The Opposite of Hallelujah (31 page)

“You’re leaving?” he asked, incredulous. “In the middle of—”

“In the middle of this super-fun party?” I finished for him, knowing that wasn’t what he was going to say. “You bet. See you in class, Pawel.”

As I walked away, I imagined I left him befuddled in a cloud of dust.

21

Knowing Hannah would be awake when I got home, even though it was two-thirty in the morning, I marched straight upstairs as soon as I snuck noiselessly through the door.

“I get it!” I announced as I burst into her room. She was sitting in her chair, reading.

“Get what?” she asked, turning her eyes to me in that placid, saintly way she had about her.

“Why you went to the convent,” I said.

“Okay, so tell me—why did I go?” She sounded bemused, although she wasn’t smiling. She rarely smiled when she talked about her time away from home.

“For the same reason I made out with Derek tonight even though I don’t really want to be his girlfriend,” I said.

“I don’t follow,” Hannah said. “Your old boyfriend Derek?”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Where were you tonight? Did Mom and Dad know you were out of the house?”

I waved off the question. “Derek took me upstairs and I knew he was going to try to kiss me and I let him because I was trying to convince myself that if Pawel had moved on and was dating someone else, maybe I should, too, and maybe Derek could be that person,” I said. “So I kissed him, and I kept kissing him even though it didn’t feel right, and I was thinking about you and why I was doing all of this and I just … saw it, I guess.”

“So you’re saying that kissing Derek even though you didn’t want to is like how I went into the convent?” Hannah’s face was blank. I couldn’t tell if she was upset or laughing at me.

“I mean, they’re not the same, but you and I both tried to create something that wasn’t there to distract us from what was missing,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

“No,” Hannah said. “I don’t.” She closed her book. “I’m really tired, Caro. It’s almost three in the morning.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. I was confused—was Hannah angry with
me
? Wasn’t Mom the enemy these days? It was hard to tell with her. Usually she wanted to talk to me more than I wanted to talk to her, but suddenly the roles
were reversed. I felt like I was being rejected. “I guess I’ll go to my room, then.”

Hannah nodded and rubbed her temples. “Good night.”

“Night,” I said, leaving and shutting the door behind me.

I stayed after school to do some setup for the experiment I planned to run later that week—with or without Pawel—and missed the late bus. On my way home, I took a slight detour and ended up at St. Robert’s. I was pleased to see Father Bob and excited to tell him about my science project, which he seemed interested in.

“I’m something of a scientist myself, you know,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“You sound surprised,” he said. “Before I went into the seminary, I got my master’s degree in astrophysics.”

“But … you’re a priest,” I pointed out.

“Well observed.” He laughed. “What gave it away? The outfit?”

“Isn’t ‘scientist priest’ kind of an oxymoron?”

“There’s a great tradition of scientist priests. Ignazio Danti, Jean-Felix Picard, Gregor Mendel—I’m sure you’ve heard that name before. Father Georges Lemaître, the originator of the big bang theory: also a priest. Compared
to them, I’m just an amateur, but I do like to dabble.”

“Okay,” I responded, not sure what else there was to say to that.

Father Bob said, “It was Einstein, I think, who wrote, ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ They need each other to be complete. Are you going to argue with Einstein?”

“I guess not.” I mean, the man discovered relativity; the least I could do was give him the benefit of the doubt. “But you can’t prove God exists. And isn’t that what all science is ultimately about? Proving theories about the universe?”

Father Bob squinted at me skeptically. “Provability is not truth, Caro. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem tells us that, if we didn’t already know it intuitively, which we do.”

“Gödel’s what?”

“It’s a mathematical theorem about natural numbers,” Father Bob said. “It basically says that within a system, there are always going to be statements that are true but nonetheless can’t be proven without reference to the system itself, which is impossible because the statement exists within the system. So, I mean, if you were to make a parallel between math and God, in this case the statement would be ‘God created the universe.’ There’s no way to prove that the statement is true or false, because a creator
god is necessarily outside of creation, and we, as scientists or mathematicians or philosophers or people of faith, are limited by what we can observe, and we can’t observe anything outside of creation—or the universe, or infinity, or whatever you want to call it. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You talk fast.” I wasn’t a dummy, but I wasn’t exactly a PhD, either, and this was pretty advanced stuff.

“Well, it’s not a limerick,” Father Bob said. “It’s a little more sophisticated, but keep thinking about it. Now, how can I help you today?”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said.

“Something about Hannah?”

I told him the story of how Hannah shut me out after I came home from the party. “I thought I was finally getting her, and then she turned all cold and quiet. What’s up with that?”

“What do you feel you know now that you didn’t before?”

“I don’t think she went into the convent because she wanted to be a nun,” I said. “I think she went in because she was feeling alienated from God, and she thought being a nun would fix the problem. But when I said that, she completely shut down.”

“Well, there’s probably more to the story,” he said. “I saw her once at church, Caro. Hannah is clearly not well.”

