I WAS A TEEN-AGE ATHEIST: A passage in India.
Mathias, Anita
I WAS A TEEN-AGE ATHEIST Memoirs of a naughty Catholic girlhood Anita Mathias F lames leaped into the horizon. My parents, my sister, Shalini, and I abandoned our dinner to race up to the...
...I won't tell you in front of the chhota memsahibs," Durga said...
...And Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am...
...Be sure...
...I felt an inner push, a shove toward this congregation, so literal in its imitation of Christ...
...I am Jesus whom you persecute...
...Paul says, "He is the image of the invisible God...
...Riotousness and devilry burst forth, a ripe sore...
...She was amused...
...A bullet of hatred, galloping to Damascus to kill and destroy, he is struck off his horse and glimpses divinity...
...I'd much rather join the non-Catholics at 'silent occupation,'" I protested...
...confession, rosary, stations of the cross, and choir practices...
...It differed in the sense of, well, holiness...
...She won a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to work on Wandering in Two Worlds, a memoir of her Catholic girlhood in India...
...Sister Hermine laughed...
...I left the room swiftly as I saw my father's face freeze...
...The Hindus retaliated...
...There was no one to reward goodness or punish wrongdoing in this world, and there was no world to come...
...I wanted it...
...the priest asked provocatively on the first retreat evening as he polled our group of Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists—and atheists...
...I abandoned my stamp and postcard collections to read everything I could find on the enchanted universe of Greek gods and goddesses...
...The fire engines were silent as Muslim slums, homes, and businesses burned...
...Your mind will atrophy...
...I lived with the Vincent de Paul nuns and was captivated by their life of prayer, quiet work, and silences...
...Now, I began, obsessively, to wonder if I had a religious vocation...
...Modern.'" Furious, I debated with my class teacher, the fiery, Irish Sister Josephine, through a long summer evening...
...It was Holi, the Hindu spring festival, an explosion of mischief celebrating the god Krishna's shenanigans with the cowgirls...
...On the patio where I sat reading, the sun, a ball of vermilion fire, sank beneath the emerald fortress of trees, lit by the orange-crimson flowers of the Flame of the Forest and the red and yellow Royal Poinciana...
...The notion glowed...
...and in him all things hold together...
...It's possible the Gospels are true, I conceded...
...My favorite writers were Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy...
...And I grew through sickness and exhaustion that never let up, and eventually made the whole enterprise untenable, and which, after I left, was diagnosed as tuberculosis...
...At the mere sight, the victim whimpered in terror and repentance...
...Can't I just obey the Ten Commandments and not go to church...
...they kill us for their sport"—his absent or malign god...
...Such things were surely wicked...
...God was the only thing that was real, I kept reminding myself, and all else—college, marriage, career, social life, money—was vanity...
...You will be bored...
...I composed scandalous poems about the nuns: "Sister Se-cunda eloped with a gunda," a bandit...
...Commonweal 1 3 October 8,1999 my childhood had been totally immersed in Catholicism— saints, angels, rosaries, novenas, litanies...
...You'll have nothing in common with them...
...When we were to be confirmed, I was eleven...
...I will follow you, wherever you lead...
...that it was the only true faith...
...Minutes after I'd returned from the Cheshire Home, full of bright decision, I announced it to my parents...
...My mother followed me...
...The traditional monastic disciplines— prayer, meditation, adoration, the beautiful liturgy of the hours, and "spiritual reading"—served to draw one's thoughts back to Christ, the breadth and depth of his love, and his enabling grace...
...How seductive to slough off everything, to live deep in the embrace of Christ, the creator of the universe, friend sufficient for every need...
...Sister Hermine, our stern-faced, square-jawed German principal, summoned her rebellious charges to her office and, from her lowest desk drawer, slowly drew forth her strap—a thick strip of leather...
...The Bible says...
...My parents, my sister, Shalini, and I abandoned our dinner to race up to the terrace and watch the blaze...
...What's the merit in taming lambs...
...In a burst of headstrong lucidity, I sloughed off the destiny my parents had mapped for me: college, followed by (an arranged) marriage...
...This felt very different from the fossilized Catholicism forced on us at boarding school...
...Atheism is closer to faith than indifference is...
...I will call them today...
...He never read them...
...His life acquires a purpose: "the surpassing greatness of knowing Jesus Christ, my Lord...
...The old story—flamboyant rebellion later swinging to passionate devotion...
