In the youth group were the two twins, petite, full-lipped, with short frosted hair, who came from trouble and were probably headed toward bigger trouble if Jesus didn't stop them short first, one of whom wrote me lingering, perfumed letters all summer, but she wasn't the one I liked.
There was the tall thin kid with the high voice who dated girls with a compensatory vigor, and the square-jawed youth group leader, a college student whose parents came from Cuba, who dated a husky-voiced, dark-haired French Canadian girl I liked too but with whom I never had a chance against the square-jawed one, and to whom I stopped writing letters during my first year of college when she asked me how my walk with Christ was going. Walk with Christ? That had ended a long time before. How did she not know?
Youth group had a couple dozen of us, Lebanese, Italian, Irish, French Canadian kids, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, boys and girls, a lot of working class kids, who went down to the seminary on Sunday afternoons to listen to talks from our elders, to plan religious retreats for other teens, and to go to Mass. It wasn't an ordinary youth group, it was the leadership group supposedly; we'd been plucked from one retreat group or another, perhaps for our devotion, maybe our malleability, could have been our charisma. Interestingly the seminary wasn't Roman Catholic but Maronite seminary, which involved some complicated church history that was explained to us at some point and which we promptly forgot. Practically it meant the Mass was said partly in Aramaic, the Mass was laced with much more incense on an ordinary Sunday than our own churches had at Christmas, and females were forbidden from the tabernacle. This we were not invited to question. It was the way it was. Only guys could serve at the altar. I was one.
These exotic practices made the Mass compelling to a teenager. It wasn't like going to church, it was like going back in time, it was an opportunity for transgression. This included the customary group hug-sway of the kids in the pews. Who knows which horny Christian teenager started it, it only mattered who was able to get away with it, but the custom during Mass was to stand up in the pews during the songs and sling our arms around each other's shoulders and sway to the guitar-strummed hymns, gripping each other with awkward innocence, hosannas and hormones rising to the heavens. Teen frottage for Jesus was the motto. I watched bereft from the altar.
The priest, he worked to keep me out of it. His name was Martin. A cool cat with a thick, long beard, he wore Converse sneakers under his cassock. He was the shepherd of our troubled, eager, impressionable, flock, and one of his shepherd tools was the Sacrament of Confession. He'd grab you gently at the back of your neck, tell you he thought you needed some confession, and cut you out of the group. You could never say no. Then, sitting in a darkened back room, he'd give you a chance to confess with an open-ended question, and if he wasn't satisfied with how much you spilled, he'd go through the Ten Commandments, building each literal rule out into a much broader net to catch teen sins: swearing, disobedience, drugs, masturbation. After getting worked over, wammalamma, Martin proclaimed you sinless. At the end you'd get a bear hug and instructions about where to locate his next sinning lamb, then you'd stumble, wrung out, into the common room. Martin of course was surveilling our behaviors through confessions and intervening directly with individuals who were veering off course. It was a youth group, after all. If anyone wanted to make a youth group sit com, here's one persistent plot dynamic, and sometimes he's right, sometimes he's wrong. Priests and bishops have now permanently soiled the image of priests in a darkened back room with teens, but I think Martin had good intentions, even if he took too much inspiration from the Stasi, and I never heard about or read about scandals that involved him. (Some of his colleagues, however.)
I had grown up with a lot of priests around; my father, who had been in the seminary once, liked to talk liturgical shop, and we were family friends with a few parish priest types who would come over for breakfast, then say Mass on the patio. So it wasn't odd or uncomfortable for me, driving home late from a school event, to stop by the seminary to confer with Martin about something. It was after Easter, and the kitchen was filled with cookies, baklava and almond shortbreads. I was editor of the school newspaper and a teen journalist for the local paper, so maybe Martin was displeased about something I'd written. Or maybe he wanted to extract other commitments from me, I can't remember. Cookies or not, it was a complicated relationship; he was genuinely interested in us but the heavy thumb of his Christly interventions irked me. I needed hands to lift me up, not more thumbs. At home were heavier thumbs itching for me.
Slowly I began to slide away from youth group. I already knew that my allegiances had been manipulated; that at the first weekend retreat, they'd kept us up late and hungry, bombarded us with heartfelt spiritual confessions, then surprised us at the end with our families gathered to hear our conversion tales, how we really truly knew that Jesus loved us. For a time I think I believed this. Piety has genuine attractions, after all. Or those that can seem genuine at the time. The incense, the song, the constant glorification of wound and sacrifice, the Aramaic and Latin, I got into those. But really, I came back for the girls, especially the dark-haired one I found perched on the stainless steel sink in the event center's kitchen one day. One day at Mass, hip to hip with a twin on each arm, I was honest with myself about why I was there, and honestly, if you'd seen the twins and you were a 16 year old boy, you would have stayed, too.
The final push out came from the two adult leaders, a married couple in their mid 50s or so. One day they gave a talk about secular humanism and its evils and what it could lead to, you know, the way that certain types of Christians used to do in the 1980s, before they discovered Satanism. They went on to say that embracing the world isn't what we should want. You don't want to see the world or be in it, they said. That's where the evil is.
But I want to see the world, I thought. I'd never been anywhere, never seen anything. Been on a few bus trips. Surely there was more than that. In a James Joyce short story you'd put the epiphany right about here, where the husk or shell or rind that I had identified as my faith dropped off, right there, in the heart of a youth group session in the basement of the seminary. What a burden it had been to be gaslit, to allow that to happen to myself. But no more.
