Listening:
War Within a Breath, Rage Against the Machine lipstick 66, Machines of Loving Grace
New Year's Day, U2
Do what you Want, Bad Religion
Darkstar, Delirium
The Big Come Down, Nine Inch Nails
Pluto, Bjork
Been a Son, Nirvana
Juarez, Tori Amos
Playing your Song, Hole
Trash, Korn
Breathe, Prodigy
Radio Friendly Unit shifter, Nirvana
Starfuckers, Inc (alt. Version), NIN
All the Same, Orgy
Polly, Nirvana
Angry Chair, Alice In Chains
It’s On!, Korn
Wish You Could be Me, Korn
Thinking of you, A Perfect Circle
Ready for Action, the Crystal Method
Mentally Replaying: yesterday's sermon
Desiring: peace

***Attention: my mood is marked as reluctant because I came to the abrupt conclusion that this is subject matter I haven't discussed in my journal purely for fear of what others may thing. So I'm still nervous, I want to edit or censor myself but I'm fighting it.

Yesterday, as I'm sure you're not surprised to read, I went to mass and spent most of the day with my family. All in all it was very nice - we celebrated my mother's (belated) birthday, I visited Samuel, my mom's dad, and had a huge yummy brunch.

But what I've been stuck on, ever since I heard it yesterday, was the homily at mass. It's going to take me a while to get to it, so either scroll down or read the ensuing background.

My race was baptized Catholic before it was even born so it was simply destined that I would be Catholic. My father has an intense sense for the spiritual, but only so long as the trappings are recognizably Christian. He dismisses other religions as either an unclear vision of the one true God or as perverted lies promoted by an antagonistic figure. He doesn't talk about the devil really, he doesn't attribute anything that actually happens on this Earth as the devil's doing, but he does wholly believe in hell, where the devil is waiting for those who die without knowing God.

My mother, sad to say, hasn't evinced so much spirituality as religiosity. She'll be the first to light the candles, the first to insist everyone stop what they're doing to pray, but she doesn't have any personal ideas about the universe. If she feels she really, really needs an answer and the material at hand doesn't provide a clear-cut one, she'll call up the church and ask a priest.

So if I only absorbed their beliefs about God and synthesized it into a spiritual thought process with only the Catholic Church to guide me I may just be radically different from how I am.

But I haven't. I blame my mother. I remember being very young and asking her what people meant by "mother nature." I think I heard it on Bewitched. She said that sometimes people call God by the name Mother Nature, but it's really the same thing. In those days and to this day I still can't imagine some old guy hanging out on the clouds watching us folks doing our "foolish mortal" thing.

I found God when I was walking my bike through some horse trails in the hills where I grew up. The bushes had nettles that flattened one of the tires and I had to walk. The sunlight through the trees was amazing and I was deep enough in the hills that I could only hear the wind and birds singing. I decided to sit for a while since I was in no hurry. I don't remember what I thought about but I remember feeling like everything was perfect, like I was part of something huge, tremendous even. If I wanted I could reach into the ground and feel the roots growing, I could feel the sun on the top leaves and birds flitting between branches. I became aware of God, there.

I remain unconcerned with the gender of God. The shape is obvious. The word "shape" only applies to that which is tangible, visible and otherwise able to be interacted with. Therefore the shape of God is all that we see and feel and so much more that defies all measurement.

Growing up, I became dedicated to one rule. Truth. We owe to ourselves and to each other, as well as the world. Therefore we must be able to act in such a way where we do not become so shamed by our actions that we will lie about them and deceive ourselves or those around us.

Unfortunately that doesn't mean I stopped doing bad things, but I tried darn it. And it became a little easier to discern when I thought I had done something wrong.

As the fortunate product of the public school system (as opposed to other products who were, shall we say, unfortunate, not everyone's PS experience will be a good one and to hear tell of it PSs suck...but I'll have to go into that another time), I was exposed to other mindsets, other thought processes, other religions, and - the evil of all evils - atheists. Now, I'm not sure but I think my high school English teacher, Mr Kopacki, was an atheist, but I know he was raised Catholic. I mention this because if there were one person who is most responsible for shaping my mind to the state that it's in now, after my dad that would be Mr Kopacki.

I learned to separate words from definitions, and definitions from implications, thanks to Mr Kopacki and a class he taught my senior year called "Theory of Knowledge." It was a serious mind trip into the arena of abstract thought and the esoteric. He liked to challenge a lot of basic perceptions students would bring in that weren’t developed, merely absorbed from their churches and families. In a word he challenged us, but he did in the way that, for me at least, inspired careful introspection. There were other teachers and many a classmate that flatly rejected religion, especially Christianity, and dismissed the faithful as fools and mentally incompetent, but Mr Kopacki knew we didn’t get into the honors classes by fluke, and we sure didn’t stay in them by whim. But it still took a certain amount of stubbornness to maintain my belief in Something Else.