...Kaye, Savneet, Bella, and I strolled into the store Commonweal 1 4 October 8,1999 wearing the baggy sweaters of our convent uniform, designed to disguise nubile figures...
...It was Anita Mathias lives in Williamsburg, Virginia...
...I wondered if the "Mary Magdalen" might prove prophetic...
...romantic in a way, the Indian Family Robinson...
...Saul, Saul, it is hard for you to kick against the goad...
...When I was sent to the principal's office to apologize for calling Miss Fernandes— a teacher who had maliciously and unfairly punished me— a Gorgon and a bitch, I clarified "No, I didn't call her a bitch...
...And was Catholicism any different from this awe-struck, foolish approach to nature...
...how it would please this appealing priest...
...Mesmerized by the flames zigzagging into the horizon, I sat on the parapet, my legs dangling over the edge...
...How utterly radical they were in their following of Christ, I thought, as I read of their austere life, stripped down to essentials...
...Catholic children brought up by nuns or priests brace themselves against a vocation: a tap on the shoulder, inward marching orders, an imperative you can ignore, but at the cost of your soul...
...I whispered to cronies, "I am an atheist," as one might confide, "I am a murderess...
...I believe...
...Buckets— dishwater...
...We were marched back to the shop with our booty and forced to apologize: "We are sorry, 'Mr...
...Nurturing two young children, creating a loving family life, running a peaceful household—the demands to give of oneself are constant, without the convent's periodic sanctioned escape into the sacred ivory spaces of psalmody and song...
...While casting about for a vocation, I volunteered in the Cheshire Home for physically handicapped and mentally retarded children, on the outskirts of Jamshedpur...
...S till, the vanishing of God left a vacuum which was filled by restlessness, unhappiness, and puzzlement about the purpose of life...
...through friendships and conflicts and the "testing of vocations," and through the tears and humiliation...
...Faith is the missing link...
...How exactly, I did not know, but, being seventeen, I wanted to do something dramatic and do it swiftly...
...Who do you say that lam...
...Here, in the postage stamp of my world, I tried to practice the kindness at the heart of Christianity, without which words are noisy gongs, ardor and alms worth little...
...Suddenly sickened, I ran downstairs and locked myself in my room...
...I want to be a pen in God's hands," I wrote in my journal, "picked up and used, leaving light where I have written...
...that Christianity was the credulity of fishermen given form and credibility by Paul's sophisticated intellect—crumbled like clay gods...
...the myth-like aspects of virgin birth and a Christ resurrected from the dead...
...Ileft for the convent that August, feeling, with the naivete of late adolescence, holier already, as if the Christian's life task of "being conformed to the image of Christ" could be accomplished in a dramatic grab for holiness, and showy, though worthy, doing would speed the slow, almost imperceptible process of transformation called sanctification...
...Wait until you are twenty-one...
...through prayer and Scripture study...
...Stranger smeared stranger with silver paint stolen from construction sites...
...Mother Teresa recruits simple women from the villages and you're an intellectual snob...
...water pistols squirted indigo...
...At the first hint of violence, libraries closed their stacks as too-easy targets for arsonists...
...I rattled them off from years of catechism, but stumbled over "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife...
...I grew through the next two years, through the aspirancy, postulancy, and novitiate...
...Get up at 5 a.m...
...What are the Ten Commandments...
...tomorrow," the priest said, "and sit alone...
...the north wind, Boreas...
...No, I would become a Missionary of Charity...
...However, if you are sure that God is calling you to this...
...Wait...
...Outwardly, I went through enforced Catholicism—daily Mass...
...My first impulse, to fly off from Jamshedpur to help David Wilkerson of The Cross and the Switchblade in his work with teen drug addicts and gangsters in Harlem, wasn't exactly Commonweal 1 6 October 8,1999 practical...
...I would feed constantly off the light and joy of Jesus...
...When I was eleven, I read through a compendium of General Knowledge during the winter school holiday and discovered a new passion: Greek mythology...
...In the convent, 'It's yours not to reason why.' It will be a life of exhausting manual work...
...And that was that...
...But being a rebel wasn't really fun despite its jaunty aura...
...I did not ask "Maggie" why she compared me to a supposed prostitute, harbor to seven demons...
...I wanted to find a way to live, always, close to Christ, tasting his joy and peace...
...Father Clement Campos and Father Ivo Fernandes, handsome Redemptorist priests with twangy-voiced charm, preached our annual retreats: an aesthetic delight, days of hymns and silences, resounding oratory, and prayer by candlelight led by a luscious male voice...
