by Kara Dennison
Our Father, who art in Heaven
My first Catholic high school memory is of being told God loved me the least of anyone in my class.
It was religion class in the old building, the one that used to be a convent, with secret hallways you could legitimately get lost in. A bit Hogwarts before there was a Hogwarts. Eighth grade religion class was on the first floor, in a room that (like every other room) was patched and crumbling just enough to remind everyone that we wouldn’t be there past the current school year.
The first chapter of our religion textbook boasted a bullseye-shaped diagram in bold colors: Closeness to God. God was at the center, of course, in bright red. Then came the angels, the saints, Catholics, “other Christians,” Jews, other monotheistic religions, and everyone else in one final, distant circle.
I wanted to speak up, to raise my hand. Wasn’t there something a bit wrong with that? Didn’t God love everyone? Why did being Orthodox put me a step farther away? And, at that, why were God’s literal Chosen People a step past me? If I had to be knocked down, you could at least swap us around. That only seemed fair.
I didn’t speak up, obviously. I couldn’t see it going well.
hallowed be Thy name
“Sorry, but you won’t be reading today.”
“What?”
A student from the choir was usually called on to read the epistle during Friday mass in the auditorium, and more often than not it was me. But today, the principal and the choir director had taken me aside.
“Did I do something wrong?”
They both looked uncomfortable. The choir director—also our biology teacher—spoke up first. “No, you haven’t done anything wrong, but—”
“The bishop is coming today,” the principal cut in.
“Okay. I still don’t understand.”
They looked at each other awkwardly. Again, the principal spoke bluntly. “Well, he might not be happy if he found out our reader wasn’t Catholic. So we’re going to need to have someone else do it.”
“You understand, right?” The choir director again, ever placating.
I understood.
They were ashamed of me.
They were ashamed of where I came from—my family had come from Lebanon a century ago to start a church. My great-grandfather was the first American-born Orthodox priest. I’d cantored in three churches, sung in two choirs. Was aces in all my religion classes.
But a non-Catholic reader? Not when anyone important was looking.
“I understand.”
Thy kingdom come
They called it the Kairos Retreat; “kairos” being—according to our religion teacher—Greek for “God’s time.” (I guess it could be translated that way, but it’s a tiny bit of a stretch.) It was the infamous junior year retreat: three days, two nights, no timepieces.
It was “to help you live on God’s time,” rather than constantly watching the clock and living on the world’s time. A cute conceit, to be sure. Not one that went over well with me.
I’d never in my life had a true nervous breakdown, but that was my first one. I never knew how much being cut off from a concept of time could rile one up. Everyone else had friend cliques to resort to. But when you’re pretty much on your own and every day of school is just a matter of surviving long enough to go home, the clock becomes your one real friend.
I can’t remember how I got in the retreat’s office, but I do recall sitting there, drying tear tracks on my cheeks, staring at a small analog clock on the wall. The campus minister kept her eyes locked on me, waiting for any sign that I was back on my feet so she could kick me back out into “God’s time.”
If God was so keen on us living without clocks, I imagine he would’ve struck their inventors dead.
Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven
Friday was “forum day,” no matter what. That’s when you had to wear the full uniform—skirt and blouse for the girls, slacks and shirt and tie for the boys—instead of just the basic dress code. Masses were on Friday, as well as any visits from other schools.
As my grandfather drove me up to the front of the school, I remembered that it was Friday. “Turn around. I have to change.”
“You’ll be late.”
“You just get a reprimand for being late. Not being in forum dress is detention.”
And I couldn’t stand the idea of detention on my first week of senior year. Not when I’d nearly dropped out. Not when my only reason for coming back in the first place was Mr. Fernandez. I’d been bullied, beaten up, insulted by students and teachers alike—but Mr. Fernandez was my mentor for my senior project. He would make everything okay. He was my favorite teacher, and I was his favorite student ever since I’d managed to quote both Dead Poets Society and Singin’ in the Rain in class the year before.
