Stories of Belief: "God Shopping" by Mary Karr
This week, in Stories of Belief, we're discussing Mary Karr's story about visiting churches with her son Dev
This is the first entry in my series “Stories of Belief.” You can read more about the series here.
Mary Karr is a poet and writer from East Texas. In 1995, she published her first memoir The Liar’s Club, which won all kinds of awards and also, according to some people, made the memoir cool again. She wrote two more memoirs, Cherry, about her teenage years, and Lit, which includes “God Shopping,” the chapter we’re discussing today.1
“God Shopping” opens with Karr’s son Dev announcing that he wants to go to church, “to see if God’s there,” he says.
Karr writes: “The phrase straightens my slouchy spine. Some native faith lets him stare out the window at the aluminum sky and see a scrim before heaven.” Prior to reading Karr, I was unfamiliar with the word “scrim;” now I find myself slipping it into casual conversation whenever I can. A scrim is a thick fabric that conceals something. So, what is Karr saying: Dev looks up at the sky and sees it only as a curtain blocking heaven; he’s looking for God behind the curtain (like Wizard of Oz?).
So, this chapter is, as the title suggests, all about Mary Karr and Dev’s visits to a variety of churches, prompted by Dev’s curiosity. Students always loved to point out the role reversal here – for many of us, our parents made us go to church. Here, Dev is dragging his mother along.
Throughout the essay, Karr references the act of reading and, specifically, a paperback book she carries with her to each church they visit. The paperback book ends up being a significant symbol in the story; we first see it when she and Dev visit an Episcopal church. She writes, “So devoid of curiosity, that I climb into my friend’s car toting a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pass time.” Let’s keep an eye on this paperback and how it functions.
The first church they visit – an Episcopal church – is a “Capital-C” church; it has “gray stones right out of some horror-movie castle.” And yet, it’s not what she expects once she gets inside. She thought it would look like a homogenous, white, 1950s-looking scene. But instead, she sees that the congregation is diverse, and people are dressed casually.
What’s more, Dev likes it. Karr gets coffee and sees people she recognized – overall, it seems like a pleasant experience. After they leave, Karr pithily asks Dev if God was there; he looks at her as if saying, “Where were you?”
So, it kind of seems like their adventures in God shopping is over, but for Karr it is not. She has her reasons; the church is too cold, she says, “not emotionally, but physically.”
Why is this observation significant? Well, it’s a frivolous reason — an excuse more than anything.
So, with that in mind, let’s look at some of the other churches they visit and Karr’s reasons for not going back:
Conservative Jewish temple: it’s more political than spiritual
Baptist church: it’s anti-gay and the service is too long
Two Super Liberal Protestant churches:
Church X: sterile and kid-free; no God in the sermon; no sense of history; “homily might come from Reader’s Digest”; they don’t believe in evil
Church Y: they see gods everywhere, and the gods are “more or less interchangeable”; rabbit foot gods; meditating, etc.
Finally, after a year of this, they go to Catholic church with a friend, Toby, and his wife. It turns out Toby is Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life, which you may be familiar with.
Of course, Karr has some preconceived notions about the Catholic church. She associates it with shame and the Inquisition. But what she finds, instead, is something altogether different. She writes, “the whole surface of the room is sloppy with kids.”
For Karr, this is good, especially compared with the sterile liberal protestant churches she’d just visited. Then there’s the priest; she describes him as unvarnished — no piety, humble. The way he breaks the bread for communion, she notices, “somehow erases him so he’s a clear conduit and the keen quality of his attention draws me in.”
And, significantly, soon Karr realizes she hasn’t opened her paperback.
From there, we see Dev get more and more involved. On Halloween, he dresses up like a saint. Shortly after he “jumps the communion line—his first show of appetite for baptism.” And this gives Karr a brief moment to reflect on Communion; she writes that it is “painfully carnal if you think about it. The body of the god is absorbed by the human body to nourish the spirit.” And then she snaps out of it and back to her pithy self: “Dev’s mouth pops open wide as a baby bird’s.”
