Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

“A heretic is someone who has belief, but not the right kind,” Lucy explains. “At least according to the Catholic Church. A heretic might believe in God, but some of the other things she believes don’t match up with the party line, you know?”

“You’re an apostate, not a heretic,” Lucy continues, “because apostates choose to reject the whole system.”

How do you change a church that doesn’t listen to you?”

The only thing more dangerous than someone who doesn’t care about the rules is someone who does—and wants to break them anyway.”

My personal motto has always been if you’ve already dug yourself a hole too deep to climb out of, you may as well keep digging.

“You don’t have to talk about it. But you also don’t have to pretend you’re fine when you’re not.”

Avi shakes his head. “I could become a Buddhist or a Mormon or a Republican and I’d still be a Jew, too. My mom’s Jewish. And her mom is. I didn’t get a choice in that.” “You don’t want to be Jewish?” Max asks. “You get to ride around on chairs and stomp on glasses.” “No, I do,” Avi says. “But not because of chairs or glasses. It’s a community, we take care of each other. Even if you don’t keep kosher or even believe in God, you’re still Jewish and you still belong to this huge line of people who fought to survive, over and over, so you could exist. I like being Jewish, but it’s not something I chose.

“If monotheism’s true, anyone who doesn’t worship that one God is a sinner. If polytheism’s true, then any god can be real. You don’t have to worship them or think they’re good, but they can still exist. I can believe that Brighid’s real, and Athena’s real, and so is Jesus.”

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Can one God be all those things to all those people?

Good intentions don’t excuse destroying somebody’s culture. Good intentions don’t excuse anything. We can’t judge dead men by our standards, fine, but we choose who we canonize, and we can do better. Shouldn’t we want to do better?”

“Think of it this way. The better you know the Bible, the better you’ll be able to argue against the parts of it you don’t like. ‘Know thine enemy,’ right?”

“Why?” Eden asks. “It hurts people you care about. It hurts you. Why can’t you leave?” “Because it’s my home!” Lucy bursts out. “And it’s a mess. I know it’s a mess. But it’s my home, and I’m going to stay, I have to stay, and make it better.” Her voice wavers. “I won’t run away from my home.”

“Saint Clare of Assisi herself said, ‘We become what we love. Who we love shapes what we become,’” Avi writes in the closing paragraph. “And I would add something else: The way we treat others proves who we’ve become. Who are we, St. Clare’s? What do we want to become?”

“The Gospel of John says, ‘Whoever does not love does not know God; for God is love.’” She picks at the threads in my bedspread. “And I love. So I know God. And even before I did know God, He knew me and loved me. He knit me in my mother’s womb and gave me life, and no matter how hard or chaotic that life becomes, He will never, ever leave me.”

“So, yes. I know it might not be true,” Lucy says. “But I don’t think I’d care if it wasn’t.” That part still doesn’t click for me. And I still don’t think any of it’s true. But if Lucy, the smartest, most logical person I know, can feel something real and powerful when she talks to God, then the whole thing is a lot more complicated than I thought.

“The idea that Catholics, with our many rules, feel more guilt than others, even in secular situations. In our society, we want freedom from guilt. Restaurants advertise ‘guilt-free’ chocolate cake. We’ve created a society where no one wants to feel guilty—they want to feel good. So the idea of guilt, the idea of Catholic guilt, is always framed negatively. But I disagree,” Father Peter says. “Guilt is a gift.”

The pain of our guilt is payment for the pains of his sacrifice.”

“You should follow the rules when you can,” she says. “Take a stand when you need to—”

“You don’t have a monopoly on suffering, okay?” I say, my voice rising. “Other people get to be mad about their lives. Your broken leg doesn’t make my sprained ankle hurt any less.”

“When you hurt people,” he says, “even if you didn’t mean to, you don’t get to choose where they go from there. When you hurt someone, it stops being about you, or what you want.”