I’m running late to meet Arlo after her class. When I get there, she’s standing outside talking to two other students in the cold. I’m happy to see them and hug everyone and say hello.
“I wish we could stay and talk but we’re late for Mass,” I say, knowing it’s an odd thing to be doing and the two other students likely won’t understand it.
“Like church?” our British friend says, and I laugh and say, “Yeah, it’s the night before Lent.”
He shrugs and widens his eyes as if to say, “Alright, whatever you guys want to do,” but seems slightly confused.
Arlo waves goodbye to them and we both start walking quickly as I pull up directions on my phone.
“I know it’s in the East Village,” I say, “I just don’t remember where. I’ve never actually been to this church, I usually go to one on 16th Street, but honestly it’s a bit too progressive and New York Times liberal-y, so I’ve been meaning to go somewhere else. They’ve got the rainbow ‘Science is Real’ sign outside. Like, if I’m going to Catholic Mass I want it to be traditional, like almost bordering on politically incorrect, you know?”
“We might just have to go to Latin Mass then,” she says. “Pre-vatican II.”
“Yeah,” I say, “the ideal.”
We’re walking so quickly it’s almost like power walking, and I say, “We’re actually good on time. We can slow down.”
“God,” she says laughing, “Sorry, I’m always doing that!”
“It’s okay. I’m just a very slow walker. I’m almost out of breath. You go so fast!”
“Sorry, sorry,” she says, “It’s a weird habit! I don’t know how to regulate my speed.”
She links arms with me and we slow down to a normal pace.
I zoom in on the map.
“We’ll get there right on time. We basically just walk straight til we get to the park, then take a right. I hope it’s a nice church. I didn’t tell you this earlier, but I found out about it from that guy who I hit on a couple weeks ago on Instagram who I found out was too young for me, the transgressive poet guy who’s tall?”
“Oh yeah!” she says, “Is he going to be there?”
“I hope so,” I say, “I haven’t met him in person and I want to scope him out.”
“Oooh, exciting! Wait, so he told you about the Mass?”
“Yeah, he is weirdly very into Catholicism and studied it in undergrad, and I messaged him to be like, ‘sorry I hit on you then found out you were like six years younger than me and backed off, do you know anywhere good to go to church?’ kind of as a joke but also kind of seriously, and then he sent me that flier I sent you and was like, ‘you should come to this.’”
“I was wondering why you had that flier.”
“I was going to take you to the other church, but I thought why not kill two birds with one stone. He said he was going to be late though, so I don’t know if we’ll find him right away. We can look around.”
“But you don’t want to go out with him right?”
“I don’t know, I mean, after I hit on him I told my therapist and was like, I know I’m choosing someone younger to avoid intimacy, and if I hook up with him I’d basically be using him for sex because it feels safe and easy to control, and then he was like, ‘yeah, good, so don’t do it.’ But also, he’s really hot and I’m finally old enough to be the older woman in a sexual relationship, and I sort of want that, but I don’t think I’m capable of it anymore, something casual like that.”
“I mean, just because he’s younger doesn’t mean he’s not capable of intimacy. You could try it?”
“I’ll at least go and meet him in person.”
The night is slightly warmer than it’s been for the last few months and it seems like the weather might finally be letting up after a long winter. My eyes aren’t watering from the windy cold like they have been over the last several months, and I feel comfortable in my wool jacket. I wore stockings and heels, and I’m dressed more formally than usual. I haven’t had anything to dress up for in over a year because of Covid, and it’s nice to perform a certain properness.
“I’ve been looking at wedding locations for me and Brooks, and I realized I’d really love to get married in a church, but you have to be confirmed,” Arlo says.
“Oh, you do? I didn’t know that.”
“Are you confirmed?”
“No, just baptized and I had my first holy communion, but I’d like to be confirmed. I can never fully keep up with the Mass and all the hand movements and phrases and stuff. I guess that’s where you learn it.”
