I do not know what I am now, but I was raised Catholic. A priest dumped a couple of handfuls of water on my bald infant forehead while I screamed bloody murder at the top of my miniature lungs and the discussion was over: I was Catholic.

It did not end there. That was only the beginning. A few years later I was in the confessional with the same priest, telling him about how I had spit on my brother, Justin's head and given him a few solid smacks across the back. He said I should say ten Hail Mary's to expiate my crime; a weighty penance for a six year old who could barely sit through an entire commercial, much less kneel and pray to the blessed virgin. I did not even know what a virgin was and if I had the priest probably would have made me pray fifteen Hail Mary's instead of ten.

Another year later I was standing on the altar, sporting my Sunday best and looking very excited about taking my first mouthful of wine, while simultaneously developing an allergy for incense. My parents stood behind me, holding hands. Mom wore a haircut left over from the seventies and a vibrant dress that did the early eighties justice. Dad wore a sharp sport coat, a neatly trimmed mustache, and, just for contrast, a chronic case of inappropriately named 5 o'clock shadow. The two shared a proud air, which they promptly lost when I passed out from incense poisoning. There was no doubt about it: I was Catholic.

There is quite a bit of doubt about it now, however. Every now and again, which is more often than I like, someone will ask me, "So what denomination are you?" as though I were a church congregation. I shrug and nonchalantly respond, "I don't know." My inquisitive friend usually waits, expecting me to elaborate on this, which I, knowing it will only lead to more questions I do not want to answer, have made a general rule of not doing. Sometimes they will ask me what church I go to as a roundabout way to gain this information. I tell them I go to lots of churches: Catholic, Evangelical Free, Lutheran, and, more often than not, Bedside Baptist. This usually leads to more questions and a discussion on the importance of church attendance.

Slightly less frequently, but still too often for my taste, someone will take this discussion a step further and tell me that I have to be something. They tell me, as though it were the eleventh commandment, that I have to be Baptist or Anglican or Catholic or anything, just so long as I am something. When the discussion takes this turn I play it as shrewd as a serpent and as innocent as a dove, which is kind of like playing dumb, but more devious. I cock my head sideways slightly, give it a little scratch, and, in a voice that belongs in an after-school special, say, "Really? Why?"

This usually stumps my interrogators for a little while. Apparently they think the reason for this truth is obvious to everyone, the way the reasons for great truths like "thou shalt not murder" and "don't mix whites and colors in the laundry" are obvious to everyone, because when they find that the reason is not apparent to me they are unable to articulate a logical response.

"I don't know," they say. "You just do."

C.S. Lewis came up with a decent analogy to support the argument that I must be Protestant or Pentecostal or Catholic or anything, just so long as I am something. In the preface to Mere Christianity he compared Christianity to a big house comprised entirely of a long hallway with a great number of doorways, each leading to a different room. There is a Catholic room and a Baptist room and a Anglican room and a Pentecostal room and enough other rooms that, if one were willing to devote a good amount of time to exploration, one could become very well aquatinted with all the rules of each room and more than a little disoriented. The catch is, eventually one has to choose a room to live in: the Pentecostal one, the Catholic one, the Congregational one. Any room is fine, save one: the hallway. Though Lewis does not say so, I suspect this is because a number of the residents of the rooms have taken up the habit of staging periodic invasions of the hallway, wielding sales pitches and cries of anathema, in the hope of conquering as many hallway-dwellers as possible and dragging them off to their respective rooms. The hapless hallway-dwellers, in turn, are compelled to either allow themselves to be conquered for the sake of escaping the horrors of no-man's-land, or run from the house in terror.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in the Catholic room, not because of any sales pitches or anathemas, but because of circumstance. I was raised in Albany, a small German farm-town in central Minnesota that has a vehement aversion to change of any sort and a big, red brick Catholic church as its centerpiece. From the Interstate, you can see its gray-green shingled steeple asserting its importance and permanence as it points high above everything else in the town. If you got a little closer you might notice a little yellow Lutheran church that looks something like a bungalow on the far side of town, too. It does not have a steeple, though, and about as many people as can see it from the Interstate actually show up there for services on Sunday, and for a very good reason: being Catholic is a prerequisite for residence in Albany, except, of course, for the Lutheran minister who continues to hold his hopeful services each Sunday before an audience of none. Being a resident of the town, it did not take me very long to figure out that unless I wanted to keep the lonely Lutheran minister company in his little bungalow-church, I was to become Catholic as well.