Somewhere along the way, I’m not sure where or when, I tossed out all of the morals inherent to the religion and went back to my adherence to the truth. This was in an effort to isolate the different factors that go into every decision I make. Laws and commandments are all well and good, I’ve decided, but honestly we know what is good and what is bad. This is not something that comes to us cerebrally, nor is it something that we could not know without having a divine being spell it out for us. Morality came from within, from somewhere deeper than conscious thought. It was gut reaction that grabbed at our reason and demanded to be heard. We understood love and so we learned heartbreak when someone we loved died. But this heartbreak, we learned, could be channeled against the factors that took those we love from us. Thus we could hate, thus we could create enemies. But we also understood balance, we learned of peace and we found that if everyone just accepted that killing people was bad we might be able to more in control of this balance, this peace. We found a rule to stick to that made things better.

In college and afterward I would have conversations like this with people, and often they would tell me that I’m not very Christian. I deny that flatly. The difference, I’ve come to realize, between moral Christians and ethical people with other beliefs is the mysteries that we believe in, not the morals we follow. That is not to say that one can be a Christian and not follow the basic morals. The whole point is to emulate the life of Jesus Christ, a pacifist teacher who encouraged acceptance of others. To ignore this to turn one’s back on the core of the religion.

When I’ve explained what my beliefs are without mentioning a Christian background it was pointed out to me that I might get a lot out of Buddhism. Sadly my research into Buddhism is terribly lacking so I don’t know the different kinds. The little that I’ve read indicates something that fascinates me and I find engaging even while it’s a little um… I dunno… high-handed almost. Yep, I just called Buddhism “high-handed.” There’s nothing high-handed about the process, it’s not even high-minded. But writers have a tendency to write from the assumption that those who seek Buddhism and are not brought up in its native culture do so because they are miserable. Let me tell you, the times that I feel miserable usually have everything to do with introspection and it takes getting out of my head and my own little world to fix it. And really, for my part I’m really just curious.

But anyway, I’ve totally wandered from the original point which was to explain that while I have a very stubborn faith in the religion I was based in, I am also a student of history and I’ve kept both eyes open when I’ve looked in on other religions. I thoroughly wish I knew more about other Western religions, primarily Judaism and Islam and it is to my continuing chagrin that the friends I’ve had who follow these religions know more about my faith than I know about theirs. Or rather, they know about my religion. Religion is, of course, very different from faith.

I think when I first hooked up with Molasses I really became stuck on him because of the many commonalities we had, not the least of which was a belief in the Almighty that was often verbalized the same way. We are both very faithful to the belief system that we were raised in, down to the details that we won’t talk about because we’ll just argue about them. He was raised Fundamentalist Christian and shrugs off the Catholic belief in intersession (i.e. praying to the Virgin Mary or to other Saints to take our petitions to the Lord). I can’t end a prayer without making the sign of the cross. It’s just not…finished…without one. But it’s important to note that we’ve both lost a serious amount of interest in the church, as this is where the people are, and people, we’ve both noticed, suck.

But we both go back as is expected by our families. It’s easier by far to go along with the family’s plan (and by that I mean the mom’s) than to try to buck the trend. Frankly, being a martyr is easy… facing down hordes of people holding torches and pitchforks…but trying to tell my mom that I don’t want to attend mass… *shudders* …uh… I don’t think so.

So yesterday I was at church. And like I said I believe in the mysteries. As much as I can feel the pull of the north and south, east and west and have recognized the patterns of threes in the world, even as much as I believe that some people are born into the world with prior knowledge of it, even for all of that I truly believe there was a man named Jesus who turned water into wine and for a follow up bested the one true Antagonist – death. I don’t think I’ll be convinced away from that. But the homily. Oy vey.

The priest was trying to make a very friendly point that was at once gory and hopeful. He talked about Christian martyrs from the Roman times to martyrs of this century who were tortured and murdered because they would not reject their religion. The trouble is he was trying to drive his point home by impressing on the congregation the horrible sorts of torture the people faced, and got many a visceral reaction from individuals in the pews. Even Molasses was surprised.

I was horrified.

Terrible shit happens to people. Fuckin happens. It sucks. It sucks all the more when it’s cause some power-hungry jack off finds out he can get off on wrecking people. But my earlier point stands. People suck. But I start getting resentful when one set of victims is held up as heroic or even better than anyone else just because they went through that horrible shit.

But the priest went blithely on telling us that the martyrs could only have done (gone through with being savaged and murdered by the haters) it because of their belief in God and the risen Christ.

Fuck that.

This same church is responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of all time, and it wasn’t even against people who were holding onto something against all odds. Women and men would get rounded up and thrown in prison to be horrifically tortured so that they would admit to something they weren’t. Whereas Christians were tortured to give up being what they were.

To speak about martyrs as if the rest of it never happened is sickening. The history of the church has never been fluffy and happy, and the only reason is because it’s made up of humans. I don’t mind the gore and I am proud to think on people who believed in something so much that they would die for it, but it does a disservice to all of humanity - all of God’s children – when we rewrite history so that only some people had it bad and only those people rose above the shit to pursue something greater.

But I’m stubborn. I still Believe. But I’m even more reluctant than ever to go back to church or to talk about my personal beliefs.