So, what turned a “reasonably responsible Catholic boy” into the hypothetical heretic who wrote A Concise Theory of Truly Everything? For starters, my Catholicism survived several years after the resurrection of my existential curiosity from the tomb it embodied, and ended abruptly, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a resounding Crunch.

Over the summer before I entered the seventh grade, my first cousin Darren came to live with us for a couple of years. Since he was my favorite cousin—born five months after me—this meant Christmas came early for me that year.

Darren’s immediate family was also Catholic, yet it soon became evident to me that he lacked my gullible piety. Thankfully, Darren was not the type of cousin who would intentionally make this fact embarrassing for me, although it did lead to the end of my Catholicism.

I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with Darren and he did not seem to mind my company, so we went everywhere together. Since my family managed to enroll him at Our Lady of the Gardens, we were also classmates—it was a small school with only one class for each of its eight grade levels. In retrospect, Darren may have come to live with us to avoid some trouble in his neighborhood. I never asked because I did not care, I was simply happy to be able to hang out with my cousin year-round.

The exact date that my Catholicism ended escapes me, though I believe it was during Darren’s first year living with us. He and I were in mass sitting near the back of the church, as was our new custom. It was nearing the time for the Holy Communion portion of the service, during which the priest consecrates the Eucharist wafers, hypothetically transubstantiating them into the body of Christ, and placing one on the tongue of each celebrant who comes up to stand before him at the altar.

I was bringing Darren up to speed on the relevant local lore at Our Lady of the Gardens. That day, I was regaling him with a tale—from before his arrival at OLG—that one of the nuns imparted to us to convey the solemnity of the rite and the reverence with which the Eucharist host was to be treated at all times.

According to the nun, a mischievous boy went up to receive a Holy Communion wafer however, rather than letting it dissolve on this tongue, he spit it out into his handkerchief and took it home. Once there, he placed the Eucharist on the kitchen table, found a knife, and used it to cut the host in half, at which point, the separate pieces miraculously started to bleed.

Darren called BS on that story, but it was apparent to him that some part of me still bought it. Consequently, he went up to the altar with me to receive the wafer—something he only occasionally did. When we returned to our pew, I knelt there reverently allowing the Eucharist to dissolve on my tongue. Darren gently nudged me to get my attention, extracted the still dry wafer from his mouth, and bit it with a resounding CRUNCH that seemed to reverberate throughout the church.

My brain went into hyperdrive at that point, processing his outrageous action, in the context of every Eucharist story and relevant piece of Catholic catechism I had ever heard, in microseconds. As the CRUNCH echoed within my brain, the entire Catholic edifice of sacred truths, myths, and outright lies I had internalized since I was first enrolled at OLG came crashing down. Before I could stop myself, I burst out laughing. I did my best to suppress it, but I was shaking with such hilarity that my sides ached and I could barely breathe, as tears leaked cathartically from of my eyes.

Looking back on The Crunch, I now realize that while I was learning the Catholic dogma along with the local mythology, I was also maturing from a guileless child into a skeptical preteen. In that context, since follow-up existential questions were generally discouraged in Catholicism—and throughout much of Christendom—I had been unconsciously maintaining a true believer facade, under which I was hiding my cache of such questions.  Darren’s Crunch embodied the sound of that facade irreparably shattering, and freeing me to embrace my status as a secret seeker hidden among a flock of believers.

I do not recall if Darren and I ever discussed The Crunch thereafter, and while I continued to attend mass through high school, my Catholicism ended that day. My attendance was obligatory through the end of my time at OLG, and continued thereafter because I had come to appreciate the utility of religion, regardless of the rational limits on its explanatory power. However, despite my ongoing presence in church, in my heart I had quietly joined the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated, colloquially known as the “Nones”.

The end of my Catholicism corresponded to my expulsion from the Edenic ignorance it provided. The parting gift I received upon leaving that metaphorical Garden was the full weight of my existential ignorance—which my embrace of Catholicism had managed to mitigate—landing on me like the gravity of Jupiter. However, at that point—thanks to having grown accustomed to existential disorientation—it felt more like a challenge than a burden, and I have always enjoyed a challenge.

Although Darren was my closest friend back then, I never shared my feelings about my existential ignorance with him (unless he is reading about them here), not so much out of shame—which had ebbed significantly by then—but simply out of habit. Yet, his compassionately irreverent presence in my life at the time undeniably helped me to cope with them, and set me on the path to A Concise Theory of Truly Everything. Thank you, cousin!