As long as I was being forced into the Catholic room by circumstance, I decided, at the wise age of five, to make the best of my predicament and begin learning some of the rules of the room. The Catholic church was right in my backyard and had its own little under-funded, parochial school with a student body of all of 70 kids where my grandfather went, my father went, and Justin and I eventually went, too. My grandfather and father managed to master the rules of the Catholic room during their years there. My own experience was less fruitful. It took me about a week to figure out that learning the rules of the Catholic room was not nearly as much fun as pestering the nuns. My classmates and I got a nun to swear at us once. At the time we felt as though we had really accomplished something. We did not get recess for a week.

But even if I failed to learn the rules of the Catholic room, I did manage to learn a few things about Catholics. A Catholic was anyone who went to the big red Church, and everyone I knew did. A Catholic was anyone who went to the little under-funded parochial school, and everyone I knew either did or had. A Catholic was, in short, anyone with a pulse. My friends were Catholic, my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were Catholic, and until I was about twelve I assumed both my parents were Catholic, too.

It was not a great stretch of my mind to reach this conclusion. I simply examined the evidence. We followed all the rules of the Catholic room: we did not eat meat on Fridays, we plastered our house with crucifixes, we went to the big red Catholic church on every Sunday and on all the Holy Days of Obligation, and we prayed nice Catholic prayers over our meals. Therefore, my little twelve year old mind concluded, Mom and Dad must be Catholic. I was half right. Dad, like his dad, and his dad's dad, was Catholic. Mom was something else.

I think it was Mom's religious jargon that first made me suspect there was something different about her. Mom spoke about religion unlike everyone else I knew and especially unlike the nuns at school. She used pithy Christian catchwords like "saved" and phrases like "born again" and "found Jesus," which were completely incomprehensible to me. For all I knew Jesus was to be found hanging on the tabernacle in the big red Catholic church in my backyard, though I had a suspicion that he might be on the other side of the screen in the confessional. Mom apparently thought he might be somewhere else, and wherever it was it did not sound like it was anywhere near the big red Catholic church or even in the Catholic room at all.

Mom, as it turns out, was an Evangelical Protestant, but she was not raised that way. She was raised Catholic, just like my dad, just like her mom and her mom's mom, but sometime after she married Dad she managed to sneak out of the Catholic room and slip across the hallway to the Evangelical Protestant room. She also managed to upset a good number of people in the process, members of my immediate family included.

She upset even more people when she converted Justin and I to Protestantism. She converted me just before it was time to start my CCD classes at the big red Catholic church, which is generally a traumatic time for most young Catholics. It is the time when every good little Catholic boy and girl learns that being Catholic constitutes more than showing up to mass every Sunday with their parents only to spend the next hour counting and re-counting the ceiling fans and contemplating what the statue of St. Peter would look like without a beard and why on earth a Jewish man like St. Peter looked so remarkably European. It is the time little Catholic boys and girls find out they have to learn the rules of the Catholic room to be a good little Catholic boys and girls. They have to learn the Order of the Mass, a few nice Catholic prayers to say over their meals, the names of all the apostles, and a few things about Jesus, among other things. If they can manage to learn all this before they graduate from high school, or at least trick the nuns into thinking they have learned it, a priest will give them the Holy Spirit, gift-wrapped, and they can do whatever they want with him after that. Most of my peers left him in the box and tossed him in the attic or tucked him away under their beds where no one would find him.

