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by Nicky Taylor

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“Love is about how much pain you are willing to endure for another person.”

This my grandmother told me when I was small, maybe eight or nine, my face tear-sodden, absorbing each syllable, filing this definition under the indelible. What a thing to say to a child. Forgive her. This is just how Catholics are. 

How I ended up at the Sunday service of a Christian Orthodox monastery on a drizzly yet warm July morning in Lunenburg County is, mostly, unimportant. In short, I did it because I loved my then-boyfriend, Nathan, who was not Orthodox or even Christian, but Jewish, who, through a series of mostly arbitrary events, had befriended the monks who lived there.

I suppose I also got up that morning before the sun had risen because I wanted to see what these monks were all about. It had not dawned on me that my return to mass would present so much difficulty. 

We traveled there with two friends who had to wear veils to enter the chapel, on account of their womanhood. What if I had worn a veil? On our way into the chapel we kissed the icons and made the sign of the cross like everyone else, except that I did it the Roman Catholic way¹. Inside, it looked like Midas had been there—like with the right lighting, the room might have shimmered like the lapping waves of the Atlantic a few dozen kilometers away. Everything was gold. Except for the icons. Two large ones on either side of the altar: an adult Jesus, the Orthodox cross behind him, looking out at the viewer; and the Virgin Mary, shrouded in red, pressing baby Jesus to her face, their skin almost metallic, their eyes so close together, holding a stare. 

I wept periodically during the service, much of which I attributed to being underslept, though I made a small allowance for the emotional complexity involved in my return to mass after a decade away. Maybe I was just so moved by all the beauty in this space: the songs, the gold, the icons, the vestments—the reverence. 

No one saw me cry. We were all facing the priest and the priest was facing God. The tears streaming down my face were hot, but private. 

It was during the Eucharist that the tears streamed the strongest. There was a family, with three small children, the smallest of which, a toddler, received communion. This I found surprising because as Catholics, we have to graduate into this sacrament, usually in the second grade. When it came for the youngest child’s turn, his father lifted him up to the Father. Another member of the clergy held a red cloth out between the boy’s mouth and the chalice, so none of the Body would fall to the floor. The child’s father kissed the boy’s neck while he took the bread in his mouth. It was in witnessing this image that I began to unravel. 

I was thinking of the transcendentals, which Catholic teachings hold to be the timeless and universal attributes of being: truth, beauty, and goodness.² Did my tears flow from some kind of primal, yet spiritual recognition of these transcendental qualities in this father and his son? That is, had I seen God in them?

Almost frantically, I wiped the tears away, and caught a glimpse of something that glimmered, belonging not to the chapel but to my hand. Fuck. And then even though I had only cussed in my head and not aloud, I wondered if Jesus had heard. 

A few days prior, a traveling musician had painted my nails at the kitchen table of an old farmhouse nestled in the Cape Breton highlands—a subrange of the Appalachians. The trouble started with the nail polish.

Or maybe it started on November 22, 1998, when I was baptized into the Catholic Church. Or sometime in 2013 when I performed oral sex on a man for the first time. Or in the 5^th Century when the Irish became Catholic because missionaries like Palladius and Patrick spread the religion across that green island like measles. Or in October 2022 when I first met Nathan. Or was it 458 to 470 million years ago, when a section of ocean crust called the Iapetus collided with, and began sinking beneath, the North American craton, wrenching what we now call the Appalachians into geological history? 

Trouble begets trouble. Let’s say it started with the nail polish, which, that Sunday, the monks and the congregation all seemed to politely not notice³.

After Sunday service, congregants gathered in a large, well-windowed room with a long table, upon which there was a humble array of snacks laid out. God forbid we were gluttonous. A woman, perhaps an administrator, tended to the coffee and tea station. Children played, clamouring up the legs of adults. Nathan and I sat with our backs facing the window-wall and a charismatic monk sat across from us, asking questions and listening intently. Priest-Monk Jean-Baptiste had loud blue eyes, sun-stained skin, and an unkempt but not unclean beard. He was kind, thoughtful, and he wanted to know if our generation feels lost. 

The answer to this question seemed so obvious to me, but later I was reminded that it is called a hermitage for a reason. The monks rely on people like us to bring outside information. 

