Bless Me, For I Have Sinned. This is My First Confession.

Antonia Angress

1 I’ve lost count of all the times in my life I wished I believed in God

2. When I was younger I used to pray, silently, before bed. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If from my sleep I should not wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. I don’t remember where I learned that. Possibly Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which I loved and read over and over again. The other prayer I recited was in Spanish: Án gel de la guardia, de mi dulce compañía, no me desampares ni de noche ni de día. That one my next-door neighbors taught me.

3. I can recite the Hebrew Hanukkah prayer, but I don’t know what it means. Incantatory gibberish.

4. I wished I believed in God when I was fifteen and I feared the ourob oros of my thoughts would unravel me. I wished I could pray myself out of my unquiet mind

5 Mostly I was afraid of dying in my sleep and ending up in Hell I feared my parents would also end up in Hell. None of us were baptized.

6. The idea of being wrong about God terrified me. To this day I’m still unable to adequately describe the existential terror of not knowing whom or what to believe. The stakes seemed so high: worship the right God in the right way or suffer for all eternity

7 Jews, like atheists, don’t believe in the afterlife about her struggles with post-partum depression and bulimia. Every time she goes through pregnancy and labor she spirals into a pit of self-loathing and despair She has five kids and is open to more life. She writes about loving her body, loving what God has made it capable of, and hating it too.

9. Jesus Christ—Jesucristo in Spanish, all one word—introduced me to the concept of generative, generous suffering. I don’t remember how old I was the first time my neighbors took me to Mass The crucifix trans fixed me It looked like something out of a horror movie. I understood that suffering was beautiful. Or, I understood that it was possible to suf fer beautifully.

10. When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out, a boy I had a crush on asked me how I felt about my ancestors being responsible for Christ’s death. I blanched; he laughed at my expression and made a joke about Jews and money I no longer recall its exact wording, but the joke involved him rubbing his thumb across his index and middle fingers. I did not occur to me to tell my parents or teachers about this incident.

11. I attended Mass sporadically throughout my childhood and adoles cence while accompanying my neighbors or friends from school. My parents didn’t mind. I think they viewed it as an educational experi ence—they were big on being open-minded and getting out of your comfort zone—and since I never repeated any of what I heard at Mass at home, they had no reason to believe that I took what I was learning seriously I never expressed to them a desire for spiritual formation. When I was at Mass I loved the music and the art, but I always felt slightly uneasy. You don’t belong here. This isn’t yours. Every time I step into a church, I feel it still: a sense of awe and transgression and voyeurism, that I am at best a guest, at worst an interloper Doubt gnawed at me I didn’t fully under stand why, but for a long time I feared that it was because I was not, deep down, a good person.

Angres s 11 for the good of the souls of others. She instructs their children to do the same. Offer it up offer it up offer it up.

12 I wished I believed in God when I was twenty-one and I told my boy friend I wanted to die. I wished prayer could unmoor me from my mind.

14. I love my mind. I love what I can make it do. But I hate it too.

15. Saint Faustina writes: My sacrifice is nothing in itself, but when I join it to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ it becomes all-powerful.

16. I believe in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiaze pines. I believe in Venlafaxine and Fluoxetine and Alprazolam. I believe my mind is crooked but medicine can fix it, or at least straighten out some of the hairpin bends.

17. I was eight when my grandmother died. My mother inherited her substantial art collection, which she had shipped to Costa Rica from London, where my grandmother had lived for the previous two decades. The artwork looked absurd in the rustic wood-and-cinderblock house my parents rented from a dairy farmer. The most striking piece was a 14th-century wooden Madonna, which had been in my family since my mother was a child My parents displayed the Madonna in a corner of our living room. She was about four feet tall, armless, and termite-eat en. When I passed her on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I tried not to look at her.

18. I wished I believed in God when I was twenty-six and my friend over dosed on street Vicodin. I wished I knew that I would see him again I wished I could promise his girlfriend that she would see him again.

19. Had I promised that, she might’ve hated me and I wouldn’t have blamed her.

20. Recently, my husband and I visited my parents in California, where

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they moved when they left Costa Rica The wooden Madonna still stands in the corner of their living room. The artwork, displayed salon style, looks slightly less out of place in their Bay Area cottage, though it is obvious that it would be more at home in an elegant London flat.

21. My husband was once my boyfriend, my college sweetheart. It was to him that I confessed my wish to die. He called my parents from the hospital Later my mother told me, “You’re lucky to have him.” She didn’t say, “He is a blessing,” but ever since then, that’s how I’ve thought of him.