I came back in proper dress, homeroom long over and ten minutes late to first period. As I walked into AP English, the room fell quiet. Everyone stared at me. The teacher, the students, all with looks of confusion and… pity? Not that I wasn’t used to strange looks from the entire school, but the silence was eerie.
The teacher nodded to one of the students—one who was less aggressive to me than most—and she walked me outside.
“What did I do now?”
She looked sad. “Mr. Fernandez died last night.”
“What?” I knew he’d been in the hospital, but I was under the impression he’d be coming back.
“He had a stroke, and he wasn’t going to wake up. His parents decided to pull the plug last night.”
I was left out in the hall.
My one reason for coming back.
The only way I’d set foot in that damned school again.
I’d been tricked. By the whole damn universe.
Give us this day our daily bread
“You can’t eat that.”
“What?”
“What kind of sandwich is that?”
I looked. “Bologna and cheese.” Deli German bologna, not the plastic packaged kind. The big huge slices that didn’t taste suspicious and had to be cut up and puzzle-pieced to stay within the square of the sandwich bread.
“You can’t eat that,” the girl said again. I can’t remember her name. High ponytail. Makeup. Bully. They all looked so similar.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because it’s Lent. You can’t eat meat during Lent.” She pointed at her tuna salad sandwich. “I can only have this because it’s Friday.”
I frowned. “But I’m…not Catholic.”
It’s true there’s fasting in Orthodoxy, but my grandparents didn’t force me to engage in it. When I was older, they said, I could decide for myself if I wanted to.
I got bitter looks around the table. “It’s not fair,” another girl muttered.
and forgive us our trespasses
Do you know where it’s easiest to lose your faith? I don’t. It’s probably in the trenches or by a hospital bed. Or at the site of a natural disaster, an “act of God.”
But Catholic school is in that list somewhere.
I was a full-blown atheist for longer than my own family knows, and I just kept it quietly to myself. How could I be anything else? I walked into a new school, was immediately handed a book telling me that God didn’t really like me all that much, and berated constantly by teachers and students alike for being the religion my family came to America for the freedom to be.
I was also severely antisocial, and because the teachers worried about my ability to eat lunch uninterrupted without some degree of bullying, I was the only student allowed to bring my lunch into the library.
I spent most of my time reading those dragon rider books, but it wasn’t long before I’d finished the library’s supply of those. I scouted around for a new read. There were a few C.S. Lewis books, all of which I’d read except one: The Screwtape Letters.
I’m not sure what did it. Maybe it was the simplicity, the honesty. Maybe it was the fact that the human hero of the story was just a normal, fallible person, not overtly saintly or of one particular denomination. Maybe it was the fact that things made far more sense than the things I was told in religion class. But it restored my faith a little. Maybe, maybe, there was someone up there, and maybe His feelings about you weren’t dependent on what you call yourself or whether you eat meat in April.
as we forgive those who trespass against us
No, I did not expect to pass a pop quiz on the Catholic catechism. That’s not the issue. I knew as soon as the campus minister told us what we were doing, I was walking away with a rare F.
I made a silly decision that day. I fought it.
I addressed the minister after class. I told her what I thought: it was unfair.
“Why is it unfair to give a pop quiz on the Catholic catechism in a Catholic school?”
“Because you’re aware that there is someone in your class who was never required to study it.”
“If you’re in a Catholic school,” she said, “you should know Catholic things.”
“But I’m not Catholic!”
She smirked. “And whose fault is that?”
My great-great-grandparents’, ma’am. The people who raised money to build a church in an immigrant neighborhood during the Great Depression. It’s their fault, ma’am. Theirs.
I swallowed my words and my F.
and lead us not into temptation
There isn’t much you can do with uniforms if you want to express your individuality. That’s sort of half the point of uniforms. The most the girls could get away with was fancy shoes. It was the late 90s, and chunky dress shoes with big square heels were what it was all about.
I’d managed to convince Nana to let me get a paid: black suede with a middling-height, thick heel, but otherwise shaped a bit like a men’s lace-up dress shoe. I’d deliberately avoided patent leather after all the horror stories about boys looking up girls’ uniform skirts in the reflection of their shoes.
