruised shins, thrown into a closet to face a teacher who believes in dual culpability – equal in responsibility, equal in punishment. Don’t throw a punch. WWJD. What would Jesus Do? Turn the other cheek. Hang on the cross. You can’t reason with other children who couldn’t care less what Jesus would do.
Nine is too young to believe in moral civility. Let them be animals while they can, while it allows them to survive.
What would I know about growing up as a Catholic?
Who would I be if I hadn’t?
The worst thing is that one question does not exclude the other.
I know nothing about growing up within Catholicism, but I know everything about being a self-amalgamated belief system. Call it Catholicism if you wish. Call it whatever you want. My childhood. My word. It means nothing and everything. They were my own ghosts and dreams feeding of the inspiration of others. Spooks in the dark and devils in the broom closet. Catholicism is too narrow a word for what I experienced. The Church was where you fell asleep while holding candles at five in the morning. I was damned when I touched myself or another. When fist hit flesh and property law is the stuff of immediate practicality. When vampires and werewolves are still hunted and can still triumph. I feared the movies as much as I feared the church, but the Church was my first horror movie.
I wouldn’t be this thing without a soul if I hadn’t been a Catholic, or more accurately, had a soul to start with. I wouldn’t be the man today who walked away from himself yesterday. Agnosticism is a nice word to sum up the struggle for self-belief. Self-disappointment is the worst enemy of faith. To not believe in a God implies you have ceased believing in yourself. God isn’t dead. He’s alive and kicking. It’s his creation that’s flat lining.
Atheism, on the other hand, is nothing but trading religion for science. I’m yet to see the value of trade, only that one gives us reason for war and the other gives us the terrible means. I have found no third way and I stopped looking for one.
All I know is that I sold my soul to dead philosophers and hacks, the wise and the misguided. I sold my soul to the only devil I knew, the only devil who ever existed. I don’t need to say it - each of us knows its name, each of us knows its face.
I don’t know anything about Catholicism but I know I sold my soul and that I don’t want it back. God keep it, the rest of me he can feed to the wolves.