Trying to find God in my great-grandmother’s apartment in downtown Baltimore.
My great-grandmother was named Esther and her tiny apartment was up an elevator and down a hall that smelled like beef soup. It had a very school lunch smell about it – not that I ever bought school lunch. My mother and father, when we lived or visited the Baltimore area (where they had both grown up and I was born), would take me to see all of the relatives. Esther – truthfully, I never called her anything, I’m not sure she ever knew I was there – was my grandfather’s mother. I never met my grandfather, Nicholas. He died the year before I was born. But his mother, Esther, still lived in a part of Baltimore we rarely went to. I really don’t even know now where it was except there were tall apartment building filled with people like my great-grandmother and Meals on Wheels came every day.
The apartment was a studio apartment with a small galley kitchen and a bathroom off to the side. It was stuffed to the brim of what I could only imagine were the remaining vestiges of my great-grandmother’s former life.
I sat on the big brass bed that was shoved against one wall and covered with an old chenille, patterned bedspread that looked very uncomfortable to sleep under. I remember feeling badly that my grandmother didn’t have a fluffy comforter like I did and that I wouldn’t like to sleep under this thing at all. While I picked at the chenille embroidery, I looked around the room at the many pictures of Jesus in all states – giving to the poor, walking along the road, being crucified, a close up of his feet with a spike through it. Yuck.
My great grandmother had rosaries too, but they were placed carefully throughout the room and I didn’t feel like I should touch them. While I sat and waited, my parents were patiently receiving bags full of government cheese blocks, extra pasta and dry milk (Oh God, please not the powdered milk), and all of the sugar and salt packets an old woman could steal from every restaurant she ever went to. Which seemed to be considerable. I couldn’t imagine going to so many restaurants that you could have that many packets of sugar. I was never allowed to touch them. Probably for the best as I was inclined to pour the sugar directly from the packet into my mouth. And suck the paper afterward.
God seemed to live here in this tiny apartment. He was everywhere. Bibles and crosses and prayer cards were littered throughout the room. I don’t remember feeling scared, but I do remember feeling like it was an awful lot. And I also wondered why we were taking the government cheese we clearly didn’t need, from an old woman, but mine is not to wonder why, my father said.
I have always wanted to believe. But was this believing? These bloody pictures of spikes in feet and knives in hearts? It seemed a bit much, but I wanted to know more.
I think I believed in God and Jesus and nuns and priests for a long time because often the things I prayed for, I received. Ask and ye shall receive, was the refrain from the two or three times I’d been to an actual church. So I asked. And I received. Often. Nevermind that I was the much spoiled only child of a fairly middle class couple. I didn’t know that. I just thought praying worked. Like Santa.
I used to pretend that I was a nun. Like Maria Von Trapp. I loved the Sound of Music and the nuns singing. I used to wrap towels around and over my head when no one could see me and I prayed like I thought a nun would. I spent most of my life believing that I believed.
My mother didn’t act religious or make us do anything really religious, but she talked about it a lot sometimes, and there were always prayer books or a Marianne Williamson tome on the bedside table – next to a Jackie Collins paperback or two. She also had rosaries. Beautiful long beaded necklaces that my six or seven or 14-year-old self would hold, letting the beads click together as I counted them. I remember being fascinated when I learned that the beads were for counting. Like a religious abacus. How many hail marys? Say a whole rosary. I was an obsessive counter as a child. I counted everything: stairs, miles on the road, specs in the ceiling, and beads in a rosary seemed almost too perfect.
My parents were not overly strict with me, except when they were. Mostly, though, I lived my own life, from a very young age. And I was left to explore. One of the things I was allowed to do that most of my friends, I have found over the years, were never able to do was hang out in my parents room. Often, they were downstairs, alone with each other as they preferred, and I was left to watch TV in their room. So I explored a bit. When I was young, it was my mother’s clothes and shoes and jewelry box and make up that entranced me. My father’s things were almost frightening. They smelled manly and leathery and metal like.
My mother’s things were soft and pretty and shiny. My mother had rings where my father had coins. My mother had Oil of Olay where my father had Old Spice. My mother had rosaries. My father had dog tags.
I remember feeling really special the few times my mother would choose me to go to church with her. My mother and I didn’t go out and do many things together that weren’t errands. She always took me along when I was small, of course, but I got the feeling over the years that my time spent in a car with her was more a “have-to” circumstance and not one she preferred.
My father and I, on the other hand, did all sorts of things together. He took me to baseball games on Saturday afternoons at Memorial Stadium (pre-Camden Yards when we lived in Maryland) and at Comiskey or Wrigley when we lived in Illinois. My father liked to yard sale (that’s a verb where I’m from), on Saturdays and go to flea markets on Sundays.
But time with my mom just for fun was rare and church was a mystical place for me. I didn’t yet have the backstory of the Catholic Church or the history of how it came to be, or any ethos at all for this type of thing. At the age of seven, walking into a ginormous Catholic Church with my mother on Easter Sunday was the pinnacle of high society and one of the most beautiful things I had seen in my young life.
I had not been baptized Catholic when I was born. My parents had gone through their own anti-religion phase at that time, and even though my mother was born and raised uber Catholic, my dad had not been. So when the time came, they did a civil ceremony and had me three years later.
I wasn’t baptized until I was 9, during another one of my parents struggles with religion. I didn’t mind though, because this meant I finally got to go to CCD, which my best friend had been doing for years. I finally felt like I belonged in this little club and I looked forward to all of the milestones that path held. In fact, my desire to be a nun was strong at the age of 9 and lasted most of my life – even when I started to get older and have relationships. At the end of the day, though, I don’t really believe. Not in a deity, at least.
I am an involuntary atheist. I still want to go to church. All of them. I love churches. I love the people who go to church (mostly). When people go to church because they love their community and they are devoted to helping and they look out for one another – those are the best places to be. But they aren’t all like that, are they? And they all start out with one basic tenement – you must believe in God.
I may not believe there is a God. Or a god. Or a goddess. Or a Goddess. I believe there have been many spiritual and even God-like people in our lives over the years that humans have existed. I believe that we have needed the idea of a God and God’s rules in order to bring civility and dare I say it, in some ways, humanity to people. But no, I do not believe there is a God.
What’s interesting is that I do believe there is something. There is something deep and spiritual and connected between people and things and animals and plants and the Earth and the ocean. But is it God? I just don’t think so. But my quest for the spiritual and some sort of spiritual fulfillment has been life long.
Sitting on my great-grandmother’s bed, waiting while my father went down to pull the car around, and then went up and down the elevator three or four times with boxes of food and stuff my great-grandmother did not want, all I could think about as I stared up at the exceedingly large, bleeding heart with a knife in it, was that my mother was going to make me drink nothing but powdered milk now, for days, and my stomach turned at the thought. My mouth grew pasty in terrified anticipation of the taste of milk that was somehow both wet and very dry at the same time. But somehow, looking back, completely unlike any martini I have ever had.
Was God somehow in the value of powdered milk and sugar packets an old Catholic woman scores from the local diner when her grandson comes to take her to lunch? My mother never took her anywhere. It always seemed like we just came, sat, took a bunch of stuff out of her house and then left. And then went and did it again three months later. I never really got to know my great grandmother. She never spoke to me really. I just sat there. On that big brass bed that took up the entire room. Looking at the knife piercing the large and bloody heart of Jesus, presumably.