The richness of thick, buttery grits fell flat on my northern tongue, and the blushed, coiffed beauty of the women foraging through the produce at Albertson’ s made me ashamed that I owned sweatpants and made me regret the fact that I wore them to Albertson’ s. I had not prepared for the black, shelled threat of the scorpion that clung onto my roommate’ s bathrobe or the spiders so big they actually turned their necks to look at me. Yet during my first year in what seemed like Texas’ s eternal summer, this strangeness held me. Safety lived in the fact that I thought my difference with those around me so big that making a real connection was out of the question. There was nothing to do but crouch behind the wall whose stones stretched all the way back to the Mason / Dixon Line.
The large Catholic vein running through the school added to the mystique of the place, even though I had grown up with this same faith, gone to Sunday school, gone to church. A picture of Christ’ s thorned heart exposed and beating through his tunic decorated my memories of my grandparents’ house. As a child, I sat in the pews with my grandmother, playing with an old rosary. The tiny hands of the plastic Christ had detached from the cross. I would twine the beaded decades through my fingers and twirl Jesus around by his feet. Sometimes we went to a reception following the service, in the church’ s basement. I squirmed and shifted my way through each Mass, longing for the donuts and juice that lay untouched and immaculate beneath the long wooden floorboards more than for the dry cracker of Christ’ s body and the sour wine of his blood. In my family, the Lord was contemplated for an hour or so each Sunday and then swept away as the current of the week pulled us through school and work. As I grew, these Sundays became more and more distant, but my body still knew when to kneel, sit, and stand.
Ten years and 2500 miles away from those Sundays, this tiny seedling of connection began to take root. Here, I found Jesus everywhere every day, hanging from the lobes of college girls and laying against their chests so chaste and fashionable. I had never made so many friends whose parents were still married and whose families were so united on matters of faith. This stark contrast to my own fragmented family lured me. I had never experienced such a strong commitment to being Catholic before setting foot in the Church of the Incarnation tucked away into one of the further corners of the campus. The marble eyes of the Virgin outside its doors looked to the sky ever adoring, ever hopeful, ever certain. Her gaze pierced through the deep blue of the wide Texas sky and locked on to a far off point. Her face brightened with recognition and
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