10:13 Catholic

An hour or so later as they’re printing up the testimony on a small portable printer Nakata asks me something that catches me off guard:

“Boncoeur, you’re Catholic, aren’t you?”

We touched upon religion briefly last Sunday at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s office in Hakata when they asked about my family background. That feels like a lifetime ago.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask.

“C’mon, just tell me. You’re Catholic, right?”

“Well, it’s not as simple as that . . . ”

“Yes or no? Catholic or not Catholic?” he snaps irritably.

What the hell is Nakata getting at?

“My father is Catholic, yes, but my mother is Maronite, which, I suppose, you could say is almost the same thing, but . . . ”

*

Unlike my older brother and sisters who were born in Beirut and baptized at the same Maronite church that my mother, her mother, and countless generations before them had also received the sacraments at, I was born in the U.S. and christened at St. Charbel Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon.

My old man, a Frenchman through and through, was devoutly secularist. My mother’s own religious sentiments, on the other hand, had grown more conservative as her family’s involvement in the Kataeb Party in Lebanon, and subsequently the Civil War there, deepened. It was my mother then, with my old man’s hen-pecked acquiescence, who called the shots when it came to her children’s pietistic inculcation.

Baptized shortly after birth, I had my first confession and communion when I was eight, and was confirmed at the age of fifteen, making an unequivocal declaration of beliefs precisely at a time when my attitude towards the Faith had already begun slipping.

At the time, Lebanon was being ripped apart in a civil war that had pitted Lebanon’s different religious factions against each other–Christians against Shia Muslims, Druze against Sunni Muslims–and reduced “the Paris of the Middle East” to rubble. It seemed arrogant, if not foolhardy, of me to believe that we Maronites were right and everyone else was dead wrong, especially when we weren’t behaving like the good Christians Jesus had reputedly entreated us to act. Turn the other cheek? Over my fucking dead body!

My Confirmation came and went, the Archbishop who presided over the sacrament never the wiser that the pious olive-skinned boy before him had grave doubts about all this Christian hocus-pocus he was professing to believe in. My faith had more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

Shortly thereafter, I took off for France where I studied for a year and a half at my old man’s insistence. I hadn’t wanted to go at first–Lebanon and her Troubles held me in greater fascination–but, after the Israeli invasion of 1982, the situation in Lebanon had gone from bad to worse. Even Summerland, a popular resort off the Corniche Beirut had been bombed beyond all recognition by Israeli jets only weeks after my family and I had stayed there. Most of my cousins were whisked away to safer havens, many of the to New England or Europe, aunts and uncles joining them later once they had secured their homes.

History, I was learning at that young age, was rich with irony: the so-called “Chosen Ones” were creating yet another Diaspora. First, the Palestinians, and now the Lebanese.

In France my religious skepticism found a warm hearth welcoming it. There I learned it was indeed arrogant to assume that Catholics, and us Maronites, had a monopoly on righteousness and that the fires of hell were stoked by the souls of the remaining five billion heathens on earth. What was religion anyways, but a hopeful stab in the dark at the Truth. For all the good Catholics knew, the guesses of the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Baha’is, the Taoists, the Animists, the Voodooists, or what have you, might have been just as valid as, or, gasp, more so, than their own.

After years of cynicism and exposure to faiths vastly different from the ones I had been raised with, I have come to embrace with far more enthusiasm both the pantheism of Shinto and godlessness of Buddhism than I had ever did my native faith.

Nevertheless, in moments of greatest torment where did I turn to? The rosary.

To say that I had found Jesus in jail is to miss the point. I was praying the rosary several times a day as a drowning man might clutch at straws. I would have also supplicated myself in the direction of Mecca or beseeched Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, had I only known the proper way to do so. Any superstition would have suited me just fine so long as it allowed me to get my mind off of my fears for five blessed minutes.

I prayed the only way I knew how: the way I had learned as a child. And slowly the gears of my long neglected faith groaned into motion.

“Our Father . . . Our Father,” I began. “Hallowed be Thy name. What the fuck am I saying? Oh, sorry about the language, there, God . . . Right! Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name. Blessed art Thou amongst women and . . . Woa!. . . Um . . . Our Father, who art in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Yes! Give us this day our daily bread . . . ” And so on and so forth.

I prayed the rosary to get my mind off of my worries and for the extremely slim and discouraging odds that the Almighty was a compassionate and all-forgiving god when the evidence around me pointed towards one who was either an aggressively sadistic bastard or frigidly aloof, indifferent to the horrible suffering most people on this dying planet are expected to reverently endure.

*

“Boncoeur, it’s a simple question: Are you a Catholic? Yes or no?” Nakata says again.

“Y-yes . . .” As Catholic as I suppose a man who hasn’t had a drop of liquor in twenty years still believes himself to be an alcoholic. “Yes, I am Catholic.”

“And Catholics believe it’s a sin to tell a lie.”

Ah, so that’s what the man is getting at.

“There are exceptions, of course, but . . . um, yes, basically yes, it is a sin to tell a lie.”

“And if you commit a sin, you’ll be punished by God?”

“Uh . . . y-yes.”

“So, you’ve been telling us the truth this whole time?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I wouldn’t think of doing otherwise,” I say, adding another shovelful of lies to the slagheap of lies and half-truths they’ve already mined out of me.

“Thank you.”

Are my pants on fire yet?

 

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The first installment of No.6 can be found here.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.

~ by Aonghas Crowe on March 29, 2010.