“Maybe we can go to confirmation class together.”
“I would love that!” I say, “I wonder who else would be there? Adult confirmation class seems like such an unconventional thing to do now.”
“It would be so nice to be with other people who care about God. It just seems like there’s virtually no avenues for anything like that, which is so weird.”
“We live in a completely godless society. Everyone worships the news and acts like they’re smarter because of their bullshitty ultra-rational materialist atheism, but they’re just as blind as ever.”
“Yes!”
“I think we turn here.”
We walk along the edge of Tompkins Square Park, and I think about how my ex-boyfriend said he used to come into New York to play punk shows in the Nineties and would have a hotel room lined up to stay in by the band’s management, but he’d end up scoring heroin on St. Marks Place and sleep in the park instead and wake up covered in sweat with the sun in his eyes. I don’t see any junkies or homeless people in the park now; it’s too cold, and it seems like people don’t even really do heroin anymore. It’s all pills and fentanyl. Even drugs seem like they’ve lost a certain numinous quality. The opioid crisis took all the fun out of being strung out.
We walk past a brick courtyard with vines crawling up the wall and an illuminated room with plastic folding chairs that reminds me of AA. I think maybe this has something to do with the church, but no, the map says there’s still a block more to go.
When we get to the church, there’s a group of around twenty people yelling and banging on drums while holding signs.
“What’s going on?” Arlo says.
“I guess it’s a protest or something,” I say and have to raise my voice to be heard over the yelling. “This is the church though.”
We stand there for a while staring at the crowd and trying to get a grasp on what’s happening.
A girl wearing a blue lace veil and standing on the steps gestures towards us.
“Come in!” she says, waving her arm at us. “Come here! Just come in!” and she puts her hand on my arms as she guides me towards the entrance.
“Shame on you!” someone in the crowd yells. “Don’t you care about women’s rights!? What about the priests molesting the kids? Shame on you!”
“New York hates you!” another person yells and someone else screams, “Go home fascists! Go home!”
I’m tempted to yell back, “Get a life! Don’t you have something better to do with your time?” but I bite my tongue because I don’t want to start something.
I go to put on my mask to be considerate before entering the church and one of the protestors who’s standing close to me says, “Oh no one in there is wearing masks, and they’re definitely not vaccinated,” in a judgmental tone.
“Oh good,” I say, and go ahead and take my mask off, happy I don’t have to wear it.
The girl wearing the veil is relieved we’ve made it inside. She seems overwhelmed and looks as though she might start to cry.
“That poor girl,” Arlo says.
“I know. Are you okay?” I say. “God, I’m sorry I brought you here! I feel bad.”
“I’m honestly just trying to figure out what’s going on. Why were they protesting?”
“I think it’s some anti-Catholic thing because of recent threats to Roe v. Wade or something?”
She picks up brochures from a table near the door as we make our ways to the pews, and she hands me one when we sit down.
“Votive Mass of Thanksgiving for the Gift of Human Life—Misa Votiva por el don de la Vida Humana,” it reads.
“Ah, okay,” I say. “So this is a straight up anti-abortion Mass then.”
“Yeah,” she says, and we laugh uncomfortably.
“I would say we should leave, but—” I gesture to the entrance. At this point the noise has gotten louder and the protestors have started banging on the doors and yelling.
Four nuns dressed in full habits walk down the aisle to their seats without masks on and their rosaries in hand.
“It’s okay,” Arlo says.
“I mean… this is really interesting. I’m sort of here for it, honestly.”
Arlo is still wearing her mask. It’s stark black against her pale skin and bleached hair.
“I hope you don’t mind that I'm not wearing a mask.”
“No no,” she says. “I don’t care.”
There are a couple people with their masks on, but most people aren’t wearing them.