I avoided the whole ordeal. I was given a simple choice by my parents: I could go to CCD classes at the church like all my classmates, which would have pleased my father and most of my extended family, or Mom could teach me at home. Being twelve and not wanting to sit through anymore class than could be avoided, I choose the latter, not understanding the weight of the decision or the disappointed look on my father's face when I made it. Mom, on the other hand, was elated, rushed to get her Bible, and began indoctrinating me with all the rules, beliefs, and practices of the Evangelical Protestant room while simultaneously purging my body, mind, and soul of Catholic doctrine as best she could.

Amputating Catholicism from my life was not especially painful. Catholicism was old, stale, and familiar. I did not care for the nuns, and the priest, to be frank, scared me. I was sick of the noxious scent of incense. I was sick of counting ceiling fans and contemplating new hairdos for St. Peter. I was especially sick of copying passages out of the Bible, a common punishment for misbehavior at the under-funded parochial school. They would never let me copy the interesting passages, either. No exodus story. No crucifixion story. No apocalyptic revelations. They would make me copy passages out of Levitcus 13 about how to treat infectious skin diseases or entire genealogies out of Joshua. In short, the Evangelical Protestant room seemed like a lot more fun than the Catholic room. No more nuns. No more old guys in overly elaborate robes holding little wafers in the air and saying the same thing they said last Sunday and the Sunday before that. No more genealogies and infectious skin diseases. Just talk about Jesus. I liked that. I liked the code-language too: "saved," "born-again," and "found Jesus."

One of the most important rules in the Evangelical Protestant room, I learned, was that Evangelical Protestants hate Catholics and Catholics return the favor. It was something I think I picked up from my grandpa on my dad's side, who could never refer to Evangelical Protestants without attaching an obscenity. Mom helped too. After every mass at the big red Catholic church she would sit down with my brother and I and point out everything that the priest said in his homily that was wrong and then re-indoctrinate us with the correct and, incidentally, Evangelical Protestant teaching.

Though they certainly did not hate each other, Mom was an Evangelical Protestant and Dad was Catholic and that was reason enough for them to fight frequently and loudly enough to reinforce the notion in my mind that Evangelical Protestants and Catholics do not get along. Dad liked to stay out late at the golf club and have a few beers with his friends, a practice Mom abhorred vehemently. She somehow got the idea that Satan himself had a habit of showing up at the golf club and that being there at all was un-Christian, or, at the very least, un-Protestant. But Dad was Catholic and, as if that were not enough to upset Mom, he saw nothing un-Catholic about spending a little time with his friends at the golf club. As far as I know he never ran into Satan there, but I do know that all hell was waiting to break loose when he got home.

The exchange of hellfire between Evangelical Protestants and Catholics was not confined to my family, though. A few years ago Garrison Keillor came to our town to celebrate the opening of our new bike trail: the Lake Wobegone Trail. He did not talk long. In fact, he just threw the speech together that morning after taking a ride down the trail, but everyone loved it. He talked about the beautiful scenery, the real sense of community in the area, and about the need for community projects like the trail. Then he said he hoped the trail would not bring too many Evangelical Protestants into the area. Because, of course, once the Evangelical Protestants move in, before you know it they will start burning question marks on the agnostic's front lawns. Most people seemed to agree.

I decided I hated Catholics, it being the good Evangelical Protestant thing to do. At the very least I decided I should stop associating with them, which was no small task, considering I lived with one. But I decided to do the best I could. At the time, I was dating Rachel, an attractive, redheaded farmer's daughter, who just so happened to be Catholic. She was a very open, outgoing, fast sort of girl and a very good friend of mine, an unusual quality in a junior high relationship. But, even so, she was a Catholic and I was an Evangelical Protestant and the very nature of things was against that sort of match. Sneaking out of the Evangelical Protestant room for a little tryst with someone from the Catholic room was strictly forbidden by the occupants of both rooms and, incidentally, one of the few things they ever agreed on. I, trying to be a good little Evangelical Protestant, began to see Rachel as a filthy, sinful Catholic stain on my beautiful Evangelical Protestant robe, so I dumped her.

Actually, I did not dump her, but I did call her one night with every intention of doing so. She had been sick, so I knew she would be home. I was the nice, sensitive sort of junior higher who would wait until his girlfriend was sick to dump her. We talked for half an hour or so while I tried to build up what small bit of spine I had before I discovered I had been born without one. I decided to ask her a favor instead.

