My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
to Roman policy of the day. Some say she grew a coat of hair as she prayed, a heavenly defense mechanism; others say the men who attempted rape were blinded. An attempt to burn her at the stake was unsuccessful. The beheading, however, worked.
While I learned so much about girls who died with their virginity intact, I never heard a word about male saints’ virginity. In the Catechism, nuns’ virginity is called for, while priests are asked only to be celibate—virginity isn’t mentioned. Christian history is peppered with virgin martyrs who appeared after the Roman period, such as Joan of Arc and Maria Goretti, known for their unique stories. Sister Agnes was obsessed with Maria Goretti, the little saint who was murdered at the age of twelve by a young man whose advances she had spurned. Maria Goretti was to be a model for us girls: die before you open your legs and disappoint the Lord.
Sister told us a story about her guardian angel. Once, when Sister was a young woman, not yet a nun, a man followed her into a gas station bathroom. Her guardian angel made him disappear, somehow. I imagined her with long, dark hair and jeans, with a happier face, maybe even makeup. I imagined what she wasn’t really saying:
Her new life was the product of a furious twisting, a repulsive stroking of thighs. The shadow of a man’s hands rose up the bathroom stall door as she struggled with the lock and tried to breathe. Years later, hidden behind a convent’s brick walls, embraced by the arms of her new vocation, she kneeled on the maroon tile floor with a bucket and rags and scrubbed. She learned to avert her eyes with humility, begged God to make her selfless, closed her eyes and felt her spine roll under the world’s sorrow. She memorized chaplets and novenas but could not turn away from the stare of the angry eyes that penetrated walls. In her room—a cell, they called it—she asked God to take her in her sleep.
Maria Goretti, born 1890, martyred 1902, patron saint of rape victims, was, alongside fetuses, Sister Agnes’s object of most intense devotion. When Maria was twelve, as she sat on the veranda of a barn at her parents’ farm, some neighbor boy of twenty tried to get her to bring him to her bedroom. Of course she refused. So he dragged her, he tried to rape her, she fought, he stabbed. Fourteen times. Then he left. She bled out, but not to death, not quite; death came the next day in a hospital bed. Last words: she forgave the guy and prayed that God would, too. The guy went to prison for thirty years. Maria’s mother lived to attend her daughter’s canonization. The rapist became a Franciscan. He died with a picture of Maria on his nightstand.
Sister Agnes said we were supposed to live by Maria Goretti’s example. We were supposed to cross our legs, clamp them shut with steel; we were supposed to guard our chastity with our lives. It made sense. My body was a book of rules, my heart the spine, my skin plastered with pages. Written on each one was the text that held the world together. Do not steal. Do not lie, swear, disobey. Do not get angry. Don’t even let your thoughts go bad or the poison will fill your veins. Above all, do not fuck.
When the nuns found out I was Cowlitz Indian, they offered me Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, as a spiritual guide. I knew nothing more than that she was holy and that I was to ask her to speak to the Lord on my behalf. On prayer cards, she was rendered with deep honey skin and delicate, anglicized features. Behind her twin braids shone the circular halo that adorned the heads of all saints. She was Indian and I was Indian, so the nuns thought I would respond to her. They never told me about the smallpox scars that disfigured and half-blinded her, Mohawk accusations of sorcery and promiscuity in response to her conversion, or her self-mortification practices that included whips, hair shirts, iron girdles, and beds of thorns. Kateri—no, Catherine, post-conversion—could withstand up to twelve hundred self-induced lashes at a time. Prolonged fasting brought clarity. Hot coals brought her closer to God. While Kateri’s bloodletting had once taken traditional Mohawk forms, Jesuit priests supplied all the instruments of self-ravage that a good Catholic girl might need to purify her dark Native heart.
In 1680, at the age of twenty-four, Catherine died a virgin. The old Kateri was long gone, and miraculously, so were the scars that had once marked her face, now perfectly pale.
