Shitty Catholic Origin Story
What the Hell is Going On Here?!?
I knew from the beginning it would be a rough fit.
Years before, while deep in study at a Reform Jewish temple, I made a joke to my husband: “wouldn’t it be a bitch if after this whole journey, I ended up Catholic?” To me at that time, it would mean a copout. A defeat, a bullshit judgment call, a cheap move. An easy, flaky sellout.
At the time, I was full of revulsion to the Catholic faith. I was preoccupied with the evil acts its people committed through their millennia of history. When I thought of the Catholic Church, I automatically thought (as many still do) “Imperialism. Corruption. Oppression. Homophobia. Antisemitism. Racism. Inquisition, Crusades, Sexual Abuse, Sexism. The weaponization of guilt as a means of control.” The long list of great sins, nailed to that old Wittenburg door by Martin Luther, that has since spawned ten thousand splinter factions within Christianity.
That was the joke: if after all this passionate study and earnest seeking, I finally jettisoned every last one of my moral principles and kowtowed to one of the most corrupt faiths on earth. He chuffled through a half-smile at the comment because even at that time, he had a quiet appreciation for the good things associated with the Catholic Church: transcendent art, the obligatory social justice work, some of the rowdier official Saints. Even then, deep within his beautiful revolutionary heart and long before he would outwardly admit it, he loved the mercy and tireless compassion of Jesus. Then, and still today, he tolerates my invective and ranting when my judgmental eyes discover something I deem to be an abuse of religious authority.
Fast-forward a couple years to the long and ridiculous Goldielocking1. Agnosticism never got comfortable for me - I could not stop poking and prodding and hungrily reading about the spiritual lives of humans; I was unable to not care. Atheism lured me directly into a black hole of existential despair. Thelema was too disorganized and I couldn’t learn enough Japanese to understand what was going on at the local Shin Buddhist temple2. Complicating matters, my suspicion was beginning to accumulate that there was indeed a Great Something “out there”, whatever the hell that meant.
My suspicions continued to mutate until they began to look like One Great Something. I needed to gather more data, from people that shared a similar suspicion. The Unitarian community, while wonderfully welcoming, left me hungry for a more substantial doctrine. The Quakers, so peaceful and so loving, were far too quiet and respectable for me to ever feel at home at the meetings. I couldn’t stay in Romania long enough to join the Orthodox church, and so, there I was, still spiritually starving, back on the Group W Bench3 from which I started the whole Quixotic quest.
The Great Something turned into God at that point, between the Unitarian and Quaker chapters: walking out of a hospital after visiting my dying father, while my brother was deployed to combat in the Middle East, recently sober4. With a Newport dangling out of my mouth, I held my lighter and extended my middle finger skyward. I flicked Him off. It wasn’t until later – embarrassingly much later – that I realized that I couldn’t be this furious with God while not believing He existed.
The Jesus thing happened between the Judaic and Eastern Orthodox chapters when a Calvinist friend innocently (I think?) asked me “what if God loved us hard enough that he put on a body to come down here and show us how to be human?” I realized: if God was made of the stuff I was beginning to suspect, coming down here to be with us, like us, is a thing He might [hypothetically] do. And most importantly, that the world’s religions in all their complex nuance and history were not a buffet that I had a right to pick and choose from. In the interest of scientific objectivity, I went back to where my ancestors came from: the Catholic Church.
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Here, I will explain this whole predicament a bit. More than that, I hope to help you see the whole Catholic thing through some different (i.e., unorthodox, probably inappropriate) eyes - and if possible, share a little of the hope, peace, and healing I’ve found here with you.
Goldilocking (v.) - to jump around between commitments like a real flake
although dancing with the elder Japanese women at the Obon was one of my Top 10 Rad Religious Moments. You should try it sometime!
see Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant
not for the last time, unfortunately. But 10 years of sobriety and counting now! Please pray for me.