It's been a busy month: my baby sister got confirmed, I discovered St. Abigail, and I was reminded once again that you can take the girl out of Catholic school, but you cannot take the Catholic school out of the girl. No matter how long it’s been… and it’s been a while.

My mother is one of the most devout Catholics I know. Like seriously. She’s following the rules in her house. She goes to Mass every week without a show. She’s contemplating wearing a veil to future services. She teaches the youth every Wednesday. She prays a rosary for each of her kids, like, a lot. Spending a week with her during confirmation season is its own spiritual experience if you get my gist. She just believes so completely and so consistently that it radiates off of her, and I find myself simultaneously rolling my eyes and feeling something I don't have a clean secular word for.

My sweet, baby sister Josephine chose St. Kateri Tekakwitha as her confirmation saint. For those unfamiliar, Kateri was a 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman who converted to Catholicism and was canonized in 2012, the first Native American saint. Josephine did her research. She chose intentionally and for thoughtful reasons. And yet there’s a part of me that can’t help but think… converted? By choice? To the colonizers’ faith? But also, what do I know! Maybe she really got jazzed for Jesus and the Catechism.

My confirmation saint, for the record, is Dymphna. Patron saint of mental and neurological disorders, and, interestingly enough, incest. My mom told me I had to pick and so I did. I was sixteen and thought that was a little on the nose even then. Some things don't change.

Whilst visiting my mother during this confirmation season, I had been planning a trip to Belfast and Northern Ireland, which I had to reroute given current happenings there. So I was in the middle of replanning, slightly grieving the original itinerary and the fact that the North of Ireland is still riddled with violence (and femicide, an essay coming about that soon), when I found myself in a shop called The Mustard Seed looking for Josephine's confirmation gift. They had an ungodly amount of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha stuff there, more than other saints, and my mom saw that as a spiritual sign while I saw it as a universal sign. Two sides of the same coin, we are. Anyways, I’m looking at these cute little keychains of saints, and I’m trying to find a Vietnamese saint keychain for my best friend Mytien. Standard errand. Nothing remarkable about it.

I found the cutest little Our Lady of La Vang that I will be giving her the next time I see her. Again, lots of violence when the Catholics entered Vietnam. What do you know? Amidst my internal debate about whether or not to get my friend this, I saw her.

St. Abigail.

My name. On a saint I had never heard of in my entire life, which felt statistically improbable given that I went to Catholic school for years and sat through more saint lessons than I can count.

I picked it up. Read the back. She was an Irish abbess, sixth century, based in County Cork. She used honey as medicine. She was an herbal healer who treated the locals around her convent. She was known for her remedies.

Huh, that's fun. Honey is basically a food group for me. My mother puts it in my Christmas stocking every year because she knows. I had just spent months building a medicinal plants database where honey comes up approximately constantly. I noted the coincidence the way a skeptic notes a coincidence: interesting, a little funny, filed away. I bought the keychain and went home.

A week later I was sitting at home reading about her properly for shits and gigs.

That's when I got to the deer.

The story of how St. Abigail found the location of her convent, the place where she would spend her life healing people, was this: she followed white deer. Nine of them. An angel had told her she would know the place when she saw nine white deer, and she did, and that was where she stayed.

I looked up at my wall.

There is a sepia photograph of a deer hanging there. Framed. It has been there for a long time. The deer is my spirit animal in the most sincere and non-ironic way I know how to say that. I don't know how else to explain the relationship I feel with that particular animal except that it has felt like mine in an extreme way ever since high school when I was on a mini solo hike (I grew up in South Dakota, lots of trees and deer).

Anyways, I came upon this stream that I was about to hop over to get to my favorite spot down by the main river and there was a deer. It was on the other side of the stream. It was so close. If I had reached my arm out, I could have touched it. We made eye contact and she didn’t run away or spook. We just held eye contact for a bit. And eventually she trotted away. I’ve been in awe ever since.

I switched my already adjusted trip from Dublin to County Cork a few hours later.

Here's the thing about me and religion. Scientifically, intellectually, I find no solid basis for organized religion beyond humanity's profound and very understandable inability to cope with the unknown. We are meaning-making creatures in a universe that does not inherently provide meaning, and religion is one of the most sophisticated systems we've built to manage that. I understand it. I respect it as a tool for internal peace and external morality. I just can't fully live inside it with any intellectual honesty.

And yet.

I pray to St. Anthony every single time I lose something. Every time. And I find the thing shortly after, which I know logically is confirmation bias. I was going to find my keys anyway. St. Anthony didn't move them. But there is a little devil on my shoulder that will never fully let me close that door and I have made an uneasy peace with him. 

I joke that I'm more culturally Catholic than religiously Catholic. It's the Polish and Irish roots, I'm sure of it. There's something that gets into you when faith is that embedded in your family's history, not as a choice but as an inheritance, a language you were taught before you were old enough to question whether you wanted to speak it. You can learn other languages. You can become fluent in skepticism and logic and the scientific method. But the first language never fully leaves.

My mother, when I told her about St. Abigail, went very quiet in the way she goes quiet when she thinks God is being obvious and doesn't want to oversell it. Then she said she always felt spiritually guided when she named me, that she knew the name was right even though she couldn't explain why. She hadn't known about the saint at the time. I was actually named after Abigail (that one wife in the Bible). But somehow, my mother feels she might have been spiritually guided.

I don't know what to do with that. I'm not sure I'm supposed to do anything with it. But with my obsession with honey and herbal tea, who am I to doubt!

What I keep coming back to is this: the version of faith versus science that gets debated publicly is always all or nothing. You either believe or you apply the scientific method. You're rational or you're spiritual. But most people I know, including the most scientifically minded ones, are living somewhere in the middle of that in ways they don't always admit out loud. Everything simply doesn’t fit the framework. There are things that land a little too neatly to fully explain away. My name has been the same for 26 years. The sepia photograph has been on the wall.

I'm not saying St. Abigail moved that deer photograph onto my wall. I'm not saying anything like that. I’m not crazy. But what if she had something to do with the deer in the woods?! What if some things can’t be explained by science? Like, maybe that deer wasn’t rabid or sick and that’s why it was so chill around me. Maybe it was just… spiritual. It was that moment that I started to question the Church. The forest that evening felt holier and more transcendent than any time I’ve knelt at a pew.

I looked up at my framed photograph after reading about nine white deer and felt something I don't have a clinical word for. And maybe that's not a failure of logic. Maybe that's just what it is to be a person, standing in the middle of everything you know and everything you can't quite explain, trying to figure out which is which.

You can take the girl out of Catholic school, and since I am only human, the rest is apparently a work in progress.

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