Dear Grandma: some thoughts on butterflies, and God

Grandma, and a hat she brought me to wear to Megan's graduation from junior high, I think. She was fashion.

In this excerpt of a letter to my Grandma, I begin reflecting on my writing process—which unfolds into a reflection on my relationship to God, and what it was like to leave the Church—her Church—after coming out.

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Dear Grandma, sometimes I wait for the words to land upon me—like a butterfly. I try to remain very still. Other times, I feel luckier—or it feels a bit easier—and I seem to feel the words lap up to my feet, like waves at a shoreline. I scoop them up. And, much like water, if I don’t make some quick decisions, they will soon be gone. The butterfly one is different though. Because that involves waiting. And I, quite frankly, have never written this way. It has always been the waves: writing only when the words came to me. This morning, though, I am waiting. Because I would like to begin saying things to you. I would like to write our story. A love letter. I can already see it. As in, I know that it will be written. I have never said that about any writing project ever—so I think that this feeling, this perception of what is to come, matters. As I wait for the butterfly to alight, typically I try to shut most of my senses off. Or, at least, I try to shut my hearing off. Or, perhaps most accurately, I just try not to talk to other people. These rituals of waiting and receiving, I don’t know where I learned them. It is possible—it is likely—that they came to me in Church.

The thing about growing up in a Catholic family—or, at least, in our Catholic family—is that God was just a given. And, thus, there were so few conversations about who God was or what God meant in the depths of our beings. Do you know what I mean? What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that I spent a lot of time feeling like I was waiting for God. A lot of time in the pews hoping that God, too, might alight upon me like a butterfly. Might treat me as something like worthy. I would watch, at retreats, as my peers would be prostrate in prayer—an embodied form of devotion that I could not muster. I would watch as tears streamed down their faces. An embodied form of affection that was not my own.

I suppose what I am wondering, and what I cannot know, is if you ever lied prostrate in prayer because the weight of your belief was bearing down on your body; if you ever cried the way that I saw my peers cry; if the feeling of belief was more intellectual, or if it lived somewhere in the center of your body. Truly core to the person that you were.

I guess I am asking, Grandma, because when I walked away from the Church over ten years ago (wow), I suppose it did not really occur to me what I might be losing.

And what I would like to explain to you, now, is how and why I left. I never really made the time to talk to you about coming out, and about all that that meant for me. All of the ways that it haunted my relationship with a being that I called God. I wish that we had sat down at that little breakfast nook (although I can no longer remember when you all removed it to put a more traditional kitchen table in). But I wish that we had sat down at that breakfast nook, as we had so many times before. You would have just sliced up some mango, seemingly always in season in the Villacorte household. There would be green or purple grapes, freshly washed, sitting in a shallow bowl; they would peek over the rim, evidence of the abundance of your home, which was our home. We sat there so many times before over chocolate chip pancakes; with Sudoku or some kind of word puzzle on deck; so that I could interview you, my favorite duo of all time, for some class project, or so that we could play Go Fish. You were always inviting me around the table, the two of you deeply integral to everything that I would become. Often, my mom is in the room, too. Having driven me there. She, too, is delighted by your stories and all that you offer us. She, too, offers her own perspective on your time in the Philippines or such-and-such relative. But we were always in that room. At that table.

So, I imagine that that is where I am sitting, when I tell you about what it was to fall in love, and to lose our God in the wake of it all.