The Third Step

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

—The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

My friend’s son was killed last week. A young soldier, having fought in Afghanistan, he had come home for a time and was waiting to be deployed again in a few days. He was a man who loved the army, so his mother and the obituaries would say. He took his motorcycle out last Tuesday to visit the wife and child of a friend and fellow soldier still in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was a sunny day like this one, a blue sky, a spring day when trees are budding and the first fragile flowers are blooming close to the ground. Perhaps it felt like a day of hope, a day he intended to comfort his friend’s wife, to assure that her husband would return.

He was a good man like that, so his mother said, so the obituaries said, a man kind to children, though he had none. He had been traveling on his motorbike, obeying the speed limit, his mother says, on some highway in Arkansas, when someone in a truck made a bad decision, pulled out in front of him, and that was it. Not even the full-face helmet he was wearing could save him.

I don’t much like churches, but I have come to this one, a Catholic church in the hills of Pittsburgh, for my friend, to attend the funeral mass of her son. The truth is I don’t mind churches of almost any faith but Catholic, because non-Catholic churches are a mystery to me, and I sort of like the mystery of unfamiliar churches and religions. They demand nothing of me, they remind me of nothing, they are often pleasant in the way that visiting a new park is pleasant. You look around at the people hanging out, at the playground equipment, the flowerbeds and trees, you walk around a bit, smile at the kid on a skateboard or a dog sniffing a bush, and then you go home. You have not been changed, nothing has been asked of you, no bad memories have been brought to light.

But I was raised Catholic, forced to attend Catholic school for nine years before I turned away from it for what still feels like forever. I know way too much about the Catholic Church to be able to relax in one as I might in, say, a Protestant church or a mosque or synagogue. I am nervous, on guard, constantly waiting for something to go wrong. I know too much about the failings of the weak men who have sometimes sat as popes and the equally weak men who have served as priests and preyed on young boys, too much about the failings of the Church dogma, especially in matters concerning women, too much about the witch trials of centuries past. I have been personally wounded by its failing to provide a meaningful spiritual compass for me as a child and young adult. Its rote questions and answers. Its stiff rites and sacraments. Where do the souls of the brain-dead go, I asked a priest many years ago as my young brother lay in a coma from a drug overdose. He couldn’t tell me.

I haven’t been to a Mass in many years and I haven’t taken Communion in maybe 25 years. While I do believe a man like Jesus may have lived a life not unlike the one that comes down to us in the New Testament, there’s not a bone in my body I can force to believe in a god that allows such treachery and quackery to go on in his name.

Although of course every bone in my body wants to believe.

Sitting here in this church, near the front, hoping my friend can see that I’m here to support her, looking at all the trappings of that religion I have come to so distrust—the priests in their special funeral garb, the cross of...