Easter & the stations of the cross

I hope you know what A/S/L means....

I keep trying to find a more eloquent way to write this but I keep landing here:

Going to mass sucked.

I was baptized as a baby and my parents raised me Catholic. Their family and friends were for the most part Catholic, and every school I went to up until university started with Saint. My parents kept their cool though, they were raised on Carrie after all. They were part of that laid back Catholic gang that said stuff like, “Oh, we don’t force our kids to go every Sunday,” “We’re not that devout,” and “We’re really doing this for the school system and the community.”

Shh, do you hear that? Someone, somewhere is also telling their friend that they’re fiscally conservative, but socially liberal.

To my parent’s credit, when you release a small child in the wild, telling them to swim in a school of fish is loving guidance. Community, comfort, safety, good morals, the like, are all offered here. But the inevitable day comes when your place in the assembly drifts towards the shoal’s edge and you see it: there’s an entire ocean out there.

But in here? I only smell the thinning teal carpet, boot worn from thousands of dutiful parishioners and their repetitive motions, processions. I smell the laminate wood panels on the walls, and the newly stained figurines of Jesus, the brown liquid pools in the creases of his grimace. I smell all of the kids and their varying stages of puberty, crammed into this otherwise beautiful structure - It’s pungent. This olfactory factory is jaggedly smoothed over with our teacher’s heavy perfumes because it’s 1997 and being sensitive to smells isn’t a thing yet.

At least it’s Ash Wednesday, so this means instead of forming a lineup to receive a stale piece of wafer that gets stuck to the roof of my mouth until lunch, we get charcoal ashes rubbed on our foreheads in the shape of a tiny, fat cross. Father Meehan steadies his fingers on the side of my temple, in order to rub his thumb on my forehead, and I can feel the little grains of soot embedding in my skin. It feels marvelous. I am not used to being touched since my self-governing body left the cocoon of childhood, and being afraid of a priest's embrace isn’t a thing yet.

We stay after mass because it’s now six weeks until Easter (Lent), and we're practicing the stations of the cross. Lent is a little period of self-denial, where you go inward before Jesus’ big homecoming on Easter morning. As far as I was concerned, he exited his tomb with a flurry for bunnies at his feet, spreading chocolate, painted eggs and pastels wherever he went.

If you know my age, don’t try to do the math, I am far too old to believe in the Easter bunny, but I’m still weighing my options on the plausibility of that vs. Noah’s Ark and I’m coming up at a loss each time.

Officially going to declare that I think it’s ridiculously unfair to teach kids religious stories at the same time as fairy tales. You know as well I do, one day when they are going through their most confusing ages, you or some shitty peer, must reveal to them that the magic fuzzy bunnies, fairies and elves are the lie and the fiery pit of sin is real.

Lent is when you are supposed to give something up. As a kid you’re allowed to choose something easy like green gummy bears or picking your nose. As you get older Lenten sacrifices lean heavily on fasting and the sinful consumption of meat. I asked my teacher why meat is a sin (a laughable concept from my immigrant household). One of the most important pillars of Catholicism is that we’re the children of The Holy Trinity, thus we are hierarchically inclined to be positioned above the animal kingdom. But - it’s also a sin to fall prey to those ravenous natural instincts (remind you of another sin?)

Six weeks is an eternity for a ten year old, so like most impossible questions Father Meehan asks me, I give him a half-true answer to what my sacrifice will be for the next six weeks: Nintendo. Little did he know that my current sins were embedded in a game that was on the family PC.

It was common to make up sins at confession or sacrifices you’ve already given up during Lent. If you didn’t have anything to report to your priest, it would be worse because you’d be a liar. We are all unclean and it’s page one Catholicism: you are soaking in sin, even as a child.

At home, I have somehow been allowed a subscription to Ultima Online, a medieval role-playing game that takes place on the internet. It’s a complex chat room where one can roam fictional worlds on horseback. You can trot around lands and visit little taverns dressed up as an avatar of your creating. I liked to mend clothes, renovate my tiny hut, and occasionally dabble in whatever I thought cyber sex was.

It’s true, the first time I looked into that vast ocean, at the outer edge of my school of fish, I saw a wizard and he was asking me a/s/l? and telling me to take my robes off.

—

Acting for mass or taking part in any extra curricular for the church is a surefire way to catch some forgiveness and a potential boyfriend (more on that later). After a few late nights playing UO, I knew I needed to wash away some dirt. The stations of the cross was just my ticket, and even though I’m fairly certain I didn’t have a choice, I would give this performance my all. The stations are 14 little vignettes that replay Jesus’ last living moments on earth beginning with his arrest.

Even if you’re not Catholic you may be familiar with a fun little film called The Passion of the Christ, which spare no detail in his final bloody 12 hours of life. Roger Ebert called this film the most violent he’s ever seen and I can assure you we were all told to watch it by our elementary school teachers. One in particular wouldn’t shut up about it because she loved Mel Gibson. If only our teachers had the same rational as Roger Ebert:

“This is not a criticism but an observation; the film is unsuitable for younger viewers... The MPAA's R rating is definitive proof that the organization either will never give the NC-17 rating for violence alone, or was intimidated by the subject matter. If it had been anyone other than Jesus up on that cross, I have a feeling that NC-17 would have been automatic.” - Roger Ebert

The girls in my class, including myself, all want to be cast in station six, “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus". I believe there is a high chance that one of the cute boys in my class will be cast as Jesus, which means I’ll get to touch one of their faces. From all the movies and books I read, this is when it doesn’t matter how much of a dork you are - they see past that and ask you to the dance. I just had to tell myself that shedding my back brace and head gear was pretty much the same thing as when Laney Boggs tossed her glasses and overalls for Freddie Prinze Jr.

I hear my teacher call out the groups and I’m stuck with station nine, “Jesus falls a third time.”

I am cast as Jesus.

Six weeks later, when Easter arrives, everyone is in their Sunday’s best. Tulips are blooming and the air is fragrant with mud and lilies. White patent leather Mary Janes file into the church. I have a goatee drawn on my face and a white toga-like sheet covers my nude leotard underneath. My awkward “falling for the third time” moan is perfected and ready to perform. I’m barely acting anyways because the cross is not even an acting prop, it was a solid oak sculpture pulled from the church wall.

I’ve gotten over being both embarrassed and disappointed in my quest for love this Lent. Coming close to any boy with a drawn on goatee would not have accomplished the wooing I had in mind anyways. At least the fake fuzz matches my eyebrows, which are starting to connect in the middle by way of parental neglect (the kind that tenderly disbelieves in my impending puberty).

The small ray of hope that my acting career would lead me to a boyfriend was snuffed out that Easter, but my Nintendo sacrifice would be paid. I’d be able to log into Ultima Online with less shame and a clean slate with the big J.

I would go back to 1997 and do it all over again, acting as Jesus in any of the 14 stations. The jeering and laughter of bullies dulls at the outer edges of the shoaling anyways. With those sounds quieted I could confidently pick up a boyfriend anytime of the day with a simple dial-up connection.

Now that the world was telling me to grow up and choose reality over the fairy tales, I did. I left the fables, rituals, sacrifices and ashes at the altar. I logged back into the Ultima Online universe instead, and fought dragons with cool (unemployed), young (middle-aged), warlocks (lonely dudes), in the vale (Iowa) - my endless supply of boyfriends were there and I never confessed to feeling guilty about that, ever again.