The Body of Christ

I: Supplication

I didn’t understand the need I was trying to meet until long after I had been damned to the eternal fires of Hell.

By the time I reached middle school my family, though outwardly intact, had fractured beyond repair. My parents lived their lives around each other. He worked nights and she worked days, and we never saw my dad on holidays because on holidays he was eligible for double-time-and-a-half. My mother had thrown herself into my younger sister’s nascent competitive-swimming career and I was largely left to my own devices.

The cutthroat world of middle school did nothing to fill that void. My school, in an upper-middle-class suburb of Boston, was filled with cliques and I was clique-less, with few friends and no protection. Decades before anyone was talking about bullying, I had no real words for why school was so awful. Though curious about what made people tick and how they connected with each other, I did not want friendship with people who were cruel to me. I wanted respect, status, the ability to engage or disengage on my own terms.

My parents had largely sidestepped the issue of religion, though I was raised as a nominal Jew. Mom’s family was Jewish. Dad’s family was vaguely Christian. When I was very little, I went to a weekly “class” with a few other kids where we acted out Bible stories. I always insisted on being God, even when God had no lines; I’d just perch on a nearby staircase and survey the action from above. That was the involvement I wanted: invisible, superior, apart—engaging and disengaging as I saw fit.

I don’t remember when I stopped believing in God, but it was in elementary school; God, like Santa Claus, just seemed a little too far-fetched when I got old enough to really think about it. This didn’t matter much until my mom had a change of heart and put me in formal Hebrew school, where I made no friends, failed to decipher a nonsensical alphabet, and saw nothing to admire.

At the end of that year—I was eleven—the head rabbi invited me to unenroll after I informed him in front of the assembled student body that God was probably a fairy tale. I thought I was doing my classmates a favor—someone had to tell them, right? When he called my mom he explained that the other families sent their children to him so that they’d be steeped in “certain ideas.” These were not, evidently, the ideas that I brought to class.

So much for Judaism. Exclusion was not a new concept for me, but that was okay. I hated Hebrew school way more than it hated me.

The following year, in seventh grade, we studied ancient and world history. “Christianity,” the textbook claimed in perfect 1980s Eurocentrism, “was one of the major civilizing forces of the Western world.” It was? And I knew nothing about it? Clearly this called for research. Take that, Hebrew school. This was how intellectuals solved their problems.

I bought a new notebook with babysitting money and headed for my middle-school library, where I bowed down before the source of all knowledge and wisdom: the World Book Encyclopedia. I looked up Catholicism, thinking it was a more sophisticated synonym. I took copious notes, carefully spelling out “sacraments” and “transubstantiation.” I loved that word; I felt more educated just having it in my notebook. “I was reading up on transubstantiation today,” I said airily to my mother, who frowned. Six whole syllables.

II: Sin

This new interest did not go unnoticed by my best friend at the time, Agnes Marie O’Malley. Eyes gleaming, presumably with the prospect of securing her own eternal salvation—another phrase I’d picked up—Agnes invited me to come to church with her family. In the interest of scholarship, I accepted. I would do research in the field! Should I bring my whole backpack, or just my notebook? Or maybe I should carry something less obtrusive, like a Steno pad. Then I cursed my stupidity. Of course I couldn’t take notes. Then everyone would know an interloper was in their midst. I might be cast out. Or something. Blending in was essential.

So off I went to Saturday night Mass at the Star of the Sea Church with Agnes, her mother, and her grandmother. Agnes was an acolyte, and explained that she would be up on the altar helping the priest. I was awed. “You have a job?” I wondered how much it paid, but my dad had always said it was rude to ask people about money. I made $2 per hour babysitting, but the church was pretty elaborate inside and I thought they probably paid even more.

Agnes, then, was at the altar, decked out in a white robe that I thought was probably designed to make her look like Jesus. Acolyte, I thought, trying to hold the word in my memory until I was reunited with my notebook. White robe. Jesus. Mom and Grandma were in their customary seats in the back row. I was up front, second row on the aisle, where I could get a good view. For most of an hour, the whole endeavor went extremely well. The congregation stood; I stood. They knelt; I knelt. They prayed aloud; I moved my lips. No one suspected a thing. I had achieved, not belonging, but the invisibility I needed to observe these strange customs. I was alone in the crowd.