...The Christian imperatives which Jesus with his Gordian-knot-slashing directness reduced to two—to love God mightily and to love your neighbor as yourself—remain the same...
...Was Jesus Christ who the New Testament claimed he was: the God who made and loves us, the creator of the universe, cornerstone and crux of human history, the zigzag of the jigsaw that makes sense of everything else...
...A compulsive reader, I went through our bookshelves: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, I had read them several times...
...But I did not believe the Bible was "the Word of God," indisputable...
...Watch the sun rise on those snow-tipped mountains and ask yourself, 'Could this grandeur come to be by accident?'" So I raised my eyes to the Himalayas, waiting to be surprised by faith...
...A foot away from the man's animated brown eyes, how easy conversion seemed...
...Surely leaving "the world," becoming a nun, was the only way to do that...
...Inwardly, I scoffed, and as the habit of confidence grew, I rebelled...
...When our desks overflowed, the nuns noticed, made inquiries, then pounced on us...
...As president of the debating club, I chose subjects like "God is dead," and "religion is the opiate of the people," speaking for the motion, annoying the nuns...
...How can you obey the Ten Commandments...
...The energy of it all and, unconsciously, I guess, the prospect of adventure dazzled me...
...I found myself praying, "Lord, I believe...
...The effect was hypnotic, as in a cinema rustling with peanut-crunching, betel-nut chewing, enthralled throngs...
...Seven years to go...
...For was not Saint Augustine a rake, and Saint Francis a playboy, and, as for Saint Mary Magdalen...
...They owned but two saris, a Bible, and no more than could fit into a bucket—their "suitcase" when they traveled...
...I became openly defiant...
...Flabbergasted mortals elevated the forces of erratic, uncontrollable nature into gods to adore and placate...
...But go slow...
...You are experiencing an Augustinian restlessness," Sister Josephine said, quoting the saint: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you...
...Why must you bounce from one extreme to another...
...In fact, I now consider domesticity, marriage, and motherhood a smithy in which the soul can be forged as painfully, as beautifully, as amid the splendid virginal solitudes of the convent...
...I was the only girl she had ever strapped, Sister Hermine often said, shaking her head...
...I got no support from my parents for my desire to officially "lapse...
...Be sensible...
...When the nuns predicted a conversion experience for me, I feared it...
...What should I do...
...Commonweal 1 7 October 8,1999...
...Gradually, my cherished objections—the lack of scientific proof...
...Like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, I concluded that if there was no God, there was also no immutable moral law, nothing intrinsically right or wrong...
...She rarely had to use it...
...How beautiful this serene life is, governed by the pealing of bells," I wrote in my journal...
...he acquiesced eventually...
...I embedded the altar candles at Mass with the sulfurous heads of match sticks, reducing the girls who strained to catch the hiss, the sputter, the odor, to convulsive giggles...
...There is just more distraction...
...The cook sifted out insects to make parathas from old whole wheat flour...
...Rumors of Muslim vengeance for this desecration flew round the town...
...It was punctuated with those rituals— baptism, first confession, first Communion, confirmation—that can so entwine themselves with the fabric of your spirit that to slough off Catholicism is to shiver in uncertainty...
...Mary Magdalen was a notorious sinner who became very holy...
...Wait...
...They worshiped the sun as Apollo...
...You are the living God...
...Who do you say that lam...
...I shared my new philosophy with my friends...
...Take her name, and she will ask God to give you the grace of a great conversion," she said...
...But back down in the valley, any belief born of eloquence and hormones left with the good-looking priest...
...And is anyone here an atheist...
...I have heard my vocation...
...For the next week, they worked on me—private conferences and counseling, private prayers for healing from whatever trauma brought me, a Catholic girl of good family, to this strange pass...
...Lord," I prayed...
...I gazed down: fire devouring houses, crashing rafters, distant screaming...
...Jesus' words sang in me like music, like poetry...
...Intellect can bring you to the brink of belief...
...It now takes ingenuity to carve for myself a circle of silence to feed on Scripture and the transforming presence of Christ it houses, and to live contemplatively, mindful of Jesus not only amid the beauty and tranquillity of my garden, my writing, and my books, but amid a child's cries and crankiness, the crucible of marriage, and the haste and busyness which haunts America as poverty haunts India...
...I would help those unable to help themselves...
...The Cross and the Switchblade, David Wilkerson's tale of Christ's radiance transforming young gangsters and drug addicts in New York City, and Catherine Marshall's Beyond Ourselves were vivid accounts of Christ bursting into everyday life, setting it to music, making it sweet...
