Cross & Chair, Jdeideh, Lebanon
Originally uploaded by Shannon Dagher.
When I was 10 I began attending mass with a neighborhood family.
I loved the church, both the physical structure and the ritual surrounding mass and communion. The orderliness.
While my parents used philosophy to banish God from their lives, I felt the unarguable presence of God in my life from a very young age, a presence that academic machinations could not deny. God simply IS for me, as real as the mountains I grew up around, just as present, a constant. I can reach out with my mind and feel God as easily as I can reach out and feel my pillow when I wake up in the morning.
And so, I decided I wanted to become a nun. I read a rather famous book about convent life called “Through the Narrow Gate” by Karen Armstrong . I decided I wanted my life to be just like that. What I didn’t realize at the age of ten is that this book is actually a bitter memoir about the harshness of convent life and the author’s deep unhappiness and mistreatment. For me, the strictness of the life was intoxicating.
For mostly what I wanted was to feel “good.” “Good” in God’s eyes, and convent life seemed a sure way to achieve that.
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