(In her first installment, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah laid bare her reasons for wanting to "fine-tune" her faith. She proposed to do so one religion at a time, beginning with Catholicism, the faith that influenced her belief as a young child. This, Danquah's second installment, follows through that resolve.)

But Jesus said, Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me:  for to such belongeth the kingdom of heaven.
—Matthew 19:14
The Holy Bible, American Standard Version

Nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to; this I know.  Still, I’d somehow worked myself into believing that in this one instance, it just might. I’d predicted that the moment I walked into the Catholic Church, a waterfall of negative memories would come spurting out of me.  Maybe then, I would, once and for all, be able to make sense of my ill-feelings toward Catholicism, and finally divorce myself from the Church.

Martha, Ruth and I met at exactly 5:15 on Saturday evening to drive to the nearby Catholic church for its 5:30 Mass.  I sat in the backseat, jotting notes in my journal.  The roads we took were so sharp and windy my words were practically unreadable, as though they’d been penned by a severely arthritic hand.  The last time I attended Mass, or even stepped inside a Catholic church, my penmanship was about the same, but that’s because I was a kid.  I hadn’t yet learned how to write in cursive and my sentences, painstakingly crafted on pages upon pages of wide-ruled cardboard-colored paper, were a jumble of lower and uppercase letters.

Despite the alcohol-induced confession I’d made to Ruth and Martha the night before, I wasn’t officially raised as a Catholic.  It was my father’s religion; my mother, as I recall, was a Methodist.  But none of that mattered anyway because we weren’t a family of church-goers.  When I was in the fifth grade, I used to attend a  Christian Science church with my best friend’s family whenever I spent the weekend at their house.  Other than that, the closest I came to church was Aretha Franklin’s  Amazing Grace gospel album, which my mother used to play quite religiously on Sunday mornings while she was cooking and cleaning.

Nevertheless, after my family immigrated to Washington, DC from our native Ghana, I was promptly enrolled in Saint-Somebody-Or-Other’s Catholic school.  I only attended for a year, but that was clearly more than enough time for the experience to leave an impression.

When Martha, Ruth and I pulled into the church parking lot, there were plenty of cars, but not a soul in sight.  Martha’s colleague had told her that Mass began at 5:30.

“I’m thinking she got the time wrong,” Martha said.  “I think it might have started at 5.”  I shrugged.  Late or not, I was going in because I definitely wasn’t gonna drag my butt back there on Sunday morning.  It was now or never. 

Saint Stephen the Martyr is a beautiful red-brick church, precisely what one might imagine in a town as small, picturesque and wealthy as Middleburg, Virginia .  And its history made it all the more impressive.  Saint Stephen’s was built for one of the most famous residents the town has ever claimed, the late President John F. Kennedy. During Kennedy’s presidency, he and his family kept an estate in Middleburg, where they spent weekends.  At the time, Kennedy attended Mass at St. John’s Parish.  The way the story is often told, some folks felt this was not befitting of his stature as the nation’s President because, at the time, St. John’s Parish was located in the Middleburg Community Center building.  Thus, plans were made to build the man a “proper” place to worship. As fate would have it, Saint Stephen the Martyr was not completed until well after President Kennedy’s assassination.

We were, as Martha suspected, unfashionably late, so we stood in the back, at the threshold between the vestibule and the nave. There was a small brass font affixed to the wall on each side of the entryway. I spied Ruth immediately dipping her fingers into the closest font and then crossing herself.  At the other end of the aisle, in the apse, was the priest wearing his flowing robe, flanked by an altar boy and an altar girl. (My, how times have changed!) 

As soon as the priest finished speaking, the entire congregation—Martha and Ruth included—delivered the requisite, “Amen.”

"The peace of the Lord be with you always," the priest continued.

“And also with you,” the congregation responded.  I felt as though I’d stepped onto the stage of a play in progress without benefit of a script. None of this was ringing any bells, bringing back any memories.  After the congregants had dutifully offered each other a sign of peace, Ruth and I followed Martha to a half-empty pew and slid in. 

We sang a hymn or two. (It was rather underwhelming, but having set my standard with Aretha, most church music can’t help but sound like one loud, overextended yawn!)  We knelt and prayed. (It was a painful reminder that my days of kneeling for religious or recreational purposes are long behind me!)  We watched as people lined up, one after the other, to take Communion; but being the textbook Virgo that I am—with a terrible fear of germs and contamination to boot—I had to turn away after the fourth sip was taken from the chalice.  That provided me with ample opportunity to notice that the walls on both the gospel and the epistle sides of the nave were adorned with all the Stations of the Cross. It was breathtaking.

