KNOCKING ON
HOLY DOORS
by Heather Setka
Illustrations by Tanya Lam
A cradle Catholic takes her devout mom on a road trip
across the diocese. They make many stops, but whether
they will reach their final destination—understanding—
is an open question.
H
ere I am: sitting in the sun, looking
out over the cumulus-crowned prairie,
a white cat rubbing up against my leg. The
weather is warm, but not so warm that I shed
my leather jacket. Its sexy creaking should
embarrass me, except that the nun across
from me doesn’t seem to mind. She’s in full
black-and-white habit, so it would be hard for
me to feel overdressed anyway. Besides, we’re
engrossed in conversation.
And what do you talk about when you
have a nun all to yourself ?
EVEN #
You talk about sex. Or, at least, that’s what
I do.
I’m on a pilgrimage, one I thought I made
up but that many Catholics will take this
year. I’m dragging my mother to three Holy
Doors in and around Calgary to see if I still
believe in God, and to see if my mom and I
can figure out our relationship. But if I want
to receive indulgence (forgiveness, more or
less) during the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of
Mercy, it’s imperative that I receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation—sit in a tight room
TWENTY≠ FIVE
with a priest and tell him everything I’ve done
wrong since the last time I sat in front of him.
In the movies, they call it confession. There
are a few things a Catholic must do before
she can receive jubilee indulgence, and one is
confession. The rest are: take Holy Communion with a focus on mercy, say a prayer for
Pope Francis, recite the Profession of Faith
and step through the Holy Doors.
I’ll explain all of this, I promise. I’ll explain the Holy Doors. I’ll explain the Year
of Mercy, I’ll explain my own pilgrimage.
I’ll even explain my childhood as a cradle
Catholic (for some, that last one requires no
explanation). But for now, let’s go back to Sister Katrina and me sitting in the sun, talking
about premarital sex.
“I just don’t feel like it’s sinning,” I tell her.
I’ve recently met a man who is funny, smart
and kind—the holy trinity of true manhood, I should say—and we’ve been having
great sex. We waited almost two months, for
Christ’s sake (whoops, better add that to my
sin list). Seven weeks is practically a long-term
commitment in this age of dating apps. And
after three desolate years of waiting, sex with
a partner so worthy feels like a miracle. I can’t
imagine anything less sinful; it’s downright
spiritual, in fact.
Sister Katrina tells me that’s because my
sin barometer is broken. It’s weak, she says.
From all the sinning. Sex should be sacred,
she says, and having sex before marriage
makes that impossible.
“But I just don’t feel that,” I say.
You can’t rely on what you feel, she tells
me, only what we know from the church,
from God’s word. “Your feelings don’t matter,” she says.
I like this nun. Many people remember
straps from nuns, verbal abuse, cold hands,
frozen hearts. But the nuns in my life have
been good, even exceptional, women. Sister
Magdalene, my great aunt, wore polyester
skirt suits (no habit in her order) and spoke
softly, like an angel. Sister Sylvia, my mom’s
cousin, taught English to immigrant women
and travelled the world. Sister Hilda, my first
guitar teacher, stuffed me with every kind
of old lady cookie known to little girls—fig
Newtons, shortbread, fruit crèmes—then
sang along in a choir-worthy voice as I picked
my way through “Michael, Row the Boat
Ashore.” I can still hear her clear soprano on
the “Hallelujah” part.
With her wisecracking straightforwardness, Sister Katrina gets added to the list of
Nuns I’ve Looked Up To and Loved. She
is the superior at the Divine Mercy Centre,
near Balzac. A former math professor—her
religious calling came at age 33—Sister Katrina is smart and funny. She makes jokes that
I think she’s made a million times, but they
land on me, like they probably do on everyone. Her get-up makes any joke funny, because, let’s face it, habits are hilarious.
“You should go to confession,” she says.
“I can’t,” I tell her. “I just can’t.” I had
intended to confess. I wanted to, I really did.
