study for your church exam
Location
it's 9:00 on a sunday morning
and instead of being home with my beloved Pop-Tarts and my homework that I wouldn't be doing anyway
I sit here in a church with cheery stained-glass windows depicting sad stories with the sunny, smiling faces of saints
and thousands of baby-blue flowers, cut from the ground they once breathed in, gathered into massacred bunches, and shoved into bright, happy pots and littered about the altar
and the grand centerpiece, hanging from the ceiling, an enormous statue of a broken, bleeding man with dead eyes and no pupils
with a face depicting a story I've heard a thousand times but never really understood
but today I decide I'd like to understand
so I sit in one of these long polished wooden pews with the back of an envelope and a golf pencil in my hands
and I listen, as if I'm in class again, just taking notes
but instead of answers
all I hear is the sniffling of old women into musty embroidered handkerchiefs
and the wailing of children who aren't smart enough yet to shut up and listen to Jesus
and the moist, heavy breathing of the man on the stage into a tiny microphone on his collar in the long silences that last after he's run out of things to crucify his congregation for
and I don't hear any of the answers to my questions like
what am I even doing here on this earth and
where is my money going after I toss it into these little golden dog bowls
and most importantly
who the hell is God and what gives him the right to create me just to make me feel like nothing more than a sack of filth waiting for hellfire to consume me
the heavy-breathing man with the microphone doesn't tell me how to love myself
in fact, he doesn't tell me how to feel loved in any way
he just tells me that I don't deserve love and I'm lucky that I get it at all
so instead of being joyful and spreading the good news of the Lord like he orders me to
I go home and bury myself under a quilt stitched together with tiny, heavy memories
I store all my sins in a bottle around my neck
and wait for a calendar date to spill them out onto the floor in front of a priest in a purple robe who doesn't even know my name
or otherwise I just flip the cork off the bottle and drink down the sin myself
stomach empty, fasting on nothing but the wine of my guilt
the wine the priest calls God's own blood, but I know, I know it came out of a bottle
and I don't see why if I just drank enough of that holy blood I wouldn't get drunk enough to be called a sinner
but these questions don't matter
because unlike a classroom or some kind of seminar
the priest doesn't pause at the end of his lecture and ask the audience if they have any questions
and even if I were to raise my hand
the congregation would probably assume I was just trying to reach up and touch the statue of the crucifix above me
and maybe I am
because maybe
if I could just get close enough to look into his eyes and see some semblance of a thought or a dream or even just a pupil
I would find the answers to all these noisy unattended questions rattling around in my ribcage
or at the very least
I would just learn to shut up,
to paint my eyes as stained-glass windows with watercolors made of dyed teardrops and false happiness
and to drink my wine until I'm drunk enough to forget the sins around my neck,
like a good Catholic would do