I recently was asked to help out with a couple of editing projects at the place I was baptized, confirmed, and made my First Communion–St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was humbled, and of course I said yes. I’m hoping to be there when the new altar is installed later this year.
It’ll be a coming home of sorts; the last time I went to Communion at St. Joseph’s was in the fall of 1971, when I was fifteen. It wasn’t until the following June, the beginning of the worst summer of my life, that I actually “left,” both St. Joseph’s and, as far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church.
My boyfriend of more than a year and I had split up about a month earlier, due in large part to my best friend’s tempting promises of a wonderful, carefree, boy-filled, sweet-sixteen summer for us both. Shortly thereafter, the two of them began dating.
I cried as only a teenager can, knowing that my life was never going to be the same, that I’d never have another boyfriend, and that I’d never trust another girlfriend.
I don’t know exactly what brought me to St. Joseph’s one evening that June on the way home from babysitting. I just knew I needed help, and I had never quite gotten the hang of praying anywhere but church. I couldn’t talk to my mother about missing my boyfriend’s kisses, and the girlfriends I still had were waiting for their first kisses. I couldn’t talk to anyone about how incredibly sad and worthless and betrayed I felt virtually every waking moment. So there I was, at the foot of the giant halfblock mausoleum of a cathedral.
I yanked at the chapel doors.
Locked.
I went up the stairway to the main doors of the cathedral itself, then the side doors.
Locked.
I even stood in front of the rectory and counted to 600–ten minutes–too scared to ring the bell, willing God to intervene and send someone there.
He didn’t.
I sat down in the parking lot shared by the school and church, praying that someone, anyone would come by and ask what was wrong. I pulled my notebook out of my babysitting bag and in the twilight wrote a damning piece of angst-y poetry, lost to my memory other than the opening lines: “I came to see You / But You weren’t there.”
Nobody–not my parents, not my friends who went to other churches, not any relatives–ever asked why I quit going to church. It didn’t seem to matter. And so, it became easier and easier not to have a relationship with God. That wouldn’t start to change in a serious way for thirty years.
