A Mother and Child Look for God

My daughter rips open mail from Michigan, and out flutters a snapshot of my 7-year-old niece wearing a crisp, puffy white dress, a veil on her head, her gloved hands folded in reverence.

“Why is cousin Angela wearing that beautiful dress?” asks my awe-struck 5-year-old. I explain the Catholic tradition of dressing like this when girls make their first Holy Communion. It is the first time children approach the altar during Mass and receive a wafer of bread from the priest that represents the body of Christ.

She eyes the gauzy dress and veil in the photo. “Will I make my first Communion?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are not Catholic.” She considers this.

“Are you Catholic?”

“I was born Catholic, yes.”

Pause.

“Are all my cousins in Michigan Catholic?”

“Yes.”

“Why aren’t I Catholic?”

“Wellllll . . .” I stall. We have arrived at one of those conversations I haven’t prepared for as a parent.

“Is it because I live in California?”

“Sort of.”

“I want to be Catholic too. I want to make my first Communion too.”

It’s not only the fancy white dress that attracts my daughter. She wants religion. She has always yearned for spiritual answers and guidance, a higher authority. Squeezed among the Dr. Seuss and Nancy Drew books in her room is a children’s Bible I once purchased from a discount table. I envisioned we could use the Bible as a literary reference book.

Instead, she twists her blanket, shivering at the plagues of the Old Testament, marveling at the miracles of the New Testament. She’s never been taught how to pray, but at night she draws back the blind so she can look at the stars and ask God to bless her family and protect her cat.

“Can God hear us when we whisper?” she wants to know. After Cinza, our family cat, dies, she asks for the hundredth time: “Is there a heaven?” I answer as I usually do, that I don’t know. “Cinza is in heaven,” she says with certainty. “She’s with me in my heart.”

*

Perhaps, I grew up with too much religion, and so, in turn, I have given my children none. The Catholicism I grew up with was like a magic show. Candles and costumes and smoky scents. Bread and wine changed to body and blood before my eyes. Praying was like making a Christmas wish list. Ask and ye shall receive.

My own first Communion was a production, a milestone, a sacred event for which I trained and studied. In fact, my best friend Peggy and I rehearsed diligently after school. She was the priest: “Body of Christ,” she’d say, holding out an imaginary wheat wafer between her fingers.

“Amen,” I’d reply, on my knees, my eyes closed, my tongue stuck way out to catch the host.

Our greatest fear was that the host would drop from our tongues. Its power would burn a hole through the church’s marble floor, our families would be disgraced and we would be doomed to eternal damnation.

After the first Communion Mass, my parents hosted a party for me. I tried to stay far from the ruddy-faced priest sitting near the fireplace in the living room. I didn’t want to seem impolite, but wasn’t this the same guy who changed bread and wine into the body and blood of God? He must be some kind of wizard.

“Smile!” The Instamatic flashed. I tried not to touch the priest as we posed. My lacy white dress next to his black man-of-God uniform would make a classic picture. I asked my father if I could stop smiling now. I wanted him to cut the cake, white frosting with blue trim, the colors of the Virgin Mary.

*

It was after my mother died during my sophomore year in college that cynicism replaced religion, and politics became my church. I resented the church’s exclusion of women as priests. I thought its position on reproductive rights oppressive. I became feminist; the church didn’t.

Later, as a journalist, it seemed that being agnostic was part of the job description. When hospital forms asked for my religion in case of emergency, I boldly left the space blank, taking the risk I could die without a soul-cleansing visit from a priest. I had entered that egotistical stage of life where I felt untouchable. I didn’t need religion’s magic.

My two babies were born and I didn’t baptize them. Baptism, as the first Catholic sacrament, welcomes you into the faith and is a ritual that is supposed to wipe out the sin every soul inherits from Adam and Eve. Without it, you are doomed to die without God. Every now and then, my husband, who is not even Catholic, brings this up.

“Maybe we should baptize them,” he says. “Just in case.”

Now that I have children, I admit that I, like my daughter, need guidance, a higher authority. But I’m not sure where to look.

*

It would be so much easier if I had stuck with the Catholic rule book and could answer my daughter’s questions and my own: “Yes, there is a God. Yes, he hears us. Yes, there is a heaven.”

Maybe it will be through my children’s eyes that I find God again, like in this urban folk tale I hold onto: The parents of two children put them down for the night but soon hear noises from the kids’ room through the baby monitor. They find their 3-year-old son has left his bed and is leaning over the baby’s crib, whispering to his newborn sister.

“Hey,” he says, “can you tell me what God looks like again? I’m beginning to forget.”