We discussed the homily. It was about salvation. The monk told us about issues they’ve been having with the new recruits: many of them display an intensity that does not bode well for a solitary life with very few interlocutors. They are among those in my generation who have found their way to religious orthodoxy through the internet, compelled by the allure of strict traditionalism. They are flailing in the meaning vacuum, and grasp at tethers that harken to “simpler times”: Christianity, rigid gender roles, asceticism, Jordan Peterson. The problem they encounter is that the promised simplicity is a rearview mirage. For many of us, it was never simple. 

There was a boy in my Catholic high school who claimed that he was in conversation with God. He pontificated in the hallways. I, having come out as gay in a very public way, was a natural target for his fundamentalist affections. He followed me around, telling me that Jesus loved me, likening my sins to that of rapists and murderers, and pleading with me to repent. In most other circumstances this would be seen for what it was: I was being harassed by someone who was experiencing a break in sanity, likely a severe manic episode. But when I grew tired of his coercive liturgy and went to the vice-principal to complain, I was told that nothing could be done. This was his religion after all. 

The politics of tolerance are fickle. Hollow virtues do not make for effective compasses. You can’t tolerate everything.

At some point in the conversation with the monk, Nathan mentioned a museum exhibition we had seen together and something grave flashed across Father’s face. Only for an instant, like a sneeze, or in the way that a car whirs past a pedestrian on a country road. It had dawned on him that we were lovers. I put my hands in my pockets. 

***

Everyone I spoke to wanted to know if it was my first time at church. I grew up very Catholic, I told them, and watched their eyebrows ascend. In me they saw a prodigal son, a lost lamb finding its way back to the flock. There was no real polite way to tell them that’s not what this was, or at least, to say such a thing there felt like blasphemy, so I refrained. I allowed myself to be sized up for conversion, or salvation. Were they salivating? 

The congregation and the monks were so nice to me, which I found irksome, because I knew the niceties were all so contingent. I imagined the conversations they might have in the privacy of their vehicles as they pulled out onto the county line. Did you see the one with the nail polish? 

Inside God’s house they had said, I’m really glad you came today. For most of the morning I had avoided holding these good Christians in contempt, but as the day droned on and the cicadas filled the pastures beyond the monastery with their screaming song, a tension settled in my chest. My patience waned. 

I could list for you every awful thing that ever happened to me in the church, detail what it was like to grow up in a container of fear, to know damnation is around every corner, to be taught to despise pleasure, to love pain because it is what God has given you, to not ask too many questions about where the world came from, to be made to feel guilty for all the wrong things by an institution responsible for untold horrors here, and around the world. Let alone the quieter violences. Maybe I won’t tell you, and spare us both. 

Yes, I am jaded. Wouldn’t you be, too? If you were given a world and then it was taken from you. 

Do you lose a world or are you lost from it? Can you give yourself another?

In a recent interview with Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann, Anne Carson reframed Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum to readhere the first two words that originally preceded the famous phrase: dubito, ergo. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum meaning I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. “Doubt has bad press,” she mused. 

Here, Carson zooms out. She adjusts the focus. She latches doubt back on to knowing. In Genesis we are told that God formed the earth out of darkness⁴; before there was light there was the absence of it. Doubt is what happens in the dark. 

First there was doubt. And then there was prednisone. 

Prednisone is an anabolic steroid with anti-inflammatory properties. When I was 13, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. I had been ill for months and I was emaciated. Prednisone was prescribed to return me to a healthy weight. Psychological side effects of prednisone include agitation, anxiety, distractibility, fear, hypomania, indifference, insomnia, irritability, labile mood, restlessness, and tearfulness.

As a curious child, I had always had my doubts about God. During the eight weeks I concealed prednisone pills in my strawberry yogurt each morning, my doubt metastasized into knowledge. I would come home from school dizzy with thought, much of it intrusive. The thoughts looped. I tried to flatten them. There was one particular thought, shaped like the ouroboros, that would not allow itself to be flattened. 

God is not real. It did not sound like doubt, but what comes after. 

Prednisone burned a hole in the ozone layer of my own belief. The church made me small enough that I could crawl right out of that aperture. On the other side, refracting off of every surface, there was dizzying light, out of which I would have to reconstruct the world. For the world I had known had been obliterated, and I along with it. 

