I was 8 or 9 years old when a classmate with a stiff white bow in her hair tapped my shoulder. We were filing into the chapel in our plaid navy skirts and itchy tights, the wooden floorboards creaking with every step. I’d walked straight into the pew, hands dangling at my sides. The girl wanted to know why I hadn’t genuflected, so I told her the truth: I didn’t know how.
During religion class later that week, we were each called on to recite the Hail Mary. I knew the opening words the way you know the first bars of a song that you’ve overheard through walls — Hail Mary, full of grace — but then nothing else. When it was my turn, the teacher looked at me as if I’d spoken in the wrong language, which, in a way, I had.
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It wasn’t that my family didn’t go to church. We did. But every Sunday morning, my dad drove to St. Peter’s Catholic Church, with its sign announcing fish fry dinners and feast days, while my mom and I drove the other direction to Bethlehem Lutheran Church, with its pale brick exterior, modest steeple, and pots of tepid coffee in the basement. At Bethlehem, I learned a different rhythm of standing and sitting, as well as a slightly different vocabulary of mercy.
From the beginning, my faith was patched together. While I was baptized Catholic at birth, I was confirmed Lutheran at 14. I wore a uniform to my Catholic elementary school and sang Lutheran hymns on Sundays. I memorized the Nicene Creed in one building and the Apostles’ Creed in another.
I knew the choreography of both services, but my body never stopped hesitating, like a traveler who can read the map but doesn’t trust the direction. No matter where I was, I was always off-register. Too Protestant at school, too Catholic elsewhere.
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As I got older, the differences stopped being theoretical. I didn’t know what to do with Mary, or whether communion was a symbol or a fact, or why one church insisted on certainty while the other left room for doubt. Friends spoke easily about what they believed, while I learned to hedge, to qualify, to speak in half-sentences. By college, I had grown tired of choosing sides. I didn’t leave the church in anger. I simply stopped showing up.
I’m a travel writer now, and I move through places as though I’m having conversations with them, looking for texture and contradiction. And everywhere I go — Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires — I end up in Catholic churches. Not Lutheran ones. Always Catholic. I’ll duck in to escape the heat or the rain and find myself arrested by the experience with all my senses engaged. Cool stone, golden music, the faint medicinal sweetness of incense. Light slants through stained glass like something physical. My feet slow. My chest tightens.
It’s the rituals that undo me. When a priest lifts the host, my body reacts before my thoughts do: I’m small again, knees pressed into a padded rail, counting my own breaths to stay still. Incense smoke hits the back of my throat and my eyes fill, as if I’ve lost something without knowing when it disappeared. Sometimes I cry, and I’m not sure why. It’s like a bodily knowledge surfacing, a memory of faith stored in muscle and breath, persisting even as I lost the language.
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For a long time, moments like this only deepened my unease. They felt like evidence of a spirituality that hadn’t settled anywhere, a reflex without a home. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be — or whether any of the labels fit. But I learned to keep that private, to leave the churches quietly and not talk about the lingering discomfort. I simply packed the feelings away and carried them all over the world.
And then I went to Heidelberg, Germany.
Heidelberg’s Church of the Holy Spirit rises out of the old town like a phoenix, its Gothic spire visible from nearly every angle above the red roofs. It’s magnificent. And from 1706 to 1936, the church was split in two: Catholics on one side, Lutherans on the other. One roof, one set of bells, one sanctuary divided by a wall to accommodate two congregations that worshipped simultaneously.
The wall is gone now, dismantled after the Catholics moved elsewhere. Today, the church is Protestant. Sitting on a straight-backed chair beneath the soaring ceiling, I recognized something familiar in it. This was a place that held division for centuries, then learned how to stand without the wall. For the first time, my patchworked upbringing didn’t feel like a defect.
When I stepped outside into the Marktplatz, the city had gone quiet. I didn’t leave with clarity about belief but with a truer reading of my own history. What I’d once taken for a flaw wasn’t damage at all. It was the seam that made the structure hold.
Questions for Reflection:
- Think about a church you have visited that left a lasting impression on you. What was so striking about that church? Did it change your approach to prayer?
- Maggie shares how rituals have influenced her faith. Is there a particular ritual or devotion that makes you feel closest to God? Why do you think that is?
- Heidelberg’s Church of the Holy Spirit had a wall dividing the Catholics and the Protestants for more than 200 years, but the wall finally came down in 1936. Sometimes, our faith differences can place a wall between us and others. How might you work to remove barriers in your own life that prevent dialogue with other faiths?
- When leaving Heidelberg’s Church of the Holy Spirit, Maggie says, “I didn’t leave with clarity about belief but with a truer reading of my own history. What I’d once taken for a flaw wasn’t damage at all. It was the seam that made the structure hold.”Think of a couple of moments God gave you clarity on part of your identity. How can your past inform your faith journey now?
