Icons, Smoke, and the Scar on My Thigh: A Post-Catholic Easter

Prelude – Scar Tissue and Smoke (A Pashka of My Own)

I’ve never known what to do with Easter.

In Quebec, it was just another long weekend by the time I came of age. The churches were half-empty, the chocolate bunnies always tasted faintly of cardboard, and no one believed in resurrection unless it was metaphorical or political. The priests didn’t seem to believe it either, if I’m honest. The homilies got vaguer every year. The incense got cheaper. The alleluias rang out like inside jokes no one laughed at anymore.

But something always held. Even if I didn’t know what.

So this year, I’m doing Easter my own way.
I’m roasting a ham. I’m remembering my grandfather, Stefan, who could make a pew feel sacred just by sitting in it.
I’m thinking about Mihaly, who sold forged Church receipts in the vestibule of Sts. Cyril and Methodius like it was a side hustle in the Book of Acts.
I’m lighting a candle, mostly for myself. Maybe for them too.

And I’m publishing this.

Not because I’ve found a new faith.
Not because I want to prove anything.
But because something still calls me—at the edge of spring, at the edge of mystery.
And I want to answer it, even if I don’t have the right words, even if I still flinch when priests speak in absolutes.

This isn’t a testimony. It’s a Pashka.
A scarred, smoky kind.
A Mass for the half-Catholics and heretical grandsons and the parts of us that never stopped kneeling.

The tomb is empty.
The ham is in the oven.
And maybe—just maybe—the smoke still rises.

This is my Pashka.
The Jews found Buddhism.
I found a Slav with a censer who doesn’t yell.
We all make peace with our childhood theology in different ways.

ACT I – “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”

My Catholicism has a scar. It’s on my thigh—faint now, greyish, but still there. A graphite wound from confirmation class in 1995, Rosemont, Montreal. I was the only moitié-moitié kid in the room. Everyone else was full-blooded Quebec Catholic, baptized in churches older than their grandmothers, steeped in Marian devotion and generational guilt. I was half-something else. My last name didn’t match the street signs. My prayers came out crooked. I didn’t know if I belonged, and it turned out neither did the Church.

One day, some kid jabbed a pencil into my leg—dead center in the thigh, no explanation. Just looked at me and stabbed. I still have the mark. A little black dot that never washed out. A stigmata by Bic. That’s my sacramental inheritance.

The school was part of the old CECM system, already rotting when I got there. It smelled like wet coats, disinfectant, and resignation. The classrooms had water damage in the corners, and the crucifixes looked bored. The teachers weren’t angry. They were just tired. We were learning about grace from people who had clearly run out of it.

The Church wasn’t oppressive—it was hollow. Nobody forced belief down our throats. They didn’t have the energy. It was like attending Mass in a mausoleum where the choir still rehearsed, but the parishioners had quietly stopped coming. The kids didn’t care. The priests were ancient phantoms in black sweaters, and I was just trying to get through the damn class without catching lead poisoning.

But the weird thing is—I still remember everything.
The Je vous salue Marie. The Our Father. The smell of incense when someone died. I can still recite the Act of Contrition like I’m trying to talk my way out of a spiritual parking ticket.
Some of it lives in my spine. Some of it in the scar.

I come from a strange Catholic lineage. My paternal grandfather, Stefan, was Slovak, tall and silent and profoundly still. The kind of man who could sit in a pew and make the whole church feel reverent just by not moving. I don’t remember him ever quoting scripture. He didn’t preach. He just exhaled slow and holy. When I picture the saints, I picture him—wearing flannel, nodding once, eyes soft and distant.

His father, Mihaly, was a different animal. Migrated from Slovakia to Montreal in the 1930s and, sometime in the ’60s, got charged with forging Church receipts and selling them at Saints Cyril and Methodius. Not a metaphor. That’s my bloodline: one generation lighting candles, the next faking donation slips behind the altar.

He was selling grace. Flipping sacraments on the grey market. I like to imagine him in the back of the church, sleeves rolled up, muttering Pán Boh pomáhaj while moving counterfeit receipts like they were indulgences. That was the quiet scandal I grew up in: a faith too broken to leave behind, too absurd to fully believe in, too beautiful to fully betray.

Between Stefan and Mihaly, I didn’t stand a chance.
I wasn’t raised Catholic. I was marked by it.
I didn’t believe in it. I was haunted by it.

So when people talk about “leaving the Church,” I don’t really know what they mean. I never left. I just stood in the ruins long enough to know where the exits were. Quebec didn’t burn its Church down—it just stopped singing. The sacraments kept happening, but no one believed the spell anymore.