Then there came a time when most of the congregants left their seats and lined up in the aisle. A few remained seated; I figured they were outsiders, like me, but they weren’t smart like I was. Attempting to arrange my face in an expression that was both wise and casual (oh, yeah, I do this all the time), I joined the line, which was moving toward the priest at the front of the room. As people approached him, they cupped their hands.

Weird.

Before too long, it was my turn at the front, and I cupped my own hands in imitation. The priest mumbled something and gave me a cracker. I stared at it, and at him, but nothing else happened, so eventually I said, “Thank you,” and returned to my seat.

Hors d’oeuvres? That didn’t seem right. A surreptitious glance at my nearest neighbors yielded no clues. No one even seemed to have their cracker anymore. I looked at mine. It was white and stamped with a cross, which was maybe sort of cool, but I was certain that the World Book Encyclopedia had not mentioned snacks. That, however, was why I was here: research. Which required me to nibble cautiously at the cracker. It was awful—completely dry, and not even a little salt. I definitely didn’t want it. Hypothesis: maybe the cracker was symbolic food and not meant to be eaten. I slipped it into my pocket.

At the end of the service, I met Agnes and her family at the back of the church. As we headed out into the misty parking lot they were all grouped attentively around me. What had I thought? Did I have any questions?

Of course, it’s polite to ask questions. It shows people you’re interested in what they’re interested in. I struggled to think of something to ask, though the service had, frankly, been over my head. Then I remembered: I did have a question! A pressing one! I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out the cracker. “What is this?” I asked.

Agnes’s mother’s face drained of color. Grandma gave out a gasp that was actually a little scream. Then Mom sprang into action. With one hand she snatched the cracker and jammed it into her own mouth. With the other she grabbed Agnes’s wrist. Then the three of them turned and bolted for the car, leaving me to walk two miles home in the dark as the drizzle turned to rain.

III: Exile

Morning did not bring clarity. I called Agnes but she just said she wasn’t allowed to speak to me and hung up. And when you’re in seventh grade and one of your only friends stops speaking to you it’s basically the end of the world. I flashed on Revelations, as described by the World Book Encyclopedia, though I didn’t need four horsemen to tell me that something was very wrong. I returned to school on Monday with no further insight into the exact nature of my misdeed, actually sort of astonished that other people were continuing with their lives and I was expected to do so as well, just as if Agnes and I were still talking.

Partway through math class—It was definitely the cracker, something about the cracker, was it rude not to have eaten the whole thing?—I realized the answer might be in my notes. I whipped out my notebook and scrutinized the pages, looking for hints. Nothing. But I was desperate for insight. So I recorded the whole encounter in excruciating detail, tuning out a good chunk of math class, failing to achieve any new understanding but feeling a bit of catharsis at getting it down on paper.

The notebook was seized without warning by our teacher, Patty Elligot. Everybody knew that Mrs. Elligot was a little bit crazy—not as crazy as Mrs. O’Brian from the year before, who kept the lights off and muttered to herself behind her desk, rocked, and left before June—but crazy enough that no one messed with her. Standing there in the aisle, she turned to the first page of my entry and read it silently. I watched her eyes go back and forth across the lines of my scraggly cursive. No one made a sound. When she got to the end, she closed the book and then asked to speak to me in the hall.

This was where my public-school teacher, obviously now a Catholic like Agnes, told me that she always knew there was something “off” about me, but now she could see that Satan whispered too loudly in my ear and I’d been listening. I was immediately in tears. “I don’t know Satan,” I protested, not knowing what she meant, but she just said she didn’t expect me to tell the truth. It turned out that people who traded their souls to the Adversary weren’t welcome in seventh-grade math, so she marched righteously back into the classroom and I was left all alone in the hall. I felt utterly unmoored. Ultimately, I went to the only place I could go.

The librarian found me sobbing over the World Book Encyclopedia, searching for answers. I told her the whole story. She was the one who explained transubstantiation to me, explained that I had bitten Jesus Christ in half and then kidnapped Him from His house. This was why I was in so much trouble. It was, she said, to Catholics, the worst sin you could commit, worse even than murder.

