Purgatory
What I wouldn’t give to be in church this Sunday, listening to the choir so heartfelt singing, “God loves you, but not enough to save you. So baby girl, good luck taking care of yourself”
- Ethel Cain, Sun Bleached Flies
There are approximately four hundred churches located within the bounds of my hometown, and city law prohibits any building from exceeding the height of the tallest steeple on the skyline. The first school I ever attended was a Lutheran church; we spent our days learning songs of worship and praise on a green carpet. Jesus loves me, this I know. Looking at it from the distant future, I wonder how a group of four-year-olds were expected to fully commit to and glorify an abstraction as overwhelming and complex as Christianity—Southern Lutheranism no less. I was told that Jesus died for my sins, not knowing that my short life was already sinful. Few weights, physical and metaphorical, compare to that of religion - the overabundant love of God. To navigate life, and every tumultuous turn that entails, all while slouching underneath the perpetual feeling of the all-knowing eyes on the back of your skull. To turn to the mirror to fix a flyaway hair or prod at food between teeth and see yourself as a reflection of His image. How do you shoulder the burden of that much love, that much fear?
It’s tough and heavy, the love. The bitter taste of the blood-red wine sipped from the shared chalice that lingers in your throat for the rest of every Sunday of the rest of your life. The love is one long, blue vein running through the beating heart of your family tree. The pulse of your ancestors’ faith beats in your throat until you feel like you are choking on it. It is the rosary you will inherit from your grandmother when she passes and from your mother after her, strings of beads and crosses you’ll never quite want but keep around anyway. The wall color in the house you ran from but can never escape, the hue seared into the backs of your eyelids. And you’ll never know if the love is real or not, if it is a pure love, a love without exchange or constraints. But you do know that His love is heavy, you pack the weight into your bag every morning and unload it every night. You’ll never quite master bearing the weight, it rests on your bones until they creak in a harmonious symphony. Then the question must be asked of how to embrace a love that is so deeply shrouded in hate and shame and grief? How to receive a love that is distributed on the condition of who you are? You’ll never really figure it out, and as soon as you begin to accept that is when it sneaks up on you. Claws and fangs bared, it jumps out at you from billboards and street corners and any other unsuspecting place. Maybe it scares you, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it keeps you awake for a few nights, forcing recollection of memories of being small and scared of the men in robes. In the book of Ezekiel, it is said that the child will not share the guilt of the parent, but that’s not really true is it? Theirs are the first thoughts we know, the first ideas we learn, the first prayers we speak. Because while Jesus may turn away from his father, he can never truly escape the weight of his mother’s blood. It’s not always intentional, the transferring of guilt, but it occurs, whether malevolent or not. They teach you the prayers, they take you to the services, they put you in the schools and in doing all of this they set you up for a life of grief and guilt that mirrors their own at least a little bit.
Although you are predestined to a life of rules and behaviors you can’t find any meaning or worth in at least a guide book is provided for you. Not the Bible, but rather the quiet gospel of your parents, and their parents before them. The long-ago established traditions have kept coerced them all into identical lives that never break the pattern. The discontent is palpable, you can taste their resentment to the life they were forced to live in replacement of the one they so desperately wanted. Panic ensues upon this realization, you grow up so enclosed in the misery that you can smell it like a bloodhound. This can’t be your life, you cannot become Cain, cursed by your family and condemned to a life of misery. It’s all so clear before you: never leaving the town that haunts you, dreams that begin to rot like old peaches, existing in the shadow of the fear of God that has lingered over your family for generations. So then like Dante and Virgil in Inferno, you begin to look for a way out of the purgatory you see before you. The road to the light is long and dark and sometimes seems unsurmountable, but you know instinctively that, similarly to the story of the destruction of Sodom, looking back over your shoulder with an ounce of regret could ruin it all. The journey is not an easy one; loneliness and pain and severed ties lay before you, but to truly see the beauty of heaven you must first venture through the caverns of purgatory.
The fear exists in the same sense that the love does: it never leaves you. The fear is swarms of cicadas buzzing outside of your open window, you don’t notice its existence until its absence. The fear is the anonymous billboard on I-95 boldly proclaiming that the end is near and you must make your peace with God before it arrives. The fear is my mother’s resentment of the television show about people who use their church for evil because it reminds her too vividly of growing up. The fear is the thought that God loves you, just maybe not enough to save you. The fear is the childhood best friend living in horrendous fear that her grandparents will one day discover that she likes girls. The fear is the boy you know refusing to go near a church for reasons he won’t tell you. The fear is spending every waking moment making sure you act in a way that honors Him, not knowing if it will ever be enough for salvation. To know that the fear was preached to keep you well-behaved, to ensure that you continue to toe the line as they see fit, to know that it is arbitrary and still being scared anyways.
"If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.
It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into Hell, where the fire never goes out.” - Mark 9:43
Then you grow up and are forced to bear the burden of the love and the fear as you journey through a world that is becoming increasingly like the Purgatory from the good book. Similarly to Dante and Virgil, every person you encounter is suffering under the weight of action and feeling, and memory, no matter what layer you land in. All around you is suffering, decay, and loss and you have to wonder how He who supposedly loves us so much allows us to live this way. Could a swarm of locusts not be sent, could a red sea not be parted? But despite all of this, a small inkling of hope lingers at the base of your spine and you continue your journey through your purgatory despite or perhaps because of your suffering. Because all suffering can be righteous if done correctly right?
Models: Cecilia Connelly, Lana Child, Leeann Gonzalez
Photographer: Haaveilu
Stylists: Alexis Mirano and Kweku Andoh
Makeup Artist: Jade Burdman
Hair Stylist: Rhia McGowan
Editor-in-Chief, Creative Director: Pilar Bradley
Photo Director, Creative Director: Kervens Jean
Beauty Director: Gillian Tokar
Editorial Assistant: Nadia Adams
Fashion Director: Monica Robles
Social Media and Public Relations Director: Maddie Paradise
Graphic Designer: Victor Shemper
Writer and Culture Editor: Cecilia Connelly