...she began...
...I believed: in a leap of the heart as rationally inexplicable as the leap from affection to love...
...The Hindu-Muslim riots held little personal terror: I was Roman Catholic...
...I embraced Hardy's bleak Learian vision— "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods...
...It's plausible...
...In the boredom of boarding school, I had read of front-page disasters wistfully—hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, floods, war...
...I did not add, "but be merciful, Lord...
...I continued reading after dusk by the glow of a kerosene lamp...
...While at the Cheshire Home, I read Edward Le Joly's Servant of Love about Mother Teresa's congregation, the Missionaries of Charity...
...Sister Hermine was ambivalent about breaking her students' wills...
...Home deliveries of bread and milk stopped...
...And Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the son of the Living God...
...It differed from the tales of Mount Kailash, Mount Olympus, and Asgard that I had devoured...
...I understood...
...Help thou my unbelief...
...I was seventeen and had just graduated from Saint Mary's Convent, NainitaL a century-old boarding school in the Himalayas run by German and Irish nuns—staid, staid...
...I became an atheist and fed off the secret knowledge of intellectual superiority...
...It had the taste of truth...
...I was not aware that doubt had a more modern face...
...But these were not sound effects—I snapped out of reverie—these were real people, just like me, burning to death...
...The classic coming-to-faith trajectory had its appeal...
...Her beautiful brown eyes kindled...
...But nothing happened, except in the movies...
...Extra ecdesiam nulla salus: Outside the church, there is no salvation...
...I ran away from school with Micky, the school sheepdog...
...How benighted they were, these parents, grandparents, priests, and nuns who ran our boarding school—they and their rattling rosary beads and boring Masses, their sprinklings of holy water from Lourdes, their relics, holy pictures, apparitions of the Virgin, prayers both to and for any good soul that left this earth...
...Benediction: a cascade of hymns every Sunday evening...
...adoration: silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament every first Sunday...
...Scaling inward mountains—lovelier by far than a life of distraction, worries, gossip, and moneymaking, a life inimical to the spirit...
...Gazing up at the mountains, I thought, as I was expected to—"Maybe, maybe...
...I still see Christ as the wisdom that created the universe...
...But if you get a lion cub, and tame it into a lamb, isn't that something to be proud of...
...Since I refused to recant (I meant what I'd said) I was struck on the calves with the strap and let off apologizing...
...They detested adverse attention...
...The muscles of his face worked...
...Commonweal 1 5 October 8,1999 I might convert like Paul...
...I will do your will insofar as you make it clear to me what it is...
...Durga, our tiny, curly-haired cook, cycled into town and returned, panting with news...
...To my surprise, I was fascinated...
...he asked...
...See, you can't even say the Ten Commandments...
...I gradually surrendered the intellectual high ground of cold reason: What I do not see with my eyes, or feel with my hands, I will not believe...
...You are a Catholic, my mother said, whether you like it or not...
...I would dedicate my life to Christ, I decided...
...How then should I live...
...Perched on a piano in the music room (a sacrilege), I argued that if "Mr...
...Would I suddenly turn "good," perhaps even, in a blaze of glory, become "a great saint...
...Sister Hermine agreed...
...How wonderful, I thought, to convert just like that, your life transformed— but I lacked both belief and an object of devotion...
...A life of love...
...And every year, I raised my hand...
...We formed a gang, "the bandits," and our first exploit was our daily raids on Modern Store which catered to rich kids from the four expensive boarding schools in Nainital, and to the tourists and honeymooners who swamped the Himalayan resort...
...No, this was not mythology...
...I shrank from rereading The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd, or The Mill on the Floss, though I loved those "classics...
...My forebears from Mangalore on the west coast of India were converted in the mid-sixteenth century by Portuguese missionaries, backed by the Inquisition...
...At some time, we all think we've caught it: That's it, we are the chosen of God, chosen for a lonely, lovely way, another bride of Christ...
...Then, I chanced upon an idea that shattered my religious complacency...
...Driven by an inchoate hunger, I read and reread the New Testament, my thirst growing even as it was quenched...
...All things were created by him and for him...
...urine?—were emptied from high apartment windows onto passersby...
...I still see following him as the sanest way to live, a way I am committed to...
...The Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were allowed to read, study, paint, or embroider, provided they sat at their desks in perfect silence—oh, oasis!—while we, we went to church...