The librarian walked me back upstairs, and she did say something to Patty Elligot that got me back into class. But what she didn’t explain was the Christian concept of innocence. I understood why I was in trouble; I didn’t understand why I shouldn’t have been. While I was pretty sure there wasn’t actually a Hell where I would burn for all eternity, I had, it seemed, irrevocably messed up the life I was in now. In those final few moments in math class I wilted with shame; I had failed as a scholar and as a friend. For weeks I stayed away from the library. When I returned (after all, ignorance is what got me into trouble), I looked up Zoroastrianism. No opportunity there for original research, not so far as I could see; no path to the destruction of anyone’s savior.

IV: Redemption

I myself, of course, had not been seeking salvation, but rather a seventh-grade anthropologist’s skilled versatility. I lacked the language of belonging, was unskilled in conversation and building relationships, and so I loved learning, or so I thought, the secret language and practices of such an exclusive group—maybe more so after the Jews kicked me out, despite my distaste for their practices. I never learned Hebrew, but Catholicism had a certain romance. Transubstantiation. Seven sacraments. Eternal salvation. I didn’t want those things, but I wanted to know them. I wanted intellectual and emotional distance beneath a veneer of belonging.

Over the years, with time and more self-awareness, the story of my sin would become a sort of key to the connection and authority I sought. In college, I repeatedly told of Agnes and Mrs. Elligot, and I developed a small, ardent following. “Oh, my god,” friends would exclaim if we were hanging out with someone new. “Tell the Catholic church story!” To the uninitiated, they would say, “Wait ‘till you hear this; it’s hilarious.” I was a stilted conversationalist but a great storyteller, and the dramatic irony played well with a crowd; there were always shrieks and gasps when I got to the part about lining up in the aisle. “You did NOT!” a lapsed Catholic once shouted as I described nibbling on Christ. I had my audience in the palm of my hand and for those few minutes I was the master of my environment, inside the locked doors with those whom I had invited. Being damned to hell, and finding it funny, carries a certain cachet.

At a bar, during senior year, I told the story to a professor at the behest of fellow students, and was surprised when he did not laugh. “You were an innocent,” he said. “Those people were assholes. It’s not actually a funny story.”

I contemplated this. For quite a while. So I was off the hook? My story had never explicitly exonerated me, and “innocent” was certainly not a concept I would have applied to myself at age twelve. But I had come into my own in college, had found a voice, had found myself. And I realized that the end result of that process—one of them—was that I certainly didn’t need Catholic doctrine to tell me I did nothing wrong. From my earliest recounting of the story, scribbled in my seventh-grade notebook, to holding court in college nearly a decade later, I evolved from (unwitting) sinner to hapless victim to hero. What was cruelty when I was twelve became absurdity with the passage of time, as I gained the looking-down-from-above perspective I sought as a small child, role-playing God on the staircase. My professor, outraged on my behalf, offering consolation, calling me an innocent, was wrong, too. His argument for my blamelessness was as religious as any of the arguments condemning me. To this day, I think of Mrs. Elligot’s small-minded declaration that I, who still secretly played with Barbies, had aligned myself with Satan, and I snicker. It’s not always easy to be me, but I’d hate to be her.

So, yeah, I ingested a bit of Our Lord Jesus Christ, stuffed Him in my pocket, and absconded with Him to a dark and damp parking lot. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew that my mission was a high-wire act and that I risked, somehow, going down in flames. The World Book Encyclopedia was powerless to prevent my fall, but as I grew older I sought other sacred texts that would hold keys to the secrets I needed. Shakespeare. Donne. Goethe. But all the while, without fully realizing it, I was learning in bars and diners and dorm rooms to construct my own text, to situate my childhood within my adult understanding.

Ultimately, I turned away from academia—alluring, seductive, but just another church. I teach high school, where no one takes anything on faith and knowledge is not an alter on which anyone prostrates. “We hate English,” they tell me. “Why do we have to analyze a poem? A poem is just a bunch of random words. Reading one is like sticking forks in our eyes.”

I smile. “Great simile,” I say. “Tell me your stories.”

 

Jennifer Zeuli: “I’m now a high-school English teacher and a single mom with a catastrophically messy house; I write CNF after bedtime and while my kids are watching way too much bad TV. I have a memoir (which could probably be funnier) in search of a home, and I’m starting an MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College despite currently having no free time whatsoever. My work can be found in Porcupine Literary Journal and Adoptive Families Magazine.”