The Holy Catholic Ice Cream Cone

Or: my problem with Catholicism.

(Well, one of them, anyway.)

A man was once asked what faith he held, and he replied that he was a Catholic.  A brief pause and a moment of introspection had him add the qualifier, "Well, a lapsed Catholic."

To which the man who posed the question simply rejoined, "Is there any other kind?"

At what point does a church cease to be the congregation and instead be identified with the facade of the building in which it is housed?

My earliest memories of church are of gathering in the gymnasium of my elementary school.  There were stacking chairs arranged and an overhead projector, rather than copies of hymnals, provided as aid for the people to sing along with the day's psalms.  (Even with the visual aid, I still always belted out, "Peace is flowing like a... Ri-iiii-verrr.  Setting all the cactus free!")

We eventually moved into a larger school that had an attached auditorium that served as a parish.  It was there I had my first (and only) Confession and received my first Eucharist.  One of the girls in my class didn't raise it properly to her mouth and had to line up and go again.  I thought she was lucky to get an extra helping of Christ.

Again, several years later, we got a real church of our own, with hymnals and a parking lot, a raised dais and pulpit, and the priest got fancier robes with each move.

In attending a funeral last month, the same priest from my childhood was officiating at the service, held in an even bigger and more grandiose church, and I felt smallified by the capacious surroundings.  Stained glass windows, a huge parking lot, hand-carved crucifix and layers of draping cloth to cover the increased girth of the priest.  Vaulted ceiling with discretely placed speakers and silently whirring fans to aid in the diffusion of the holy aura permeating the building.  The slender microphone snaking around to his mouth from the priest's ear, and through which the Word of God was broadcast over the sound system so all could hear, even those way, way in the back pews, frankly looks better on Britney Spears and created a sense of distance between the priest and the people.  (Kind of like he's the mouthpiece of God and therefore needs to speak to the rest of us through his own mouthpiece.  Or is it just me?)

Somewhere, between the gymnasium of St. Justin elementary school and Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Catholic parish, I got the sense that church wasn't so much about the people that attended, but more to do with the icons housed in the building and the tenets espoused by the priest.  The sense of community had been replaced with that of leader and followers.

I don't doubt that this comes across as more than a little disparaging to religion, not to mention somewhat facetious.  And it is. 

I hold my beliefs loosely in my hands and offer them freely to those who enquire, but never foist them on those who have no interest.  And I hold them loosely, not because they are fragile -- so very far from it -- but because they are constantly morphing.  They grow as I grow.  There is a solid core of belief, but it is swathed in play-doh, and the breeze and the tickling of my fingertips have their ineffable influence.

And thus is in not with Catholicism.

For the doctrine and dogma at the core of the Catholic faith are bound in iron chains and chastity belts and weighted down by tradition and icons.  There is little to no room for interpretation and all questions seem to have their rote answers.  And most people seem to be content to listen, and follow, and not ask questions.  A friend of mine recently wrote: If the tradition is exclusive (Christian Communion) or the community is exclusive (Freemasons), then you risk becoming isolationist and alienating. The church has excelled at this for millennia even though, ironically, it espouses an ideology of unity.  Just so long as you're a Catholic.

My own journey through religion has followed what I observe now to be a fairly predictable and dare I say not at all uncommon path.

I began, as I imagine most people do, as a child.  The wide-eyed wonder with which I approached the natural world was born of an amazement of the inexplicable, at the time, phenomena that surrounded me on a daily basis.  I marvelled at seeing an endless sea of clouds gently curving over the horizon and wondered why the tops were all puffy and the bottoms were all flat.  How the heck did that work?  And even though the car may have been hurtling down the highway at the tail end of a rain storm, that rainbow just never got any closer!  I was largely content to gaze and marvel, but always asked questions about my surroundings.  My appreciation was unspoken, but omnipresent.

I was only ever lured to church, never had a desire to attend, and never really 'got' it.  For me, and my brother, the best part of Sunday Mass was going to Dairy Queen afterwards for a chocolate dipped soft serve cone.  I will forever associate those with church.  Given my sweet tooth, this bait actually worked into my teenage years, at which point an element of independent thought intruded its way through the morass of dogmatic preaching that had heretofore experienced little success in breaching my outer defences of ambivalence.

What's that guy spouting off about now?  Did Jesus really make all that fish and bread multiply?  Water to wine?  And that whole walking on water deal... what gives?  Noah's ark?  If the whole Earth flooded, where'd all that water go?  Has anyone ever found the remains of an Egyptian army inexplicably charging across the floor of the Red Sea?  An army marching around in circles, carrying a big box and blowing trumpets actually caused the walls of Jericho to crumble?  Who buys into this; I mean really!

It wasn't long before I officially told my mother that I was no longer going to be attending church and dubbed myself an agnostic.  I was fairly certain that there was a Big Something out there, but I had no idea what it was and had, by this point, also become fairly certain that it wasn't a Big Something that would content Itself with being defined purely within the confines of the Catholic doctrine I had been assailed with for the first 17 years of my life.  This Big Something, in my mind, wouldn't put up with that sort of B.S.

So I harrumphed as only an arrogant teenager flexing his new found omniscience can harrumph and thought myself terribly enlightened to be able to remove myself from the mass of lemmings in the pews.

This harrumphing, I quickly found, did not provide any answers to the questions that Catholicism had purported to answer, and which answers I had most definitely chosen to eschew.  Or at the very least decide for myself whether I wanted to agree with them.  A necessary element of humility was slowly accepted and I grudgingly embraced ignorance with the caveat that I would strive for its undoing.

