I returned to the site of St Vincent De Paul Seminary more than a decade later with my boyfriend Paul. The building’s doors were boarded and chained, its lawns and flower-beds overgrown with itchy weeds. The seminary’s chapel was nothing more than a bare room with fallen plaster and splintering boards strewn over a concrete floor. No trace of a cross here in that room which we’d circled once a day to hug each other as tightly as we dared before accepting the body of Christ on our warm tongues. I thought of the boys who once ran through these grounds, believing in the religious symbols handed down to them.
I remember “pink bellies”: That was when the older guys would pin you down, lift up your shirt and slap your stomach until it turned pink. It sounds more than vaguely sexual, and surely it had some erotic effect on the older boys, but for the guy who was receiving the blows, it just hurt a lot. Anyway, I knew nothing about decoding signals of repressed sexuality when I was the center of the ceremony and the receptor of the blows. Once, while they were giving it to me good in the wreck hall, Father Tom came in and said, “Not in here, guys,” then walked out.
Already in ruins before their former inhabitants could reach the fourth decade of life, the crumbled seminary buildings seem today to testify to an elaborate rite of initiation, or rather a huge practical joke that we had all taken part in unknowingly. By investing those bricks and boards with the importance of a sacred, spiritual place, we had allowed them to constrain us, and the universe responded with the silent laughter of its unflinching elements, effortlessly wearing down our physical references to ruins.
By labeling myself an atheist after leaving the seminary, I “turned away from God.” But in turning away from religion, hadn’t I given it a higher worth than it was due? At a certain level, I still trusted that “The Church” had a genuine foundation on which to anchor its existence. I thought of these symbols as tangible and thus things to be decided and acted upon, even if negatively. One had to make a decision regarding the church rather than simply ignore it. The idea of truly eradicating religion entirely never even presented itself to me.
But on this visit, the abandoned red-brick buildings assured me once and for all that not only was the church “wrong” about its positions, but that my entire time at the seminary was nothing but an absurd theater played out under an empty, indifferent black sky. I ceased instantly to feel resentful toward the priests, brothers and leaders who had organized this ritualized cult, for they had been caught up in the same tragic drama. If in their adulthood they acted as church leaders, they had started out no wiser than the children they led into darkness as its unsuspecting victims. I was sad for all those who’d lost themselves to these false rites in this mortal universe, but I felt no affinity with them, nor did I wish to see what had become of them. I left their memory among the ruins of their shattered temple.