An Appalachian Epiphany

It was a difficult night.

Things have been a bit easier. I will never not have religious trauma, but I’ve been able to go to Mass most of the time, stimming in the back instead of sitting in the pews, only stepping outside once in awhile to catch my breath. I have gone from feeling as if I’d rather claw my skin off than go to confession, to wishing that I could find a way to go to confession without a flashback if only I could. Instead of getting sick at the thought of it, I was making a silly plan to write out my confession in case the panic and the mutism that sometimes accompanies it came back, and maybe the priest could read it and give me absolution in ten seconds before I had a chance to get sick. That’s progress.

New Year’s Day was a bit of a setback. I had a panic attack at the thought of going to Mass, and stayed in. But I forgave myself and went to Mass on Sunday. I stayed through the whole thing. I even listened to the homily, which I usually don’t. I sang along with the chants. Then I came home and got on the computer.

And I accidentally opened the old Twitter tab instead of the Bluesky one I use more often now. Twitter has become X, a platform infested with right-wing trolls. On Bluesky, the people I follow were talking about the readings for the day and how nice it is to celebrate Epiphany or the memorial of Saint John Neumann. On X, they were squabbling about Holy Days of obligation, reminding one another that they’d go to hell and burn there if they missed Mass, decrying people who were too lax in their practice of the Faith. The sort of Catholicism I was raised with.

I started to shake.

All the calm I’d built up since the Wednesday panic attack fell off. I started to feel what they call an “emotional flashback:” not a flashback to a single event but a flashback to trauma and fear.

When I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep.

I kept thinking of my mother who hates me, and the morose Charismatic community in Columbus. All the fear of going to hell for doing the wrong thing. Al the fear of the End Times and the persecutions that were coming. The way the children at the Catholic school bullied me for my eccentricity that I didn’t know was autism. About coming to Steubenville and ruining my life. Being told that my problems were a demonic oppression. Father Mike Scanlan holding me to his chest and stroking my hair, kissing me on the forehead and telling me I was sweet. I didn’t even think it was wrong for years and years, not until the TORs of Steubenville started getting exposed for who they really are.

And then there was every bad thing that happened after that.

I felt as if I was going to hell: as if I was already there, and God wanted me there.

I tried to imagine God there with me in hell– or at least, here in the bedroom.

Not the god of the Charismatic Renewal or of the Legionnaires of Christ or the Traditionalist Catholics in their veils and three-piece suits. Not the god of Franciscan University and not of the Diocese of Steubenville. A god of justice, and of kindness.

Not the God who would say “depart from me, I never knew you” because I was so paralyzed by religious trauma. But the God who would say “I’m so sorry they did that to you. I don’t know those people. I didn’t authorize them to speak for me. They are not here. Here’s a quiet place for you and me to talk until you’re ready to meet the family.”

I imagined the quiet place: or, rather, a place that was quiet and not quiet at the same time. A forest without any loud city noises, but with a good babbling stream running through it. The crick where I once saved a mudpuppy, or the grotto where I made the Sign of the Cross. Not in winter, when it’s beautiful to hike but painful to touch the water, but in summer when the green leaves form a tunnel and it’s nice to feel the stream against your skin. If God took me there to talk with me I wouldn’t talk, not at first. I might cry. I might swing a punch at Jesus’s chest while He sat there with me and was nice about it. I might eventually calm down enough to stop sobbing and sit quietly with my feet in the water, stimming. I would listen to Him tell me who He is, and what the Father’s plan had been in making anything as ridiculous as me, and how it was that evil entered into the world, and why He didn’t let me die when I begged.

Eventually, maybe, my beloved grandfather would wander by with his binoculars, looking for birds, and be glad to see me there. He’d talk about all the times we went to feed the ducks at the city park in Hagerstown. He would tell me what made him become a lapsed Catholic, and how much it hurt to fall down the stairs, and how good it felt to open his eyes here where it didn’t hurt anymore. He’d tell me he was proud of me. He’d step away for a minute, and then come back with a handful of honest-to-God rednecks from Greenbriar County and dour Gaelic people from Europe, some Catholics and some Druids and some even more ancient people, my ancestors. They would say that they were proud of me as well.

Maybe then Saint Francis would come along and tell me that he didn’t know anybody named Father Mike Scanlan. He’d admit he’d never been sure what a Third Order Regular was or why they kept claiming his authority to do such terrible things. But he was glad of the way I was kind to that possum, the one I named after him. And since I felt like a leper, he would be glad to embrace me if I gave permission.

Maybe my soul would be mute, like I sometimes get mute from the autism when I’m terribly anxious and afraid people will yell at me. But nobody would mind, and nobody would be ashamed, and nobody would try to make me normal.

On that hiking trail by the grotto, there’s a foundation where there used to be a cabin for people who had come to see the mineral spring. In my imaginary Heaven, the cabin was built again, and we could all go inside and have a gluten free dinner that didn’t make my stomach ache. That is the Heaven I would like to find, at the end of all of this. And the purgatory that seems like justice and healing instead of cruelty and nitpicking would be that stream by the grotto, with my grandfather birdwatching there. That’s a God I could believe in and love.

If God is truly the Being the greater of which cannot be imagined, then He can’t possibly be more petty and cruel than my imaginary vision of Heaven. He can only be better still.

Somewhere in all of this, I fell asleep.

At some point I woke up to Adrienne quietly getting ready for school. After she was gone, I looked out into the street.

The snow had fallen again, at least another two inches: a dusty blanket over the yard and the road and the whole of the world, with only one line of tire tracks in the middle where Jimmy had borrowed Serendipity to take everybody to school.

I dropped back off to sleep, and didn’t wake until noon. By then, the world was a clean white paradise without blemish, sparkling with snow, silent as a cloister, holy as Christmas.

It was January Sixth, the Epiphany of the Lord, and I was safe.