Rites Of Passage

Fifty years later I honestly can’t remember why I became an altar girl. I wasn’t especially pious. I suspect it might have been because I wanted to get close to those smart, cute altar boys, who wore cassocks and surplices and looked like miniature priests. They learned Latin. They assisted at Mass, weddings, baptisms, and funerals. They swung the incense burner, rang the bells, and were often recruited for the priesthood.

As altar girls we performed our invisible duties on weekdays, dressed in our ugly school uniforms: vacuuming the sanctuary and altar area; dusting the statues of the saints; ironing the priests’ and altar boys’ complicated garments; and laying out the priests’ vestments in a highly ritualized order taught to us by dour, black-robed nuns.

We also filled the golden bowl — known as a “paten” — with unsanctified Communion hosts (papery wafers a little bigger than a quarter). I was shocked to find that the wafers came in cardboard boxes marked “Manufactured in Chicago.” It’s not that I’d believed they were sent from heaven; I just hadn’t thought about it. Finding that factory shipment was like stepping behind the magician’s curtain. The central act of the Catholic Mass — the transubstantiation of the Host into the actual body and blood of Christ — now looked like a trick.

One day, after we’d finished our heavenly housewife chores, we unchaperoned altar girls began to play Mass. In the role of priest I mumbled in faux Latin and laid the hosts on the outstretched tongues of the other girls. We munched on the unconsecrated wafers like potato chips.

By the time I was thirteen, I had lost my faith. What had once been reverent religious ritual had become to me only so much hocus-pocus.

Kate Dwyer
Port Townsend, Washington

At the age of fifty-eight I was laid off after sixteen years on the same job. I’d intended to work there until I retired, but instead I was escorted out the front door in under fifteen minutes with no explanation. 

I sat in my car feeling lost. My daily routine, my income, my friendships with co-workers, my sense of identity — all were gone in an instant. I knew this was happening to thousands of other people all over the U.S., but I felt singled out and alone.

I went to unemployment offices, filled out confusing paperwork, met with officials about pension and severance, and struggled to make sense of the health-insurance bureaucracy. Finally I enrolled in community college. In 2009, at the age of sixty, I received a degree in small-business management. The local unemployment rate was 22 percent, and the commencement speaker told us to go out and volunteer in the community. The day after I graduated, I applied for food stamps. Congress did not extend my unemployment benefits, and they ran out.

Today I am writing a plan for a market-gardening business that I hope to run from home. I am living off my savings, eating two meals a day, and not driving anywhere I don’t absolutely have to. Instead of enjoying retirement, I am facing a future of uncertainty and unfulfilled promises.

Carol Sommers
Woolwine, Virginia

I was struggling with anxiety and being a parent, and my therapist suggested I go on a vision quest. For eight hundred dollars I could experience an indigenous ritual in a remote location with just a tent, a sleeping bag, and some water. (Why don’t I just starve myself at home for free? I wondered.) After three days without food, my body and brain would think I was dying, and I would have visions. I was told I could come out of this experience with a newfound sense of peace and perhaps a spirit animal to boot. 

I didn’t do it. If I was going to spend that much money and all that time away from my kids, I wanted more than hunger pains and hallucinations.

Then I found an alternative: a one-day “holotropic breathwork” workshop. From what I had read, the rapid-breathing technique created the same illuminating visions, and I didn’t need to starve myself to have them. I signed up.

When it came time to do it, however, I was terrified. I was supposed to breathe as deeply and as quickly as I could for three hours. I’d already witnessed the breathers in the first session thrashing about wildly,
howling, spooning their partners, and being cradled like a baby.

“Can you please wake me up if my lips start turning blue?” I asked the breathwork facilitator, Glenn.

“You just have to trust your body,” answered Glenn.

That was the problem: I didn’t.

I took a quick last glance around. The other people were lying on their mats, their eyes covered with black sleep masks, partners perched on pillows next to them. We were a group of strangers lying on the floor of a Grange hall, watching each other hyperventilate. The idea of starving alone in a tent no longer seemed so bad.

I told myself I needed to do this for myself and my kids. So I furiously snorted air in through my nose and out through my mouth. Soon my hands and feet started buzzing as though they were full of bees. Then my hands curled into tight bird claws, and my calf knotted up. I kept breathing.

It didn’t take long for the visions to come. I could see myself dying in the desert with gimpy limbs. I saw a raven. I saw a magician eating her hand. And then, right in front of me, was the most peculiar sight of all: a huge womb. I was looking inside a giant vagina, the cervix widening like a camera lens. Jesus. Was this my message from the great unknown? I hadn’t expected the Virgin Mary, but a vagina?

Now someone was emerging from the womb — a young girl with her arms wrapped around her knees and hair over her face. I could only guess this was my inner child. If you aren’t protected as a child, my therapist had told me, you end up parenting yourself. He said I needed to let go of the hurt girl inside me in order to be a better mother to my kids. I can’t let her go, I said, because I don’t know what will happen to her if I do.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to let her go. I just needed to let her out. And, in a room full of strangers in sweat pants, I did.

Diane Ripper
Bellingham, Washington

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