And yet, I still cross myself at funerals. I still flinch when priests say “life begins at conception.” I still pause outside old churches like I’m expecting someone to call my name from inside. The structure’s gone. The longing isn’t.

A few weeks ago, I caught the scar again in the mirror.
That little graphite dot.
Confirmation class. 1995.
Rosemont.
I touched it and laughed—not bitter, just tired.
Like someone laughing at the end of a funeral because the priest forgot to dismiss the congregation.

That’s when Father John Misty kicks in.
Click play.
“Jesus Christ, girl…”

That song is what it felt like.

Like attending a funeral for something no one acknowledged was dead.
Like listening to incense smoke try to pray for itself.
Like the Eucharist had a hangover and didn’t want to talk about it.

And like fucking your girlfriend on your grandfather’s grave.

That only happened in the song but – well, this is meant to be at least somewhat allegorical – I think.

The Church didn’t die with fire and brimstone. It bled out quietly in a cold Montreal classroom, while a priest explained transubstantiation to a kid with a pencil and something to prove.

And I was the only moitié-moitié there.
Half-Catholic.
Half-in.
Whole scar.

ACT II – “Holy Shit”

Many years later, I crossed the border.

Not in exile—just for love. I ended up in the States with my partner, and somewhere between cohabitation and Costco, I had to go to Mass one ordinary Sunday. Not because I believed, not because I wanted to repent, but because it was Sunday and parental instincts die harder than doctrine. Sit. Stand. Kneel. Check your watch. Bless yourself anyway. I figured I could coast through it like I did in Quebec—dead liturgy, blank expression, no one looking too closely.

I didn’t expect to get ambushed.

American Catholic Mass is not the slow rot of Quebec. It’s not the tired sigh of a dying parish or the quiet rustle of coats in a half-empty church. No. It’s alive. Violently so. Bright lights, big screens, pews full of khaki dads with Republican haircuts and wives who clap off-beat to hymn remixes. The priest has a mic. He walks. He gestures. He smiles.

I should have known.

The first half was harmless enough. Gospel of the day. Vaguely topical. Some football metaphor, probably. I tuned it out. That’s the trick—you don’t listen to Catholic homilies. You absorb them like background radiation. But then he said it. He pivoted from Lazarus or whatever right into the sacred script of the American culture war.

Abortion.

Suddenly, the Eucharist was conditional.

Suddenly, I was supposed to believe that the miracle of Christ’s body depended on my voting record and my proximity to uteruses. That the sacred was now a talking point, that the mystery I grew up with—the one that lived in Stefan’s silences and Mihaly’s backroom grift—was being weaponized by a man in a wireless mic headset.

I froze.

And then, without thinking, I whispered it—not even under my breath:

“Oh, do fuck off.”

Not loud. Not theatrical. Just… final. A sacramental nope.

I sat there, numb, while everyone else nodded and smiled and said amen like we hadn’t just turned salvation into a press release from the bishops’ lobbying arm. And in that moment, I realized something awful: I wasn’t in church. I was in a theological franchise, and the God on offer was a corporate mascot with strong opinions about your insurance provider.

Quebec’s Church died slowly. It collapsed into itself like a lung.
This one?
This one was still breathing, but it smelled like bleach and guilt and polyester vestments.
It felt like going to dinner with someone who keeps reminding you they cooked, so you better eat all of it—even the cold ham scripture and the undercooked moral panic.

The worst part? The bones were still there.
The liturgy. The architecture. The Eucharist.

My body still responded.
Stand. Kneel. Cross yourself.
Muscle memory stronger than disbelief.

And yet…
I knew I was done.
Not angry. Just done.
Like when someone keeps cheating on you and expects you to apologize for finding out.

And that’s when Father John Misty walks in with the smirk of a drunk angel at a theology convention.

“Ancient holy wars. Dead Religions. Holocausts.
New Regimes, old ideas. That’s now myth; that’s now real.”

ACT III – “Only Son of the Ladiesman”

I didn’t go looking for the Eastern Church. I wasn’t seeking spiritual healing or a new kind of incense to fill the hole left by doctrine. I just… ended up there. A friend of a friend invited me to a Byzantine liturgy one Saturday in the grey zone of Eastern Europe. Said it was “weird and beautiful” and “didn’t feel like a hostage situation.” That’s all I needed.

It was an old building, unimpressive from the outside. No giant crucifix jutting toward heaven. No marketing banners or Eucharistic theme nights. Just a door, half open, like it wasn’t sure if it still wanted to be a church.

