Irish-Catholic guilt, as experienced by an adolescent male at St. Kenneth Parrish in Plymouth, Michigan, USA
Enter sanctuary. Amble down aisle, choose pew, drop to one knee, gesticulate the wounds of Christ, look at idol statue hanging from a cross behind the alter, stand, enter pew, pull down knee-rest, kneel, entwine fingers into double fist, recite “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” and ask Christ’s forgiveness for masturbating or hitting your brother or saying “shit” or “fuck” or “cunt.”
Feel guilty. Guilty for wanting to bang your ninth grade science teacher, and for eating till your stomach felt like stretched lambskin on a djembe drum in tenth. Guilty for drinking booze and smoking fat joints and snorting Tylenol-Three-with-Codeine tablets in your friend’s basement, or for neglecting to tithe ten percent of your one hundred-fifty dollar bi-weekly paycheck from working your senior-year minimum-wage job at the downtown sandwich shop.
And Worry. Worry that the sins you have forgotten will compound and damn you in the afterlife. Worry about that time you called your mother a “bitch” under your breath, or the time you said “Jesus Christ” in anger. Worry that you aren’t going to confession enough, that you didn’t fast for an hour before consuming the Eucharist. Worry because you had premarital sex, because you hate going to church, because you’re sick of praying, because you’re questioning God’s existence. Worry because God has never made you feel good. Only sick, and empty, and numb.*
A youth’s first exposure to the irony of adulthood
Every other Sunday as a kid I’d go with my mother and stepfather to their fundamentalist church and watch my stepfather raise his hands and step to the altar every time the pastor—who wore high-priced suits with gold cufflinks, his fingers always heavy with encrusted rings—requested all sinners seeking repentance to join him by the stage. “Hallelujah,” people would say, quite loudly, almost yelling it. Occasionally, people in the front pews would start speaking some jibberish--something like, “Hommena hoomenah hommena, sacti sancti, oobady doobady doo…” and so on, almost as if they knew some Latin, but then threw in mostly nonsense.
“You hear that, folks?” the pastor would say. “That’s called speaking in tongues*. It happens when the Holy Spirit speaks through you, with the language of Heaven.” There would be moaning—hundreds of people experiencing some kind of spiritual bliss they only could achieve when the Musical Director of the church would come out and play a slow, contemplative tune on the piano, near the end of the pastor’s speech. There were always people around us (eventually my mom started doing it too) that would slowly sigh, or mmm, and put their hands in the air. Once or twice I raised my hand like that, trying to fit in. But it always seemed a bit silly to me. And I never understood why we just kind of stood there and meditated in front of everyone. I would always peek around and see what everyone else was doing, to see if I was getting the full experience of higher-power worship.
I’d look over and see Tom, my stepfather, saying, “Praise Jesus.” He looked so strange in church--a grizzly-sized man with a scowling goatee submitting for three-ish hours a week in fear of the consequences of his acts. When the pastor would call all the sinners up to the front, Tom would lift his hands, walk toward the stage and, as they say at the church, “give [his] heart to the Lord.”
At home, Tom would give the stick to our dog. He would whip the shit out of our chocolate lab, Moose, for chewing on something, or for shitting on the floor, or for escaping the yard and running wild around the neighborhood. I remember watching this happen—Tom yelling and chasing Moose around the room, Moose running and hiding beneath the desk, then behind the couch. What I remember most are the noises: the heavy stomping of Tom’s feet across the carpet, the smacking of the stick on fur and flesh, the high-pitched yelps of a helpless canine. I remember seeing the anger in Tom’s face. I remember my mother watching, but doing nothing. She saw, but said nothing.
He was nicer to my brother and me, but he still treated us like dogs. He stomped up to us, too, and would get in our face, threaten to beat our asses--he alpha-dogged us. He saw us as just a couple of mutts that shouldn’t get more than table scraps and water. And my mother, unwilling to disturb her happy marriage, never overtly opposed his assessment.
Tom had us do everything he didn’t want to--we were his slave-boys, created to follow orders, and to keep our mouths shut. He woke us up to shovel the driveway when it snowed, then would sit in his dead father’s recliner and watch TV in boxers and a stained tank-top as frost bit our fingers and our noses bled snot. In the summer he would call us lazy-asses and tell us to mow the lawn, then would drink lemonade on the deck and micromanage our mowing technique as the motor shook our hands and arms numb.
Some days Tom would use the weed-whacker himself—maybe he thought we were too young to use it, or too short–to clean up patches of our yard mulched with woodchips. One of those days, Tom and I were in the backyard. I was shoveling dog shit into compost bags, and he was shouting orders to me over the weed-whacker’s motor. He must have lost control or forgot the cords were whipping wildly in circles, because he somehow got whacked in the back of his calf.
