The rumor was that someone had booked the wrong place for my all-girls Catholic high school class retreat. We were in the desert, hours away from home, in a monastery laden with the goriest images of Christ available. The statuary was tucked in corners, hallway niches, bleeding over doorways. We were to be quiet. We had to remain locked in our individual cells and were told that monks would be patrolling the hallways to make sure we didn’t visit each other.

In my cell, with only a Bible and my overnight bag, I sat nervously on a little cot. This was hostile territory, so I didn’t take off my clothes or shoes. I lay down, gingerly, and looked at the mid-blue curtain covering the window. I couldn’t hear any scuffling outside, any giggles or sounds of doors opening or closing. It was completely quiet. Everyone was clearly just putting the night-peeing on hold. We had no cell phones, no computers, no way at all of communicating “Help! We’re being held in the desert by insane blood-focused monks!” There was only silence.

The Catholic Church used to run a spiritual and educational monopoly, guaranteeing an almost seamless cradle-to-grave Catholic experience. We wore uniforms to school, marched in lines to masses, prepared for sacraments, and learned many, many songs in the process. That Catholic bubble only really lasted for a few decades. What with the fall-off of the American nun population (which did most of the teaching for free), and the rise of mass media, and moms going to work, faith’s most dedicated soldiers—women—had other things to do than to keep it alive. The bubble burst.

But those of us who experienced a full twelve years of Catholic education bear its marks forever. Some of us return to the faith. Some of us return and leave time and time again. Some of us search in vain for something to replace it, or reject the notion of God altogether, since what they told us, and insisted was absolutely true, was so ludicrous as to be absolutely laughable if you actually paused to consider the contradictions inherent in their tales—which you weren’t really supposed to do, since at some point, everything depended on these “mysteries” of faith.

Our class retreats usually involved having to be in camp-like situations with bunk beds and horrible “bonding” sessions involving passing candles and/or bags of M & M’s and girls being moved to tears about what great friends we all were—so there was that to be grateful for, I supposed. I was hungry ‘cause the dinner seemed like Contrition Food and I didn’t eat much. It was the wateriest, limpest “spaghetti” I’d ever encountered, and, being the youngest of six children at the tail-end of the large-family Catholic boom, my palate wasn’t demanding in the least. I liked plain food. I had never eaten such oddities as bagels or hummus until I went to college.

I opened my eyes from a light sleep to the sound of pounding on the door. We girls were rounded up by robed monks and led on a moonlight hike through the monastery graveyard and surrounding hillside. I was fully-clothed and wearing shoes, but most were in their Lanz nightgowns or pajama sets with their Keds or flats thrown on, sweatshirts and cardigans protecting Southern Californian skin against the desert chill. I concentrated on the ground in front of me, which was glowing softly in the silvery night. I thought, “They’re trying to scare us but it’s not really working.” Then, “Maybe it is.” Then, “Okay, this is fairly terrifying. These people are nuts.” Then, “All I have to do is keep my mouth shut and watch where I’m stepping and I’ll be home soon. It’s really not that different from anything else.”

A lot of us young people no longer just accepted everything our elders told us. The religion was obsessed with sinning and salvation, but we no longer felt that we needed to be saved. We were told that Jesus died for our sins, but we wondered, “Why on earth would someone need to do that? We’ve never done anything that bad!” What sort of God would do such a thing in the first place, and why would anyone want to sing “His” praises? The beauty of ritual was no longer enough for lots of us, who couldn’t get over the actual content contained therein. Reenacting the Last Supper of a sacrificial God-Man, whose dying body was the focal point of our rituals, never got any less weird, and the host never seemed magical in my mouth, only dry and gluey.

One could feel the frustration of lay teachers and clergy trying to impart this sacred knowledge to us, test us on it, make us understand and believe it. To which they were greeted with mostly blank stares and “Is this going to be on the test?”

The night of the abduction, I looked down at the glowing rocky soil and thought about other things. Things I liked, like men in leather miniskirts, and colors of hair dye, and cookies. Years of Catholic education had prepared me well for this kind of thing. I was very good at keeping my mouth shut and sending my soul elsewhere; it’s what I did every day of my life. I stared down the monks’ moonlight walk of terror and I did not flinch. I strapped on my imaginary Walkman and listened to some imaginary Depeche Mode, whose dreary synth-heavy dirges reflected my worldview to a T. I trudged on. They did not break me or cause me to ask Jesus for mercy. I knew that, despite the fact that we were being held captive in the desert, it would end.

On the bus ride back I showed my (real) Walkman to my seatmate. It was a rare one my dad had brought back from a golf tournament that had two outputs for headphones. I also said that I had a Depeche Mode tape. She plugged her headphones in next to mine. We sat, grateful that we could listen together but did not have to speak. The album was A Broken Frame. To this day, the song “Leave in Silence”—a minor masterpiece, to me, anyway—always evokes an odd sense of desert-y, moonlight-ish monasticism, and defiance in the face of institutional hostage-taking.

