I grew up Catholic. Every morning, rain or shine, the Franciscan nuns at St. John’s Catholic elementary school lined us up two abreast and marched us over to St. John’s church at the end of the block, where we experienced—each in our own way, I suppose—the mass. My experience was not deep; it consisted of satin robes and incense and Latin phrases we had to memorize and say on cue. My brother and sister seemed to understand it all, but not me. I invariably settled into a warm, stuffy cocoon of boredom that numbed me to sleep during the sermon. The kind of boredom that comes from relentless incomprehension.

The nuns, with Father McGuire’s New Baltimore Catechism as their guide, attempted to remedy my ignorance. We covered topics like original sin, the resurrection, and the Trinity—dense, arcane topics that no attempts by the nuns or Father McGuire could clarify. Illustrations showing sin as a dirty milk bottle or virtue as a fruit tree only deepened the mystery.

When First Communion came, we learned that the bland bread wafer was really the body of Jesus Christ. I’m not sure I ever believed it. I don’t remember ever feeling that I was eating the body of Christ, but as the priest came down the line placing hosts on congregant’s tongues, it was hard not to feel something magic was happening. Something I did not understand.

In summer we were cut loose to learn our own lessons. One day in July we met up at a grove of crabapple trees at the edge of a field, me and three or four other boys. We liked the trees because they were close together and we could climb from one to another. That day we found a large, heavy cow femur in the tall grass. Somebody said it was Davy Crockett’s leg bone, and we believed it. Davy Crockett was a big, larger-than-life figure to us. It had to be his leg bone.

For a number of days we treated the bone like a relic, forming a kind of cult around Davy Crockett. We put the bone in a special place and thought about giants and heroes.

Then the bone disappeared. We were briefly dismayed, then the spell broke and we moved on. That was just an old cow bone, we admitted. But even as a youngster I knew something odd had happened. Of course we knew the bone came from a cow, and yet we convinced ourselves of a parallel reality: it was Davy Crockett’s leg bone. For three or four days we believed, we fervently believed. Each boy’s belief reinforced the group, and the group reinforced each boy.

By my twenties I had drifted far from Christianity. I decided it was high time read the Bible. Catholics, at least where and when I grew up, were not encouraged to read the Bible; the pull quotes were enough. But I read it through, all sixty-some books. I took notes. I wasn’t looking for religous confirmation—I was out of that dream—I was trying to understand it. And what I saw in the early, formative, books reminded me of those few summer days in my childhood, of that mysterious something that overcame us and drew us out of the rational world. Just like those primitive nomads in Genesis and Exodus, we, a group of six-year-olds, had created religion.

Image: Disney Corporation publicity photo of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. Found at https://craighodgkins.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/disney-some-davy-crockett-photos/