"Rachel," I began, "Can you do something for me?"

"Maybe," she said, drawing out each little phonetic sound to let me know she had a suspicion something was up.

"Can you dump me?" I asked.

"No," she said, deadpan.

"Oh," I said, equally deadpan. "Shoot."

The conversation went on for an hour, and then another week and a half after that. She caved in eventually, and I was free of my Catholic stain.

Almost.

Let me tell you about Easter at my house. Mom gets up at the crack of dawn, neglects her hygiene, and begins the long and minimally rewarding cooking process. Dad joins her a few hours later and ritually drops some precious piece of fine china on the floor that once belonged to my mother's grandmother, shattering it into a million pieces. A vulgar argument invoking a deity's name follows with a two-hour shouting match on its heels. Justin and I wake up to this sound around noon, grateful for the privilege of sleeping in and for the Easter Vigil at the Catholic church the night before that made Sunday morning mass unnecessary.

That is not how Easter begins, though. Easter begins when Grandpa's commanding six and a half foot, 300 pound frame walks through the front door accompanied by his equally commanding voice shouting "Happy Easter" so loudly and abruptly that it resonates from the foyer to every hidden nook and cranny of the house, nearly shattering the rest of Mom's china. "Grandpa's here," my mother always says, as if this were new information. The shouting match stops for a while.

Grandpa lumbers up the stairs from the foyer into the kitchen, keeping one hand on the banister and the other on his knee, which was replaced a few years ago because of a baseball injury that went unattended for a few decades. Grandpa was a catcher in the minors and, infrequently, with the Dodgers. In exchange for a few years of his life and his right knee, the Dodgers gave him a little pittance pay and a professional baseball player's demeanor: loud, outspoken, playfully rowdy, and, above all, completely entertaining at any social event. He puts this demeanor on display at the table.

We all sit around our antique oak dinner table, Grandpa at the head and Dad at the tail and everyone else somewhere in between. We pray our little "Bless us, oh Lord, and these, thy gifts;" a nice traditional Catholic prayer. Mom is silent. Sometimes I am too.

Mom then subjects us to her annual ritual of dissent. She reads aloud from an overtly Evangelical Protestant devotional and follows it up with a "deep question" for everyone to answer. These questions usually go something like, "What's something God has really taught you in your lifetime?" We all go around and say pithy little things about our uninteresting little lives. Mom says something pithy and pointedly Protestant about Jesus and throws in a few Evangelical Protestant catch phrases for good measure. Dad says something pithy about community and somehow ties it into the joke Garrison Keillor told about Evangelicals burning question marks, which Grandpa enjoys immensely. Everyone else laughs too, except for Mom. I try to stifle my laugh as best I can.

Then the question comes to Grandpa. His response is always a series of anecdotes about his glory days. He tells us about the time he caught for Ty Cobb and about what a "miserable S.O.B." he was. He tells us about how he forgot his anniversary one year and came home drunk, six-pack in hand, and ended up spending the night on the couch. He tells us about how he was on the road when my father was born and ended up driving 300 miles straight through the night to get home and see him.

After four or five stories, and about that many glasses of zinfandel, Grandpa is warmed up for his finale: the story of how he proposed to Grandma.

He had been sitting at the wheel of his Chevy four-door waiting for one of the few traffic lights in northern Indiana to change. The woman who sat next to him would eventually become my grandmother, but at the moment she was nothing more than a good reason for him to sweat straight through his blue button-down shirt and make his then dark brown, slicked-back hair glisten quite a bit more than usual. He had just picked her up at the bus station two hours later than the time they had agreed upon. He had been out with his friends and lost track of time.

They had been in the car for half an hour and had not spoken a word since they left the bus depot, which suited Grandpa just fine. He had downed a few beers and was not feeling up to defending his way through a lecture on punctuality. Grandma managed to give him one without ever speaking a word, though. She stared out the windshield with her arms crossed over her chest and, through a subtle series of deliberate sighs, sideways glances, and leg-crossings, she managed to communicate volumes of indignation without speaking a word. Grandpa squirmed in his seat while his shirt turned progressively darker shades of blue around his armpits.

