CATHOLIC SCHOOL
It’s snowing today. I like snow. My teacher says that no two snowflakes are ever the same. Not ever. I believe him because I almost always believe what grown-ups say, especially teachers, but its still really hard to imagine that no two are ever exactly the same. How can they not be? There are so many. How can there be that many differences?
I learned about snowflakes in public school back before I started going to Catholic school last year. I’m still not sure why I have to go to Catholic school. I go to catechism too. That’s after school once a week for more lessons on how to be good enough so you can receive communion. I don’t go to Mass though because my father isn’t any religion and my mother isn’t Catholic. She says she is religious but she doesn’t go to any church because we are poor and she doesn’t have anything good to wear. She says I need to go to this Catholic school now because I have I am evil and the devil has taken me over and the other church she was sending me to was only on Sundays and one day a week didn’t seem to be straightening me out.
Catholic school isn’t bad really. The nuns are all pretty old and they look all hot and puffed up behind those white cages around their faces but some of them smile and the rosary beads they have in their pockets are really pretty. They are mostly serious though. Not like other teachers who you see driving cars and stuff.
I have to wear a uniform. I don’t mind except that mine doesn’t fit very well and my socks don’t match. We don’t buy mine new. The nuns give them to me from other kids who outgrew them and they never give away the matching knee socks just the jumpers and sometimes the white blouses. Except that they aren’t my size and that mine is never ironed mine looks the same. One of the sisters gets pretty upset about the ironing part. She says, "Even poor people can iron their clothes." I understand what she means because even my mother says that poor people can be clean. I think that’s the same sort of thing, but ironing is different. Not because we are too poor to iron but because I can’t reach the ironing board and my mother says it’s not important to iron kids clothes because they don’t take very good care of them anyway. So "why bother?" is what she says.
I have been trying to learn about evil though and Catholic school is a good place to learn about that. They talk about God all the time. Well mostly they pray to him. Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s. We learn about all the things that are sins and what we have to confess before we can be holy enough to do communion. I’ve tried to understand what evil things I have done. I don’t lie or steal and I never hit anyone or even killed them. I sometimes think bad thoughts so I think that’s the biggie for me. I try not to think them, but sometimes when my brother’s head is bleeding from the yardstick and I’m cleaning him up I do think that it’s not right for a mother to hit a kid so hard that his head bleeds.
Then one time after I cleaned him up I went to play with my doll house and I did put the mother on the roof, then let go of her so she went crashing to the floor. I wasn’t really thinking about it, but my mother was standing in the door and she saw it and she yelled, "See? I know that’s what you would like to do to me. I know what you think of me! Don’t think I don’t. You think you are better than me, but I got news for you. You aren’t!"
I didn’t know I was thinking all those evil things, but it doesn’t make sense any other way. So I asked the sister who is like a principle how to stop yourself from having evil thoughts when you don’t know you are having them. She said to pray. To ask God to take the evil out of your heart. You need to cast Satan aside. So I did. I asked him everyday. At least ten times a day to take the evil out of my heart.
It hasn’t worked though and now I don’t think I’m going to pray to him anymore. Not because of that, but because of the woman who comes when I pray. She came yesterday when I was crying on my bed. I was reading the Bible I got from the sisters. I was looking for the parts that explain about being good and holy and righteous, but my tears fell on the pages and made big smudge marks so I couldn’t read the words and now I’ve done another evil thing and ruined the Holy Bible. That made me cry harder and then I knew that I did not belong in Gods kingdom (that is what the other church called it). I knew that I was not holy or righteous and that Satan was really inside of me. But, God didn’t come to push him out. God didn’t answer at all. I don’t blame him. If I was God I wouldn’t want to come and be near that Satan either.
But a lady came. I just looked up in my mind and there she was. I couldn’t touch her or anything like that, but she talked to me without moving her lips. She said that I wasn’t evil and that there was no such thing as Satan. I believed her. Just like that I believed her and I stopped crying.
Now I’ve thought about it and I know that I’m not supposed to believe in her and the sister says that she is really the devil in disguise. The trickster that he is, but it doesn’t feel like a trick. It’s not just because she thinks I’m good and God doesn’t. It’s because she feels real. It feels like she knows me and I know her. It feels like she is right about me not being evil and there not being a devil inside of me. I hope I’m not putting my faith in a false God. That’s what the other church called it when you worship any other than the one and true living God.
I think the best thing for me to do is just be as good as I can and not tell people that there is a lady who sometimes visits me and who feels more real than the God in the Holy Bible. It stopped snowing now. I wonder if all the snowflakes realize they are all different from each other now that they are all lying piled up on top of each other. I wonder if when they melt they are still each different or if they just all lose themselves into each other.
Betsy Foster
© March-2000
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