Molly O’Connor

In Saint Michael’s Catholic Church, there are four aisles of pews with about 14 rows in each. An unquantifiable number of lights, spreading across the ceiling in small circles to mimic spots of sunlight. I tried to count them during mass when listening became unbearable, but I always lost track before I could come up with a total. Around 50 windows, most stained glass, telling the story of Jesus’s death. How he hauled the cross up the hill. How Mary wept.

In first grade, my religious education teacher walked our class around the outskirts of the church, the story ending with us gazing up at Jesus’s malnourished and mangled body nailed to the cross. It was the first thing I saw every Sunday. I found him hard to look at directly, like the sun.

I sat so still my legs went numb. My chest buzzed like a swarm of hornets during the homily, like if I moved too much, I’d be exposed — like everyone would see the doubt crawling around inside me. I once faked being sick to skip mass, then cried in my room because I thought I might die before I could confess it. I imagined my soul tipping into hell for a lie I didn’t know how to undo.

In seventh grade, my best friend, Grace, and I were split into different religious education classes. We filed into the building across the street from the church every Wednesday after school, the lessons increasingly intense as our eighth grade confirmations approached. The catechists were usually parents of students who sometimes had assistants — promising young adult members of the church who wanted to help teach the faith to children. After class one night, the assistant in Grace’s class added her on Snapchat and asked her for nudes.

In 2002, the parish was burned down by a former member. He entered the church, drank wine from the sacristy’s fridge, set fire to the tablecloth atop the altar and the tapestries and threw matches into garbage bins full of papers and dead flowers. Flames suffocated Jesus’s crucified body, shattered the holy images stained into the ornate windows. He said he did it because Catholicism scars kids.

In the aftermath of the fire, Father Don went on the news and said “the church is more than a building.” Something I would hear reiterated through future sermons as I squirmed under the watchful gaze of the statue of Mary or Saint Michael himself. He said that the devil tempts people to do evil things, and I wondered if he was in me, too.

My earliest memories are of shame. They said you had to follow all of it. That if you died with a mortal sin on your soul, you’d burn forever. When I questioned my parents on the church’s stance on gay marriage they said, “Well, the Church isn’t always right.” But they said it casually, like it wouldn’t shatter something. Faith was a maze I was told to run without touching the walls. And each time someone whispered, “Oh, that part of the maze doesn’t matter anymore,” I’d already bruised myself trying to stay inside the lines. A kid with anxiety doesn’t forget where they bled, even if you patch the walls later.

With insurance money and donations from the community, the church resurrected. I never knew the original building — the one with the older windows, the unbroken saints. What stood in its place was the version I grew up in: four aisles of rigid wooden pews, their creases printing into the backs of my knees. Hundreds of warm yellow lights scattered across the ceiling. The stained glass windows — clean and vibrant, telling the same old story — how a man was tortured to death for love, and how we were supposed to feel saved by it.

I sat beneath them for years, trying not to fidget, trying not to think about hell or shame or Grace or how badly I wanted to believe in something that didn’t make me afraid.

What survived the fire was guilt. It doesn’t burn. It waits.