I saw him wince. “God DAMN it,” he said. Then he shut off the motor and pulled up the leg of his jeans. There was a long, red welt across his pale and hairy flesh.
Often I had prayed for something bad to happen to Tom, dreamed that I could hurt him as he had hurt me and my brother, and here it was, happening in front of me: Tom, in pain. Sure, I enjoyed it, and yes, it felt like some kind of revenge, a sort-of answer to my prayers. But that was it. I’d never seen him hurt after that, in any physical or emotional sense, unless irrational rage counts as a form of pain.
But it didn’t feel like enough. Didn’t feel like the just punishment of the wicked that I’d been taught about in church. It felt more like a lone, random instance of minor comeuppance. One that I could only see over and over in my head, rather than in front of my eyes. So I waited, indefinitely, for God to finish his punishment, to insufflate the full breath of justice upon my stepfather. And then, after years of waiting and praying and waiting, it never happened. If there is a God, I thought, it seems that he isn’t on my side.
Inklings of centrifugation from the supreme superstition
When I was a kid I would pray for a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure. I prayed for Transformers. I prayed that my braces would stop cutting my cheeks. I prayed that the kids at school would stop picking on me. I prayed that my eyebrows would just grow. Prayed that I would get skinny like everyone else. Prayed that my stepfather would treat me humanely. Prayed that my mother would stand up for her kids. Prayed that I’d be someone, anyone but me. Prayed that I could be in Heaven instead of here, in Hell. Prayed that I could just die in my sleep.
I asked God, “Why?” so many times. “Why does my life suck so bad? Why don’t you do something? Why can’t I be happy?”
And then I stopped. I stopped asking why. I stopped praying. I stopped worrying. I stopped feeling guilty. I stopped blaming God. I stopped wanting to die. I stopped caring. Caring if I sin, if I swear, if I fuck, if I go to Heaven or Hell. I stopped caring about tithes, about keeping the Sabbath, about maintaining the portrait of a “good Christian man.” It just seemed so futile--all of it. The praying, the begging, the shame, the fear. What good had any of it done for me? I wondered, without ever reaching a conclusion. Whatever, I thought. Fuck it.
Around this time (age: seventeen), Tom and my mother rallied up a “family meeting,” which really just meant that I had to talk to them for thirty-plus minutes (as opposed to none-at-all). Whenever we had these “family meeting[s],” Tom and my mother always had some agenda that they were trying to push upon me (and my older brother PJ, when he was still living with us). It wasn’t communication—it was familial propaganda.
This time they wanted to discuss how I hadn’t been “pulling my weight” around the house, and how even though I cared so very little about anything else (particularly my waning days as a high-schooler), that didn’t mean that I shouldn’t care about doing my chores, and that I shouldn’t disregard their authority over me, or anyone else*’s authority for that matter.
Tom called it “senioritis,” like it’s some disease you get when you realize you no longer need to take anyone’s shit. When you turn eighteen and you know, you just know that you can do whatever you want, because you just don’t give a damn. My mother, who didn’t usually contribute much during the “meeting[s],” said, “Remember, you aren’t invincible,” as if that meant something.
“No, I’m not invincible,” I thought, but didn’t say. “Just apathetic.”
Getting revenge on a self-righteous individual
Most days I looked at the dent in the door that once led to my bedroom. My mother and stepfather built another room at the back of the house when I was just starting middle school. My brother, PJ, got the new room, and I kept the old one--which is actually smaller now because a hallway was added, using our old door as an entrance, that led you past my new door and toward my brother’s. But the old door still had that dent, that boot-print, from the time Tom kicked his way into our bedroom when PJ and I were just seven and five.
Some days I would touch the cracked wood of the door. The crack looked like a narrow mouth, with long, sharp teeth. I would look over at the doorframe—the wood splintered from the kick, the loose piece long ago trashed. The door never shut the same after that.
Before the new bedroom, PJ and I never had any privacy. Not from each other, and not from the outside world. But after the renovations, when, for the first time, we got our own rooms, we also got our own doors, our own locks. A new kind of freedom.
When PJ moved out, after Tom told him he’d have to start paying rent, they converted PJ’s room into a second “family room”—that is, it got a TV and an L-shaped couch. I spent a lot of time back there my last year of high school, playing Super Mario 64 or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, then watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or American Psycho, and falling asleep on that couch instead of my own bed.
