Called Out of Darkness Page 10

  The teenage state was, if anything, less desirable than that of a child. There was an even greater criminal taint attached to it apparently in the eyes of adults. And it seemed to me that most of what I heard about “youth” from adults was C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s entirely negative, and to a large extent unconvincing and hypocritical.

  I was told repeatedly, for example, that “youth was wasted on the young,” but I retained the obdurate conclusion that my youth was not wasted on me at all, but was wasted on older people around me. I still believe this. I passed through these adolescent years, with considerable misery, and with some happy experiences, but the lessons—

  that girls were responsible for keeping boys in line sexually, that good girls never gave in until the marriage night, that brides, pure as lilies, ought to want husbands who had acquired a little experience, that housework was noble and important, that marriage was to be desired over the single state, that one should have as many children as God chose to send to one—these lessons made little or no lasting impression on me. I remained a person in rebellion, and continued to gravitate to subjects beyond my immediate milieu. I needn’t linger on the blunders or trials of this period, except to say that religion became mixed up with it. I think I lost my intimate conversation with God during this period. I think I stopped talking to Him and looking to Him to help me—long before I lost my faith. It became almost impossibly difficult to disentangle the moral teachings of my church from all the “teachings” of the blue-collar class in which I was brought up as to what a

  “good girl” represented. I spent far too much mental energy trying to distinguish class values from core Catholic values, class traditions from genuine Christian truths. And I didn’t achieve any success.

  1 1 7

  But never in my mind did God Himself become connected with gender, or the gender morass in which I found myself. Never was I convinced that Jesus Christ, Our Lord, wanted me to be a certain kind of good blue-collar-class girl. My deepest convictions transcended gender. The God in whom I believed transcended gender. Reason and conscience and heart told me these things. Yes, God was He, but He was infinitely bigger than a man. God belonged to the wild and rambunctious female saints as surely as He belonged to the male saints. God’s Blessed Mother was more important perhaps than any other person after God. And she was a woman, and a uniquely powerful woman. Not only was she uniquely powerful, she was uncompromised. In sum, power and blamelessness coexisted in her. God was immediate and absolute. Mass and Holy Communion were for everyone, old and young. Yet life as an American teenager was penitential and excruciating. This was another half existence, rather like that of childhood. I wanted full existence. I dreamed of marrying young so as to be an adult; I dreamed of having a child young so as to be an adult. I dreamed of any sort of escape from the control of the adults around me who seemed to have contempt for all of us young people a priori, as if we were an offense to them for having been born.

  I was just too confused, however, to make much of the whole struggle.

  By my senior year in high school, I had a full-time job that kept me working school nights till 10:00 p.m., and all day on weekends, including Sunday. This made me happy. It seemed to have some value. I don’t recall how I passed my C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s classes. I think it was the same old formula: listen, seek to follow the spoken words, and write well on the exams. There certainly wasn’t much time to read.

  By the time I entered Texas Woman’s University, I had earned and banked money for the entire first year’s room and board and fees. I welcomed the genderless world of TWU, not because I knew it was genderless but because it was a serious place. I wanted a meaningful and significant life.

  I was already deeply in love with a high school boy named Stan Rice, but as he had his senior year to complete in Richardson, Texas, and did not seem to be in love with me, I was on my own. It’s worth noting that my militant Catholicism had discouraged him. I couldn’t engage in kissing and hugging because it was a mortal sin. I had committed a mortal sin in kissing and hugging him quite a lot, but I think the grief and the sense of catastrophe on my part, my misery over all of it, understandably put him off.

  Of course the atmosphere of the university attracted me mightily. Over the years, I’ve found it impossible to explain to people who never went to college that college is too different from high school for the two to be compared. In college, one is an adult, expected to select one’s classes, and get to them, at various times, and in different buildings, on one’s own. Different university departments immediately bring one into contact with scores of new people. The prison of high school is indeed blasted to pieces, and one wanders in a “brave new world.”

  Perhaps it’s worth noting in passing that an aunt who vis-1 1 9 ited before I went to college strongly advised me to major in something much more realistic than journalism. She suggested secondary education so that I might be a teacher, as the idea of working for a newspaper and being a reporter or a writer was far-fetched. She made quite a case for normality, averring that highly intelligent people weren’t happy. Her thinking was not unlike that of nuns who had urged me to be good in all subjects, rather than to try to excel in any one subject. I simply didn’t agree with these people. And college was the place where I left all such thinking behind. More than thirty years later, this aunt came to a jampacked book-signing party for me in Kentucky, with an armload of my published novels for me to sign. I didn’t remind her of that old conversation, in which she had so strenuously urged me to curb my ambition. But I think of it every time I see her. My life went a different way.

  Let me return to the year 1959.

