Kim Magowan
My husband is Catholic and more devoted than I like, though it didn’t stop Matt from marrying me. In September, our ten-year-old son Ethan will be confirmed—a strange verb. As babies, both our kids were baptized, but Matt blamed it on my mother-in-law. Or rather, Matt allowed me to assume that my mother-in-law was the instigator, and that I should be a good sport and capitulate. That my agreeing to the christenings was akin to eating Rose’s disgusting sweet potatoes topped with mini-marshmallows on Thanksgiving.
But Rose died two years ago, so Matt no longer has her to hide behind. “Why do we need to do this?” I ask, when Matt schedules Ethan’s confirmation. I suspect the current culprit is Matt’s sister. I like her considerably less than my mother-in-law and consequently feel more motivation to resist.
Only then does Matt say, soberly, “I don’t want Ethan or Sallie to go to hell.”
“Don’t you care if I go to hell?” I want to ask. But I don’t. What’s Matt supposed to say?
Instead I go to Holy Waters, our neighborhood bar. My favorite bartender, Theo, says, “Your usual?” Theo makes me one of their off-menu cocktails, an After the Gold Rush. They’re delicious; they sneak up on you.
Over drinks, I joke with my friends who live down the street about being left out of Team Heaven. My friend Miranda reminds us of that Seinfeld episode, where Elaine gets pissed off when she discovers her boyfriend Puddy is born-again, not because his Christianity is off-putting, but because he doesn’t try to convert her. Puddy accepts her eternal damnation with equanimity. To Elaine, this is proof that he doesn’t love her.
I laugh, uneasily.
My friend David says, “It’s interesting for a Catholic to get all wackadoodle about these rituals. Usually it’s us Jews, insisting shiksa girlfriends convert.”
Ethan and Sallie are automatically Jewish, because I am. Unlike David and Miranda, who celebrate Shabbat, I am only Jewish in the most technical of senses, because my mother was. I never go to synagogue, I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah. One thing about being Jewish is that no opt-in is required. I like the fact that my religion is the hereditary one, like my dominant brown eyes.
For Christmas, my sister-in-law gave Ethan a book about the saints. Often while I cook dinner, Ethan reads me stories about the martyrs. I repeat these to Miranda and David now, as we down second drinks. They are truly gruesome, I tell them, disturbing material for a ten-year-old to be consuming.
I tell them that Saint Sebastian, contrary to what they might think, didn’t die because he was shot with arrows. He was indeed shot with arrows and left for dead, but then some woman discovered him bleeding and unconscious, and she nursed him back to health. Once he’d recuperated, Sebastian zoomed straight back to the same emperor who’d condemned him. This time, Diocletian ordered Sebastian clubbed to death; this time, the execution stuck.
Theo the bartender is cutting limes in wedges, listening. “How weird, that Sebastian’s always painted stabbed with arrows,” Theo says. “Why not being beaten with clubs?”
We decide arrows are better optics, the injuries more paintable.
It’s also, of course, weird that as soon as his wounds were healed, Sebastian would dash right back to the court of the emperor who commanded the original arrow firing squad. But one thing I’ve learned about the Christian martyrs, via my son, is that such behavior is far from exceptional. Many saints energetically pursued their martyrdom. If the mode of execution seemed too benign, they sometimes campaigned for additional suffering or indignities. Peter insisted on being crucified upside down.
“Allegedly to make up for denying Christ three times,” I tell David, Miranda, and Theo. “But still: doesn’t it seem show-offy, being so masochistic? Isn’t that pretty much what gives ‘martyr’ a bad name?”
Renaissance artists painted saints holding the weapons that killed them, like baskets of stones or Catherine’s wheel or the gridiron upon which Lawrence was burned alive. Or saints brandished grisly nods to how they died. In Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgement, Bartholomew, flayed to death, holds a knife in his right hand and his own loose skin in his left, pinched between his fingers like a scrunched-up towel.
Miranda, who minored in art history in college, tells us that Bartholomew is a self-portrait. “Apparently, Michaelangelo had ‘feelings’ about being forced to complete The Last Judgement,” she says.
That makes us laugh—we’re maybe a little drunk.
I tell them flayed Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners. Does this mean Catholics have a sense of humor?
“Supposedly Saint Lawrence, the one who was grilled to death and lugs his gridiron around in paintings, said ‘I’m cooked on that side. Turn me over,’” I say.
David says, “Well, that pretty much defines gallows humor.”
“That’s what you’d call humorose,” says Miranda, running “humor” and “morose” together. I groan, and David impersonates a rim shot.
Then I describe my favorite martyr: Wilgefortis, a young Portuguese noblewoman, promised in marriage to a Moorish king. Committed to maintaining her virginity, Wilgefortis prayed to be made repulsive. Her prayers were answered when she sprouted a full beard. That cracks us up, though the ending of Wilgefortis’s story is sobering: her pissed-off father, angry at having an ambitious match thwarted, ordered her crucified.
Quite a few of the martyrs, I tell them, were killed by the command, or even the hand, of their own fathers.
David Googles Wilgefortis and reads to us from his phone. Apparently, Wilgefortis has many names, some surprising. David says, “Her Latin-derived name, ‘courageous virgin,’ seems predictable. But In Dutch, she’s called ‘Ontkommer,’ which means ‘One Who Avoids Something.’”
That makes us laugh again. But now I’m staring into the depths of my brown drink, its ice cubes half-dissolved, reflecting on all the ways that I relate.