One day home alone, I try to open the door to the back room, “PJ’s room” we still call it, and the knob doesn’t turn. I check the tops of all the door frames in the house, try to find a key—which is just a straight piece of metal with a flattened tip that opens any bathroom or bedroom in the house—but someone had hidden them. I call my mother.
“Tom locked it,” she says. “He says you left the room a mess again, and you can use it when you learn to clean it up a bit.” A pillow, a blanket, a DVD case, a “mess.”
My Xbox is in there. And my Nintendo 64. And the only movies in the house worth watching are there, too. I press myself against the locked door, inches away from the sweet solace of videogames. I need that escape from reality, need to enter the virtual universe to escape my debilitating teenage angst. Need to jack a Lamborghini, jet down the streets of Vice City, gun down innocent pedestrians, drive up a ramp, jump out of the car in midair, get back up and steal a crotch-rocket, drive to the other side of town where there’s a helicopter and fly to the tallest building so I can shoot rockets at police cars and SWAT vans and tanks and rack up the highest “Wanted” level I can before I’m dead and the screen fades to black.
I turn from the door, and I walk down the hallway. I see the dent in the hallway door--the thin but toothy mouth, the cracked frame, the useless lock.
“Doomp,” my foot says to PJ’s door. But the door remains closed. A second time, with more force: “DOOMP.” And the door swings open. The frame cracks a bit from the kick, but it’s still intact. The door isn’t damaged, except for a scuff, because I’d pressed my foot flat against the wood, rather than forcing my heel into it. It shuts okay, and locks too.
When my mom gets home, I’m watching Blow or playing Xbox. She finds me in PJ’s Room. “What happened? Did you find a key?”
“No, no key,” I say. “I kicked it in. You know, like Tom did to the other one? I figured if he can do it, kick down doors, so can I. Door for a door.”
Beginning to regret the inclusion of subheadings
Alison: short, funny, sassy, brunette, pouty lips, wide hips, great ass, handful breasts. We meet the second day of the first year of college and spend all day grocery shopping and talking and laughing, then end up making out in her apartment-style dorm-room. We kiss for so long our lips and necks hurt but it feels almost weirder to stop kissing than to keep at it. We spend most days of our freshman year together and I sleep in her bed more than mine, and she’s the first person to make me think, “Damn, I love her,” when I look at her face, or into her hazel-blue eyes.
But she says some things that scare me. Like, “I want my husband to love Jesus as much as I do.” And, “Everything happens for a reason.” Or, “When we have kids, I want us to be a good, Christian family.”
I say things that scare her, too. First, “I just don’t really like going to church.” Then, “Me and Jesus are taking a break.” And finally, “I don’t think I even believe in God.”
When I say that last one, we’re lying next to each other on her twin-sized dorm-room mattress. She gets silent, and stiff, then rolls to her side. I can’t see her face, but I can feel her cry. “Hey,” I say. “Are you okay?”
She crosses her arms and presses them against her breasts and scrunches her shoulders up to her neck. She sniffles in response.
“Why are you so sad?” I say. “I’m just telling you how I feel.” I rest one hand on her upper arm, then weave the fingers of the other into her light-brown hair.
“It’s just, when I picture our future,” she says and turns her face toward me, her eyes tearing, “I see us taking our kids to church, and praying together, and loving each other through God--[sniffle]--I knew you were having doubts, but I thought things could change. I thought you could change. I didn’t realize it was so final.”
“Ehhhhggg-[sigh].” I lay on my back, my hand still in her hair. I say, “I’m just not sure what I believe, you know? I’m still trying to figure it out.”
She keeps her body turned away from me for a few more moments, and we lay in silence. Then she turns to me, finally, and says, “Okay,” then puts her hand on my cheek and kisses me on the lips. “Well let me know what you decide.”
It is a materialistic world, and I am a materialistic boy
About a year into our relationship, Alison and I broke up, then got back together, then “took a break,” then fucked other people, then got back together, then dated other people while together. Then she got serious with someone else, and I got serious with bourbon and White Russians and weed.
Most days post-Alison were the same: wake up half-drunk, take a shit, play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Grand Theft Auto IV on my roommate’s Playstation 3, watch an episode of “Scrubs” or “South Park,” eat microwaved chicken nuggets or pizza rolls, shower, drive my ’95 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible to work, serve tables for a few hours, drive back, stop by the grocery store down the street from my apartment, buy a bottle of Wild Turkey or vodka and Kahlúa, go home and drink and get angry or sad or both, then black out and pass out with a half-glass of liquor in my hand, wake up at four a.m. to clean up my spilled drink, fall back asleep, and repeat.