  I landed at a secular campus in a Protestant part of the country, and among my many classmates and teachers there were no Catholics, and I soon found myself confronted with barriers to understanding the modern world that I felt I had to overcome.

  The Index of Forbidden Books loomed over my head. More insidious than the Index itself, which contained many venerable classics, including all the works of Dumas except for The Count of Monte Cristo, was the concept of the “general index” which governed any book which was likely to lead a Catholic into the occasion of sin. In other words, you didn’t have to find Albert Camus on a written index to C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s know that you couldn’t read Albert Camus. All you had to know was that he was an atheist and an existentialist. That made his work forbidden under pain of mortal sin. In the world I’d left behind there had been much talk of the dangers of secular colleges. One teaching sister had told us in class that it was better for a Catholic not to go to college at all than to go to a non-Catholic college. My father had dismissed that notion out of hand. So had I.

  I needed a college education. My father and mother had not had college educations. I needed to work to become somebody. And there were no Catholic universities that I could conceivably afford.

  There was also much talk in my late childhood of people

  “reading themselves out of the church.” If you asked too much, read too much, questioned too much, you would wind up outside the church and it would be your own damned fault. I took that to heart, as I took everything I’d been taught as a Catholic. But I was hungry for knowledge, hungry for information, hungry for facts.

  As I roamed in the library and the bookstore at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, I began to lose heart. Sexually, I was in an agony of strong desire and impossible curiosity. It was a mortal sin to have solitary sex; to kiss; to do anything basically except to have conjugal relations in marriage which were entirely open to procreation. So this was an undercurrent of constant pressure and pain. But the question of the modern world became bigger and bigger to me with every passing day. The old world of New 1 2 1

  Orleans was gone beyond reprieve, along with all its protective accoutrements, and I was no longer interested in it. I wanted to read all the books I saw in Voertman’s Bookstore, near the campus. I gazed at big thick trade paperba
cks, with rich interesting covers, and names on them like Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Immanuel Kant, and Aldous Huxley, and I wanted to know what was in those books. I wanted to read Nabokov’s Lolita, even if it was a scandal. I wanted to see tantalizing and condemned foreign films. My education, which had left off to some extent with my mother’s death, resumed in earnest in college classrooms, as ideas poured forth from my professors on various topics ranging from sociological studies of American class structure to the preeminence of the style of the great writer Ernest Hemingway, who in our Catholic schools had been completely dismissed and ignored. I was around students who knew much more of contemporary literature than I did, and who discussed subjects I’d never thought to discuss. They were hungry for learning, and there was no barrier to their learning. And they were good and wholesome people.

  My faith began to crack apart.

  All around me I saw not only interesting people, but essentially good people, people with ethics, direction, goals, values—and these people weren’t Catholic. They negotiated their moral decisions with considerable thought but without the guidance, it seemed, of any established church. I liked them. I was learning from them, learning from fellow C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s classmates as well as teachers, something which had not happened to me earlier in the purgatory of childhood where it seemed other children were monsters with precious little to teach.

  Most of my new friends took sexual experiment rather casually. All girls were cautious in these times; pregnancy was the ever-present threat. Contraceptives could only be got from doctors and by married people. There was no birth control pill. Young women did not slip into affairs easily, but their reasons for this were practical, and they were as intimate as they felt it was safe to be, and they weren’t tormented by notions of sin. They knew a great deal more than me about sexuality, and their attitudes seemed wholesome and natural. My ignorance of sexuality, in fact, became something of a running joke.

  But the lust for the modern world was infinitely greater in me, I think, than the desire for sex. I ceased to believe that the Catholic Church was “the One True Church established by Christ to give grace.” Those are the words of the Baltimore Catechism, and we were too far from the world of the Balti- more Catechism and things were working entirely too well. I couldn’t understand why so much vital information was beyond my Catholic reach.

  I had at the time a spiritual director, a Paulist priest, at the church in Denton, Texas, and this man was fairly young, quite intelligent, and generous in trying to help me through what had become a nexus of utter pain.

  We had many conversations on various matters, probably more about my sexual desires just to kiss and embrace a 1 2 3

  young man than anything else. But we also talked about my doubts. And doubts were beginning to tear me apart. I remember at one point, a decisive point, the priest suddenly realized what he had not realized earlier: that I had grown up going to daily Mass and Communion, and had gone to Catholic schools almost all my life. He’d assumed apparently that I did not have that kind of old-fashioned upbringing. When it came clear to him that, indeed, I had come from that milieu, he said rather dramatically, “Oh well, if you were brought up like that, Anne, you’ll never be happy outside the Catholic Church. You’ll find nothing but misery outside the Catholic Church. For a Catholic like you, there is no life outside the Catholic Church.”

  He meant well when he said this. He was speaking, I think, from his experience with people. The year was probably 1960. I was eighteen going on nineteen, and, well, it was understandable what he said.

