Mary Karr’s Lit, it turns out, is the story of an Augustinian conversion. I was more than a little surprised when we began to move from drunken rage at life's unfairness and general rowdiness into Catholic spirituality. She notes that many of her lapsed Catholic friends were horrified when she started to turn in that direction, demanding to how such an intelligent person as she could take on Catholicism with all of its misogynistic superstition and baggage. I don’t have any trouble understanding her attraction – how can you not love the incense and the rustling of the satin as they parade down the aisle holding those great big crucifixes. But what I do want to know is why Mary Karr, a woman who at the time she begins her instruction is divorced and has no intention of remaining single forever and who is even enjoying a sex life, why she gets to waltz into Catholicism and partake of all the consolation it has to offer, while I, a person who was raised in the Church, who left the Church with the greatest imaginable sorrow because I couldn’t adhere to the fundamental law not to remarry after a divorce (a decision that took me years to final make reluctant as I was to leave the Church; indeed, for several years I imagined living like the Sebastian’s already-married sister Julia whom Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited wants to marry, but who finally refuses him because as a Catholic she cannot face the idea of remarriage after a divorce); who has not taken communion since my remarriage; who lives outside the Church because I cannot in good conscience live within it, lives excluded forever? I run around in circles like a hopeful little dog begging to be let back in and being kicked in the face, while Mary Karr just bursts right in. My first instinct is to ask myself what possible difference it could make to me that she is welcomed in – that she finds spiritual guides who teach her to pray and that God actually ANSWERS her. Her inclusion in the Church has nothing to do with my exclusion. That is always my first instinct. What’s it to me?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
