Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

I didn’t lose my faith or anything. I never had it in the first place.

just because a person says something is true doesn’t mean it is, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to keep you from doing something fun.

“Before you go, I want you to understand something—my job at St. Clare’s is to mold young men and women into leaders in their church and their community. Whether or not you enjoy that process is irrelevant.”

“Do you think Satan prefers goats or sheep? I’ve had the hardest time finding a baby.”

“Take it up with your theology teacher,” she says, “because you’re getting very close to blasphemy.”

Does mirabile dictu mean ‘strange to say’ or does it mean ‘wonderful to say’?”

Aren’t most wonderful things a little bit strange?”

I don’t know why people assume shit like that. Like being an atheist requires some sort of tragic backstory. “Did something happen to make you believe in God?” “No, I just always did.” “Yeah,” I say. “And I just never did.”

change a church that doesn’t listen to you?” Her shoulder brushes mine as she adjusts her book bag, and I wish humans could tell each other things through touch the way we can through words. I’m not used to my friends caring about things like this, I try to tell her as our shoulders touch for a brief instant. I’m not used to caring about them, either.

“Heretics are usually true believers,” she says. “Martin Luther was a priest. Galileo was very devout. The only thing more dangerous than someone who doesn’t care about the rules is someone who does—and wants to break them anyway.”

Sister Helen’s lecture in theology is about the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel appeared to the teenage, engaged Virgin Mary and was basically like, “Hey, little girl. You’re going to get pregnant with a god-baby, and everyone’s going to think you’re a cheating slut and your fiancé will try to divorce you, and then you’ll go into labor in a stable and flee to Egypt later that week because everyone in power wants to murder you and your god-baby. But don’t worry, you’ll get some sweet frankincense and myrrh out of it.”

“It’s not irrelevant,” Connor says. “Just because it’s not about you or me doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.”

“He’s not going to notice,” I tell Mom. “He’s not going to notice any of this.” She suddenly yanks on the tie, dragging me down until I’m eye level with her. “Michael Andrew Ausman, I love you more than life itself, but if you pick a fight with your father tonight, I am going to drive you into the mountains and leave you there.” She hasn’t resorted to that threat in years.

“How the West Was Won,” Dad corrects her. “Henry Fonda. Great movie.” Sophia hesitates. “No,” she says. “How the West Was Lost. On the History Channel. It was about how white settlers took Native people’s land, even when they promised they wouldn’t, and they said the West was ‘won’ when it was obviously really lost for the people who’d always been there, which is why the movie’s called that. And then they started talking about all these massacres—”

“I like turkey and I like the Thanksgiving parade, but this holiday is really sad and I sort of don’t get why we celebrate it.” “I’m not sure I like you learning about all this,” Dad says. Sophia blinks. “Why not? It happened.”

In Argentina in the 1970s, the mothers of people killed by the military used the Magnificat as their anthem, so it was banned. Francisco Franco banned it in Spain in the 1930s. It’s dangerous, a song about the poor and lowly being raised up and the rich and powerful falling.”

She wasn’t kidding about the revolution parts. I think about all the famous Christians, all the kings and presidents and televangelists in thousand-dollar suits. Do they know this? Do they know this is in their holy book, that the mother of God proclaimed their downfall?

For J.J., God is something warm and innocent, Christmas presents and stories from his big sister. Lucy’s God is one of revolution and justice, someone who can set a damaged, difficult world right. But they’re the same God, from the same book—the same unbending, authoritarian God that Theresa believes in. Can one God be all those things to all those people?

“They thought they were doing the right thing,” Theresa’s friend says. “Then they were wrong,” Jenny says. “My grandparents were born in colonial Nigeria. I don’t care about Britain’s good intentions. 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?”

I wonder how many things and people I’ve looked at but haven’t seen at all.

Mom, putting away groceries, hesitates. Food outside the kitchen is her third-greatest fear, after bees and members of her family being harmed.

“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?”

“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.”

“Straight white boy destroys everything, world stops to listen?” She pops a piece of cinnamon roll in her mouth. “That’s the history of the Western world.”