But when I read “How to Make a Good Confession,” a pamphlet available at the Centre,
I changed my mind. It states: “Sufficient contrition for forgiveness means:
. . .MY MOM
AND I TALK
ABOUT
CONFESSION.
SHE’S GLAD
SHE WENT;
I’M GLAD I
DIDN’T.
• You wish you had not committed your sins.
• You sincerely intend not to commit those
sins again.
• You intend to stay away from any person, place, or thing that easily leads you to sin,
as much as is possible.”
Not one of these is even remotely true, in
my mind. I’d be lying in confession.
Sister Katrina says that she has to go;
mass is beginning. Her habit flaps behind her
as I rush to keep up.
When I arrived here earlier, with my
mom, to visit with Sister and talk about
the Holy Doors, I expected a stately brick
TWENTY≠ SIX
convent. But the white and grey building
is more like any Alberta farmhouse. I imagined the Holy Door would be grand,
gothic and powerful. But it’s a screen door
that leads to a walkout basement. It’s covered with a poster depicting Pope John Paul
II, a nun and Jesus.
There are seven other Holy Doors, designated by Bishop Henry, in the diocese: St.
Mary’s Cathedral and Corpus Christi Church
in Calgary, Holy Cross Church in Fort Macleod, Holy Trinity Church in Siksika Nation,
St. George’s Church in Hanna, Mount St.
Francis Church in Cochrane, and the Martha Retreat Centre in Lethbridge. Besides the
centre, my mom and I plan to visit St. Mary’s
and Holy Trinity.
As families pile into the centre’s basement for mass, I find us seats. I end up next
to the stove in the basement kitchen; my
mom (after a quick visit to the confessional)
takes a seat in front of me. My seat beside
an appliance is unusual, but otherwise it’s
exactly like every mass I’ve ever attended.
It’s as familiar to me as breathing: the songs,
the postures, the words.
Well, actually, the words have changed a
bit, some time in the course of the 22 years
since I last attended mass as a 16-year-old.
Most are the same, but there are a few key
moments when I say slightly the wrong thing.
It’s an apt metaphor for how I’ve felt in
churches for the last two decades of my life.
On the drive back to Calgary, my mom
and I talk about confession. She’s glad she
went; I’m glad I didn’t. We also talk about
mass. I tell her, for perhaps the hundredth
time, that I don’t find God in mass. Truthfully, I don’t find God anywhere right now. I
am a recent non-believer, but I don’t tell her
that. Not yet.
Instead, my mom suggests we go to mass
the following day. My mom is always trying to
wrestle me into church—Christmas, Easter,
heck, she’d stage her own funeral just to get
me into a pew—but I’m always refusing. But
I agree. Sister Katrina must’ve worked her
nun-voodoo on me. That, and my mom also
makes promises she knows I’ll be into: mass
will be in a restored old church and it will be
conducted by Father Jack.
✝✝✝
I am a cradle Catholic, baptized just weeks
after birth. We went to church every Sunday
morning—my sisters and I in scratchy dresses and patent shoes—at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Francis, the community near
our farm in Saskatchewan. (My confirmation name is Francis, so, yes, you do detect
a theme here.) On Tuesday nights, we drove
into town for catechism, even in snowstorms.
All the Catholic kids from two towns over
were there, to learn about our faith via comic-like workbooks and someone else’s mom.
We also missed The A-Team, which aired Tuesdays. This last fact annoyed me, but I never
questioned God, His existence, or my utter
unworthiness of His love.
When I was 12, we moved to Okotoks.
We still went to church every Sunday, except
here people wore jeans! Scandalized at first,
we eventually relaxed our standards since we
looked like such dorks in our Sunday best.
A few years later, St. James parish got a new
priest. Father Jack was young, spoke gently,
and captivated his congregation with meaningful homilies. Church became interesting.