The problem is, I got so good at packing off my soul for long stretches of time that I now struggle to remain in the moment, so to speak. I’m still daydreaming my way out of life even though I have long-since been freed from the institutions that made me wear polyester-blend uniforms and do strange things like eat my God and tell my secrets to strange men in small cubicles. I’m like a caged wild animal, who, once freed, still paces a 12×12 foot space. In some ways, I remain the most Catholic of people. Death-obsessed? Check. Guilty? Check. Ever-hopeful and believing in fresh starts and trying to see the best in others and myself? Also, check. But it’s hard for me to get over the Catholic fixation on Jesus’ death and suffering for “our sins,” resurrection and eventual return. It has been over 2,000 years since he promised to come back; if someone doesn’t call you back after that long, you can reasonably guess that they just aren’t that into you. Humanity, I hate to say it, but: I just don’t think Jesus is coming.

As an adult, I mostly feel for the monks. We were probably their least-favorite kind of retreatants—spoiled teenage girls—hence their dour demeanor, short words and scare-tactics. I still retain some fantasies about a cloistered existence and communing with God in pure silence, and I might even be happy to take another crack at that desert retreat. A few days in a cell and silent moonlight hikes sound fairly dreamy at this point. I’ve always wanted to know that God is there. I’m available any time you want to make yourself known, God. I am here, waiting for you, just as I have always been.

My throat hurts. If I tried to hum with the muezzin or call with the cats, it would hurt. I get up and take eight tablets of yin chiao from a friend who does acupuncture. It will, as she puts it, push the sickness back out through the skin. It worked the last time.

Later, I go out for more provisions, past the Baptist church with minarets; it used to be a Masonic temple. At Tony’s health food store I greet Khan who, like several sons of the owner, works there six days a week. I compliment him on his Om tattoo and he is delighted that I know about Shiva. I tell him that Shiva is actually very important to me and that Shiva Natajara is on my mantel and another Shiva adorns my Christmas tree. His face clouds over. “Wait,” I quickly explain why I think Shiva would be okay being a Christmas ornament. I redirect the conversation to finding broth. But now Khan follows me around the store, entreating me to take that ornament down. He keeps moving to front shelves in my vicinity and is now frankly warning about disrespecting Shiva. I feel like a total idiot religion professor.

On the way home, I pass churches of Pentecostals, Adventists, and Daddy Grace, as well as another masjid. It is February 3, 2011, and no one is surprised that someone walking around in Brooklyn would run into so many brands of religion. What might surprise is that the run-ins pierce and balm in so many ways. The neighborhood does this to some bodies and not others, I guess. But if you have a body that feels like the skin does not hold things in or keep them out, if you are made partly of memories of cuts and sutures, it might do this to you.

Religion is a chain of memory, says the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and catholicité is a palimpsest. Bedford-Stuyvesant used to be all Catholic, and still the most and biggest churches are Catholic. Seven within ten blocks of my apartment. Now I pass one where a few women enter through the side door, the main door being locked on weekdays.

Thirty years ago, I lived far from Bed-Stuy, in a place where every town had a view of cornfields. Thirty years ago, I was going to school at St. Mary’s in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Probably standing in a line. We were always in lines. Lines for changing classes, lines for going to lunch, lines for visiting the lavatory, lines for school assemblies, lines for going to Mass, lines for waiting for the bus at the end of the day. Lines on weekends, too. Line up for your heat at the swim meet. Line up for Rice Krispie treats at the bake sale table. Line up for confession. Line up for communion. In lines, you waited. Waiting was normal and so was the transaction at the end of the line.

But some lines were different, and you anticipated unusual things while waiting. In line to get ashes on your forehead, for example. There was always an emotional chill as the priest spoke mortal words about dust, and a physical flinch to feel fine black palm ash fleck the bridge of your nose. Or, in line to kiss the cross on Good Friday. Making sure to get behind Mrs. Viozzi who is ancient and four feet tall but still kneels on both knees and grasps the cross with both hands and kisses the wood with two full lips, a juicy smack that sounds across the whole nave. In line to have your throat blessed on the feast of St. Blaise…

Crossing Marcy Avenue now, I catch native son Jay-Z’s music blasting out an apartment window three stories up.

Can I hit it in the morning without givin you half of my dough,

and even worse if I was broke would you want me? …

If I couldn’t flow futuristic, would ya

put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya…

I don’t know. Is love deeper than deep pockets? The neighborhood that used to be “Bed-Stuy/do or die” is now “Bed-Stuy/too late to buy” and churches turn into yoga studios at Washington Avenue.

Line up to go to the auditorium to see Jesus Christ Superstar. It was the monthly school movie some winter Friday in 1977. Eight years old, watching girls in sequined hotpants gyrate as the heavenly host, watching Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene drag herself after wooden beams as if she herself were lashed to them, I wanted to dance, I wanted to be lashed, I wanted to kneel and kiss that wood.

When we lined up to get our throats blessed on the feast of St. Blaise, this too was different waiting for an unusual transaction. Frankly, it was scary. At the end of two lines advancing up the auditorium center aisle stood two priests. They each held a pair of thick white candles, tied together at a right angle to make a cross, and secured at the crux with red ribbon. When it was your turn, you stepped up and the priest held the crux at your throat and said, “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God preserve you from ailments of the throat and from every other evil.” Then, making the sign of the cross, you peeled away.

