My Catholic catharsis

1994. My cousin’s First Communion. I sat on a rock-hard pew in a cavernous stone church and looked up at the altar where I met, at least in my seven-year-old mind, my worst nightmare. I had spoken of him in hushed tones with my friends at Hebrew school. But I never expected that I would ever come face-to-crucifix with He Who Shall Not Be Named: Jesus Christ.

My name is Chelsea Paige and, until recently, I was scared of Christianity. For about one-third of the world’s population, Jesus is numero uno. But for that largest of religious

diasporas, the Jews of the New York metropolitan area (or the ones I know, at least), Jesus was altogether foreign-a vague, amorphous being who lay at the core of the religion which brought us the Crusades and the Inquisition. Oddly enough, my visceral reaction to Christ stemmed from silence rather than any anti-Christian propaganda: my teachers failed to mention him once during my fourteen years of Hebrew school.

Despite a religious education void of Jesus, I probably would have been able to understand him, and thus never develop a fear of him, if I had had any positive exposure to Jesus at home. No such luck. My mother endured twelve years of a Catholic school run by, in her words, “well-meaning, but very ignorant” nuns. My mother regaled me with a few choice nun stories, like when they told her not to bite into the communion wafer or Christ’s blood would spurt into her mouth. Since my mother was, to put it lightly, a little turned off by that brand of religion, I didn’t form a particularly positive impression of Christianity growing up. Sure, she went to church occasionally to meditate and never said anything negative about Jesus, but she didn’t want my sister and me to grow up in what she saw as a limiting, intolerant tradition. Hence her desire to raise us Jewish, my father’s faith.

My last recourse for an education in Christianity could have been my public middle school, but that pesky separation of church and state prevented my teachers from feeling comfortable discussing religion in any kind of thorough fashion. Instead, the religious education on Christianity I received before college lay in the obligatory paragraphs at the end of each chapter of my history textbooks, chronicling the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Christians, along with accounts of the plight of other minorities, most named according to the ethnicity + hyphen + American formula.
Then I started college. The fact that Georgetown is a Catholic university didn’t really cross my mind, as my eyes filled with stars at the thought of shooting the breeze with Madeline Albright. Over the years, the lack of religion beyond obligatory, though dreaded, attendance at major holiday services had allowed me to mostly forget about my complex. I expected Georgetown to be no different.

But Georgetown’s Catholicness soon began to pop up. Walking back to my room on Sunday nights, I saw people from my classes coming out of Dahlgren Chapel. My friends started to express their commitment to Christianity as well. “I’m going to Bible study,” my friend from Harbin told me. Wow, are you like those kids in the movies that air on the Christian channel? I thought. My friend’s decision seemed odd to me, but I soon forgot about it. Then my problem hit close to the heart. “I’m going to church,” my Catholic boyfriend mentioned casually. Suddenly, I realized that I was still holding onto my decades-old fears. Realizing that I should stop feeling apprehensive about an important and seemingly comforting element of the life of someone about which I was starting to care a lot, I began to go to church with him. At first I felt completely out of my element, but after two and a half years of going to mass regularly and discussing my complex with a Jesuit and my friends, I have finally come to an understanding and appreciation of Christianity. (My boyfriend even comes to Shabbat with me sometimes, though I doubt it’s because he’s getting over a fear of Moses and that big snake-stick). Sarah Palin’s penchant for speaking in tongues and waiting for the rapture is a different story, but after Jesuit-informed therapy, I am happy to report that my name is Chelsea Paige, and I think Jesus was a pretty cool guy. His religion isn’t half bad, either.