22. As my husband admired the wooden Madonna, my mother com mented that it would be ours someday. “Though you’ll have to fight your brother for it,” she joked.

23. Judaism is matrilineal. By Jewish law, you are a Jew only if your moth er was a Jew

24 “She scared the shit out of me when I was a kid,” I said

25. My mother is a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and her mother was a Jew and

26. “Really?” my mother said. “I found her comforting. I would get up in the middle of the night and touch her face.”

27. The Madonna’s face is the only part of her that is not termite-eaten. The wood is smooth.

28. My mother told me that when my grandmother lived in London, she used to go to Latin Mass “She loved the sermons, even though of course she didn’t understand them,” my mother said. “And she loved the mu sic.”

29. When I was fifteen I accompanied a friend to the baptism of her new born cousin. The baby cried briefly when the water splashed her head.

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Then she quieted, cooing in her godmother’s arms.

30. Indelible in my memory is the case of a ten-year-old girl known in the Costa Rican press only as Rosa—my middle name, incidentally who became pregnant after an assault and was refused an abortion A nonprofit activist group flew her to Panama for the procedure, where upon she, her parents, and the doctor who performed the abortion were excommunicated from the Church

31. The closest thing Judaism has to baptism is circumcision. My parents, both Jewish as far back as their families can remember, decided not to circumcise my brother. My mother calls the practice barbaric.

32. One of the Catholic bloggers celebrates her children’s baptismal an niversaries in addition to their birthdays. The child gets to eat dinner off a You Are Special Today plate During dessert, the other siblings sprinkle the honoree with holy water. It’s a nice ritual.

33. As the story goes, my extended family was aghast, since circumcision is the lowest fence you need to clear to keep your Jew card.

34. Recently, a college friend of mine in her third year of medical school described circumcising newborns at the hospital where she assists. “It’s like a baby dick guillotine,” my friend said. “You pull the foreskin over the glans, freeing it as you go, maneuver just the foreskin into the guil lotine, and then clamp it down really tight. All the while, you’re feeding the baby sugar water on a pacifier while his arms and legs are strapped down so he doesn’t wiggle, and he’s deafening you with his screams.” My friend paused. “It’s basically baby torture. I would never circumcise my kid.” I came away from that conversation thinking: Good call, Mom and Dad. I also thought: The Catholics have the right idea. Just splash the kid with holy water and call it a day

35 One of the Catholic bloggers plans destination First Communions for her children. She has nine of them. The eldest is sixteen, the young est not yet a year old. It amazes me that she has been either pregnant or breastfeeding for the past seventeen years of her life. Her kids take their First Communions in Paris and Rome and Belfast and Lourdes. In her Instagram photos, the children look radiant in their little three-piece suits and white dresses. Faces all ablaze with faith. The most important moment of their lives so far, their mother writes She captions the posts with angel emojis

36. My husband’s parents prayed with him every night before bed. They recited the Our Father and Hail Mary together and then they listed all their relatives and asked God to watch over them.

37. One of the Catholic bloggers wrote a post about how she recites the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel and sprinkles her children with holy water and blessed salt before they leave the house for school in the morning Spiritual warfare, she calls it

38 I wonder sometimes if there are people who pray for me How would I know? Would my ears burn?

39. At my wedding reception, my aunt sidled up to me and whispered, “Your new in-laws are going around telling people they’ll see them at the baptism.” Drunk on champagne and love, I laughed and laughed and laughed.

40. My husband and I have decided that if we have a son we will not cir cumcise him, Jew card be damned We want our children to have some semblance of a spiritual education but neither of us can agree on a reli gion. At the dinner table we toss ideas back and forth. Secular Judaism? Buddhism? Unitarianism?

41. I can’t remember the last time I went to synagogue, but I remember the last time I went to Mass.

42. We excised all mentions of God from the wedding ceremony, though we left the traditional Hebrew prayers in, figuring no one would un derstand them. My father, whose Hebrew is passable, read those parts.

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There was no rabbi My mother-in-law, a retired federal judge, officiated and signed the paperwork.

43. By Jewish law, our children will be Jewish.

44. My husband also lost his faith around the same time I lost mine. Sometimes I picture us both as teenagers me in Costa Rica, him in Louisiana lying in bed at night asking ourselves the same questions. He refused to be confirmed. It was a big deal, he recalls. His father was despondent. I had nothing—no one—to rebel against. I was already at sea.

