The Feeling I Get

God will not be mentioned at my wedding, not even if somebody sneezes.

I decided this last year - on Easter Sunday - as I sat in a Catholic church with a friend and her family in Waterloo, Ontario. Driving there, I was told that this was one of the most beautiful Catholic churches around. Feeling ashamed and blasphemous, I admit that had I selected adjectives to describe the place, I would have gone with obnoxiously gaudy or hideously over-the-top.

The service began, and my (admittedly) naïve description of the service went like this : Stand up, sit down, pretend to sing, yawn, kneel, stand up, back down, watch people eat some flat bread, leave.

The Catholic mass is a foreign place to me - I don’t understand it. When I start to feel uncomfortable, I immediately look around for reassurance. I have this hope that I will meet eyes with someone; we will share a moment of confusion together, one that reassures me that I’m not alone in my thoughts. But when I started scanning and searching the church that day, all I saw were people appearing oblivious to my discomfort, people who seemed perfectly content and at peace. So my alienation deepened.      

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Last year for a number of months, I dated a man who is Irish Roman Catholic. I knew his faith was important to him, but he sensed my uneasiness with organized religion, so for the most part we avoided talking about ideas of God. The first time I went to his house, though, I was hit over the head with a dose of that feeling I get. I entered his room, and my eyes were automatically drawn to the crosses - three or four of them scattered here and there - along with both a picture and a statue of Jesus.

My mind was telling me to run for the hills. This Jesus thing wasn’t my life, and I didn’t think I could get over this unbridgeable gap that was suddenly made visible to me.

From what I understand, religions tend to welcome people into their faith, so shouldn’t I feel a sense of being welcome? I’ve read the Bible; I’ve taken religious studies classes in an attempt to make myself more at ease with the rituals of religion, but all it has done is increase my frustration because I still don’t get it.

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I played basketball at an American university in my first year out of high school. My coach, a self-proclaimed devout Catholic man, would yell, scream and swear at our team in the changeroom, threatening to “make your lives a living hell” if we didn’t show up ready to play.

Then, before running onto the court, we would come together and huddle as a team, and yes, we would pray. My coach headed the prayer, and he always began with the same words. “Father in heaven, we thank you for the opportunity to come together again in your name…”.

I did the same thing I do in church: I looked around at my teammates. Just like my coach, their eyes were all sealed shut. They looked focused and peaceful. Every single one of them seemed to be buying into this praying thing.

I tried it. I closed my eyes and hoped to feel some sort of greater presence. But the thoughts that ran through my head didn’t reassure me:

Why would God care if we play well tonight?

Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

I feel so alone.

Why can’t I just hop onto this bandwagon with everyone else?

I felt like a foreigner struggling to learn a new language, yet maybe my window of opportunity to figure it out has closed on me. I’ve often been told that children learn languages more easily than adults. Had I been brought up going to Sunday school every week, would I have been comfortable with a team prayer?       

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My Opa died last year; his funeral was held in a Catholic church in Merritt, B.C.

For the most part, I felt all the emotions I deemed appropriate for a funeral. I spent some time remembering anecdotes about my 86-year-old grandfather - appreciating his life, feeling sad, feeling partially relieved that he was finally out of pain, mourning the loss, thinking of my widowed Oma, feeling sad for my dad and his brothers and sisters, and remembering my Opa for the man I knew him to be.

But soon, the Bible spoke. One of my aunts read a passage. I remember being embarrassed for her because I couldn’t connect what she was reading to my Opa’s life in any meaningful way. But when I looked around, everyone else seemed to be getting something out of the passage. The table suddenly turned; I was now the one who felt like the embarrassed outsider.

I was reminded of a time when I was about eight years old. It was when those Magic Eye posters and books became a hit. At first glance, they don’t look like much, but they have three-dimensional images hidden in them that you can trick your eyes to see.

The first time someone showed me a magic eye, I was the last one in my family to see the image. Being competitive, I was overwhelmingly frustrated each time I heard another family member say, “Oh, there it is. I see it. That’s so cool.” The more frustrated I got, the less patient I became. It took me days to finally sort out how to train my eyes.

During my aunt’s reading of the Bible that day, it seemed like everyone saw the image but me.

Then I looked at my sister Amanda, wondering what was going on in her head. If either one of us is anti-religion, it’s Amanda. She would openly call herself an atheist, while I cop-out and choose the term agnostic because at least I want to believe. The difference between us, though, is that she seems to be able to laugh off anything to do with religion and faith, while I feel conflicted by it. 

This is why I’m not getting married in a church; the last thing I want to feel on my wedding day is alienation.