I Came All This Way To Meet Me
Learning from nuns, worshipping a new god, and jet-setting for a Bumble date.
April 10th, 2022: I’m on a plane for a Bumble date. Find the edge, live up against it, and occasionally throw yourself off of it just to see what it feels like.
“I know I did what I’ve done countless times before: I projected my bottomless craving for God onto some man I can’t see clearly. I cannot tell you any of this. If I tell you the truth, you’ll leave me - or worse than that: I will have no choice but to leave you. I am on my knees praying that I can live in denial. Lord, let me have this manic yearning. God, let me cling to the dream of his skin, the taste, the effortlessness of entry. Don’t make me transcend this, transform this, just please let me touch him.” -Molly Frances, @molefrances
Growing up, my mother shielded my brother and I from organized religion. I suspect this was a side effect from her choice to raise us in some of the most outwardly devoted parts of the world (Italy and Saudi Arabia) and from her own Roman Catholic upbringing. In Rome, one is never far from God; the city is designed that way. Encounters with nuns, Sorellas as they are called (sisters), are ubiquitous. As a child I didn’t know anything about them other than that they were the older ladies who lived together, dressed alike, and had renounced the kind of life my mother was devoted to. Sorellas were interested in something else. I thought of them as outcasts, but not in an invalidating sense. I knew that these were were women who had consented to their vows and were just living in accordance to them outside of society. Their agreement to deny everything that my own survival seemed dependent on confounded me. Things like money, status, materialized freedom, technology, variety, romantic love and sex. Their ability to forgo all of these things and seem gratified while doing so was further mystifying. I didn’t understand it, and I thought it was either because I lacked a substantial religious education or because I was a simpleton, too self-indulgent and pleasure seeking to grasp the asceticism conceptually. What do you mean you’re devoted to God instead of all these things right here that we can see, touch, smell, taste, and attempt to be infinitely validated by?
Last week, after spending several hundred dollars on an impromptu trip to Mexico City for a long weekend with a man I hardly know, I realized that I didn’t understand nuns because I was raised in service to something else. I was raised devoted to Men.