  But when he said it, something in me revolted. I didn’t argue with him.

  But I was no longer a Catholic when I left the room. Those few remarks had pushed me right over the edge. It wasn’t his fault.

  But he had hit on something which I couldn’t abide—the idea that my upbringing condemned me to be a Catholic forever, no matter what my heart and conscience told me was true.

  My heart and my conscience were telling me to leave the church, to explore. My heart and my conscience wanted information. My heart and my conscience were in love with C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s the wide world. Whether there was true knowledge out there, beyond the pale, I wanted to discover. I hungered for experience, for risk. And I also believed mightily in the life of the mind, and the life of the artist, though what kind of artist I might be, I didn’t know.

  The church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there a blending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been throughout my childhood. Desperately I sought to escape the sense of sin that seemed to dominate every choice facing me. I lost faith in Hellfire. Or to put it differently, faith in Hellfire simply did not hold me firmly, as faith in God had once done. I left the church. I stopped going. I stopped being a Catholic. I stopped arguing with people about being Catholic. I stopped getting upset if they made fun of my church or the pope. I simply quit. I quit for thirty-eight years.

  The real tragedy however was that I quit believing in God. I think about this a great deal. People ask me why this happened; sometimes they indicate that my loss of faith must have been precipitated by some emotional or social event. There was no emotional or social event. This was a catastrophe of the mind and heart. I could not separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church. As I mentioned, I’d stopped really talking to God a long time ago. I hadn’t felt entitled to talk to Him in a long while. I’d felt far too demoralized to talk to Him. I just wasn’t the Catholic girl who had a right to talk to Him. I harbored too many profane ambitions. And now faith in Him was giving 1 2 5

  way. I think I had to stop believing in God in order to quit His church, and the pressure to quit became intolerable. Whatever the case, I left it all.

  I think I can safely say I never put my dilemma before God. I never knelt down before Him and said, “Please help me with this.” I failed to perceive Him as a source of creative solutions to one’s personal problems. I failed to see Him as a Person of Infinite Compassion. My religious mind was an authoritarian mind, and once I found myself at odds with God, I couldn’t speak to Him. I couldn’t question Him. Instead I made decisions about Him. And they amounted to rejection of His existence, and a determination to face the world with a new courage which seemed right. The church, with all its rules about sex, the modern world, and books and matters of dogma, had become absolute proof to me that God didn’t exist. The idea of God belonged to the utter falsity of Catholicism. If an edifice like that was a pack of lies—and it had to be a lie that one could burn in Hell for all eternity for masturbating or kissing a boy, or reading a novel by Alexandre Dumas, or an essay by Sartre—then there was no God.

  There just couldn’t be a God. A God would never have made a church so unnatural and so narrow, and so seemingly fragile—vulnerable to information, that is—as the Catholic Church. People who believed in God believed in churches, and churches told you lies. Not only did they tell you lies, they made you tell lies. They taught you how to tell those lies when you were a little child.

  I had grown up telling lies for the Catholic Church. Let C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s me give one example. If those outside the church criticized the Inquisition and its torture of heretics or Jews, we had a standard Catholic answer, and it was this: The Inquisition was only going along with the times. Indeed the Inquisition never really executed anyone. It was the secular state that did the executing.

  That, I think, is a first-rate Catholic lie. But Catholics of my time were taught quite a number, and their goal was always the same—to gloss over the failings or corruption of the church and bring the subject of the discussion back to the church’s perfection. As I lost my faith in God and in this church, these many lies seemed proof to me that I was moving away from falsehood and into truth. Also I’d come to realize what most Christians realize sooner or later—that millions were born and grew up and died
without ever knowing anything of Christianity, and that seemed to prove that Christianity was only one man-made sect making grandiose claims that could not be true. In my heart of hearts, I believed this finally: there was no God.

  The cure for the agony of my religious upbringing was to face this fact, I felt, and to journey on bravely in spite of it, and to learn what was good and interesting and challenging from the teachers of the modern world who had long ago rejected God, out of necessity, yet never ceased to care bravely about the fate of human beings. And this caring was key. The secular humanists I knew did care. They were conscientious people. 1 2 7

  In sum, outside the Catholic Church, one did not find a sinkhole of depravity. Quite to the contrary, one found articulate people who made complex and refined distinctions about how to be a good human being.

  After a few months of dismal grieving for my faith, I began to feel a new relaxation, and a new passion for life. But I felt a certain bitter darkness too. The world without God was a world in which anything might happen, and there would never be justice for the millions who died at the hands of tyrants, or the poor who suffered in the neglected parts of the world. The world without God was the world of the Cold War in which “the bomb” might drop at any minute—and civilization might be annihilated, leaving behind a polluted and silent earth.