Days I didn’t work, I would get high with the guys next door, then sit in my car and chain smoke cigarettes while listening to The Mars Volta and feel peaceful. These moments allowed me to ignore money (lack thereof), girls (also lacking), and my own ego (damaged, but not destroyed). The music—so complex and strange—when coupled with psychedelic euphoria from the pot, made me feel more spiritual than the Catholic hymns and fundamentalist Christ-songs ever had.
There was a recent study at the University of Missouri regarding the brain and its link to spirituality. It attempted to scientifically explain the kind of spiritual phenomenon that I felt while jamming out to intricate guitar-work and baselines in my green-whale car. In the study, one of the University’s health psychology professors, Brick Johnstone, studied several patients with damage to their right parietal lobe—the area of the brain that focuses on the “self.” He found that subjects with worse injuries to the lobe reported feeling closer to a higher being. The more the subjects relied on their left parietal lobe, wherein language and mathematics are decoded, the more spiritual they felt.
Johnstone concluded, “when the brain focuses less on the self, by decreased activity in the right lobe,”--and instead, perhaps, focuses on the lyrics and harmony of music--“it is by definition a moment of self-transcendence and can be understood as being connected to God or Nirvana. It is the sensation of feeling like you are part of a bigger thing."
Perhaps this too explains why mathematicians and musicians feel their work provides the language of the universe--the act of contemplating such things is apparently so closely tied to a feeling of universality and unity. And it wouldn’t be imprudent to argue that my general lack of spirituality, when I would sit in the hard pews at church or kneel on those thinly padded knee-rests and beg God to forgive my sins, came from me being such a damn self-loathing narcissist. Maybe the reason I never felt connected to the others at church, never felt that I had a soul that is inexplicably linked to the whole of humanity, is because I spent most of my time wallowing in the right side of my parietal lobe, rather than accessing the communal and spiritual left.
Zeal for entropy v. delusions of order
When we were together, Alison would say to me, almost too often, “Everything happens for a reason,” which she wholeheartedly believed, or that’s what her conscious mind forced her to believe. It gave her a reason to live, to not bust out in tears every morning when the bliss of her dreams would wear off and the dread of waking life would take hold. You see, when she sleeps, she sees her father, and she can touch him, hug him, ask him, “How are you here?” and “What is heaven like?” Sometimes he answers, and sometimes he just smiles, but no matter what, she is happy.
So when she wakes up, and she tells me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I can’t just disagree. Because what she means is, “My father died for a reason. He didn’t wither in that hospital bed as the chemo ate his insides just because. His life, his death—they mean something.”
I could argue with her. I could tell her, “Everything is random.” I could say, “The brain creates meaning.” And I would be right. “Everything exists in a probability field.”
“A ‘probability field?’” she would say, curious, but not really wanting to discuss it. She would look at me, next to her in bed, and give my lips a vacuous gaze.
“Nothing has an exact location,” I could say. “Every object requires an observer to determine its position, its velocity, its direction—things that have meaning. It’s easy to find and define the large objects, but for smaller particles, like electrons, you never know exactly where they are--and if you figure it out, you can’t know where they’ll be next. Fundamental particles are always popping in and out of existence—it’s chaos. And without an observer to figure out where these particles are, they don’t exist in any exact spot. Consciousness creates the position, the velocity--it creates the meaning.”
She wouldn’t get it. She would think that I’m trying to stomp her beliefs, dismiss them as nonsense. “It’s not as complicated as all that,” she would say. “God controls all particles, all objects. He decides what happens.” She would try to touch me, try to conductively transfer her faith with her fingers, but I wouldn’t want to be touched. “It’s all part of the Plan.”
I could get angry. I could think that she’s stupid, or naïve. But I could never believe her. “How can you just dismiss a century’s worth of scientific observations and conclusions like that?” I could say. “How can you know that there’s a ‘Plan?’ How can you know it’s not just probability, just chance? How can you know that ‘everything happens for a reason?’”
“Because,” she would say, “I just know.”
Didn’t Jesus smoke a pipe?
I’m at a party drinking brandy from a flask. I don’t know anyone except for my roommate and his girlfriend and they’re passed out in her upstairs bedroom before I even arrive. Her roommate David tells me, “Stay.” He says, “Have a good time.” It’s mostly girls so I think I might get laid.
I watch.
I dance.
I go for a smoke.
I step back inside.
A girl walks into the front room and says, “It smells like smoke in here.”
“Oh, yeah, well I just had a cigarette,” I say, still standing near the door. “So that explains it.”