I am rarely content with accepting the unknown as unknowable.  Thus did introspection worm its way past my previous ambivalence and cause me to start again with the question-asking thing.  But this time, there not being a priest readily available with his penumbra of holiness and cornucopia of a priori answers, I sought within.

Providing my own answers was predicated on the basis of my conclusion that Religion with a capital 'R' is wholly Fear-based and, though individual religious entities inarguably do Good for Man (lots of capitalisation going on here), religious bodies are extant to assuage mankind's fear of the unknown (ie - death).  They need to be; the ignorant masses demand that The Way be provided for them rather than seeking it.  (Even religion follows the supply-demand curve; they're just a whole lot better at marketing.)  The sheer audacity that there are those who claim to have the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything based on the tenuous fact that some time ago somebody said something somewhere, and yet another person subsequently wrote down something approximating what that other somebody said is such a mind-numbing act of hubris that I can hardly fathom.

The subsequent years of introspection have led to certain conclusions of my own, most of which are far from immutable.  I must always keep in mind that they are the unsubstantiated conclusions of a fallible human being who thinks that they just feel right.  If I do not give somebody else's questioning of what I believe its due consideration, I need a bit of a smack in the head.  I am reminded of Valentine Michael Smith's admonition to himself at the beginning of Stranger in a Strange Land: "I am only an egg."

This, then, is some of what I believe:

• There is a God.
• I am not Him, but I am part of Him, as are we all.
• We are all One.
• Thus, I am no less a Son of God than was Jesus.  (Yay heresy!)
• God has gifted us with three things, and three things only:
  Life, Free Will and Ignorance.
• Our Purpose here is to use the gift of life, exercise our free will and lessen our ignorance through experience.
• We have endless opportunities for experience.
• The only Hell is that which we create for ourselves here on Earth.
• There is no evil but that we define it as being such relative to our experiences.
• From those previous two can be concluded such controversies as: Hitler went to heaven.
• Love is all there is.
• I do not require anyone to share my beliefs.

And now, having journeyed this far in 30 short years, all I really want is to return to that wide-eyed wonder and silent appreciation of the child that I was.  Thankfully, I am still able to do that, most poignantly when I hold my own in my arms.

Comments

[Aaron]

I'm sorry that your experience of the Church has made you feel this way. Much like yourself, most of my life was spent questioning the purpose and validity of religion, especially Catholicism. Unlike yourself, however, I was able to find the answers that resolved the intellectual and experiential confusions I had encountered all those years. The biblical stories, the miracles, the "proof" that I needed to have before I would be convinced was given to me, though it was my pursuit that unearthed the realities buried beneath misconceptions. Facts and theories, surrounded with historical records and liturature, all piecing together to frame a picture that we know as "the Catholic Church," are what I have at my disposal now.
My own struggle to understand the 'why is that' is not finished. But at least I have been able to come to a place of peace and understanding that no longer leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as if I was being lured or fooled into believing a global hoax. The reason that religion has stayed alive is because great thinkers of every age are compelled to study it, to learn the details, to challenge its validity, to stretch the limits of 'why we believe', and for some strange reason, they are convinced that it is true. Not based off of only someone else's opinions, but from facts backed up by personal conviction.
As I said at the beginning, I am sorry that your experience has not been fruitful in finding the answers that should have been given to you so you could properly decide for yourself. Perhaps you feel that they were, and you have to follow your conscience in that. Still, if you aren't sure, don't give up until you get answers.
God will guide you.
-Congratulations on the birth of your child.
Aaron (found you on blogsearch)

[Tina]

I can certainly relate to this one. I started out believing everything I was told in Catholic school. And that was the biggest part of my problem. While there were other kids who could just blow off Sister's suggestion that eating meat on Friday would lead to an eternal stint in the fires of Hell, I swallowed the concept ... hook, line, and sinker. Which caused me to spend that part of my life which should have been the most carefree , pretty much scared to death. Doubly sad, seeing as how I was a parent and teacher's dream ... Always obeyed, and got straight A's.
I grew up and started to question this whole thing when I could no longer ignore that quite a few of the things I had previously accepted not only didn't make sense, but they were causing me to be less of a person than I could be. Thus started my journey to discover how I MYSELF thought and believed. At 51, I am still walking down that path, and I am sure I will still be on it at my deathbed. And this is the greatest of discoveries for me. Because it means that I finally recognized that I am a mere mortal who was never intended to figure it all out. Just to try.

[Simon]

And you know Tina, what would be the fun in figuring it all out? What would there be left to do but start all over again?

[Jenn]

"Peace is flowing like a... Ri-iiii-verrr.  Setting all the cactus free!"

HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!

I always thought it was "Setting all the captains free."

I survived twelve agonizing years of Catholic school. They lost me very early on, right after our fifth-grade math teacher Sr. Maria Madonna made all the boys in the room raise their hands and promise they would never, ever let any woman they know ever have an abortion. I recognize Sr. M.M.'s heavy-handed uberpatriarchal approach is not representative of all Catholic education, but hell, it sure did me in. I was out, man, out!

Made worse only by the seventh grade, when I witnessed another nun grabbing a third-grade girl by her pigtails and slamming her head repeatedly against a cinder-block wall until my horrifed lay teacher ran out into the hall to intervene.

Holy crap.

[KiwiNomad06]

Wow, I am impressed with how you are able to lay out your thinking so clearly. I am quite a bit older than you and spent a lot of years "angry" with Church - not helpful to moving on. Now I am ready to try and sort out my thinking it seems to be that it is hard to find ways to talk about it.

I expect your babe in arms is now trying hard to crawl or walk.