...I wished I could believe...
...We stuffed Cadbury's chocolate, Mills and Boon romances, stickers, cards, nail polish, and costume jewelry into our sleeves and up our sweaters...
...You've always found it impossible to conform...
...How easy choice can be when there are absolutes, a road map through the maze of decisions...
...How would I get through curfew without them...
...They did just what Christ commanded, I thought, impressed: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was sick and you looked after me...
...I asked...
...Jamshed-pur, my North Indian home town, was 82 percent Hindu and 11 percent Muslim...
...I doubted it...
...And every year we, who from March to December rarely saw a man except the chaplain, developed monstrous, predictable crushes...
...Still, she would be unimpressed by an eleven-year-old atheist, I thought...
...For like love, faith is the heart's knowledge...
...corn, fickle in blight or plenty, was Ceres...
...As a child, I un-questioningly accepted Catholicism, and believed what I was taught...
...Who are you, Lord...
...I read that primitive men and women, often devastated by nature, imagined it was God...
...In revenge for being sent out of class, I locked my teacher and classmates into the classroom throughout an afternoon...
...For me to live is Christ, to die is gain," he writes...
...Go and see your father...
...Without training, with impetuosity, they plunged into all manner of human misery, their reach widening year by year, their mandate simply to serve "the poorest of the poor," defined broadly: lepers in Yemen, shut-ins in Melbourne, crazed drug addicts in New York, freezing homeless people in London, orphans in Peru, tramps near the Vatican, the dying destitute in Calcutta...
...I grew...
...Their naughtiest girls often become the "holiest," they claimed...
...How wearying to thrash out the morality of every case, every time, all by yourself...
...The market shut down...
...But too awkward, alas, too "nice," to refuse Sister Magdalene, I became Anita Mary Magdalene Mathias, adopting that stodgy, dated name I hated...
...There were tears on his cheeks...
...I got my friends to join me in crawling out of the choir room while Sister Cecilia, behind the organ, warbled in a holy dream...
...Then decide...
...It was the prospect of boredom that bothered me...
...A procession of Hindus, chanting bhajans, statues of Shiva, god of destruction, hoisted on their shoulders, had marched past the mosque and forced a pig into it...
...But at the same time—secretly—I began to crave a moral framework...
...Just eleven, I knew better...
...I said a witch," which seemed worse...
...You have to be a Catholic now...
...Pascal, she said, wrote of the "God-shaped vacuum" only God could fill...
...my father's brother, Theo Mathias, a Jesuit, asked her when she was close to expelling me...
...I left the convent sadly, with a sense of falling off, to study English as an undergraduate at Oxford University, to go to graduate school in creative writing in America, and later to forge myself into a writer and a faculty wife in suburban America—the less poetic path...
...Flung water balloons gushed vermilion...
...I settled down with the books I had not already read: Christian books...
...The police slapped a curfew on the town: A glare, a curse, a flung stone could spark a riot...
...I did not quail at this largesse, this scattering of blank checks...
...I grew through work in the orphanage, with the mentally retarded and the dying destitute...
...It's like stripping off your skin...
...My father bought them at parish jumble sales as though there were virtue in the purchase...
...So one could do whatever one wanted or, at least, whatever one could get away with...
...Though we lived in faculty housing on the campus of Xavier Labor Relations Institute, a business school run by American Jesuits at which my father taught, it was impossible to get books...
...Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me...
...Police stood at every street corner, their rifles cocked...
...If I could have been "good," I would have...
...I was nicknamed "the naughtiest girl in school" after an Enid Blyton heroine...
...And I was God-bitten...
...With an air of adventure, of rusty doors wrenched from their sockets, revealing fresh vistas, I prayed: "Show me, Lord...
...the raging sea, they imagined, was the mighty god Poseidon...
...When I turned fourteen—no longer one of the "babies," or the "middle set," but a "big girl," especially in my own estimation—I knocked on Sister Hermine's door and announced that I did not believe in Catholicism, or in God for that matter, so please, please, could I not have to be a Catholic, and— especially—not have to go to church...
...Modern" overcharged us all year, it was okay to even things occasionally by "swacking" from him...
...Still, I was fertile soil at seventeen as I read the Bible while confined to the house during those Hindu-Muslim riots...
...I will not wait," I said...
...I could not spar against the Christ I apprehended dimly—I who did not understand cars, or logarithms, or tides, or love...
...Sister Magdalene, an enormous, squint-eyed British nun, persuaded me to take her name...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 17
