#*lens

You spend the first few months attending Mass with your parents. They give you some teething toys or your bottle to keep you from disturbing the rest of the Congregation. Having a baby disrupt the Mass will make your family look bad, after all. 

You are now three years old, old enough to walk and talk. You pull out the Misselletes and flip through them, tearing out the flimsy pages and laughing. Your parents pull you away and give you a cardboard book with pictures to look at. They look away and you run off again. 

You are five years old now! Such a big child, I remember when you were a little baby crying from the baby carrier in the back of the Church! It’s time for Sunday School! There are only five children there for your age group. You spend an hour after Mass every Sunday eating snacks and doing Catholic Crafts. 

Happy First Communion! You are eight years old now, still not quite old enough to think for yourself, but you have to go to Confession for the first time now. You aren’t sure what to say and make something up about hating your siblings if you have any. Maybe you stole some chocolate from your family, but you don’t really know what needs to be confessed. The teachers told you to tell Father everything, but some things feel too personal to tell. Your parents dress you up in the fanciest clothes you remember wearing so you can go up and eat some bread and drink some wine in front of everyone. There are pictures afterwards. 

Welcome to Middle School! You are 12 years old now, starting to think for yourself. You say you still like the Church and you still mostly blindly follow their teachings, but sometimes you think other thoughts. Sometimes you see ads that are pro-Choice and you think “that’s stupid,” but then you think about what you would do if you got pregnant. You banish the thought, because having sex at age 12 is not something you should be thinking about anyway (even though you sometimes think about your classmates like that). You’ve already been questioning your sexuality at this point, but you try not to think about it, because being gay is a sin. 

14 years old and still following the Church. You’ve shaped some vague opinions on hot topic issues, still following the guide of the Church. You hear the Priest talk about how abortion is murder and how gay and trans people are ruining the sanctity of life. You quietly fume about one of these issues, but quickly move on, as the Priest has gone off on another tangent about veganism now. You continue going to confession only when Sunday School tells you to. You now have a better idea of what to confess but you can’t bring yourself to do it. Maybe if you keep it bottled up God will never see it. But speaking makes it real and you can’t even think about confessing to some of the things you’ve done even though you know you should. So you make something up and you know the Priest doesn’t believe you but you do your Hail Marys and Our Fathers as penance. Afterwards there is a pit in your stomach because you know God can still see what you didn’t confess. 

You are 15 now, just starting high school and everyone seems so different now. You’ve known these kids since you were five, but you’ve always been the odd one out. You try and follow the Church’s teachings about living a holy life in example for others but it just makes you tired. So you stop caring during the week. You attend some youth groups to “keep the faith strong” but by now you know that you aren’t straight or cis and it just hurts. Every little comment just chips away at you until you feel complete apathy towards both Catholicism and Christianity in general. You still go to summer camp and winter retreats because you have lots of fun outside of the religious activities but prayer is tiring and the microaggressions leave you feeling empty and alone. 

Sweet 16! You can drive now, and you’re still on the fence about the Church. You don’t miss Sunday Masses ever and it gives you structure to life. It is also the year you get confirmed. Your Church does Confirmation later than most. You are surrounded by 8th graders and your little group of High School Juniors. Even though you don’t have any bad feelings about having to go to Church on Sundays until now, the Bishop standing in front of you says that you should die for who you are. You are trans and queer and so deep in the closet you feel like you have to hide your phone screen from your parents all the time even if you aren’t looking at pride related posts. You heard your parents say once that gay marriage was ruining the country and decided never to come out, and now a Bishop, someone with a lot of local authority, says that trans people are freaks and gay people are irredeemable. You make a silent promise to yourself to dissociate with the Church. But for now, you sit, stoney faced, knowing that this man has to bless you into the Church. You feel that pit in your stomach again. 

Welcome to adulthood, age 18! How exciting! You’ll be going to college soon and you need to decide if you want to keep going to Church. You know your parents and grandparents want you to go but after a few weeks you know they won’t know if you stop. They don’t ask about the Priest or his homilies or activities happening in the Church. You get away with it too, because the Church services on Campus overlap with the ones at home. You continue to go through the end of the semester, needing the time to think and walk before going back to class the next day. You hear the Priest here, too, tell you that abortion is murder but you know that people don’t go getting abortions willy-nilly and silently fume. You don’t socialize with anyone in the congregation so when you stop going in the Spring, you don’t think they notice you left. 

You come home for break, now sure that you don’t want to be Catholic, but your parents still drag you to Church every Sunday. You’ve taken this time to think about other religions that have appeals to you, including paganism and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian deities. You’ve tried worshipping them all, but when things get rough, your mind drifts back to Mary, the Saints, Jesus, God. You still keep that little gold pin in your car to keep you safe while driving and you still call to Saint Anthony when you lose something, and sometimes you still think you feel a response as Saint Anthony draws your eyes to the one spot you missed and shows you what you were looking for. 

Even in the dark of night, when you let your guard down and cry, you cry out to Mary for help. You feel a comforting presence there, and then you feel a pit in your stomach again because you want out of this religion but you can’t seem to let go no matter how hard you try. So you let Mary wrap her arms around you as you confess everything to her and then wake up and try again to forget everything you’ve grown up with. Your life until now has been so entrenched in the Church and it's hard to separate the good from the bad. You still want to go back but you know you will never be accepted for who you are.