Inside: smoke.
Everywhere.
The air was thick with it, not in a choking way, but like the building was exhaling.
The walls were covered in icons—flat, gold, elongated saints who looked like they’d been staring into eternity and didn’t like what they saw. The priest was already chanting, barely visible behind the iconostasis, a wall of sacred images that hid the altar from view.

And instantly—my body relaxed.

No one was looking at me. No one was giving a sermon on abortion. No one had a wireless mic. The priest didn’t ask if I believed. He didn’t even seem to care I was there. He just kept chanting, swinging the censer, whispering old words like they still mattered even if no one understood them.

It felt like walking into a dream. Or a memory I’d inherited from someone I loved.

And then I saw Stefan.
Not literally.
But I saw him in the quiet.
In the way the priest didn’t raise his voice.
In the way the ritual kept going even if no one explained it.
In the smoke that curled upward like it was trying to reach the ceiling tiles and apologize for something.

This wasn’t my faith.
It wasn’t even my rite.
But it felt like mine in the way dreams feel real until you wake up.
The cadence of the chanting. The rhythm of the bows. The lack of demand.
It didn’t ask me to believe.
It just asked me to sit still and remember what reverence feels like.

And I did.
I remembered Stefan kneeling. I remembered Mihaly behind him—probably side-eyeing the donation box, but still kneeling too.
I remembered the scar. The confession booths. The funerals.
I remembered not hating any of it, even when I didn’t believe.

And I realized—this isn’t about belief.

It’s about presence.

It’s about sitting in a room full of people who don’t need to be right, because they’ve already surrendered to mystery.

It’s about ritual as muscle memory, not performance.

The icons didn’t smile. They didn’t wink. They didn’t offer prosperity or certainty or a hotline to Heaven.

They just looked back.

The prayers looped and bent and repeated, not for efficiency but for depth. Like waves reshaping a shoreline you forgot you lived on.

And I knelt.

Not because I was saved.
Not because I suddenly believed again.
But because my knees knew what to do.
Because something in my blood was exhaling.

I thought of Mihaly—how he might’ve sat in a church like this, half-praying, half-scheming, all shadow.
I thought about how sin is treated here—not as a crime, but a sickness.
Not as rebellion, but as separation from light.

And I thought maybe… maybe if he had found this place instead of Sts. Cyril & Methodius in 1960s Montreal, he wouldn’t have needed to forge the receipts.
Maybe he would’ve just sat still.
And listened.
And healed.

But… he probably would have still forged them.

He was “ethnic” as the Quebecois say.

Because that’s what this is.
A space for Stefan to breathe.
A space where Mihaly doesn’t have to steal grace—it’s already there.
A space where I don’t have to join or leave, because I was never really invited or kicked out.
Just marked.
Just remembered.

I didn’t convert.
I didn’t sign anything.
I didn’t even take communion.
I just stayed.
In the smoke.
In the silence.
With my ghosts.
And my scar.

Epilogue – Smoke Instead of Answers

I still don’t go to church.

Not really.

I haven’t signed up. I haven’t joined a parish. I haven’t submitted to any new bishop, or memorized a creed in Slavonic. I’m not trying to convert. I’m not chasing salvation. I’m just… less allergic to incense than I used to be.

But I still cross myself.
All the time. Without thinking.
Before flights. In hospitals. At funerals.
And here’s the thing:

I do it the “wrong” way now.
Right shoulder first. The Eastern way.

I didn’t plan that. No one taught me.
It just started happening.
Like my body remembered something my mind hadn’t decided on yet.

I still carry the scar on my thigh from confirmation class in Rosemont.
I still remember the Act of Contrition.
I still think about Mihaly—hawking grace in the vestibule.
And Stefan—sitting in silence, holding the roof up with his spine.

I didn’t find a new faith.
I found a room where I could kneel without flinching.
Where the smoke curls upward and no one asks what you believe.
Where icons look at you like they already know.

That’s enough.

I’m not a Catholic.
I’m not Orthodox.
I’m not even sure I believe in God.

But I know how to cross myself now.
And when I do—
It feels like I’m facing the right direction.

I said above that Eastern Catholicism is to lapsed Catholics what Buddhism is to non-practicing Jews—and I still think that tracks.
Not because I’m looking to convert, or get Enlightened, or figure out how many angels can dance on a thurible.
But because there’s something comforting about finding a parallel system.
Something ancient, ritual-heavy, and just foreign enough to feel sacred again.

Jews get koans and zazen.
We get icons and smoke and chants that don’t ask us to prove we belong.
It’s not a solution.
But it’s a way of not running, while still not pretending.