The service begins with the choir singing in the rafters above us. We can’t see them, but the sound is sweet and unifying. It has a soft angelic quality that comes from above, the way a choir is supposed to sound, but it’s imperfect and human too. It’s only slightly louder than the loud banging and yelling outside, and the two mix together in an unsettling way that fills the space. It’s impossible not to be affected by what’s going on, and everyone looks flustered.
“It’s so sad that it’s come to this,” I say in a whisper to Arlo. “It honestly makes me so mad. Is there no understanding of the importance of religion in the modern world? People have completely lost an understanding of the symbolic function of the soul.”
Arlo nods and shakes her head.
“I think this Mass might be in Spanish,” she says, and when the priest steps up to the microphone and speaks, I find out that she’s right. Part of me is relieved to be able to sit and witness the service on a purely ritual level. I can feel myself held and encompassed by the structure of the building and the sounds echoing through this space intended to serve as a sacred vessel.
As the priest speaks, I stare at the intricate mural painted at the front of the church. At the center, there is a large crucifix mounted on the wall. There is the standard image of Christ on the cross that I remember staring at on the wall of my second grade classroom in Catholic school and wondering why we were allowed to be exposed to an image of torture and violence as young children, and how it had anything to do with the lives of the warm-hearted nuns that taught us in their strange outfits. I remember looking at the nails piercing Jesus’s hands and pinning him to the cross and feeling almost nauseous imagining the pain.
The crucifix at the center of the church here is framed by angels and saints, none of whom I can identify, except for Mary. What’s odd about this particular mural is the red tones they’d painted into the clouds of heaven, as though there was a certain passion or fury involved in this revelation, a glimmer of fire in the sky where it parted.
“I thank you all for gathering here today for this celebration of the gift of life.”
I’m surprised to hear the priest begin to speak in English.
“To say that we are pro-life means we support life in all of its stages,” he says. “We recognize that God is the author of life, and we know that it is only God that has the power to give life, and the power to take it away. It is not for us to take the pen out of the author’s hand and try to write our own story, and to take that right which belongs to God alone into our own hands.”
I turn to Arlo and give her a look.
Most of the Mass continues in Spanish, and I scan the room to see if Luke, the guy from Instagram is here. I can’t see him anywhere. The protestors have stopped banging on the doors, but their rhythmic chanting continues outside.
I’m worried that Arlo might be overwhelmed and dissociated. I tend to perk up in moments of chaos and find them familiar and exciting, but I know other people shut down, and I have the impulse to try to protect her.
“The police have been called and should be arriving soon to handle the situation outside, so don’t worry,” the priest says. “It’s customary on today, the day before we enter our fasting period of lent, to feast, and this is why we refer to this day as Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras,” he says in a slightly slowed down voice, as if he is speaking to children. The whole thing feels rather infantilizing, and at no point does he speak of the significance of lent, or of abstinence, or of Jesus entering the desert. He just rattles on about pancakes and fish fries and not eating meat.
“We’ll be having a pancake supper afterwards in the basement of the church, and I’ve made a decision,” he says, taking a moment to pause for comic timing, “No pancakes for the people outside!”
The audience musters up a laugh, less because his joke is funny and more because it’s nice to have something to laugh at to release tension.
I laugh slightly myself but second guess it afterwards and think how not Christian of a statement that is, to pettily deny those that stand in conflict with you a gift they’re not even looking to receive.
The priest speaks more in English and advocates his pro-life views from the position of what feels like a weak man exuding a false confidence born from combativeness and unexamined self-assuredness. Several times during the service I feel his eyes fall upon us, two tall, pretty women accidentally in this position, and he has a smarmy look on his face, as though he’s glad the sort of young women who bow down to the authority of the God he’s supposed to be facilitating still exist in this world. I can’t see the love in his heart, just a misguided and unacknowledged longing for power, and the performance of a ceremony he’s been indoctrinated into blindly.
