GETTING MY DUMB PHONE ON FOR JESUS

I am not Catholic, and I will always be catholic. I am catholic in the ways that are inherited, not practiced. Just saying my full name feels like a deliberate act of Catholicism. I mean, have you ever met a Mary Katherine who hadn’t had at least her first communion?

Catholicism is in my bones, no matter how my brain feels about it. It’s in the virgin mary on my wall, my prayers in times of fear, and this one silly song I learned as a kid that I now sing to my best friend:

The fruit of the Spirit’s not a banana.
The fruit of the Spirit’s not a banana.
If you want to be a banana you might as well hear it: You can’t be a fruit of the Spirit!
‘Cause the Spirit is Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, Ohhhh!

The song repeats, ad infinitum. You create new verses by substituting in whatever fruits you want, a veritable song of Theseus. I remember learning this song in American Heritage Girls, the hyper-conservative alternative to Girl Scouts my mom forced me and my sisters into. It was honestly kind of a bonding point for us. Usually, sisters have a much harder time agreeing to hate the same things.

Instead of selling cookies and learning about 2008-style female empowerment like the oh-so-secular Girl Scouts, we put wreaths on soldier’s graves in Arlington and got our homemaking badges, in preparation to be the most godly of wives and mothers in the not-so-distant future.

I was on an American Heritage Girls camping trip the first time I ever heard someone use the word “vibrator”. The girl who dared to utter such a word was catholic too, her name just a step away from mine in the canon of saints. Her family was rich enough to send her to a private Catholic school instead of homeschooling her. She was posh. She was worldly. She scared the crap out of me.

At Catholic school, the posh girl frenched a boy sometimes, she told us, and that same boy bought her a purple silicone vibrator. The roar of giggles from the other girls led to an equally disruptive rash of shushing followed by further whispers and giggles. I fled the tent when I heard the word vagina, something bad and dark flushing across my skin and burrowing into my stomach. I was glad my little sisters had slept in my mom’s tent with her.

I stood in the bathroom alone, trying not to Freak Out. Despite the bare room more closely imitating a Saw movie than any habitable space I’d seen before, I could breathe a little easier there. Bathrooms have always felt very safe to me. They’re in-between spaces. Nowheresville, USA. A place I can repeat my prayers over and over until my brain stops feeling so jagged around the edges.

I’ve never really stopped praying, even when I couldn’t bear to believe. I remember all the prayers. Catholics love apologizing to God. It sucks they don’t do it as much with like, alive human people. But I like that one of the most frequent rituals of catholicism is that of confession, of offering up one’s shame for forgiveness.

The summer before last, I went to a queer house party with a “confession booth” among a selection of others. When I showed up, word on the street was the “confession booth” had devolved into more of a kissing booth. Of course I got right on my knees and taught them all how to do it properly. Repent, that is. That my particular penance was a kiss from a curly-haired dyke is neither here nor there.

Depending on whom you ask I:

1. will always be Catholic, through the fact of my baptism and confirmation.

2. can never be Catholic, for I have chosen to be a homosexual.

3. was born this way.

4. was taught to be this way by evil leftists.

5. can be both catholic and homosexual, as long as I don’t “act on my same-sex attraction.” and don’t talk about it with anyone, obviously.

6. am probably just going through a phase, right?

7. should not be discussed.

None of those assessments sounds quite right but neither does “lapsed Catholic” or “raised Catholic”. Maybe Irish Catholicism? If I had to define my relationship to Catholicism, it would probably be through some wild and pathetic gesticulation at this picture of Sinead O’Connor.

God, I love Sinead O’Connor. Anyways, enough catholic preluding for now. I’m a woman on a mission. Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. And for the first time in five years, I will be observing Lent this year. (Sorta.)

The basic idea of Lent is to suffer in God’s honor. At first utterance, it sounds regressive. Haven’t I suffered enough for God? What happened to queer joy? What happened to liberation?

But there’s good suffering and there’s bad suffering and the way I am choosing to suffer this Lent is honestly embarrassingly luxurious. To put it briefly: I am giving up my smartphone. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to say it will be a kind of suffering. I think most of us are pretty functionally addicted to our phones.

Plus, I also just have fun with smartphone stuff. I like Instagram Reels, I like playing games, I like dating apps, I like oversharing online, I like seeing the funny things my friends say, and I like convenience. Growth doesn’t tend to be convenient.

In the book My Grandmother’s Hands, author Resmaa Menakem talks about pain as “clean pain” and “dirty pain”. Clean pain is the pain that comes with growth, the pain of difficult emotions and “facing what you don’t want to face–what you have been reflexively avoiding or fleeing. By walking into that pain, experiencing it fully, and moving through it, you metabolize it and put an end to it.” Dirty pain on the other hand, is a pain with no purpose, a pain that expands upon itself.

Dirty pain is the pain I feel when I spend three hours watching videos of lemony garlicky miso gochujang brown butter gnocchi and gorgina drag queens distressingly interspliced with wildfires, genocide, and police violence. What if I spent those three hours calling my representatives, working on a garden, or bringing dinner to a friend? My phone is a bastion of dirty pain that keeps me prone, overwhelmed, and mistaking attention for connection.

On average I have been spending about 5 or 6 hours a day on my phone. A lot of that is texting, which I view as mostly fine and honestly, a skill I need to refine. My usual response time is like… 3-5 business days. But then I think how am I spending 6 hours a day on my phone and still taking 3-5 business days to text back a friend???

My phone makes me passive. I’m checking out then I'm lonely and I’m horrified at the state of the world and I’m too overwhelmed to text back then I'm checking out again. I must trust Sinead O’Connor will allow me to borrow her sentiment once more with this comment she left on an New York Times article about her.

When I say I need to do more suffering, I mean I need to let myself feel all feelings, including boredom, fear, anger, and other less pleasant ones. My phone lets me feel fear for sure, but boredom is a crime unforgivable by any algorithm.

To be forgiven in confession, one must acknowledge one’s sins. Sure there’s the catchall “for these and all my other sins I am truly sorry” but you can never just do that and feel forgiven. You have to admit, at least to yourself, that you’ve really messed up and something needs to change. Here is my confession.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve messed up. I look at my phone when I’m bored and when I’m nervous and when I don’t know who to talk to and when I’m avoiding talking to someone. I look at my phone and get angry about what I see and then I let that anger die and rot within me. I commit the sin of despairing passivity on a near-daily basis.

So here’s my penance. My experiment, if perhaps that term sits better. I am going to go 40 days and 40 nights with a “dumb phone”. I’ve deleted all social media apps and most apps altogether, turned off color on my phone, and will only be using my phone according to the functions a flip phone or “dumb phone” might provide. I can go on social media on my personal laptop only, and I’m going to try very hard not to do that.

I am also going to write about this experiment every day and I am going to share that writing once a week, on Sundays (the day that Catholicism usually allows adherents a reprieve from their Lenten sacrifices.) I want to stop being a voyeur and I want to take a long look at my brain and see if a little clean pain won’t do me some good.

At camp, once I made myself stop shaking over the concept of having a body and that body being seen by others, we played hide-and-seek. The posh girl found me behind the bathrooms. She didn’t snitch. Instead, she told me she’d never actually kissed a boy. We ran in between the shadows of trees as they spiraled up in the cool gold sky of midnight.

We ran so fast I thought my lungs would burst, and then we ran some more. I don’t have a single photo with her. I think about her all the time.