I’ve never been a particularly religious person. Growing up a Catholic Filipino-American, my exposure to church was my mother dragging me out of bed at the crack of why-am-I-awake on a Sunday, making me put on a skirt, and forcing me to sit on a pew for a whole hour listening to some guy in a dress tell me that it’s not too late, that I don’t have to go to hell, if I just say sorry, my bad, and stop sneaking money out of my mother’s purse. And blaming things on my sister. This routine got old for a while, even for my long-suffering mother, so when I was about seventeen, I woke up to an empty house on a Sunday morning. The car was not in the driveway, my parents and sisters weren’t home, and there was a plate on the kitchen counter with a solitary egg, two pieces of bacon, one dry toast, and a note that said, “Bam” (unrecognizable emoticon. Not happy, not sad. Straight line for a mouth). We never discussed why my mother stopped dragging me to church. Maybe she got tired of shushing me during mass while I made fun of the priest’s Filipino accent to the delight of my equally bored sisters. Maybe I made her feel like a bad person for threatening to kill me if I didn’t shut my mouth for one hour, just one hour, for God’s sake.

So I must not have been in church on the day that they talked about stigmata. I had not heard of it until I saw that awesome-awful movie starring Patricia Arquette. Is there something I’m not understanding about this idea of receiving the wounds of Christ (punctures through the palms and feet, bleeding forehead, a stab through the side, not to mention the wicked-weird visions and God talking to you) and suffering not just pain but people thinking you’re hurting yourself for attention, just because YOU REALLY LOVE the LORD AND THIS IS YOUR REWARD?!? And why would anyone inflict this thing on a 7-year-old Jewish girl whose parents are in the middle of a really bad, really ugly divorce?

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