When he prepares the wine and the bread, I do get a sense of his devotion as I peer up at the altar from my knees. There is a subservience to some great power and mystery that seems genuine then, but later, when I go up to receive communion, I can’t bring myself to kneel before him and allow him to place the wafer in my mouth, though I’d admired the gesture of humility when I saw those before me in line perform it. I take the wafer in my hand and eat it as I walk back to my seat. There’s no communal drinking of the wine, the blood of Christ, because of Covid, though part of me had hoped for it because it is my favorite symbol in the Mass, and I thought if any place would disavow the current health guidelines to permit it it would be this one.
At the end of the service the priest calls upon Saint Michael to help us in our fight for life, and the attendants recite a prayer from the bulletin and he tells us to exit through the basement to avoid the crowd outside.
I look for Luke as we make our way downstairs.
“I can’t see that guy anywhere!” I tell Arlo, “I should have known better than to take his recommendation. He struck me as someone drawn to Catholicism because other people don’t like it and it’s strangely become this new way for young people to be edgy and rebel against society.”
“Really?” Arlo says, “That’s so weird! Who would ever think of that?”
“Oh yeah, it’s like a whole thing now. You haven’t heard of Catholic e-girls or this whole new internet trend of kids being really into God sort of in an ironic way and sort of not?”
“No! I’m so not online. I had no idea.”
I check my phone and find that Luke has dm’d me, “hey, i’m outside! i couldn’t get in because of the protest. this shit is crazy.”
“i know right? wtf!? we’re coming out the side door on the left,” I write back.
When we make it outside he’s standing on the sidewalk.
“Luke! Hey!” I say and awkwardly reach to shake his hand, “Nice to meet you.”
He seems slightly off put by the formality of my gesture but smiles and shakes my hand anyway.
“You too,” he says, and I introduce my friend Arlo.
“This is crazy!” he says, “I was trying to get in but all the protestors were blocking the door! Let’s get out of the way before they come around here.”
We walk across the street to the entrance to the park.
“I was just telling Arlo about this whole movement of young people converting to Catholicism because of internet culture and all these memes about saints and Christian purity and biblically accurate angels. She doesn’t have Twitter so she’s never heard of any of this.”
“Oh yeah,” he says, “I’m all about it. I’m an edgelord.”
“What’s an edgelord?” Arlo asks.
Luke and I laugh.
“It’s like someone who’s intentionally provocative online and says shit to get other people mad, and being Catholic is one of those things that tends to upset like social justice-y types.”
“That is so weird,” Arlo says.
“Yeah, like, do you know what ‘trad’ means?”
“No.”
“It stands for traditional. So now there’s this online movement of being, like, trad Catholic, meaning that you would theoretically wait til marriage to have sex, although I’m sure no one is doing that, but that it’s like this new thing of assuming super traditional gender roles and talking about how much you love God, and it’s sort of performative and ironic but also not.”
“God, that sounds horrible,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “Millenials and Gen Z are so irony-poisoned we can’t even unironically fulfill our religious longings. God help us!”
Luke is different than he looked online. He’s sort of meek and nerdy with a runny nose from standing in the cold, and he has the slouched posture of young men who spend a lot of time on the computer, but he’s still handsome.
“I’m going to try and get in and check on my friend Max who’s in there,” he says to us.
“Okay, cool! Well nice meeting you!” I say, and he walks off.
“He’s less attractive to me in person than he was online,” I say to Arlo, and pull up his Instagram page to show her.
“Yeah! That’s weird. It’s like all these pictures were taken from below so he looks much taller,” she says.
We start walking along the edge of the park to try to find somewhere for dinner.
“I’m sorry to have put you in that situation,” I say. “I had no idea that would be going on.”
“It’s okay,” she says, “Really. I mean, it didn’t bother me. It’s just sad that people are so angry nowadays, and no one with an opposing viewpoint can have a conversation about anything, whether it’s religion, abortion, gender stuff, Covid, whatever it is, without screaming and someone somewhere wanting someone to get canceled.”
“I have to show you this meme I saved the other day.”
