Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure

2 Falling Away or Crossing Over?

Something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live. —Thelma in Thelma and Louise (Khouri 1996, 161) Everything was the same—the smell of beeswax, the red lights of the sanctuary, the words that the small children were whispering beyond the altar screen. But Nanda knew that whatever might happen in the future, nothing for her would ever be the same again. —White 1992a, 221 My own chief sensation was one of detached surprise at how far I had come from my old mainstays, as once, when learning to swim, I had been doing the dead-man’s float and looked back, raising my doused head, to see my water wings drifting, far behind me, on the lake’s surface. —McCarthy 1985, 123 I thought of Sister Scholastica who always said to the debating team before we went to another school: Remember who you are and what you represent. I no longer knew whom or what I represented, and I became [ 27 ] 2 falling away or crossing over? absorbed in the word itself. What did it mean, to represent? . . . It meant being connected to something so strongly that people could not think of you without thinking of that thing. What if you represented nothing but were only yourself? —Gordon 1979, 165 The accepted euphemism for the gradual, half-willed, half-passive departure from the church is “falling away.” Like other euphemisms, this one never even approaches the concrete powerful reality of the experience that it signifies. The phrase “falling away” sounds as if it was concocted by church authorities to denote other people’s lapses of faith as they are perceived by superior beings, believers, safe within the fold, those who have never doubted or been tempted to leave. It captures the perspective of staunch Catholics who stand still, firmly grounded in an unwavering (or unquestioned) faith and watch others “fall away,” victims of some mysterious spiritual avalanche that is comprehensible only within the infinite wisdom of God. The experience of Catholic women who act on an impulse to distance themselves from the church is distinctly different from the standard depiction of “falling away.” It is far closer to what Thelma, in the controversial female friendship film Thelma and Louise (1991), means when she talks about“crossing over.”At a pivotal moment in the film, Thelma and Louise, friends in their early 30s who have been close since high school, find themselves at a point of no return. It is not something that they have planned, but neither is it something that has simply happened to them. Faced with an ultimatum, they have chosen themselves and flight over trusting the system. What starts out as an impulsive decision to take a “girls only” fishing trip without consulting Thelma’s controlling husband and Louise’s feckless boyfriend turns into a fatal encounter with a would-be rapist outside an Arkansas night spot. In a few intense days on the run in Louise’s 1969 red Chevrolet Impala convertible, Thelma and Louise confront themselves and choices that have kept them, or parts of them, locked in a post-adolescent state just short of adulthood. For Thelma, it was her marriage to Darryl at 17. For Louise, it was a sexual assault in Texas many years before, when she was victimized first by a rapist and then by the legal authorities. Somewhere on their pilgrimage on the back roads between Arkansas and Arizona both Thelma and Louise cross over. Thelma, whose arrested g r a c e f u l e x i t s [ 28 ] development has been most obvious up to this point, suddenly emerges as the leader, the one who is capable of taking charge and articulating what their recent transgressions, such as killing her assailant and standing up to an abusive trucker, and their short life on the lam have done for them. She is also the first to recoil openly at the thought of turning themselves over to the authorities and hoping for a plea bargain. Thelma asks Louise whether she plans to “make a deal” and return home to her boyfriend. She is relieved to hear that Louise, too, knows that going back is “not an option.” It is at this point, as they make their way into the Arizona desert, their last refuge, that Thelma realizes “something’s crossed over” in her; there...