“You smoke cigarettes?” she says. “You shouldn’t smoke. Aren’t you a Christian?” She has a gold-plated cross tucked into the cleavage of her small breasts.
“Actually no,” I say. “I was, but now I’m sort of a non-theist.” She crinkles her forehead. “Is that relevant?”
“You mean you don’t believe in God?”
I pause. “No, I guess I don’t.” This girl is borderline belligerent. “Do you?”
Some other girls walk into the room. “Hey you guys,” the first girl says and aims her finger at me. “This guy is an atheist.”
Thunderclap.
A second girl says, “You don’t believe in God?”
A third girl says, “How can you not believe in God?”
A fourth girl says, “What is wrong with you?”
I shrug.
I give up on getting laid.
A creation story for the twenty-(unspecific) century
“We’ve done it,” says Professor Zaius. “The experiment worked.”
Professor Farnsworth hadn’t expected this news so soon. In fact, he hadn’t expected this news at all. “You mean--“
“Yes, Farnsworth. Come, see for yourself.”
The laboratory is large, enormous, some might say, for it contains the world’s most elaborate particle collider. The scientists and engineers travel via electric carts--four tires, a steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake pedal. Farnsworth and Zaius sit in a cart labeled “3” and scoot toward the control room near the center of the collider.
Farnsworth has been to the main control room nearly every day for the past fifteen years. Once they enter, Farnsworth walks briskly past the monitors and wave detectors and quantum mainframes, and follows Zaius to the main screen. The screen where he had once witnessed the production of anti-matter, and the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson/field, and the first particles to experimentally transcend the barrier of time, and the taming of a quantum black hole, and then of a wormhole--but nothing had compared to this, not even close.
The screen magnifies the image 100,000x, but slowly zooms out as the object grows. It is translucent, a dodecahedron, and expands exponentially. “It’s based on the design of our own universe,” says Zaius, “but time in there moves much more quickly than for us. Before you arrived, it completed its inflationary period, and its state of quantum chaos. Now, as you can see, galaxies are starting to form. Soon, very soon, there will be stars, and planets, and maybe even--“
“Life,” says Farnsworth. He watches as swirling streams of light move quickly across the surface of the tiny universe and wrap around miniature black holes. The object is already almost too complex to comprehend.
“Yes,” says Zaius. “Life. But don’t get too attached. If this thing expands too quickly, we’ll have to shut it down.”
“Shut it down?” says Farnsworth. “Don’t be preposterous! This is our greatest accomplishment--[scoff]--shut it down.”
“Hey, I don’t like it any more than you do. But we’re all answering to a higher power here,” says Zaius.
Farnsworth turns and looks at him, glaring. “Higher power?” he says. “What are you saying?”
“Whoa there, Farnsy, just a joke,” says Zaius. He laughs. “I meant the investors, of course.”
“Of course,” says Farnsworth, relieved. For a moment, he thought his partner had lost it. “You do know, Zai, if there is a higher power,” Farnsworth says, then turns and gazes at the screen, in awe of their creation, “then we’re it.”*
A wee bit o’ Irish, as consumed by an adult male at Z’s Bar and Restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
Enter bar. Present state-issued identification, choose booth, order whiskey on the rocks, drink to Albert Einstein, spin glass with fingertips; order pint of stout, drink to Carl Sagan, tip glass till it’s only foam; order g-and-t, squeeze juice from wedge of lime, drink to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, poke at ice with black swizzle sticks; order whiskey-Coke, drink to Edward Baum, drink another to Amalie Noether, drink to Maxwell and Kepler, and one to Heisenberg and Hubble. Drink one to Giordano Bruno and one to Galileo. Drink until you’re carefree, happy, drunk, mellow.
Feel pleased. Pleased for wanting to fuck the girl at the end of the bar, and for eating half-a-dozen fried buffalo chicken rolls. Pleasure in all the drinks and all the bong-rips and all the LSD and speed. Pleasure in every cigarette, every book, every song, every independent dramedy. Feel pleasure in everything you eat smell touch see hear that has been created for its own sake or for your nose hand eyes ears. Feel pleased with life.
And have faith. Faith in science, and in knowledge. Faith in the unknown, and in the human will to seek and discover what we don’t yet understand. Faith that mankind will not destroy itself with petty squabbles over religion and race and cash and control, but that we may one day prosper as a united species that seeks to transcend our modern immorality. Faith that, after all the chaos and persecution and diseases and guilt, a person might find happiness and pleasure and peace in this strange and perplexing enigma of consciousness. And faith that, in life or in death, we will one day understand the Universe.
© Matthew Sullivan