I stop and flip through my photo library to pull up a picture of a nun smoking with meme text layered on top of it that says, ‘ONLY GOD CAN CANCEL ME.’”
“I think about this all the time when I'm writing,” I say.
“Oh my God, I love that,” she says. “I've been so scared of writing these days because I’m worried I’m going to hurt someone's feelings or someone is going to call me out because I accidentally say something gender essentialist or something."
“God, I'm so happy to hear you say that. It just feels like there's all these bands of jackals everywhere and everyone is on the edge waiting to snap and attack or start screaming about something, and it’s not even their fault! It’s not anyone’s fault! We’re just living during such incredibly difficult contentious times where there are no clear guidelines for anything and society is basically crumbling and discourse doesn’t exist!”
“I know! I mean, like tonight for instance, I understand that abortion is important, and I’m grateful we live in a society where we can make that choice and blah blah blah and all that foundational feminist shit that I do genuinely care about, I mean, of course, but also, it is so sad to think of people banding together to go yell at a bunch of other people that are just trying to go to Mass before the beginning of lent and participate in religious ritual. Like, that the only source of community they can find revolves around getting together with a bunch of other people that are all mad about something they read on the news so they can go and spend their Tuesday night yelling at people? Like what the fuck?”
“It makes me so sad!”
“Not that the service was any better! Or that those people are any more right! I mean, ‘the protestors don’t get any pancakes!’ What the fuck was that about? That’s not exactly Christian love.”
“People just seem so angry and their lives are so devoid of any meaning greater than themselves. Though I also didn’t feel the presence of God in that service, I’ll tell you that.”
“I know, I know,” I say, “It’s all become so political. Everything.”
“Where do you stand on the whole abortion thing?”
“Look, the idea of women not being able to abort pregnancies is absurd in this day and age, and the idea of the state or the church having control over people’s bodies, particularly women’s bodies, is maddening. I’ve never had an abortion, though I’m sure I could have because I never used to use condoms when I was sleeping around, so I’ve been really lucky. And maybe I’d feel differently if we lived in Texas, but honestly, the attitude that a fetus is just a clump of cells is so gross to me. Women are the keepers of life and death and they always have been. Of course a woman can choose to not bring a child she’s pregnant with into the world, and women have always done that, but it is a death in my mind, and to me, just personally, it’s sad to not be able to acknowledge that.”
“Did I tell you about that herb that went extinct in the Middle Ages because so many women were using it to have abortions?”
“No!” I say and laugh, “But it doesn’t surprise me!”
“I heard this sermon on a Christian radio station one night driving through Texas after I had my abortion where this preacher was talking about how we are all just the keepers of life. He said the great spirit moves through us and we participate in it as we all have since everything started. It helped me because that meant to me that death is just a passing away that happens and contains within it the seed of rebirth. It’s just a natural process, and when you look at nature, that is the way things really are.”
“I didn’t know that you’d had an abortion.”
“Oh, I thought I’d told you,” Arlo says. “I was in my early twenties and it really fucked me up, both because there was part of me that was really scared I was going to go to hell because I was basically raised in the Baptist Church, but also because there were no avenues to grieve the loss in any sort of spiritual way from any other perspective. I mean, I wasn’t even given the remains so I could do a burial or something. I went to someone years later and did a ritual that finally brought me some peace, but I really needed that, you know? It was devastating.”
“God,” I say, “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve made peace with it now, but it meant listening to the part of myself that knew something was unresolved and giving myself permission to grieve, and I just feel for people who don’t have that.”
“I know,” I say, though I realize I’ve gotten in the habit of saying that in response to things and think maybe I should start saying something else.
Liz Ayre is a writer based in New York City. She’s currently completing her MFA in fiction at NYU, and she’s working on a novel about UFOs. @liz.ayre
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I love everything about this. It's like an episode from an edgy new season of "Girls," with all the messy authenticity that makes that show great, but interacting with something deeper and more mysterious than "Girls" ever did.