***

The monastery was stationed atop a grassy hill. Below, there was a large garden, or a small farm, cloistered by an electric fence. Here, I was told, the monks grow much of what they need to live, and sell the rest at local markets to help sustain the monastery’s operations. Beyond the plot there was forest, and just beyond its edge there was an abundant bog surrounded by cedars. It was as beautiful as the chapel atop the hill. At its periphery, a small cabin—I was told it is used for prayer—presided over the swamp. It is undeniable that there is something beautiful, intoxicating even, about the monastic way of life—that there in their own Eden, they live with so much intention and discipline. 

With the bog as our altar, we discussed the day so far: how handsome the charismatic monk was, the life-cycle of cicadas and how it is as close as we come to finding a resurrection narrative in nature, the Internal Family Systems school of therapy, how my IFS therapist had recently confided in me that she had a disproportionately high rate of clients raised Catholic. I speculated that it was because we are so used to thinking of a whole composed of different parts. The Father. The Son. The Holy Spirit. Three parts, one God. 

Have you ever noticed how former Catholics define themselves with language analogous to that of addicts—we are ex-Catholics⁵, or recovering Catholics. There is a reason why. Have you seen Spotlight starring Mark Ruffalo? Or Doubt with Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman? 

If you relied solely on Oscar-nominated films you might be surprised to find out there are Catholics outside of Boston. In fact, over a quarter of the Canadian population identified as Catholic in 2021⁶. How many more if we include those lambs lost by the flock? For every Catholic convert there are more than six people who leave the Church⁷. No other religion has a loss/gain ratio even close to this. We’re talking about an Exodus of biblical proportions. 

This last fact I learned in the r/exCatholic subreddit, which has almost 40,000 members, and is described as a place “for any and all ex-Catholics to talk, educate, discuss and maybe even bitch about their experiences within the Catholic Church.” The figure comes from a 2017 study that predates the online TradCath movement of the 2020s, which has seen a resurgence of young people taking up the proverbial torch and converting, often informally, to Catholicism⁸. For many, the movement is about transgression and intellectual independence; for some it is about aesthetics; for others it is about asserting their allegiance to the religious right (see: J.D. Vance’s conversion), and its attendant white supremacy, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia and transphobia. No matter the impetus, the trend troubles me. 

The group description of the subreddit goes on to warn, “Please refrain from proselytizing to members of this community. Catholic apologists will be perma-banned without warning.” That ex-Catholics feel so strongly about this is unsurprising to me. We are in recovery. We deserve to be left alone.

I know a recovering Catholic who once stopped me when I described it as “my religious trauma.” She corrected me: It is not yours. It does not belong to you. It has nothing to do with you. It is the trauma of religion. To traumatize is the point. Of course, I understand that this is not a universal experience, that some religious contexts are less traumatizing than others or perhaps not traumatizing at all, and that there are those for whom a deeply conservative and repressive ethos will align well with their way of being in the world. But of course, it felt true to my ex-Catholic friend, just as it feels true to me now. 

In recent years I’ve become invested in a project of defining cultural Catholicism—that you can take the person out of church, but you cannot always take the church out of the person. Cultural Catholicism is about both what remains and what is left behind. 

What remains. Of course there is good, too. I’d been trained to look for the good, the true and the beautiful, to fix my attention in its direction, no matter the instantiation. If I had not been raised in the church would I love poetry? Would I have studied philosophy? Would I be so compelled by narrative? I still look for God everywhere. Miraculous are the places where I find Him⁹. 

That there are good Christians, and good Catholics, is as true to me as any other idea posited here. There are good Catholics, not that they are good at being Catholic, but that they are Catholic and good and their goodness consists outside of, but is perhaps informed by, their Catholic-ness. 

Take my grandmother, who has had chronic pain for as long as I can remember, her hands gnarled and fingers bent by arthritis. She has always offered her pain up to God. She prays for everyone she knows, and even some she doesn’t, never out of malice or with concern to their sins. 

When I was fifteen I endeavoured to come out to my grandmother. Sitting on the edge of her bed in that blue room with the blue floral bedspread, I said, “Nana, I have something to tell you and I do not know how you will react.” She said, “You’re gay.” That was that. It is an open secret that I am among her favourite grandchildren. And she has many. Catholics. 

