lunabee34

The Christmas I was six years old, I was given a stuffed catapillar--striped in various shades of purple with an orange nose--that also functioned as a purse. I named her Cattie for the obvious six-year-old reasons and slept with her every night for longer than I care to admit. She was soft and huggable, and she smelled like what I now realize as a parent was essentially my own saliva and sweat, comforting and familiar and mine in that way that all children crave.

Even then, my parents were highly religious. They would become more so as the years passed, but even then they were hitting the upper threshold of most people's definition of devout.

So we were at church, me and Mama and Daddy and my little brother Russell and Cattie.

"God wants us to love Him," the preacher said from the pulpit.

I don't remember what the church looked like anymore. I remember accidentally dumping a whole glass of tea on my head during dinner on the grounds and being mortified. I remember my brother rolling around in the grass with Rachel Smith and trying to kiss her with his fat, toddler lips. I remember a little bridge that connected the sanctuary to the fellowship hall. But I don't remember what the inside of the church looked like anymore. I can guess, though.

I'm sure the preacher stood in front of a baptistery, possibly adorned with a handpainted mural of dubious quality of Jesus being baptized. The windows were probably that fake stained glass that Protestants seem to adore in the South--nearly opaque and strangely plastic-looking monstrosities, crayons haphazardly melted in a pan and smeared on glass.

"God wants us to love Him," the preacher said, and I clutched Cattie more tightly in my arms.

I don't remember this part either, not well, not clearly. The invitational began; the guilt trip began; the fear-mongering began. I would not realize until I was much older, until I'd read Bakhtin on Rabelais and Salvation on Sand Mountain, exactly how pivotal this moment is to the fundamentalist Protestant worship my parents engage in. Everything any theater major needs to know ze could learn in this moment. The pageantry, the crocodile tears, the empathy mixed with the need to control the audience, the sheer spectacle of the whole damn thing concentrated into a handful of minutes.

I left my seat. I was small but full of purpose. I understood perfectly well what the preacher wanted of me, what his God required of me. I had to love God, or I would die and go to that hell he always threatened.

"If you died right now, where would you go?" I had no idea. I would continue to have no idea for years. I still have no idea. I no longer obsessively compulsively pray for God to save me as I did almost every night of my childhood, but it's hard to shake off what you learn as a kid. If I died right now, where would I go? That question still curls up hot and sick in my stomach, in the base of my throat.

"I don't love God," I said to the preacher. "I love Cattie, and I love my family, but I don't love God. How do you love God? You can't even see Him."

The preacher smiled at me indulgently, the way you smile at precocious children who don't know what they're saying. "Of course, you love God, sweetie. I know you do. Don't you worry." He patted me on the head, and I went back to my seat.

Mama and Daddy wanted to know why I'd felt compelled to go forward, but they didn't get it either. I amused them, this little girl so worried about my affection for God. This little girl.

I wish I'd had the words then that I have now. How do you love an intangible? How do you feel something for a vasty nothingness? How do you create and maintain a relationship with no feedback from the other partner? And how in the heck is loving God supposed to serve as a model for all your other relationships when God's an unknown Quantity?

I've often wondered how in such an insular community in the pre-internet days I managed to question pretty much from the get-go my parents' religious, social, and political beliefs. I don't know. I don't. It's a mystery. But I did, tiny and uneducated and so firmly under the grip of my parents and their convictions. I did.

I didn't know it that day, crying down into Cattie's fur, salt mingling with the stale scent of spit and sweat, but this was the beginning.