After Grammar School, I elected to attend our area catholic high school. My parents at this point, would have preferred I attend our area public high school, which had a much more diversified college prep program, but all of my friends were going to the Catholic High School and I didn't want to start over.

My rebellion against the Catholic church expanded here. In between getting high, peddling dimebags and drinking gin with my vending machine tonic nearly every day at lunch, I began to question the church and it's chosen voices.

In Catholic High School, you inevitably find a bastion of young-ish priests who think they are God's gift. They think that they make the girls swoon and are guy's guys. And they do have their groupies. The ones who wanted to get written out of study hall to hang in the priest's offices. I refused to buy into this. Even as a teenager, I recognized something wrong with a celibate man in his 30's or 40's wanting to hang out with teens as if he were a teenager. I mean, DUH. Basically, I was too cool for school. And this, was apparently off-putting the clergy. Here I was, one of the popular kids, not buying into their clique. They would mandate meetings with me in their office and I would sit there in my uniform and not speak for the entire hour while they tried to probe my psyche, undoubtably searching for something wrong with me for not buying into their projected cool factor.

One year my school ran an "extra credit" field trip to a Pro Life rally in Washington, D.C. Pretty much everyone in my class of 170 kids signed up to go - it was free boost to the GPA. I didn't sign up. One of the priests took me aside and asked me why I wasn't going. I explained that I wasn't interested. He tried to strongarm me to go and finally I said, "Listen, I'm happy to go, but if I do, I won't be marching on your side. I believe in the freedom of choice for women." I didn't go to the march.

Sometime after that I was cornered by a scary IHM nun in the hall who hissed in my ear, "I knoooowww what girls like you are up to," as my friends on the cheerleading squad burst out into laughter behind her.

You would think that I had learned my lesson after 13 years of Catholic School, but instead, I chose to go on to a Jesuit University.

The Jesuits. They are a another group of hip priests who didn't get the memo that they are celibate and not kids anymore. However, I learned something from this order. They are exceptionally learned people. So learned, in fact, that they question the history of the Church and our religion.

I would put them to the test, asking, "If our Popes are infallible and we are not to kill, how do you explain the crusades?" And they would respond, saying that the crusades were wrong and that the Pope, exercised his human judgement and erred egregiously. Interesting, I thought. Finally.

The Jesuits were often more interested in speaking about other world religions than our own. They created a Judaic Studies Center and ran exchange programs for our students to work on Kibbutz's with Israeli's, which was my plan post-college, before thwarted by my parents who decided I would definitely in some get myself killed in Israel. Based on the fact that my parents are generally right about these things, and the fact that I decided I would be better served to go on tour with the Grateful Dead, I didn't go.

Religion and philosophy were the most difficult courses at my college and they doubled the manadated core requirement at my school in those areas. Do you know that I spent an entire semester, *just* exploring the Holy Trinity?? Believe it. And it was the hardest class I've ever taken, from a female minister of some Christian denomination. It was not at all unusual to sit in a room filled with Philosophy majors and no one questioned what those people would do after college because to Jesuits, philosophy is a career.

The Jesuits were completely unlike the priests in my past, those rich dioceseans, these men had taken a vow of poverty. They spent years mastering knowledge of foreign cultures by living among these people. I was taught by a small Lebonese priest who laid himself down in front of a tank to stop an attack on an Israeli village and said he would do again. This man was of such incredible faith that he says that even as the tank moved toward him, he prayed to God that his body would be enough of a sacrifice to stop them from further devastation.

In the summers, when we all went off to frolic in the sun and the sand, these men returned to places like Eucador and Africa to help build schools with bamboo and help acclimate the new the Peace Corps volunteers coming to teach.

And they drank. Boy, could these guys drink.

But they weren't enough to bring me back to the church. And they didn't pressure me about that.

So that brings me to the last few years. For the last few years I have been the black sheep of my family, angering relatives when they questioned my lack of faith. My flippant answers such as, "What gives a bunch of old, white MEN the right to decide what I should do with my body?" or "Why can't women be priests? Are we not all created from the same cloth? Did Eve not receive a rib from Adam, thereby making her made from his flesh and bone and making her his equal?"

And then there's the matter of my Episcopalian Church, which prompted my father to snipe, "And what have the Episcopalians ever done for YOU," to which I responded, "About as much as the Catholic Church."

But the topper may have been when a few years ago, to shut up my uncle and my father at a dinner party, I announced, "Religion was created by man in feudal times to make the uneducated believe that must suck up mistreatment in this life so that they will be rewarded in the next. Religion is chicken soup for the masses, something created to comfort them with the inevitability of death and the ending of this life. It is nothing more than a concoction by man to comfort the psyche of mankind. I am not afraid of death, therefore, I do not need religion." And that, pretty much stumped my father and my uncle and ended what had been up to that point, a delightful dinner party.

After that, my parents pretty much gave up and my uncle started to look at me with a sad face.

And then 9/11 happened. And I freaked out. My mother tried this "It was their time" bullshit and I freaked out. "You CANNOT believe that it was time for 4,000 people to all go at once! That's BULLSHIT." Shortly after that I publicly renounced God, Catholism and organized religion and my Father told me to never speak of that again in his presence. He said it made him feel sick and sad for me. That made me sad as well, because finally, we had reached an immeasurable gap in shared experience.

And then I went to that funeral for a friend in November. And the friend's uncle, a Jesuit, stood on the altar firm in his beliefs in God and Catholism but angry. And this man didn't defend his God, or make explanations for what happened as being a part of a bigger picture, he said it didn't make sense. That he was sure that this omniscent God that I've been taught about all my life must not have known what was happening or that worse, he knew but could not take back the free will he gave to man at the beginning of time. He made no effort to pretend this was part of God's plan and he encouraged everyone to be angry about it. He even referenced the crusades and said, YES, we were wrong. We killed in the name of religion and that was also wrong.

He painted a picture of the dead in this case as channels of peace ascending to heaven to be with God. Reuniting with other deceased loved ones and finding a better existance in eternal life. Serving as our angels to provide us with strength for the rest our lives here on Earth.

And maybe it is bullshit, but it's bullshit I needed to hear and finally something that made sense to me among all of this choas and hatred and evil and anger.

I still can't explain miracles and can't say I believe Mary was a Virgin. And I will probably laugh the next time some group thinks they see the Virgin Mary on the side of a brick home in Florida. I may not go to mass every Sunday or listen to the Vatican Council they next time they get together and make some cockamamie ruling.

But I believe in Heaven. I believe that when we die, we go to a better place than here. I believe those people become angels and give us strength to keep going because there is no other way to explain how I searched tirelessly for so many days after 9/11 and there's no other way to explain how I get up every morning and keep living in a world filled with chaos and murders and evil doers who kill young fathers and pregnant women. There's no other way to explain why I still believe that bringing a child into this upside down world is a blessed event and why I still believe that we can find love again, in each other.

And that's where I stand on religion.