Origin Story

The first “What the—” reaction of mine I remember having, erupted when I was in the first grade. Not first grade of regular school, but Sunday school, which, back then, was even held on Sunday. And in church.

One day our catechism teacher Mrs. Dufaut (don’t pronounce the “t” : Du-FOE) introduced the notion of “original sin.” Catechism was the official name for Sunday school, but was a four-syllable word, which I suppose they thought was too many syllables for us to learn till second or third grade, maybe even fourth. This will turn out to be quite ironic, as I shall demonstrate subsequently. At any event, we had already parsed the difference between mortal sin and venal sin, in preparation for our first confession, but this particular Sin, she tried to tell us, was something we all were born with, not anything we actually did.

Well, if you were ever Catholic you know the rest of the story. If you never were, suffice it to say that Original Sin was why no one could get into heaven until Jesus died on the cross, a bloody mess and a needlessly painful ordeal which for some inscrutable reason was supposed to get His Father to forgive us our sins, or “trespasses”—our original sin, in particular—and mysteriously open the pearly gates of heaven, as if by magic. It was a given, of course, that His Son would probably have no sins of His own to atone for and be forgiven. Or not many, at any rate, although like His Dad, He was known to blow a fuse from time to time.

I wondered why God set up such an elaborate system. And such a mean one. That kind of anguish was not called for, was it? Why didn’t he—sorry, He-capital-H—just snap his fingers and open the pearly gates for those of us who managed to behave ourselves? Why, in creating the universe, would He opt for a system that made His very own Son go through all that agony? It was too cruel to even contemplate. And on top of that: to blame us—me—for the excruciating agony other people put Him through—or was it His Father Who put Him through it?—why, that was textbook sociopathy. Of course, I didn’t know the word sociopathy at the time, so I didn’t realize that that’s actually what it was till, well, till this very paragraph, I confess. Anyway, it couldn’t be right. No, it wasn’t right, it was just plain mean. I felt I wanted to do my part for God in helping to set Mrs. Dufaut straight, and so dutifully informed her that I did not have original sin. She insisted that I did. Oh, poor creature. No, not me: Mrs. D.

Now by this time my two older brothers had already developed considerable skills in learning how to be right even when they were wrong, through the implementation of clenched fists and whatnot on the person of any sibling who happened to be younger and therefore smaller. Which, being the youngest of three, I invariably was. As a result, I was already adept at the incredible sociological efficacy of applying the three pacifying words “Whatever you say” in the course of any heated exchange—or one that was just beginning to heat up. So I planted those three words in the air that Sunday and shut up for the rest of the lesson so Mr. Dufaut could get on with it. Still, though I never brought the issue up again, I knew what I knew. But who cared if I was right when it was the entire Catholic church and two thousand years of history that were wrong? It would take a revolution to fix things.

Little did I know that such a revolution was already under way.