45. We exchanged our vows under the same chuppah my parents were married under now it hangs on the wall in our apartment and we circled each other seven times, and we both smashed a wine glass to shouts of mazel tov. It felt important to me to be Jewish, just for that one day. But not too Jewish. Jew-ish.

46. My other grandmother my father’s mother was born in Vienna. She spent her girlhood imprisoned in Auschwitz. I spent my girlhood on a dairy farm in Costa Rica, wishing I could watch Nickelodeon and rollerblade down the all-American streets of suburban California like my cousins.

47. My husband swears his aunts shot him concerned looks as he recited his vows. This might have been because his vows included, “I promise to do my very best to not leave my dirty socks lying around.” In return, I promised not to procrastinate for too long before folding my clean laun dry.

48. These were the same aunts who disregarded my husband’s grand father’s wishes to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in his old hunting grounds in rural northern Louisiana, his favorite place in the world. By the time my husband’s grandfather died, he’d been divorced and remarried and had long since left the Church. The aunts insisted on a traditional Catholic funeral Mass and burial, fearing for his place 16

49 I first read my paternal grandmother’s memoir when I was thirteen. There was a lot I could not wrap my mind around. That there were branches of my family tree that simply ended, lopped off by the Angel of History. That for years while my grandmother was in the camps, she’d ceased menstruating. That my father is named for my great-uncle, my grandmother’s older brother, who perished in the gas chambers

50. “Instead of God,” my grandmother wrote, “I believe in ghosts.” s 17

Angres o e p e h r e n e s L do o G a h c u S s e H m o y e n a C bo R y e n o m e h u o b a n w o n

T M E n a e m o c e b e v e n e v a h dl u o w s a e n e bt s o d n a s e u c a u o w o b a br o o e g a w m u m n m e g e w w o h e n n d n a s o e v a h li s d n a a e o s k a e b e u n mn e e fi e g y n o e W n u u o a w e w u b u c s u e s e m o s u c e k a m dl u o w m o n u e h k n h d’ u o y d e n e p a h s e e s n a c do o u o e g n e v e e w e o e b e v a e o e v e o d n a s e o g e e s n e h W s g n n a e m n e e d e v a h s e x A n a g a y a w e m a s e h s c n e p s n e e g d n a s n w o b d n a s e u b o w o b n a e h s a m o a m e h a b e e c a n o h o o h c s y e v e o g n o g e b dl u o w e w a h s u dl o y e h o o h c s T M E n s g n s u b g n n e s r o e bi s s o p m e r a s b u c h g n a h s dl e fi e n m e r a s d n u o r g y a p a h y n u o c e h n n o o n r e a r u o g n n n p s p o s o e s u e r w s J D e h a h s d n u o s h a e r b d n a s a e bt r a e h o s do n s r e n o r o c e h o g n a w o o fl e h n o n a m d a e d a h t i w e l b a t a t a g n s n e p s g n m s p e e k d a e d e h y a w e h e c n e o v o y c o d n a s e r e h T d a e d s n a m e h p u y a h r a e y m e a c e r p p a e m s e k a m d e z e m s e m m e e s s e y e e h y a w e h r a e o t r a e m o r f s r e h t o e h t t a k o o I e c n a u b m a e h t f o k c a b e h t n k c a t t a t r a e h e h t h t W e f y m e y e y m k l a t r e v e n d’ e h s s y a s d n e r f r g y m de b e r o f e B g n h t a e r b g n v r d w o d n w e h t h g u o r h

Ars Elegica

John A. Nieves I

Under a stand of hedged juniper, I would coax the pincers of large black ants to catch the tips of my fingers, then lift them a few inches off the ground and hum to them, hum them lullabies and set them free. I once got a whole hand’s worth simultaneously. On a still

II.

February night, years back, I woke to my partner singing nonsense up into the popcorn ceiling while sound asleep Nothing I did could stop the almost gurgled melody. I left for the couch, used the TV to drown her out. Even now, I walk out into the road to move turtles. Even now, I mutter-smile while slicing onions, tell jokes to smashed garlic and diced peppers. Dance peeling ginger Her hair was in her mouth when I went back upstairs, like her own body had stifled her song. I tried to wake her, to tell her. But nothing. The crickets were so much louder in the muffled blue-black. Once,

III.

II.

I brought the ants sugar cubes and watched as they slowly pulled them apart. I thought it might make us friends. Instead it brought 20 Nieve s other, smaller ants. The two groups fought each other viciously until they were carrying bodies of the opposing types away with their hard-won crystals while my mother screamed dinner from the door