Catholics wield a Manichean dictionary: right, wrong, good, bad, heaven, hell, darkness, light. To be post-Catholic is to access both/and thinking, to learn how to hold two seemingly contradictory truths in either hand. If to be raised Catholic is to be imbued with both blessing and curse, salvation and doom, then to be post-Catholic is to learn how to walk side by side with both Genesis and Revelation, but in a world God did not fashion. 

I spent much of the drive back to Halifax transfixed by that paternal eucharistic image as though it had become lodged under my eyelids, but why? Was it true? Was it good? Was it beautiful? When we stopped for lunch, our parking spot had an ocean view. I leaned back on the rental car, lit a cigarette and with only a glance, I told Nathan I wanted him to stay there a moment with me. 

In my chest I found an ache. I was aching to articulate—what, I did not yet know. I started and stopped several times with the sting of the sea salt air in my eyes. He told me how he missed these kinds of spaces in Montreal. His relationship to the space was felt in a lack. 

Like any good ethnographer, Nathan is so comfortable being within and without—in fact, it might just be his favourite mode of being. He loves being at a party wherein many conversations are taking place, his attention flitting from dialogue to dialogue, sometimes participating, sometimes not. Straddling a certain kind of liminality. It requires a malleability—you must be able and willing to shapeshift, to be non-descript. Nathan does not often stand out in a crowd, nor is this something he necessarily strives for. He is good at ethnography. 

His fascination with the monastery is, in part, an anthropological endeavour, but it is more than that. The monks are his friends and he holds them in high regard. They have real discussions, sharing interest in philosophy and culture. He is able to see beyond their homophobia and conservatism, to participate in a community wherein everyone approaches one another with a rare form of intentionality. They take each other seriously. 

And what do they make of him? This bisexual Jewish kid who is thoughtful and smart and engaging, and has now brought his boyfriend to the monastery. Will they pray for him as they always have? 

A fact of that Sunday that would only later strike me in its obscenity is that the trip to the hermitage was not the only mass on our schedules. Old friends of Nathan’s were having a baptism for their child that evening at an Anglican church just beyond the city limits of Halifax. Our friend Jenny was to wear blue robes and sing in the choir. 

The church had a fairly modern aesthetic. Something about a recently-erected church unsettles me in its anachronism. Like a monument built for a long-dead god. I’d prefer if new churches were built to look as though they’d been there forever. The one aspect of the church that adhered to this desire is the altar—it was traditional and intricate, made of dark wood. 

So many children—dressed like adults might have in the 50s—scuttled around the pews, chasing each other, laughing, yelling—I was transported to a time where the church was my own jungle gym. Church was only ever boring when the priest was talking.  

During the service an especially adorable little girl in the pew in front of us decided to collect the empty donation envelopes that were carefully placed next to all the songbooks, every meter or so in each pew. She walked up and down the rows, charming, then clamouring over or past every adult in her wake. Another even smaller toddler stationed herself at the end of our row and fixed a very serious stare upon her face, making eye contact with each of us. This day had been so long and full of God, I laughed almost deliriously at the public theatre before us. When I stopped laughing there was a tug somewhere below my stomach. 

The priest asked some of the children questions about the concept of baptism, meeting them almost perfectly where they were, yet none of the children answered, out of shyness or shame. The congregation laughed. The children swayed and fiddled with their hands behind their backs, looking to their parents to intervene. 

The service ended not a moment too soon, and I found myself in the foyer pushing past all the kids in a state of nicotine-dependent despondence, making haste for the parking lot when the priest stopped me, extended his hand and asked me for forgiveness. How did he know I was owed an apology? Outside as tobacco filled and left my lungs, Nathan explained that this was just a bit he did. There was a certain kind of script for it, a call and response, that I did not know then, nor do I remember now. 

At this point, I was exhausted. I wanted to go home, but there were hands to shake and polite conversations to be had and little hors d’oeuvres and desserts to be eaten. I found a chair inside and watched it all—Nathan was not introducing me to anyone. Did his Christian friends know who I was to him? 

Once I had gorged myself on church-foyer-fare at this baptism where I knew no one, I retired to a picnic bench outside so I could chainsmoke and dissociate in peace. Children played around me, their Sunday best hanging by a thread, shoes discarded, ignoring the concerned calls from their parents to stay away from moving cars.