That didn’t stop the other girls in my class—not only were their shoes glossy, but their heels were as high as they could get away with. Considering how much trouble I had descending the new, slippery stairs of our climate-controlled building, I couldn’t imagine what it was like for them.
The other thing they’d try was hemming their skirts shorter. The rule was that the hem had to be at least to your fingertips when your arms were hanging straight down. Not a terrible rule, but the scratchy, shapeless polyester of our skirts made them look frumpy at any length. Attempts at shortening them did a bit to help the silhouette, but the senior English teacher took to roaming the halls between classes with a yardstick once she noticed something was afoot.
I overheard two of the more popular girls—two of my regular bullies—whinging about this state of affairs in the upstairs bathroom between classes one day. I should have stayed clear, but I couldn’t help myself.
As I was walking out, I leaned in and said, “Just tell her it looks shorter because you’re wearing high heels.” Obviously ridiculous, and they’d never believe me.
A week later, I saw the teacher stopping one of the girls in the hall, yardstick in hand. “Oh,” I heard the girl say, “no, it just looks shorter because of my heels.”
The teacher rolled her eyes. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
but deliver us from evil
I couldn’t just keep saying I was sick over and over. Nana would eventually figure out I was perfectly healthy. Even though I definitely didn’t feel it.
“Do you need to go to the doctor?”
“No. I just want to stay in bed.”
“What are your symptoms?”
“I don’t know.”
She finally figured it out for herself. “Are people at school being mean to you?”
The whole thing spilled out after that. Our Latin teacher had gotten fired for reasons I knew nothing about, but the entire school—literally all 200 students—blamed me. I wasn’t even sure what was going on. It got back to me later that he’d allegedly slept with a female student and I’d tattled on him to get him kicked out. This whole thing was news to me…but no one believed me when I said I’d had no part of it. I was glared at during classes, “accidentally” knocked into walls, tormented in the hallways.
The teachers refused to do anything—according to them, clearing my name would mean outing the student who had reported the Latin teacher. Allowing me to take the blame was for the “greater good,” apparently.
Nana called the school raging. “She can’t even get out of bed,” she said. “They’ve bullied her out of class. Is this how you do things?”
The principal promised things would be fixed, so I was taken back to school the following day. Their “fix” was to hold a school assembly where all 200 students were told at once to leave me alone.
You can probably imagine how much that helped.
for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
“God never gives us more than we can handle,” I’m told every day.
I may not be full atheist anymore, but I still don’t believe that.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
I don’t believe that.
Tell me the way I was treated was for a “bigger reason.” To build up my emotional defenses? Maybe. But I find it hard to believe in a God who would deliberately let me go through what I went through because it’d be good for me eventually.
Maybe my mind will change someday. Maybe it’s all a part of “God’s plan.” Me, I chalk it up more to kids who did not know how to treat someone different from them.
for ever and ever.
A therapist asked me once how I could believe several hundred people secretly hating me was possible or logical. When I told her my story, she understood. And apologized.
Friends wonder why I’m afraid. Why I always second guess. Why I think that people being kind to me is a huge trick. Why I bristle a bit when people mock my St. George medal. Why it takes me literal years to genuinely trust someone.
People in general wonder why I resent high school comedies. Why Ferris Bueller feels like mockery.
It’s been 17 years since I graduated. And not a day goes by when I don’t remember the things said and done to me. Not a day goes by when, even free of those people, something they said to me, something they inflicted on me, colors a choice during my day.
High school changes you. Catholic school more so.
Amen.
Kara Dennison is a writer, editor, and presenter from Newport News, VA. A graduate of the College of William & Mary, she has a special interest in medieval romance and modern science fiction. Her works can be read in The Perennial Miss Wildthyme, Associates of Sherlock Holmes, and multiple volumes of the “You and Who” series. She lives in a town home with four guinea pigs and a bass guitar.