Seeded

I went to Church earlier this year. Now before you go gettin' all excited about my return to Christianity, this was a familial obligation. My niece had her First Communion, which the Catholic Church is starting to call First Eucharist. The title change annoys me, but then, there isn't much about the Church that DOESN'T bug me.

I won't go into the details of the family dynamics of the event, except to say that some of that side of the fam is Catholic and some isn't, so there's the usual back-and-forth Catholic vs. Protestant bullshit. Tangentially, I always wonder about the crappola that goes on between the different sects of Christianity. If they're all following the path of righteousness, where do they get off bashing one another's forms of Christianity? But I digress.

My niece is 7. First Communion (I flat out refuse to call it First Eucharist, its too cumbersome and strange-sounding to my ears.) at that age is about the pretty dress, the presents, and the little veil that you get to wear. The significance of accepting the body and blood of Christ, as Catholics believe the communion bread and wine are transformed during the blessing from bread and wine to body and blood, is largely lost on your average 7 year-old. Trust me. Been there, done that, have the pictures to prove it.

I haven't been to Church since my nephew's first communion, two years ago. At that Mass, I enjoyed myself hugely, but not for reasons of faith. Firstly, because DH was not raised Catholic as I was, and the subtle cues that indicate to the congregation when to stand, when to kneel, and when to sit are lost on anyone who doesn't have that doggerel pounded into their heads from birth. So he's half a beat behind, and each time the congregation moves, he rolls his eyes at me, as if to say, "What? Again? Why can't you people just SIT STILL?" So that makes it hard not to giggle through the Mass. A benefit of being with someone for nearly half of your life is the ability to telepathically communicate with them. 

Secondly, at my nephew's first communion, the priest had all of the children come up to the altar and sit down on the dais. He joined them, in his vestments, sitting down on the floor with them, and giving the homily to them. He ignored the rest of us, just having a conversation with the kids. I know it made them feel special and involved in the Mass, unlike every other Mass they'd ever been to in their lives.

The priest made an effort at this Mass as well to bring it to the kid's level. Might have even been the same priest, I'm not sure.

The communion song was about growing; a part of the refrain was

Seed scattered and sown
Wheat gathered and grown

I was thinking about English, and a few of the other words in English that sound like seeded; seated, ceded. As these words swirled around in my head, I was remembering so much of the dogma of my childhood. The Nicene Creed, a recitation of Catholic beliefs. At the end, it talks about Jesus seated at the right hand of of the Father. I can't tell you how many homilies I heard over the years about growing and gardening, seeds, seated....and how I've refused to cede my viewpoint that the Catholic Church wants women to be barefoot and pregnant, or nuns.  According to Pope John Paul II, the only two acceptable vocations for women:  wife AND mother (The two are NOT mutually exclusive; to be one is to be the other.) OR a nun.

Ladies, isn't that wonderful?  You can choose to become a member of a religious order, or you can get married and start popping out kids.  Y'all have fun with that....I'm not allowing them to plant those "seeds" in my head.

Atone

In a holiday greeting, a friend urged me to remember those we lost this year, and celebrate those that are still here. We do that around New Year's. That and make new starts, new resolutions.

Generally, for a reason that remains unknown to me, I tend to think of fall, rather than the new year, as a time for resolutions and changes in habit. Probably just 'cause I like to be contrary, more than any other reason. However, since most of the rest of the world does it now, I'll indulge in a bit of it as well.

I'd like to be able to let go of the guilt that I carry around.

That's my resolution, to feel less guilty about any and everything. There's a website I discovered years ago, I don't know if the domain is still active and I'm not about to check; it was called Catholic Guilt, and it was a porn site.

The name stuck with me, though, making me wonder at the time if the Church created guilt in its practitioners, or if those who practice the religion are just prone naturally to more guilt.

It starts young, this whole guilt thing. It varies from parish to parish, of course, but the sacrament of Confession, a Catholic's FIRST confession, takes place anywhere from 8 to 12 years old. Mine was in the 4th grade, at about 9 years old.

Confession is all about receiving absolution for your sins. Now please tell me; what sins could the average middle class American 9-year-old possibly commit? Lying, fighting with siblings, OK, I'll give you those. I imagine that the priests tasked with hearing those first confessions howl with laughter as soon as they're able....the kids are so nervous, and the sins so petty, I'm sure it is an exercise in hilarity for the most part.

I dutifully made my first confession with the rest of my class, but the strains that became fissures, then cracks and finally breaks in my faith started not long after that first confession.

I was about 12, and playing with a new friend in our neighborhood. I'd gone to school with her for a while, and like most of my suburban schoolmates, she was Catholic like me. Her parent's new house was within walking distance of mine, and we spent a lot of time together in the summers.

"I have to go, I have to get to Confession," I told her one afternoon. The local parish had open time for confessions on Saturdays, and I went from time-to-time.

"Why?" She asked, hugely startled. "I don't believe in Confession. How can a priest grant forgiveness? Only God can do that. Priests are human; forgiveness is divine. I don't believe that they really have the power to grant absolution, do you?"

(Yes, we really talked like that. Bright kids, with big vocabularies...dorks...shoot me.)

"Um, yeah..." I trailed off. She was by far cooler than me during the school year, and I didn't want to seem provincial. "That's what they teach us..."

The more I thought about it, the more I decided she was right. How did saying a few Hail Marys fix some petty wrong that I'd done? God somehow was closer to the priests than the ordinary people? With typical pre-teen sarcasm: What-ev-er! And: plur-eze! That was the end of confession for me. I've never been back.

