Catholic Anonymous

On their first date, David was a stone. Silent, stiff, almost trembling. Five years of I Kissed Dating Goodbye will do that to a man.

Hannah knew almost instantly he wasn’t her type. Through high school and college she’d gone for the wild ones—loud, reckless, the kind who turned every Friday night into a wheel of fortune. David, by contrast, mostly sat quietly, and when he did speak, it was always about the Bible. She could handle religion, but this much? No thank you.

Still, she went on another date. And another. She’d learned the hard way that first impressions don’t always stick. Over time, his steady eyes, his soft voice, even his silences began to wear her down. He brought a collection of wildflowers he picked on the way to her house. He opened car doors for her—something her mother would sneer at from behind her wine glass. “Like you can’t open your own damn door!”

Before long, Hannah found herself talking more than she meant to—about her mom, about old boyfriends, about the wreckage she usually kept buried. And she began wondering whether “wild, stupid, fun” was really what she wanted anymore.

What unsettled her most was that David had his own kind of wildness. Not the loud, impulsive kind. His wildness was in his faith. He didn’t just “go to church”; he lived it. He crossed himself in public. He refused to hold her hand, telling her gently he wanted to keep things pure. He’d say, “Let’s pray about that” whenever she vented about her life. He called Mary Our Lady with the same ease her friend Alejandra used to mock her grandparents.

Oddly enough, his devotion lit something in her. She remembered going to Mass with Alejandra’s family as a girl—sunlight through stained glass, incense hanging heavy, the chant of voices rising as one. Being there again with David, those memories came flooding back.

A year later, he proposed.

Hannah froze. She’d never been one to think far beyond the weekend, and suddenly she was staring at the rest of her life. She knew it wasn’t fair to string him along—this was heading somewhere or nowhere—but the words wouldn’t come. Could she really say, “Your people will be my people, your God my God”?

His smile faltered when she didn’t answer.

⸻

She needed counsel. Not from her mother, not from friends. From higher up.

So on a warm spring afternoon she sat on a bench at Wiggin Park and waited. When He came, He didn’t come in thunder or light, just strolled over and stood in the sun for a moment, as if He were anyone else.

“Hello, Hannah,” He said.

“Hello, God,” she replied.

He sat beside her like it was the most natural thing in the world. “This must be important. Usually we only talk at my place.”

“It is.” She took a breath. “I don’t know if I should marry David.”

“Why not?”

Her first instinct was to blurt out the truth: Because I’m a disaster. She thought of her father’s belt whistling through the air, the crash of glass bottles, the shameful haze of smoke in the car during senior year. She thought of mornings when her body felt nailed to the mattress, gravity pulling harder on her than anyone else.

But all she said was, “I’m not his type.”

“I don’t think he agrees with you.”

“I know… but he doesn’t really know me.”

God tilted His head, puzzled. “Hours of late-night conversations didn’t get the message across?”

Hannah stared down at a flower pushing its way through a crack in the pavement.

“He’s kind, he’s quiet. He fits in with the nice church girls at his parish. Me? I can’t even talk about… well, God stuff. I don’t think like him. I’m not built like that.”

“Sounds like you’ve already decided,” God said mildly. “So why ask me here?”

Hannah had half expected Him to thunder at her, to curse or belittle her the way her father once had. What the hell is wrong with you, Hannah? But instead, He was maddeningly calm.

“I guess I wanted to know what You thought.”

God looked out at the trees, almost wistful. “I think you’re afraid to be happy.”

That caught her off guard. Finally, something to fight about.

“Of course I want to be happy! Why would You say that?”

“Things are going well with him?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you don’t think you should marry him.”

“Well… yes.”

“Then it sounds like you’re afraid to be happy. Life with David would make you happy, and you don’t know what to do with that. You’ve walked upside down for years, and suddenly you’re being turned right-side up. Feels strange, doesn’t it? Strange… and good.”

He turned to her. “So tell me: do you want to be happy?”

“Of course I do. But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Then tell me how.”

Images assaulted her: her father towering with the belt, her mother passed out with a bottle, her own fist connecting with a boyfriend’s jaw, her body cocooned in blankets when she couldn’t drag herself out of bed.

“He doesn’t know me,” she whispered.

“But you’ve told him, haven’t you? About your past?”

“Yes, but…” She shook her head. “He hasn’t lived with me. He doesn’t know what it’s like waking up next to a mess like me every day.”

Her eyes dropped again to the flower at her feet.

“He wants to marry a train wreck.”

They sat in silence while that thought anchored her, pulling her down, heavy and cold.

At last God spoke. “My dear, you love David. And by asking you to marry him, he’s showing he loves you, too. Real love is always a risk.”

“It’s too much to ask of him. Sooner or later, he’ll realize what he’s gotten into. He’ll leave. They always leave.”

“You might be right,” God said gently.

She looked up, startled. “So I shouldn’t marry him?”

“No,” He shook His head, “I don’t agree with that.”

“But it could end horribly!”

“Of course it could.”

“Then tell me to walk away! Or tell him to stop asking!”

“No.”

“Why not?!”

“Because I’m the one who brought you two together,” He said, almost exasperated.

“What?”

“Think back. After your first date, did you want to see him again?”

“No. Not at all.”

“So why did you?”

She thought back. That awkward night. His near silence. Her certainty she’d never call him. But later, lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, she felt something tug at her. A strange certainty. I’m going to marry him.

“And what did he tell you about that first date?”

“That I wasn’t his type either. But something told him to keep going.”

God smiled. “Exactly.”

She remembered all the times she almost quit but didn’t. That same tug always pulled her back. One more date. One more conversation. And now here she was.

“Maybe you’re right,” God said. “Maybe this ends in disaster. Or maybe it changes you both for the better. Maybe you’ll learn to love theology, and he’ll learn to loosen up. You think you have nothing to offer him, but if that were true, he wouldn’t be here.”

A warmth spread through her chest, loosening something she hadn’t even realized was clenched. He loves me. She wanted it to work and was terrified it wouldn’t and wanted it anyway.

“I’m so scared,” she admitted. 

God reached across and took her hands, His grip steady and firm. “I’m trying to give you a gift, Hannah. Please—take it.”

Images flashed before her: coming home to David after work, children in the yard, Thanksgiving dinners, old, wrinkled hands clasped together in a park like this one. A life—ordinary, steady, frighteningly good.

She stared at the flower between the cracks again, then closed her eyes and whispered, “Okay.”

God exhaled, as if He’d been holding His breath the whole time. A quiet smile spread across His face. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

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Read Chapter 2.

You should know I wrote this with the help of ChatGPT. I explain how I use and don’t use it here.

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