By then, Nicole had joined me. We’d known each other since we were 19. Knowingly, she asked how this day had been for me, and my eyes answered before my mouth could. Weeping. Suddenly it was all clear to me: the toddler taking the Eucharist, his father holding him up, the barefoot children running in and out of the church, their parents calling. All my crying: it was about the children.  

When I see kids in church, I want to cover their ears. I want to scream. I want to yell fire. I want someone to come and save them. 

Nobody protected me. No one covered my ears. Now the tears are substantive, and my thoughts are looping like I am thirteen and on prednisone. Everyone inside is so casual, jovial even, but none of this is okay. 

A few cigarettes later, I caught my breath, Nicole and Jenny were consoling me. Nathan walked outside and spotted us speaking quietly and solemnly—Is it time to go? The time to go had come and gone. Whatever fortitude I had summoned to make it through this day had long since evaporated, and now I was angry that Nathan had not foreseen what this day would demand of me. 

It was unfair, because I hadn’t foreseen its difficulty either, and my participation in the day’s events had been voluntary. How could I have been so naive? Had I thought myself healed? As though I had killed the priest inside my head. The church’s shadow is long and as I told you in the beginning, I went to church willingly twice in one day after a decade away because I loved my boyfriend, and these spaces and the people who animate them seemed important to him. And love is about how much pain you are willing to endure for another person. 

When Nathan and I were alone, he struggled to understand why I was so upset, and I struggled to articulate it to him—there was too much exposition. This is what the church did to me, it made me unintelligible to everyone outside of it. I am always having to explain myself. In this moment there is a crevasse between us that neither of us knows how to bridge. 

I start from my beginning, how much I had to hide, how I had to fashion myself into something acceptable, how I would plead with God to take away my abomination,¹⁰ how I had to humiliate myself for a chance at absolution. The books I was not allowed to read. The tears shed over my brother’s interest in the first living organism, again when we made clear the doubts we had about the sacrament of marriage. When it was suspected that I’d begun masturbating, the book that was thrown at me. It was about sin. I did not read it. How I’d been taught that my body didn’t belong to me, but to God, and then everything that followed from that. How I used to vomit every time I had sex with a man, made sick by the sin of it. 

I tried to paint a picture of the world I was given. How I had to steal myself from it, crawl through the aperture of my own doubt and disbelief. The pain. 

I told him I cannot be made to hide. I cannot go to church again. There will be children there, and I cannot save them. 

He listened. I cried. I asked him to hold me. He did. 

That night, as we were going to sleep, Nathan said, I’m sorry they took church from you. 

I felt an impulse to agree with him—to indulge in the tragedy of it all, but then I remembered every good and true and beautiful thing that I would have never been able to give myself had I stayed in the church. 

They can keep it, I tell him.

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1. Historically, the sign of the cross was made from the right to the left, as done in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Western Catholics (the Latin Church) have made the motion from left to right, while Eastern Catholics follow the traditional signage of right to left. ↩︎
2.  “Truth, beauty and goodness have their being together, by truth we are put in touch with reality which we find is good for us and beautiful to behold. In our knowing, loving and delighting the gift of reality appears to us as something infinitely and in-exhaustively valuable and fascinating.” Dubay, T. (1999).  The evidential power of beauty: Science and theology meet. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 23. ↩︎
3. The exception being the approximately 6 year old girl who glowered at me through the homily. 
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4.  Genesis, 1:1-2: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. ↩︎
5. https://www.reddit.com/r/excatholic/ ↩︎
6. In the 2021 census, 10.9 million Canadians self-identified as Catholic: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/page.cfm?lang=E&topic=10&dguid=2021A000011124 ↩︎
7. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-2-religious-switching-and-intermarriage/ ↩︎
8. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/nyt-dimes-square-trad-catholic-op-ed.html
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9. Places I have found God: in the arms of a lover, in a point of MDMA, swimming in the ocean. The ocean is so full of God. The smell of bread wafting from the bakery. In a flower. In the stars. A hot dog. Hot dogs are also full of God. In children’s song and laughter. In my grandmother’s arthritic hands. In all the best poems. In a patch of moss. On the dance floor. At the symphony. In the alleyway. ↩︎
10. Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; for this is an abomination.” ↩︎