I can’t describe the incredible sense of calm and belonging that I felt while sitting there in that pew.  I felt so at home, so at peace; I’d be lying if I suggested otherwise.  I loved it—the robes, the crucifixes, the rosaries, the rituals—all of it, except the “wine” part. (I don’t care that it’s only really grape juice, or that it’s merely symbolic, my mind still registers the image of people’s ingestion of blood and it just gives me the heebiejeebies.  But even if I could get past that, there’s still the issue of backwash! Eeew!)

By the time Mass was over and Martha, Ruth and I were standing outside, I had all but become a convert; or, should I say, revert. I was wondering if by arriving as late as we did, we’d missed the “bad” parts because I had really and truly enjoyed the experience and, much to my surprise, would’ve readily agreed to return the following morning to do it all over again.

What had made me keep my distance for all those years?  It was a bit perplexing.  I kept glancing past the open doors into the church, trying to see if I’d overlooked something.  While Martha made small talk with some friends of hers who just so happened to be sitting in the pew behind us, Ruth started explaining to me in detail why she had broken off from Catholicism. I was so deep in my own thoughts I only caught a few snippets here and there of what she was saying, something about not being able to stay committed to a faith that would consign her then-fiancè-and eventual-husband, a good man, to fire-and-brimstone simply because he wasn’t a Catholic.

“You want me to leave you alone?” she asked when she saw how distracted I was.

“Oh, no, I’m listening,” I lied, not wanting her to feel dismissed. Ruth continued, admitting that once she became a mother, despite her break from the Church, she still felt compelled to raise her daughter in the faith.

“There was a really good Catholic school not far from where we lived, so we enrolled her there.  She was getting a solid education.  We didn’t have any complaints, until the afternoon she came home and shared the prayer she’d learned that day—an Act of Contrition.  I mean, my daughter was what, five or six years old, and they had her asking forgiveness for her sins?  What sins?”  I stared at Ruth, and bit into my lower lip as though it might ease my passage through the silence which hung between us as we pondered her questions.

“I’m ready to go now,” I finally insisted after a few minutes. 

The negative memories didn’t come by way of waterfall, as I had imagined.  It was something more like a trickle, a slender, squiggly line not unlike an errant thread one might discover in an otherwise adequate, if not admirable, outfit.  You would do well to leave it alone, to just let well enough be and appreciate the beauty that lies before you.  Instead, you give it a small tug and before you know it, the whole damn fabric is unraveling in your hands.

I had sat through that Mass like a victim of amnesia, unable to recall a single verse or response, unable to even say my “Amen”s on cue.  None of the rites or liturgies seemed familiar to me. Yet the instant the words “Act of Contrition,” fell from Ruth’s lips I felt the urge to fight back tears.  It was as if I was being swallowed by this humungous sorrow for her daughter, whom I had never met and was, by now, no longer a child.  Then in the car on our way back to Martha’s, I saw her in my mind, that child, but it wasn’t Ruth’s daughter; it was me.

I remembered being taught those words:  O, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell… 

I remembered the nuns who taught me those words, Sister Meanface and Sister Screamer, cloaked in all that black, with their funny headgear.  The witches with the wooden rulers, that’s how I saw them through my child-eyes. 

I remembered, too, that as a child there seemed to be so much light, wonder, elegance and grace to everything I saw and was able to interpret instinctively about the Church and the faith.  And I felt entitled to it all, as if I knew without a doubt that it belonged to me, with me, in me. That was, obviously, long before Sister Meanface and Sister Screamer taught me the indelible lesson of an all-too-conditional love.  God’s love could only be mine if I confessed, because only then would I be forgiven and spared His wrath and the pains of hell.  But what was my sin at such a tender age?  Surely not my birth, the very life and soul which I’d also been taught that God, Himself, had breathed into me!?!?  It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Especially at six years old!

No wonder I was bitter about the Pope’s apology to the Church’s sexual abuse victims.  In my own way, I identified with their loss of innocence.  Once you start to doubt God’s love and protection of you as a birthright, that doubt will always be there, no matter how many Acts of Contrition you whisper with your palms pressed tightly together.  After all, what’s done is done, isn’t it?  Once that original sin has been committed, you carry the stain of it forever, right?   

Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. Innervisions is her new column for Ebonyjet.com on her path to finding religion.