Except, for me, now 16, not interesting
enough. There were two reasons: I got a job
and I got a boyfriend. I loved them both. I
worked Sundays at a grocery-store bakery,
which meant missing mass. Meanwhile, my
boyfriend, a Jehovah’s Witness turned atheist, made fun of my Catholic school and my
church-girl ways. We also started having sex.
It was my idea; he wholeheartedly agreed.
Since then, I’ve struggled with being
Catholic. University didn’t help; Religious
Studies 101 was about world religions. All
that education makes a gal think, you know.
Then, I had a daughter when I was 25. Out
of wedlock, as the old folks say. While another
priest might’ve refused to baptize her, Father Jack did it with his usual grace and kind
words. Score one point for the church. But
still, I was a noticeable outsider.
Through all this, I kept the faith. My journals are filled with letters to God, begging for
patience, praying for guidance, hoping for
mercy. Oh yeah, and I kept asking him for
TWENTY≠ SEVEN
a good man, someone to love, someone who
would love me back. Properly. So vast was my
loneliness that I would sometimes fall asleep
talking to God, crying—“wailing” would be
more accurate—about the ways He’d done
me wrong in this area of my life.
And then, last May, I stopped believing.
It was May 8, and I know this because I also
wrote about it in my journal. It happened in a
moment. I read an article in Salon about a cosmologist named Sean Carroll, and his views
on naturalism. He defined it as “the simple
idea that there is only one world, the natural
world; there isn’t a separate spiritual or theistic realm of existence … the natural world
obeys rigid patterns, the ‘laws of nature,’ and
… we can discover what it’s like through the
process of scientific investigation.” Carroll
went on to explain that “Naturalists are atheists—they don’t believe in God—but the label
is a positive claim about what one does believe in, rather than what one rejects.” Like
that, the lights went on inside me. Or rather,
the God light flicked itself off.
And I was relieved.
Seven days later, I met the man whom I’m
dating—a good man whom I’ve prayed for
over and over again for years. He is a cradle
Catholic (obviously) and now an atheist (of
course). When I eventually told him about
my recent non-conversion and my subsequent relief, he said: “Of course you feel that
way. There isn’t some horrible monster in the
sky watching you, a genocidal maniac judging
you for every small mistake.” (Didn’t I tell you
he was funny?)
But, besides relief, I’m also confused about
how to cope. For so long, I’ve relied on prayer—the act of it more than its intended results—to fill my aching loneliness, which has
not evaporated with the appearance of this
beautiful man. (I naively thought it would.)
That’s why I wanted to make my pilgrimage
to the Holy Doors: to see if there is any belief left in me. Well, that, and I wanted to see
what all the fuss was about.
On Dec. 8, 2015, the Year of Mercy
began, and Pope Francis opened the Holy
Door at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He also
opened doors throughout the world. “The
Holy Door symbolizes the extraordinary
way that Catholics can open themselves up
to their faith,” wrote Father Thomas Rosica.
“For pilgrims, the highlight of their journey is
walking through the Holy Door.”
An Extraordinary Jubilee Year (this one
ends Nov. 20) has only come around five
times in the history of the Catholic Church.
In April 2015, the Pope spoke in his homily
about the reasons for this declaration: “It is
the favourable time to heal wounds,” he said,
“a time not to be weary of meeting all those
who are waiting to see and to touch with their
hands the signs of the closeness of God, a
time to offer everyone, everyone, the way of
forgiveness and reconciliation.”
Who doesn’t want that? I know I do. Especially with my mom.
✝✝✝
The morning after our visit to the Divine
Mercy Centre, I pick my mother up at the
condo she and my dad own in Okotoks. We
drive to a lavish property called the Bar None
Ranch with dozens of horses and giant stables. The church is there. St. James was built
in the early 1900s in downtown Okotoks, and
is the oldest church in the Calgary area. Purchased, moved and restored by the ranch’s
owner, the church has doors that look, frankly,
quite holy: enormous handles embossed with
foliage and colourful stained-glass windows
depicting angels’ wings. When the doors
open, a waft of wood and oil—similar to the
prairie church of my childhood—hits my
nostrils.