Scary. First of all, the wax against your neck was scented and tacky-cold and felt like a funeral. Then, why was this saint’s day of all saints’ days so important to take time out? Was there imminent danger to all human throats, as opposed to other body parts? Shouldn’t we also have blessings for eyes and brains and hands? I asked this. No. Only the throat. It made you think of things that could crush or slice you there. It made you pay attention to movies where after a quick yank and flash, someone’s jugular was spurting. It made you retain a vocabulary word like garrot. It made you notice when you had a sore throat.

Many years later, when I wasn’t in school and wasn’t going to Mass and the millennium turned and I just wanted to get through my first year of teaching, I still noticed in particular when I had a sore throat. In fact the one I got during finals week of that fall semester soon turned into a cough. But I was busy. And homesick. No time for a doctor’s visit. I left Texas for a trip back east. I wanted to see my family in Pennsylvania and my love in North Carolina. I packed it all into a mad visit with lots of long-distance driving. When I got back to Fort Worth, I felt much better.

Except I still had a cough, and swallowing had started to feel funny. Spring teaching commenced and I coughed through the first class. Finally I visited the doctor and was sent home with antibiotics. But that night my chest exploded with pain and my throat hurled back anything I tried to swallow. The next morning I presented at the doctor’s again. A more thorough exam revealed that some unknown problem had already resulted in severe pneumonia, one collapsed lung, a swollen heart lining, and infection blooming throughout my chest cavity. I was taken by ambulance to All Saints Hospital and did not leave for over a month.

The first two weeks, nothing happened. My sister Mary flew in from Atlanta and virtually moved into my hospital room. The chair of my department, Daryl, visited every day. Tests were run but no one could find the problem. Antibiotics slowed the infection but didn’t kill it off. A brown bacterial stew that smelled like raw sewage had begun to burble up into my mouth. One day, finally, it started to drown me. Mary and a friend, Leah, frantically alerted the nurse. I lost consciousness as doctors cut notches between my ribs on both sides to insert chest tubes. When I woke up, I was in the ICU, lung fluid still draining into canisters on the floor.

My doctor would come see me and talk. His name was Noble. Noble Ezukanma, internist, point person for an array of specialists. Nigerian, Christian, married with three kids, beautiful and wise. I asked him all the questions I could think of. “This diagnostic process, we are trying things, you know, but it is really more an art than a science,” he would say. “We have to wait.” He didn’t know how things were going to turn out. He said so. He was an artist in process. It was comforting.

But it was another doctor who arrived early one morning, when I was alone, to tell me that one test had finally nailed it: prolonged coughing—or a fishbone accidentally swallowed, or vomiting, or chance?—had torn a hole in my larynx. Everything I ate or breathed was feeding the infection. They required my signature for surgery. Immediately.

What happened next, I am not sure how. I was frightened and teary plus high on morphine. Did I remember what day it was? Did Daryl somehow know? Did the hospital chaplain staff piece it together despite no checked box on the intake form? I don’t know. But within a few hours, Daryl had brought the campus priest to my bedside. Fr. Charlie carried two white candles, crossed and tied with red ribbon. It was February 3, 2001, and I got my throat blessed.

So, as you see, were it not for St. Blaise, I would not be here to tell you this story. I would not have returned to my classes that semester, would not be chewing over the meaning of spirituality for an online collection, would not be remembering waiting in lines, would not be walking home from Tony’s in Bed-Stuy with good broth for a sore throat.

But wait … this is no way to end the story. Don’t mess with people, people in the guild, my guild, my people. Don’t mess with my head. Leave out suggesting that St. Blaise was actually involved. Leave out hinting that without St. Blaise I would be dead. It was doctors who operated and sewed me whole. If St. Blaise supposedly saved my life, then why didn’t all those blessings years earlier work? If I am having a fit of wanting to thank a saint, I can do it on my own time. Would I say this stuff in the classroom? Do I really believe … ?

I do believe … in religion as a social construction with a long history, and in spirituality, too, begotten not made, one in being with religion. And in experience, and the self, and pluralism, and God, and any story any of us could possibly tell, all of them truly assumed, asserted and produced in very complex genealogies. Credo.

But sometimes I forget to care. My skin does not hold things in or keep them out. And having this kind of body—a body of memories of cuts, not all my own—goes back long before the hospital, long before I was born, long before St. Blaise himself. Still, I have faith. Tell the children that they can see through the powers that be. Tell the children that they can choose to believe this and not that. Tell them that their bodies are theirs for the making. That if something goes wrong the doctors can slice through layers and suture back out and then you are whole again.

Yet I keep bumping into religions and they don’t bounce off. Why live? Why sicken? Why call for ravishment? Why calm at the touch of red-ribboned candles? I have nothing against stitches. The rows run across my neck and over my heart. There are little crosses that closed chest tube holes and a big stripe under each shoulder blade. They saved my life. But some bodies are pounds of flesh with oozing edges and no fix for that. Meanwhile, I teach, I write, I walk around and see what happens. “This process, you know, we are trying things, but it is more art than science,” the good doctor said. “We have to wait.”