“I know.” I took a deep breath, fully prepared in that
moment to tell him about Hannah’s letters to St. Catherine and the mystery of Sabra, but at the last second I found I didn’t have the courage. So I changed the subject. “If you were all set to be an astrophysicist, why did you become a priest?”

Father Bob drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of the desk. “It wasn’t so much a decision as it was an answer. I felt like I was being called to the priesthood. I knew that I would never be a great researcher. I was by no means an extraordinary scientist. But over the years, I became convinced that I could be a good priest.”

“Have you ever regretted it?” I asked.

“We all have our moments of doubt,” he said, smiling. “But no, I don’t regret it. I love what I do. And I didn’t have to renounce my interest in science when I was ordained. I still try to keep up, and to look back.” He gestured to the
Principia
, still laid out on his desk.

I pointed to a black-and-white print that hung on the wall above his head:
Waterfall
by M. C. Escher. I was surprised to see it there, and even more surprised that I hadn’t noticed it the first time I came in. “I have that same picture on my binder,” I told him, showing him. “It’s my favorite Escher.”

“It’s an exquisite piece of art,” he concurred. “I became acquainted with his work during my time at the seminary. There was a priest there, Father Rushing, who was something of a mentor to me. He gave me that print.
He said I should keep it with me always, to remind me that there is beauty in paradox. He told me that grappling with faith is a bit like looking at that image, that logic rejects it but that intuition recognizes it as a sort of truth even in its impossibility.”

“I just thought it looked cool,” I admitted.

“It certainly does,” he said. “But it’s unnerving, too. It’s a bit like staring into another dimension, one that has a different set of mathematical and physical laws. For me, it also serves as a reminder that the mind of God is unknowable, that things that seem contradictory to us only appear so because we have no context for them, or aren’t seeing the full picture.”

I thought of Hannah and her dark struggles, how little I knew about her, how little she seemed to know about herself. “So if we can’t see the full picture, how do we know that we’re making the right choices?”

“
That
, I believe, is the whole point of faith,” Father Bob told me. “Science and religious belief are very much alike in that way. You can operate based on what you think you know at any given time, but you must always be cognizant that there are forces at work you can’t see, or don’t understand. It’s not enough to blindly believe in what you have been presented with, what you
think
is true. You must always be open to new information, always be listening and watching and experimenting and seeking. Only then can you really say that you’re doing God’s will.”

I stared at Escher’s
Waterfall
, my eyes tracing the impossible objects that created the bizarre architecture of its alternate world. There were only two people in the image; one was a woman doing her laundry, blithely unaware of (or perhaps uninterested in) all the strangeness that surrounded her. But there was another, down at the bottom, an obscure figure that leaned casually against a wall, looking toward the waterfall. I liked to think he saw what I was seeing, the completely unfeasible and yet inarguably existent perpetual-motion machine that towered above him. I wondered what he thought of it.

22

With everything that was going on, the holidays snuck up on me. I left home one morning and noticed, for the first time, that the leaves had changed and were falling, blanketing the lawns and sidewalks like confetti.

The snow came in late November, and it carried on all through December until Christmastime. This was going to be the first Christmas with Hannah in the house in eight years, and not coincidentally, it was going to be the first time we’d gone to Christmas Mass in years. The catch was Hannah wouldn’t come. She’d stopped going to Mass a few weeks after she and my parents had seen
Pawel there. I guess after all that struggling, she’d decided that she had lost her faith for good. Of course, she wouldn’t talk about it. She wouldn’t talk about anything at all.

I argued with my parents about attending the holiday service. I figured if Hannah didn’t want to go, why should we? Dad might’ve backed down, but Mom insisted. Something about it being our job to support Hannah in her faith even when she was unsure of it herself—
especially
then, she said.

I’d hoped Father Bob would be saying the Mass we went to, but as it always seemed to be, it was Father Boring. I let my eyes and mind wander during his interminable homily and caught sight of Pawel sitting a couple of rows away from us with the people I assumed were his family. His mother, a short heavyset blond woman in an apple-red sweater, was sitting at the end of the pew, next to his father, who was also short, and completely gray-haired. Beside them were two taller, dark-haired girls—Pawel’s sisters—and a small, lean blond boy. Pawel was next to him, at the end of the pew. I watched them intently; Pawel’s parents and sisters were listening to the sermon, but Pawel and his brother appeared to be engaged in a silent punch war. They were watching Father Boring, but every once in a while a fist would strike out like lightning and land on a soft shoulder, and then another would follow it up in retaliation. I could tell
they weren’t hurting each other, or at least they weren’t trying, although a couple of times, during a momentary détente, I noticed Pawel reach up and rub his shoulder lightly. It was just boyish restlessness playing itself out in the least disruptive way possible. I couldn’t help finding it completely adorable.

During the sign of peace, Pawel turned around to shake someone’s hand and noticed me. He lifted his hand and gave me a little wave; I returned it with one of my own, and a smile. He smiled back.

Dad leaned over and said, “There’s your boy, Caro.”

I shook my head. “No, Dad. He’s just a friend.”

“You sure about that?” I made a face at him. Dad was just kidding around, trying to get a bit of a rise out of me, but I felt warm inside all the same.