Listening: "Sunday, Bloody Sunday," "New Year's Day," U2
Considering: my position vis a vis the Church
Desiring: clarity
Physical Aches and Complaints: cramps from HELL

The Catholic church has done some horrible things in it's time, it has also done lots of good and important things. But nothing makes good press like a scandal.

But for the most I've been able to stick with the Church as my main outlet for the expression of my faith. But something is tripping me up. At a time when enrollment in the Holy Orders is at an all-time low the Vatican wants to exclude homosexual men from signing up and is starting to make sounds that imply that homosexual priests are an aberration and should not exist I'm really questioning my position to continue with the Church.

I try very hard to keep my politics seperate from Church teachings primarily because my thoughts on sex and reproduction are quite at odds with what the Church says about it. But for my sense of interaction with God, and how I've been taught to speak with Him and relate to the heavenly host has come primarily from the Church. And this leaves me in a great quandary.

I've sat on witches circles, lit candles at three am and spoken to the moon until my eyes ached but nothing has brought the satisfaction of kneeling before the altar at St Mary's in Fullerton and praying the bedtime prayer to Mary I was taught when I was about three.

There are other Christian factions I suppose, many more that would be in line with my beliefs and politics, but having attended services at Lutheran and Episcopalean churches and sat in on Fundamentalist and Evangelical bibles studies (yes I know the last two are crazier than the Catholics) there's something I still miss. I like the regimented formality of mass. I like all the candles and the stained glass. And while post-Reformation churches tend towards inviting worshippers to avoid form over function I feel strangely uncomfortable praying with them.

The Church has moved in cycles, occasionally having stand out theologians - many of who were cannonized - encourage the faithful to study their religion and think about what they did so as not to take the soul out of the action and having an overbearing heirarchy extolling the virtues of *not* questioning them. Right now I feel like we're sliding down from a high point that valued thought almost as highly as faith under the papacy of John XII (I think, or was it XIII? I forget) and his Second Vatican Council. That John proposed universal salvation, basically that there is no hell, and the destructive forces of the adversary were here, on this earth. That there was not and could never be an adversarial force that could create its own world to drag dead souls down into eternal pain and suffering, but it could introduce that in this world and tempt unwary souls with pleasure and escape from suffering by taking care of themselves first at the cost of hurting others. In otherwords, we live in hell and when we die we will all fact forgiveness in one way or another and eventually enter Heaven. This is everyone. You, me, Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, Hitler, Osama bin Laden, heck, even the original Martin Luther.

I believe in this in a kind of bass-akward kind of way. God is everything. All physical things, all forces, all emotions. But that doesn't mean that there is no right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate. I personally feel that there are two ways to go about life and that is either toward God or away from Him. In life we switch back and forth, almost like a pendulum. But we can control how we swing. At some point we may even be able to "cut the string" so to speak and allow our centrifugal forces to propel us away from that which was keeping us back from an unwavering path. I'm barely interested in what happens after life because in the end I think it'll be so completely different from anything that we have known or could know striving for one hypothetical circumstance versus another is virtually futile. Hopefully it will have something to do with more thoroughly knowing existence, which to me translates to knowing God. But I don't really know and until I get what I'm supposed to do here straightened out I can't be bothered to care.

Wow, I am a humanist. I used to hate those guys. hums...

Well I still disagree with the Church and really hope an upswing in promoting thought and faith over knee-jerk disgust and form comes along soon. But I'll try not to get my hopes up.