I could not pray to Kateri Tekakwitha. She seemed more like one of my Native American Barbies than a saint. With her braids and ethnically confused features, her prayer card image reminded me enough of myself that I found it impossible to venerate her. Kateri could not be trusted to do any better than I could with my desperate implorations to the Lord.
Prayer is not a satisfying outlet: you talk to God, God doesn’t answer; you have to have faith that his plan is in action, and you pray some more. I used to pray to saints instead of God because if I didn’t get what I wanted, I could blame heavenly miscommunication. I prayed novenas to Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, asking him to make the cross-eyed boy I loved love me back. It never worked. I was like a before girl in a teen movie, gangly with bad bangs and glasses, no concept of style, no sense of how to present the new body I was sprouting. The boys joked about my undesirability, one telling me that another had dedicated a love song to me on the radio or was going to put a note into my locker later. The nuns promised that in heaven, we would eternally appear as we had at our hottest in life, but I ran out of patience. I lost faith sometime near the end of sixth grade. God had so many people working so hard to make him happy that I knew he wouldn’t miss me when I was gone from his flock. Anyway, the nuns had told me that Jesus loved me unconditionally, so I wasn’t worried about making any effort to try to snag him.
The summer after seventh grade, I bought my first pair of black plastic, modified Buddy Holly glasses, a new wardrobe, and makeup, ready to reinvent myself and broadcast a message to my new classmates, who didn’t know the bookish girl I had been at All Saints Regional: you don’t know me, but I am very freaking cool.
To be a sinful woman is to be a whore. The New Testament never says so, but Mary Magdalene has a reputation. Woman’s sin is sexual. So, even though there is no biblical evidence of Mary Magdalene’s sluttiness, we believe that it is so. Mary Magdalene and Jesus were tight, leading scholars to speculate. All that we know about her is what we place into the marginal white space in the New American Bible. Even if she wasn’t a prostitute in life, she sure is a hooker now: see The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Passion of the Christ. Mary sits in heaven with her hair down past her shoulders, among the girls whose breasts are just beginning to grow, whose hymens still guard the span of the chastity they died for. Mary lived to see her body break and heal, to change over years, to become immaterial. She lived to see God die. In heaven she feels no need to cross her legs at the knee.
Mary of Egypt, patron saint of penitents, is likely the slut earlier Catholic scholars confused with Mary Magdalene. Just as Mary Todd Lincoln shouldn’t be confused with Mary-Kate Olsen, Mary of Egypt was a separate woman from a different time with a different agenda. I never learned about her in Catholic school—maybe because she wasn’t important, maybe because keeping track of so many women named Mary was too much to ask of schoolchildren, maybe because she made it okay to sleep around as long as penance eventually comes. Born around 344, died around 421, Mary moved to Alexandria at age twelve and started sleeping around. She didn’t fuck for the money, she said; she wanted it, loved it, couldn’t get enough of the cock. So she went to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. It was an anti-pilgrimage: she wasn’t looking for salvation, she was cruising the pilgrims. Something happened—visions, forces—and she repented. She crossed the Jordan River to live like a beast in the desert. When Saint Zosimas found her, she was naked, more animal than human, clairvoyant. She could walk on water. I try to explain this away with what I know: petit mal seizures, maybe, because I can’t believe in superpowers. Zosimas left and returned to find her dead. With the help of a passing lion, he buried her.
In 1 Kings and 2 Kings, Jezebel, Phoenician queen of Israel, is manipulative, scheming, idolatrous, and powerful, but never a slut. Like Mary Magdalene, she has become a slut in our eyes millennia after her story first emerged, but since she worshipped Baal and never the LORD God, her redemption can only be secular and feminist: she was so strong she made her husband’s knees buckle, made pagans of the Israelites. A woman only has power to make a nation of men fall if she has evil, a force stronger than nearly anything, working through her. Somehow, when she was turned from Bible story to pure myth, she became an adulteress who turned the Israelites into