I Can Haz Theologeez? Part 1

Nobody seems to study Theology anymore.

There a select few things I remember from studying my faith in a Catholic school. Let's go by year, shall we?

Key: * No Catholic teacher, # Catholic teacher rotated religion and another class with my homeroom teacher because homeroom teacher was not Catholic.

*Salad Days: I went to Mass with Mom, usually on Saturday nights. Our Church was Saint Mary's, and we had a little statue of her which I used to sit and talk to outside. Years later I left her a rose on an Easter trip back. I remember thinking they were singing "You take away the cents of the world" and it made sense to me because we had just gone through the Offertory, after all. I would usually sit on the floor by Mom's feet until "The part where Father told jokes."

*K-2nd grades:  Went to a "non denominational" Christian School. Excellent Curriculum, close-minded principal. And a lot of silly assumptions about things like peace signs and animals not having souls. Watched a lot of Veggie Tales.

*3rd grade: Get called "Mary Worshipper" in class. Get laughed at for making sign of the cross. Teacher tries desperately to help, being married to a Catholic man, and wants the class to learn more about Catholicism. Principal doesn't even bother to tell the kids teasing is bad. Mom angrily calls school board. Board chair is a limp noodle about the whole thing. Later learn through his business dealings with my Dad that he pretty much always is a limp noodle. We decided we had to move.

#4th grade: I arrived with no clue how to say about half the prayers in the Rosary. So I learned all of those. Didn't learn much else because whenever we took quizzes the teacher sort of rigged it. "Is the answer A, B, C, or D?" she'd read out loud. I do remember my homeroom teacher saying she thought the idea of Lent was stupid. That's pretty much it. Oh and I accidentally took Communion at the beginning of the year, and didn't have my actual First Communion until that Spring. I had my first taste of a feeling I've yet to encounter anything comparable to: the feeling of absolution. Received my only failing grade through grade, middle and high school: an essay on Stewardship in which I said I thought the idea of mandatory volunteer hours made no sense and that the Church sent way too many specialized collection envelopes home. Apparently God really, really wanted me to serve chili pies at turkey bingo.

#5th grade: I had really bad penmanship and consequently it took half of the year for the teacher to realize I was not, in fact, spelling Jesus "Gesus." I became an altar server and I remember no one ever wanted to be "Server 2" because that involved the most work. "Server 1" had to ring the bells. Ideally you'd be "Server 3," but not on a Sunday when they used the big, heavy procession cross. We watched a movie about Fatima. Discovered writing "JMJ" atop my math tests before taking them was not a valid substitute for understanding the concepts.

6th grade: A guy in my class didn't know how to pronounce "chaste." We went over abstinence and "girl/boy stuff" for the first time. I wrote a lot of letters to a lot of nuns. I wanted to be a cloistered Carmelite. Was in Children's Choir. Remembered really wishing we would have done "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" instead of "People Worry About This and That" during the Archbishop's visit.

7th grade: We had to do a "Return to the Church" ad for a project and two of the guys did a song parody of "I Ran" by A Flock of Seagulls for theirs. Also at some point I was Napoleon in a skit about a persecuted French soldier. There was swordfighting with rulers. I did a 180 from the year before and couldn't care less about the Faith. Studied Church History, and instead of actually talking about the Inquisition in the context in which it took place the book spent a paragraph saying, "Oh, yeah, that. That...well...we were all on vacation. With the Sephardic Jews and Moors. In Palm Beach. They liked it so much they stayed." Received thurifer training. Did KEEP, which made me leery of drinking after people who had recently eaten Doritos owing to a demonstration about kissing we did. Though I firmly intended to save myself, I wasn't too fond of the "u guyz 4bst1n3nc3 iz roxxorz!" approach.

#8th grade: Ugh, what a year. Teacher had a remarkable gift for explaining things in the poorest, harshest and most inaccessible way possible. Learned more from the life and example and conversation from my History teacher that year than from all five years of Religion classes combined. Election year and the whole school acted like Bush had descended from heaven to save us from Planned Parenthood...which actually received a pay spike during his previous tenure. Whole school shut down the day Benedict XVI was elected. I remember watching the reveal on TV.

9th grade: Classes were now called "Theology" classes. I don't remember much about Theology being prevalent. I remember reading "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens" and watching "What About Bob?" There was also a graphic and depressing presentation on abortion that really made me wish I hadn't taken the class in first hour.

10th grade: Left for correspondence courses. Discovered Ladies Against Feminism and wrote a few articles for them. Contemplated attending a traditional Catholic Mass with a friend of mine who went, but it never panned out.

*The rest of the time: Bouncing back and forth between being Catholic because that's what my family 'did,' the ever-popular 'agnostic' label, and Calvinist Protestant. Didn't have much of a clue one way or the other, but emerged knowing two things: 1. The world couldn't possibly be as old as this Biology book was telling me, and 2. I really didn't like pants.

To be Continued.