Father Jack, long retired, gives mass, and
it’s beautiful in the small church. It feels communal. During the intentions—when the
faithful specify everything they want to pray
for—he walks out into the aisle and prays for
anyone who doesn’t feel worthy of love.
Pressure builds under my cheekbones
and a tear slips out from each eye. Both
drops roll down and then cling to my jaw.
Because the church is small, everyone can
voice his or her intentions. People pray for
friends suffering from addiction, others getting married, having birthdays. One woman
prays to end abortion.
Any feelings I had of community crawl
TWENTY≠ EIGHT
back inside me. I try to will my tears up my
cheeks and back into my eyes. If there is one
thing I don’t want to hear about in church,
it’s abortion. My moment of solace, of feeling soothed by Father Jack’s prayer—which I
am certain he knew I needed—is smashed by
someone else’s politics.
When we are leaving church, my mom
and I fight about this point. I ask her why
they need to bring up abortion in the middle
of mass; she says it’s a perfectly fine thing to
pray for.
“I don’t understand you,” she says after
our argument becomes personal. “I don’t
think like you, I can’t think like you.” I’ve
been hearing some version of this since
I was a kid: you’re too sensitive, Heather.
You’re too intense. You need to relax. You
think too much.
“I feel like I never measure up to you,”
she adds.
“I feel the same,” I say.
We agree, without saying it out loud, to
take a break from the Holy Doors.
✝✝✝
A month or so passes before we resume
our holy road trip, and by then the tension
has subsided. We don’t even discuss it. We’re
both used to this cycle of flare-ups followed
by heavy peace.
We go to St. Mary’s Cathedral, where I
hope the doors will be ostentatious and grand.
They are and they aren’t. The cathedral’s front doors open at the
foot of The Virgin Mary and
Christ Child, a larger-than-life
16-foot statue by Luke Lindoe.
But stunning though they are,
these are not the Holy Doors (you
wouldn’t want anyone scuttling through them without
stopping off at confession
first, I suppose); instead, a
side door has a plastic sign
tacked to it: Jubilee Door.
It would be unsatisfying,
except that on the inside, the door
is
intricately
carved: people holding hands to encircle the
cathedral, doves of peace, the Holy Spirit
ascending. I don’t dare walk through, even
though I’m tempted.
My dad has come along. He’s not Catholic. At least, not officially, even though he’s
been going to church with my mom since the
’70s—such is their sacrificial love. I sit between my parents in the pew, and, during the
Lord’s Prayer, we hold hands. Again, pressure
swells behind my eyes. But this time, it’s my
parents’ grip that spurs my tears. They are
both 67. They are relatively healthy. They are
active and retired. But still, it’s coming: the
day their grasp won’t be so tight. It will only
weaken from here on out, until I have to let it
go for good.
If there is a commandment I have broken
with renewed fervour each time, it is Honour
Thy Parents. I’ve criticized them behind their
backs. I’ve complained about them to their
faces. I’ve disagreed with them. Let
them down. Rejected their
values. Spurned their
acts of love. If
this sounds like
confession,
that’s
because it is.
I consider
these my
sins—my
true mis-
takes—hurting people I love, people who love
me unconditionally.
After mass, my dad leaves us so we can
head to our final pilgrimage spot: Holy Trinity near Cluny, in the Siksika Nation. It’s a
stark contrast to St. Mary’s, both in the worst
and best ways. The church is surrounded
by rubble—a smashed-up old rectory and a
boarded-up convent. But inside Holy Trinity, it’s far more comforting than St. Mary’s,
much more like my childhood church, with
bare pews, chipped statues and an approachable altar. There are differences, of course,
like an animal hide spread out at the front.
