Why I Am Suddenly Wearing a Tiny Cross

It’s black, and so small that if you saw it from across the room you might think it was a fly that had landed on my neck. I got it for $10 on Amazon. Why, after over half a century as a lapsed Catholic, am I now wearing a cross?

It’s the same impulse that makes some liberals hang the flag on their front porch, to reclaim a symbol whose original meaning has been subverted. I got sick of seeing gold crosses adorning the throats and lapels of people who voice sentiments contrary to everything that Christ stood for: hatred towards immigrants, policies that abuse the poor, “just wars.”

It’s possible that nobody will ever ask about my cross, since the circles in which I travel are too discreet to ask questions. But if they do, I will say that mine is the cross of those who fight for social justice, no matter their faith or lack of it; the cross of the Beatitudes; the cross of Da Pope. And I’ll try to say it without even a smidge of self-righteousness, because that would defeat the whole purpose of my little cross.

It took me weeks to work up the courage to order it. After a religion-saturated girlhood—Catholic school, weekly confession, daily Mass—I came of age in the years after Vatican II. For a while it looked like the Church would relax its obsession with the rhythm method and allow artificial birth control, but that door slammed shut just when I got married. That same year, my father died of cancer at fifty-three, leaving me to face the problem of evil—how a just, all-powerful God can allow the suffering of the innocent. In anger and despair, I put away my missal and my habit of daily prayer, and stopped going to church.

And I began my profession in academia, where, if you wanted to get tenure, you didn’t go around talking about your spiritual longings. Smart people were atheists or possibly agnostics. Only idiots believed in stuff. With Descartes’ cogito as my motto, I reveled in Flaubert’s pessimism, and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made a lot more sense to me than Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. My eyes were on the here and now, my most important organ was my brain.

But as the years went on and life, as it tends to do, became more difficult, I realized what a deep hole the absence of religion had left in my life. At twenty-five, I had blithely assumed I could leave it all behind, but as I approached sixty, that seemed less obvious. Still, I didn’t want to rush into anything.

There are no atheists in the trenches, and now, for reasons both national and personal, I find myself deep in the trenches. What to do? Where to go? Existentialism is passé, post-structuralism seems irrelevant. Buddhism, though helpful in many ways, withholds the ultimate consolation.

Slowly and timidly, still worried that I’ll be thought a fool, I am dipping my toes back in the stream—going to Mass occasionally (and wishing it were in Latin). Reading the Psalms (my soul looks for the Lord more than sentinels wait for daybreak). Trying to be kind. Reminding myself that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certitude. And, like an early Christian facing the lions, bravely wearing my itty bitty cross.