Not long after that, she really starts to become won over. She writes, “I feel myself as an animal herded among similar animals…I think how horses in the Colorado of my youth huddled together in the cold…Catholics aren’t who I thought they’d be, not even close.”
It’s the people who impress her about the church; within a week or two, “it’s turning out that I forget to bring my paperback to Mass, so obviously, I’m not just coming for Dev anymore.”
The paperback is gone. Let’s talk about how it has operated throughout:
She brought along like she brings it to soccer games
She opens it, apparently, in every other church
The first time at the Catholic church she realizes she didn’t open it
She eventually stops bringing it
So, how has the paperback been functioning? Like a protective shield. A sign of disinterest. A way to maintain her status as a learned skeptic as opposed to a believer. It’s no coincidence that it’s a book that she’s using to shield herself here.
And yet, she’s not done making excuses. She writes, “It’s historical interest…when I start reading all manner of theology.”
So the book, the learning, the reading is still there…it's still a shield. She begins to connect with the social justice aspect of the faith, but as we’ve seen, each time she connects, she finds a reason to pull away. This time, it’s Jesus: “I confess…that Jesus himself seems sappy—a chump or fool.”
Not content to complain about Jesus to other parishioners, she takes her complaint to the priest. She writes, “I bargain like an insurance salesman to convince him how crappy Jesus is.” She uses the example of the story of the woman at the well—she says that Jesus is snotty to the woman; he puts her down for sleeping around.
But what does Father Kane say? “I always thought He was joking or teasing her.” He explains: she was Samaritan; it was radical for Jesus to drink after her. Now, in light of how we’ve been reading this story, it becomes clear that Karr is the outsider who doesn’t feel she belongs. In a way, she is the Samaritan woman. And the story of the woman at the well is about Jesus extending salvation beyond the Jews to people who don’t feel that they belong.
She can’t argue about Jesus anymore, so she puts up her last defense: The Pope. She says she doesn’t believe the Pope is the ultimate religious authority. Father Kane doesn’t argue; he simply says, “Maybe someday you will.” And, he tells her, “God’s after you. Struggle all you want.”
Of course, she does continue to struggle; she’s okay with Jesus but wants to believe that “resurrection is only a metaphor for renewal.” In other words, it didn’t really happen. Still, the following week, she says, “I enter and get on my knees like everybody else, saying the prayers I usually say at home.” And here we know that even as her walls have been coming down, even as the paperback is left behind, she still hasn’t been participating in the prayers. But now she does, and what happens? She tears up; “There’s something different about praying in company,” she writes.
Earlier in the memoir, prayer is the thing that begins her breakthrough and helps her overcome her alcoholism, and here it’s the thing that lets her get closer to joining a community. Shortly thereafter, she decides to get baptized, and Toby, her friend, becomes her Godfather.
So this is a story about resistance; about putting up walls and fighting against God. From her reticence to attend a church, to the paperback book-shield she uses to stay separate, to her various arguments against Jesus and the Pope and praying in public. But finally, she is the Samaritan woman, and “The father is seeking people to worship him,” as Father Kane tells her. In this story, God wins.
Karr opens the chapter with a poem, “The Gift” by Louise Glück. Let’s end with it:
Lord, you may not recognize me
speaking for someone else.
I have a son. He is
so little, so ignorant.
He likes to stand
at the screen door, calling
oggie, oggie, entering
language, and sometimes
a dog will stop and come up
the walk, perhaps
accidentally. May he believe
this is not an accident.
At the screen
welcoming each beast
in love’s name, Your emissary.
See you next week, when we’ll discuss “My Mother’s Bible,” by Walter Kirn.
Ideally, I’d love to share the full text we’re discussing with you here, but I’m unclear on the legality of that. Some other readings down the line (like, next week) I will be able to link to because the text is already online, but in this case I can’t find the text online, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing a whole chapter from Karr’s book. You can learn more about the book and read an excerpt (not the one we’re discussing) here. I’ll try provide substantive summary as we go.