It is a really nice idea, though. That with a few simple prayers, you can atone for wrongs done, whatever they may be. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way for me.

What guilt am I carrying around? Oh, a few things. I feel guilty that I'm not as good at many things as I think I ought to be. That I'm not perfect, which who knows where I got that idea, I ought to be absolutely perfect at everything I try on the very first attempt. Or that I'm insanely jealous of the lives my sisters are leading, I feel really guilty about that, how jealous I am of them, because it is patently ridiculous. I should be proud of them, happy for them (and I am) and able to leave it at that (but I'm not).

The times that I know peace from this cacophony are only when I'm able to enter into a meditative state of some sort; either during my yoga practice, or when I'm running. Both of those things being times when I can concentrate solely on what I'm doing just that second, and nothing else.

Not even when I'm sleeping does it go away; I had way, way, waaaaay too vivid dreams the other night that I feel very guilty about. And yep, there ARE limits to my over-sharing, because I'm certainly not about to share that one.

So the question remains; how to let go of the guilt? And the only answer I can come up with is to increase the amount of time that I spend running and doing yoga. An answer that I like a whole lot, incidentally.

In my spare time (hahahahahahahaha) next year, I am going to get my certification to teach yoga. As well as apply to several graduate programs, after taking the GRE.

hmmm. perhaps the guilt factor comes from setting expectations far too high, then feeling like I've failed when I fall short.




Nah.




Listening to: Rent soundtrack, Seasons of Love

Contraception Day

It isn't often that I write more than one post in a day. Something has to happen or catch my attention or really piss me off for me to come back to the computer and finish another post. I start more than one a day, usually, but they sit in my queue for a few days until I get them finished.

Today, it is something that has me pissed and feeling confrontational and like I've been left in the dark. I get news feeds from NOW (National Organization for Women), the ACLU, and NARAL, so I'm surprised that this didn't hit my radar screen before the actual day. I heard it on the BBC's World Today, which my local NPR affiliate carries. I love listening to the Beeb. I love to hear the voices of the Brits...mmmm, those accents. But I digress.

I turned the radio on when leaving Pilates, and caught about 15 minutes of the programme. If you're a regular reader, maybe you've been wondering why I haven't been doing Current Events or politics lately, and the answer is that I'm depressed enough without focusing on the constant stream of bad news. Every time I tune in to NPR or CNN, I hear and see things that make me sad and angry, leave me feeling impotent and powerless in the face of a giant patriarchal Republican conspiracy. Now I know that point of view is both radical and a weee bit unfounded, part of my natural paranoia, but I can't help feeling like the bad news from Iraq combined with radical religious right hysteria and the erosion of our civil rights by things like the USA PATRIOT ACT all weigh me down, make my depression worse. Therefore, I haven't been focusing on that so much lately.

But then I'll hear something that snaps me back to a reality that I'm not happy about. Today was World Contraceptive Day, and I didn't even know it. Contraceptives are a woman's issue, solely because no one has bothered to try to invent a male version of The Pill. Don't get me started on that one.

Being raised Catholic, you know that I was taught from an early age that contraceptives of any type are wrong. It goes without saying that I never agreed with that idea, in fact it mystified me from the very first time I ever heard it. I'm not alone in that; many Catholics use every type of contraception available, because no one really wants 21 children. Who can afford that in this day and age? The Church's stance on contraception began when the Church wanted lots of new followers, and when the infant mortality rate for the entire known world was very, very high. Outdated? Yep, you could say that.

I've written before about the things that Pope John Paul II had to say about "appropriate" roles for women; the duality of motherhood and wife should be enough for them, according to his late Holiness's 1988 letter to women. I don't have much use for Benedictine XVI, his writings before he became pontiff as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger are enough to make me hunt for the nearest vomitorium.

The Beeb had 3 people on the program to talk about Contraception Day; one was a Catholic professor, a woman, who opposes any contraception. One was a scientist who has researched contraceptives extensively in developing nations, and one was a spokesperson for a Brit organization called Marie Stopes. The scientist and the Marie Stopes bloke were both well-reasoned and sane. The professor is a whole 'nother story.

The professor started her comments off by noting that she's opposed to contraception not as a Catholic, but as a woman. Contraceptions are bad for women, y'all. Who knew? I always thought that bringing a child into the world should be a reasoned, measured decision, one not undertaken lightly, one that you should make when you are emotionally, physically and financially able to care for another human being. Wow, guess I really missed the boat there. Apparently, I shouldn't use contraceptions because they're unhealthy. Riiiiight.

Turns out that the Church does support one type of contraception: Natural Family Planning. But then again, the Church doesn't allow for sexual intercourse of any type outside of the marriage bed, for the sole purpose of procreation. What does it say about your sexuality if you allow it to be controlled by people who are (theoretically) abstinent their whole lives?

But anyway. I won't let this post become a diatribe about sexuality. I won't let this post become a diatribe about sexuality. I won't let this post become a diatribe about sexuality. Sorry, back to the point.

World Contraception Day is about bringing attention to the fact that many women around the world do not have access to birth control of any sort, even when they want it. Additionally, it calls attention to the fact that by 2050, there will be two billion (that's billion with a B) more people on this planet than there are today. If we don't start paying attention to population control, we're going to out grow the planet before the end of the 21st century. Scary.