Father Long, the parish priest, arrives
shortly after us, and opens the front doors to
the church—these are the Holy Doors. I walk
through them without saying a word about
any of my sins.
I want to talk about reconciliation with
Father Long. Not the personal kind, but
Truth and Reconciliation. The Catholic
Church played a horrendous part in residential schools, and I want to know what responsibility I have as a white Catholic to First Nations people.
“What should we do?” I ask. Father Long
has already told me that he handles everything in the church from the altar to the toilet, and that when he first arrived there were
mouse droppings on the pulpit.
He says white Catholics need to offer
“acceptance, understanding, and love” to
our aboriginal brothers and sisters. This answer is not enough for me, because all three
seem so obvious. But I know what I should
be doing, anyway. Calls to Action 62 - 65 in
the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report detail how Canadian kids should
be taught the history of residential schools
and the beliefs of aboriginal spirituality.
When I first read these points, I vowed to
write letters to my daughter’s school board
to request that these calls be honoured. I haven’t done it, yet.
“Can I play a song for you?” Father Long
asks. He pulls out a guitar, a classical guitar,
and tunes it. The tuner is like the church, he
says. It ensures harmony. I love a metaphor,
and this one punches me in the gut since it
could’ve come straight from the mouth of my
guitar teacher, Sister Hilda. The song is one
that Father has written, about St. Kateri. “Do
you know who that is?” he asks.
I do. My daughter researched St. Kateri last year for a school project. St. Kateri
I IMAGINED
THE HOLY
DOOR
WOULD
BE GRAND,
GOTHIC AND
POWERFUL.
BUT IT’S
A SCREEN
DOOR THAT
LEADS TO A
WALKOUT
BASEMENT.
Tekakwitha is a Mohawk woman who refused
to marry, dedicated herself to God, and died
in 1680, at age 24.
Father begins playing and I grab my
mom’s hand. She starts crying, and I feel like
it, too. His voice is sweet and his playing is
lovely. After he’s done, we talk more. He tells
TWENTY≠ NINE
us about his life: in Vietnam, then coming to
Canada as a boat person, several health problems. From stress, he says. Music has saved his
life many times.
For me, it’s writing. More than my parents, more than any man, more than prayer—writing has saved me over and over
again. It’s put food on my table; it’s made
me feel full in my emptiest hour. It always
has, it still does, it always will.
Father also tells us that travelling to
the Holy Doors is not Mercy. Going from
church to church is not Mercy. Mercy is
looking at every human being and seeing
the face of Jesus.
Then, he says he’s going to play us a love
song. That’s when I am sure Father Long can
see inside my soul because he plays “The
Rose,” from the Bette Midler film about a tragic rock star. (Looks like I have the same good
luck with priests as I do with nuns.) There’s
a part in the song about love being “only for
the lucky and the strong” that always makes
me cry, and I squeeze my mom’s hand harder
when Father sings those words.
On the road back to Calgary, I tell my
mom that I need to accept her for who she
is. “I know you love me,” I say, “You show me
all the time. It’s just not the way I want you
to love me. But we should all accept the love
people can give us in their own way.”
My mom sews. When we were kids, she
made all of our summer clothes: brightly
patterned matching tops and shorts. I didn’t
know this was unusual until I went to camp
and I saw all the other girls wearing jean
shorts and logo-ed T-shirts. Currently, she’s
reupholstering a chair for me. I don’t care if
it gets recovered. It’s fine the way it is, if you
ask me. But my mom wants to recover it because she loves me. That’s how she shows her
love. Not with intellectual discourse or sharing our deepest feelings. I need to accept it,
as she gives it. It’s still love. Even if it’s not the
way I want it to look.
I’m still not sure if I believe in God.
Maybe I won’t ever know. But right now, I believe that I am worthy of Love. Yes, the capital L kind—the kind that has nothing to do
with boyfriends or parents. And that is more
than enough. S