The traffic did not justify the length of the light: two cars passed while they waited. Grandpa silently cursed them both. Then he cursed the people in the crosswalk for walking by without offering him sympathy. Then he cursed the depraved sadist who invented traffic lights. Then, when he ran out of people to curse, he cursed Indiana for being so sparsely populated.

About ten seconds had passed.

It was then that Grandpa decided things probably could not get any worse and he ought to do something to relieve himself.

"Aurie," he said.

"Yes?" she said, appalled at having her silent lecture interrupted.

"Will you marry me?"

For the first time in half an hour Grandma's body language was silent.

"Of course," she said.

The light turned green.

Everyone at the table has heard the story so many times that each of us could relate it flawlessly ourselves. We know the particulars by heart, right down to the body temperatures of the characters: Grandma a cool 98.5 degrees, Grandpa sweltering at an uncomfortable temperature just slightly short of triple digits. But, despite its familiarity, we are all wholly engaged in Grandpa's relation of the epic. It is the same story we have heard the Easter before, and the Easter before that, and even a few times on Christmas, but we are all enthralled. Sometimes we add bits and pieces to the story, but mostly we listen.

It is then that the miracle occurs: for a few hours the fighting stops.

For the few hours it takes to polish off a ham, twenty pounds of mashed potatoes, a Jell-O mold, and two pots of coffee, there is nothing dividing us except the big oak table and a pile of dirty dishes that will occupy the bulk of my mother's evening. For those few hours we are able to talk like civilized human beings about something that happened fifty years ago in an intersection in Indiana. We become so wrapped up in a five-minute slice of Grandpa's history that we are able to forget about all the rules of our respective rooms--rules that would normally set us at odds or at least keep us from associating--and we step out into the hallway. As far a we are concerned all those rules, Garrison Keillor, and my mother's ritual devotional reading can go to wherever it is they go when they are not making mischief--a place I suspect is somewhere in the vicinity of hell--because they will not be making anymore mischief at this Easter table. Grandpa has delivered us from their grasp with his mighty baseball player's hand. There will be no more fighting, because on the day the Lord was resurrected from the dead we resurrected a little piece of Grandpa's past and, despite all the pointed jokes, shouting matches, and broken china, he saved us all.

For a few hours, at least.

The fighting will resume the next day, new jokes about Evangelical Protestants will be told, and relationships deeper than the one between a junior higher and his open, fast, redheaded girlfriend will be strained and broken. Even those few hours of peace on Easter Sunday are disturbed by the nagging voice of my Evangelical Protestantism. How can you be associating with these Catholics? it asks. You should be serving them anathemas, not dinner rolls. And you call yourself an Evangelical Protestant?

The question is supposed to be rhetorical and I look down at my Evangelical Protestant robe just to assure myself that it is, only to be shocked when I find it is stained by more than gravy and grease from the Easter ham. Right in the center of my chest is an ugly black Catholic stain, the gift of my father and grandfather. But it does not bother me for some reason, and I know when I wash the robe after the meal the black Catholic stain will still be there, unlike the gravy and grease. Catholicism has a little more resolve than gravy.

Well? the voice asks. Are you an Evangelical Protestant or not?

"No," I say. "I have no idea what I am."

I do not know if I say it because it is true or because the voice just happens to annoy me and I want to annoy it back. But I do know that having spent thirteen years in the Catholic room, six years in the Evangelical Protestant room, and a total of twenty years watching the two parties burn olive branches on each other's doormats, I am starting to see the beauty of the hallway. I am starting to think it could be a very comfortable place to live, were one able to expel all the room-dwellers and their sales pitches and anathemas from it. I am starting to suspect that if I traveled far enough down the length of the hallway I would eventually be out of earshot of the Catholic and Evangelical Protestant rooms, and there I would find a big antique oak table set for Easter brunch.