Posts tagged ‘catholics’
Infinite Virginity (What a cool name for a band)…
Familiarity with your own religion (or at the least, the one you were raised in) often immunizes you from recognizing how weird it is. When I first met my husband I recall thinking “Mormons believe some really weird stuff! How can anyone with half a brain believe this!?” Then he asked me if I believed in transubstantiation and the ever-virgin Mary. The answer was that no, I didn’t and that furthermore, I didn’t know that as a Catholic I was even supposed to! The fact that I didn’t believe in half the things the Catholic church taught was actually one of the things that made me start questioning my faith. As soon as I started to see my own religion from the same distance as all the other ones, it ceased to hold any real significance for me. I quite happily threw the baby out with the bath water.
The ever-Virgin Mary was always a strange concept to me and one that I had given a lot of thought to. So, when I heard an author on the radio not too long ago, talking about sex and the bible I was very interested. His point was that in the Catholic church, it is believed that each human is born with original sin. This is why it was necessary for Jesus to have been born of a virgin, so that he was not tainted by this sin. It is also why Mary was forced to remain a virgin, so that she could remain a saint and sinless forever. Except, there is a problem. For Mary to her herself remain sinless, she too must have been born of a virgin. Uh oh. This is where the whole thing starts to unravel. (To be fair, anyone with a heart beat should recognize the absurdity of the ever-virgin claim before we get to this point, but I digress.) So was Mary’s mother also a virgin? And her mother and so on? Nobody ever gets into that because theological muddy waters are best avoided if you want to keep up the ruse.
Poor, poor Mary and Joseph. Born of a virgin-mother and a sexually frustrated father, forced to remain chaste and endure the death of her only (only?! that’s a whole other post) son on a stick in the desert, and wife to a very bitter man who must have been on the receiving end of a lot of jokes. And all for the love of a non-existent God and beatification by a sexually perverted church. Not much of a life is it? Better to have never existed at all. :)
ritual sacrifice
I missed going to church today. As a Catholic, Easter was always a big deal. I loved going to church…especially all the masses leading up to Easter Sunday. The priest washing our feet, the nails being driven into the cross, the sadness of the passion story and the wonder of Jesus’ resurrection. I remember the songs that we sung, the excitement I felt when I bought my Easter dress, the smell of incense, the joy of Palm Sunday and how all the kids would sit through mass, braiding our palms. How the entire mass competed against the quiet rustle of palm branches.
Rituals are so powerful. That is why churches rely on them as much as they do. Whether it is a Catholic mass, where everyone sings psalms as a group and you already know what words will come next, to the Mormon temple ceremonies, all churches are rich with repetition, tradition and synchronicity. It makes you feel safe, secure and like you are part of something bigger than yourself. You not only identify with the religion but with the group of people who belong to it – even those who you have not met. It connects you to your heritage, your future and in a sense, humanity.
My husband and I both find ourselves missing these things at times. Usually, for me at least, it happens at Christmas and Easter. I have thought about what I can do about this for our family. Do we need to put aside an hour each week to slow down, think and reflect on our lives? Should we make it a point to go outside, explore nature and connect with the larger world in an attempt to recreate our own “church”? Do our children need that ritual to feel secure?
I haven’t got an answer I’m afraid. I do think that there is a difference between the vacuum left by leaving a church and never having had one to begin with. I don’t think you miss what you haven’t experienced. Having said that, a lack of community and connectedness are probably one of the atheist’s biggest challenges. Truth doesn’t always compare to cheesy songs sung with 100 other people.
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