ii

“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.”

-Dave Barry

“Doubt is a part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.”

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

            The cross in my room does not even have a Jesus on it.

Dark, gun-metal pewter likenesses of lambs, bibles, and doves frame a grimacing visage of St. Joseph at right angles, as he holds his gray flowers, draped in his silver cloak, clutching a blackened new-born something (Something, rather.) To me, it defeats the purpose of having a cross mounted on my stuccatoed wall at all. It merely provides impetus for the constantly quipping Evangelicals who worry about this goddamned saint-worshipper; the ones who disapprovingly shake their scraggly pointer-fingers at my kneeling body through cracks in my blinds.

My mother is worried that, just like every other newly-freed adult before me, I will lose my faith in college, like two quarters through a hole in my jean pocket. Since I am stereotypically leaving a generic private, single-sex school for a generic, impossibly-enormous state school, it can only logically follow that I will stereotypically leave every worn rosary bead and tattered prayer book behind me and, thus, stereotypically adopt an appropriately apathetic view of the world around me. And, for now at least, the evidence continues to pile on top of each other in squealing favor of this opinion.

She should not worry. My faith in something (Something) is secure. Last summer I battled this topic with myself, refusing any help from More or Marcel or Mohammed, and, by the end of August, was able to set out a course of my beliefs on a cheap piece of notebook paper. The tenants were few and simple:

1)   Life is complex.

2)   God created life.

3)   Love is more complex.

4)   God is love.

This was, of course, thought to be both profound and slightly hilarious by its author, a then-blossoming cynic of seventeen. However, a passing year has forced me to add one more tenant to the Commandments:

5)   Life is good. Love, not so much.

This next month, this first semester scares me. I am unsure, unprepared, and uncomfortable. I have spent eight years with those same forty boys, eight years sitting in the same kind of seventies-import chair. And, right now, the only things that are being carried over to my new life are my clothes, my books, my religion, and my sacrilegious pewter Joseph Cross already packed in a cardboard box, patiently waiting for me in a pocket of my room.