LaurieWrites

Biting my tongue (a little bit.) (Not really, no, not so much.)

You know what I want to do? I want to write a scathing rant about the Catholic church and its decision to divert funds and human resources to investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial life at the same time it is threatening to take away funding for its social service operations in the District of Columbia should the city legalize gay marriage.

STABSTABSTABSTABSTAB.

I can't believe I just Googled "Catholic extraterrestrial."

After years of reasoned, quiet disengagement with the institution out of genuine affection and respect for my upbringing and family I am just about ready to go completely, vocally rogue because I've had it with misplaced priorities and ridiculous stances that not only serve no one, but are also selectively discriminatory to other human beings and punishing to the very individuals the Jesus of my understanding walked this earth to serve ACCORDING TO SISTER JOAN, YOU JERKS.

Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me, as I recall, yes? Do not force me to go through my scrapbooks because it's all there.

If you believe in a heaven and you really want to go there, and protesting the expansion of civil and legal rights for homosexuals is a part of that process for you, does taking services away from the elderly and poor, the traditionally underserved, ethically fit into it, regardless?

Yeah? Well that's a problem. 

Adultery is a sin of the first order, right? It's a busted Commandment. Annulments are okay in the aftermath, though. There are whole offices dedicated to granting them. People are forgiven. There are thieves in every town, allowed to continue living there, and stealing is another big gun no-no. Catholic Social Services doesn't pull up stakes in towns because thieving miscreants are sapping tax dollars either incarcerated or roaming the streets. Addicts, gamblers, porn freaks, you name it - they're everywhere, mister Pope sir, sometimes holding public office, running these places! Is the response to this to shut down the shelters so heterosexual homeless people won't have anywhere to go either? Batten down the hatches! Do not show them the money! 

No, it is not.

I'm ranting when I said I wouldn't but I am incensed. I need to research all of this more but what I'm afraid of is I'll just confirm what I think I already know and I'll reach the sad, scary conclusion that I'll have to break entirely, even on the surface, even in terms of setting foot in buildings or participating in ritual ever, which I know is no threat to the church at all but it should be.

You'll take away services from the most needy citizens in the capital of this country while you'll travel to the ends of the earth - to places run by governments guilty in some cases of human rights crimes and vile abuses of oh, let's say, WOMEN? - to evangelize and find priests who fit the most basic of requirements.

They're men.

I am tired of abuse and discrimination in the name of supposedly holy things. 

Maybe it's a crisis of spirit of my own that's driving this home. I don't know. Why is so much about scarcity and lack? Where is compassion here, hand-in-hand with our own hardline views? Who is in charge of these universal shenanigans? Way to gear up for Advent, Vatican. 

This all fits together in my brain, I promise.

At the end of a conference I attended today one of the session leaders who is a yoga teacher led us through this breathing exercise of Oms and exhalations, stretching out our arms and finally bringing our hands to our heart and literally setting intentions for ourselves related to how we were going to treat ourselves with compassion as we moved forward with whatever we were doing in our lives.

It occurred to me that I don't do that anymore, that I am constantly moving, brain and body, thinking about what I'm not doing or what I need to be doing or where I need to go that I either haven't gone or don't want to. I haven't taken the time to check in with myself, beyond the most basic of environmental scans. It felt good. I felt connected to something - to the other people in the room or to my own heart and mind for a change and it took that to realize how disengaged I am. 

Tonight my father and I had a talk in the car on the way home from a basketball game about Ft. Hood, about what people are going through in the military, and I watched our own sometimes divergent views come together around the issues involved - the suffering of others and the lunacy of systems, on the danger of doing things in the same way over and over in spite of crushingly bad results.

I don't understand this way of thinking. I don't understand a monolithic entity that continues, in an age of great change and challenge for so many people, to dig in its heels, to hate, to take away. It is the opposite of spiritual growth, in my excommunicated eyes. And honestly, I'm not stupid enough to ask for a shift in belief system that makes it all of a sudden throw its arms wide open to homosexuals, because I don't believe that will happen. But what I would like is for humanity to intrude upon whacked out principle, and for commitments made to needy citizens in major metropolitan areas to be kept, because that's just the right thing to do. It's like the golden rule in action, or something.

Giving up Lent for Lent - or How It's Not the 40-day Shred

My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent.
Me: Does she know what Lent is?
Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.

I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)

I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.

My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.

It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.

The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.

I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.

I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.

There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.

And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.