1.
I used to be an altar boy. I was an Episcopalian acolyte, despite having professed atheism since fifth grade when I told a surprised girl on the school bus that I didn’t believe in God or Jesus. She later told my math teacher, who after a stern moment said that it was not a matter of for the classroom and went on correcting our multiplication and division. We were still pretty crappy at that. But it’s the truth: every Sunday morning from when I was seven to when I was sixteen, my mom woke up a reluctant boy who called church “cult” and took him to a place where he vested in red and white robes to light and extinguish oil candles to organ music.
My mom, sister, and I attended the Calvary Episcopal Church in Wadesboro across the street from the First Baptist Church. The First Baptist Church was a terrifying structure: looking like a renovated hospital with holiness power-stapled to its eaves, surely it held the membership of a thousand of Wadesboro’s three thousand citizens. Its location across from the Episcopal Church must have been the doing of some cackling priest with a heavy sense of irony. The Episcopal Church was a small, old building where about twelve grey-haired women worshipped every Sunday. The plaque on the short stone wall surrounding it said it had been there since 1808, and it looked less like a building and more like a magnificent crystal of clay and slate emerging from the earth; even though it was stone, it was something organic and surreal.
On Christmas Eve, you could be assured that First Baptist was then holding two-thirds of Wadesboro’s population and the Episcopal Church was packed. I always found midnight mass particularly moving. Something, maybe the incense or the rows of people in silent meditation, forgave the years of begrudging altar-boy Sundays. At the end of the service, after the communion and the blessing, we knelt together in candlelight under great wooden arches, under the ribs inside our whale’s belly, and we sang “Silent Night”. Among the greenery dark like seaweed draped on the altar, among the organ and every stained glass window with its back to the black December midnight, we sang with our voices. We were underwater and we sang, and we sang and prayed our voices out to the cold seas.
2.
At the North Carolina School of Science and Math I met Thomas. He was sorta-Buddhist and I was then “spiritually ambiguous,” having dabbled half-heartedly in various ways of justifying the universe since that day on the school bus in fifth grade. The summer after my junior year we decided to stay away from our respective small towns by living in Asheville, that fabulous hippie town in the North Carolina mountains. Together we managed to get jobs (he at Sears, I at Subway) and a studio apartment in a woman’s basement. We slept on futon mattresses, I biked seven miles to work for near-minimum wage, and our landlady was a bitch. On our thrift-store dresser we had two magazines: Shambhala Sun and XY. It was glorious.
One of our first days in the apartment, after the night of hesitantly eating 33-cent macaroni-and-cheese made with powdered milk, we took a biking trip to downtown Asheville. I had yet to perfect the ritual of downing four glasses of water during breakfast and drinking a constant stream from the CamelBak while biking. I still drank coffee in the morning, and my legs weren’t broken in. I was pretty miserable when we arrived.
After visiting stores with names like “Instant Karma” and resting in sketchy downtown parks, we stopped by The Basilica of Saint Lawrence. Thomas and I had a thing for big churches: in the past year we had made a hobby of antagonizing Duke Chapel and its phoniness (weren’t its stained glass windows made of Plexiglas or Lucite or borosilicate or something? Maybe.) Whether or not we entered the basilica with a similar mindset, I’m not sure, but after entering I was awed. It was gigantic and it was stone and people had prayed there for years. Thomas and I, sweaty with our bike gear, walked down the aisles past the Hispanic couple in prayer and the one other person in the basilica and sat on a pew in front of an altar to Mary.
Sitting there, catching my breath, I remembered I was afraid. Not an instant kind of afraid, but a deep, pulsing afraid that showed bare every morning when I woke up on a futon mattress. I was a seventeen-year-old boy living unsupervised in a city I had never been to before. I was working my first paid job. Having taken up intense biking only the year before, I didn’t know if I was capable of biking up and down mountains every day. I barely knew how to cook. Jesus, I barely knew how to feed myself. What the hell was I doing?
In the basilica other lost boys in the hot summer sun had been afraid. Years of boys, years of sun had rested on its pews. My legs salty and damp, my helmet on the floor in front of me, I slipped into that pose from the Confession and the Nicene Creed and the Holy Eucharist.
Sun pressed through the windows, and taking refuge underwater in the cold seas, I knelt down and prayed.