I understood that this was happening because of what I had done. I just didn’t understand how. I knew the morality but not the mechanism. It didn’t matter. I accepted completely that if you suck two dicks in a boys’ room after hours, you will end up with a Pharaonic visitation in the part of your body they rammed.
This seems an appropriate time to mention that my mother was (is) a priest.
To be precise, she was the first woman from Chicago to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, in 1987, the year I was twelve.
We had always been churchgoers, every Sunday at 9 a.m., unless you were actively vomiting. My father was a regular reader of the lessons and served on the vestry. I was baptized in the same church where my parents were married and my grandparents would one day be buried. Our fealty was total. Our piety was of the Episcopalian sort that places great importance on the clothes you wear to worship Jesus the homeless Jewish carpenter before driving straight from church to the country club for brunch among other families who, like you, are white, Anglican, wealthy, and heteronormative, because nobody else is permitted to join.
“What is there to understand?” said my father, when I was finally adult enough to ask. “I’m a Christian, and this is my club.”
Discreetly, Dad wore a metal cross on a cord around his neck, never visible beneath his Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties. Nights he read to my brother and me, and after switching off the lights we recited the Lord’s Prayer and our God Blesses, naming every member of the family and all pets, teddy bears, bikes, blankies, and assorted teachers and friends. When Dad ran in the mornings, his five daily miles before dawn, he told me, he prayed. He talked to Jesus about his life, his family, his questions. He’d come home and have breakfast with the papers and make the 7 a.m. train to the city, returning twelve hours later to a beautifully cooked supper from his wife, who, the year my brother was born, when I was almost five, decided to begin seminary.
Of the two of them, Dad was by far the more devout. He talked about God and the church without irony or ambivalence. Mom worried about getting her nails done before celebrating the Eucharist. She chafed at the constant use of the male pronoun in the Book of Common Prayer, and would loudly sing, at the doxology, “Blessed is she who comes in the name of the Lord.” She was willing to spill wonderful details from the back-of-house operations, such as the silent jockeying that went on, when more than one priest was presiding over a service, to determine who would have to polish off the wine in the chalice (because no blood of Jesus could be spilled) after it had been passed through the entire crowd. “There are actually things floating in there,” she told us. “It’s vile.” I knew which deacons wore heavy metal concert T-shirts beneath their cassocks, and who at the altar had Oreos under his seat. Mom let us peek inside the tabernacle, where the spare communion host was kept once it had been sanctified, when the little red light burned to signify the presence of God. I watched boxes of wafers, not yet holy, being unwrapped, simple as saltines.
Over pots in our kitchen Mom practiced breaking the bread. She worked on the clarity of her enunciation in prayer, and labored over her preaching, which was praised by her seminary professors. I recognized this pride. I’d always seen it. It was the same high focus with which she cooked and served us dinner, in deep pasta bowls warmed in the oven and topped by a chiffonade of basil leaves grown on her windowsill. We ate with rigorously enforced manners and directed our conversation over a centerpiece hand-arranged from her own gardens.
When might vanity become devotion? Or was the question better posed the other way around? Because it was never an option to do things differently, not for her and not for us. Clothing had its own taxonomy. So did dining and travel. So did women. There were wonderful people out there. Mom loved a classy lady, dignified and reserved: look for her in vintage Lagerfeld or Halston. Mink in winter. Wool bouclé in spring. Linen or silk in summer. She ate a chopped salad and sent an engraved card the next day, even if she had treated. Nonetheless, iconoclasts were welcome—Mom’s best friend in seminary was a defrocked nun. There was also a category for ditzes and one for fools, and one—characterized as best I could tell by bleached-blond hair and hard eye makeup—for women who, Mom said, “looked rode hard and put away wet.”
And then she’d go out there on Sunday mornings and turn crackers into the body of Christ. There was no higher form of rightness than righteousness. Beyond that, I never knew the nature of Mom’s calling, but I’d have been comforted to hear something of her conviction. Those years she was in school, part-time because we were so young, my brother and I learned not to take the bait when certain other adults in our community tipped their heads and said, “So, your mom’s gonna be a priest, huh?” There were people, we knew, who did not want to be blessed by her. There were people who thought her horrible for thinking she might bless anyone at all.
As for myself, I gave up on God as Mom progressed through seminary.
