More death

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As I deal with the remnants of my uncle's recent death, I can't help but worry my father might not be far behind. He's

My dad had double bypass surgery last year. At first, he improved his attitude about life and eating and exercise, but like with any supposed revelation, the effects were purely transitory. He quickly went back to his old habits of eating and drinking as much as he wanted, as often as he wanted.

If I believed in signs from God, I would say when he contracted an extremely rare, extremely potent form of food poisoning in the summer of that same year that landed him in the hospital numerous times over the course of five months, often because he couldn't even keep water down, that it was a sign from God. A sign that said, "Hey, stupid, quit eatin' so goddamn much! I already saved your ass once this year and if you're not going to start losing weight, exercising, and taking care of yourself, then fine, I'll help you this one last time, but you're not going to like it."

Naturally, since he could barely eat anything for months, he lost tons of weight but, for the first time in at least two decades, he was at a healthy weight. Once the bacteria and its effects finally worked their way out, it was the new year, a clean slate. Of course, rather than keeping the slate clean, he filthied it with grease and alcohol.

My uncle first ended up in the hospital in January. For months, the prospects were still hopeful. In March, my parents went to Detroit to visit and to try to look after some of his business. They stayed with Margaret, my mom's childhood best friend. A few short months later, my uncle passed away. 

In June, when we prepared the memorial, the family again stayed with Margaret. My mother and I stayed a while longer than my dad and my sister. One evening while my mom, Margaret and I were chit chatting, my mom brought up my dad's awful health. She mentioned how he can't stop eating and drinking and in fact, those are the only two activities he seems to enjoy.

Margaret, who has a heart of gold and would never intentionally say anything harmful, remarked, "Yeah, he looked pretty chubby when he was here. He looked pretty good last time but he's put on a ton of weight since then."

It turns out, in three months' time, he had gained between 30 and 40 lbs.


Although raised as a true Catholic, when the majority of the damage was done, my father is not particularly religious. Yet, he clings to the faith that there is some governing force out there, that there is justice in the universe, that if he suffers enough by "doing the right thing," in the end, he will be somehow rewarded. As always with the victims of religion, he refuses to see when he's doing the wrong thing, and has no problem idly waiting to be rescued. 

In one way, I believe this attachment to religion has preserved him because he knows that, by the laws of the church, if he were to commit suicide, he would surely end up in hell. Instead, the attachment to religion is killing him slowly and painfully. While almost all religions have a principle that suicide is the highest of sins, one so offensive that it sends the spirit instantly to Hell without passing GO to collect his $200, there is no specific clause about reckless endangerment. It seems he has a plan of eating and drinking whatever he wants, overworking himself, over stressing himself, failing to relax for even a moment, and never bothering to move his body other than say, from his bed to the shower, from the shower to the toilet, from the toilet to the closet, from the closet to the car, from the car to the desk, from the desk to the car, from the car to the couch, from the couch to the bed. In other words, no exercise whatsoever.

Not surprisingly, this pseudo-hedonistic lifestyle has landed him at the doctor's office numerous times, each time with a set of numerous medications, each medication with a set of numerous side effects. Naturally, as the faithful are apt to do, he doesn't blame his lifestyle on this new set of side effects. It's, "the medication making me sick." Of course, he remains blind to the warning labels of the medication, most specifically, the warning labels about alcohol consumption, then lashes out with derision against the family doctor and how he's, "trying to kill me."

I understand his pain. He has had a painfully disappointing life. Nothing in his life has worked out the way he had struggled and planned, scrimped and saved for. I also can't help but wonder if all of his self inflicted suffering is a subconscious and constant punishment for making the "wrong" decision at a vital time in his career. He worked in the IT department at Ford Motor Company and when Ford dissolved the department, he could choose a path in the auto industry or a path in the IT industry. He opted for autos and we all know how that story goes.

In any case, I can't shake the hope that if he would let go of God or karma or any attachment to "spirituality" and afterlife, that he would commit himself to a better life. I would hope he would realize that he only has a short time left and when it's gone, it's gone. I would hope he would cherish his last, remaining, autumn years and would go the extra mile to get a few extra laps around the track. I would hope that he'd understand his family's love may be all that's there for him, but that it's a precious gift worth savoring every moment of.

Instead, as stubbornness runs high in the family genes, he will insist that his falsely hedonistic, yet incredibly masochistic lifestyle is The Way to go. Thanks, Catholicism, for fucking up my life, yet again.

Image stolen from quickmeme.com, who probably stole it from someone else.

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The Goddess Trap

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Like any other kid of reasonable intelligence who'd been raised Catholic, I began questioning Catholicism and Christianity in general pretty early on. As a kid, I never knew there was such a thing as an atheist. I never realized that it was possible to have no God at all. Had I known that, I probably would have realized the truth much sooner. Alas, I spent a lot of time seeing what else was out there. As a female who, at a very young age strove for equality, naturally, paganism, witchcraft, Goddess worship and all that jazz became my next stepping stone.

When I was very young, girls were not allowed to be altar servers in the Catholic Church. I was always jealous, not because I cared about serving Jesus, or assisting the priest, or sporting those ultra high fashion robes, but I wanted to play with those mystical toys. I wanted to ring bells after incantations, I wanted to carry offerings to the altar, I wanted to light and snuff candles. It seemed exciting and like it would connect me to something greater.

Fast forward a few years, the Pope announced that females could be altar servers, but by that time, I somehow wasn't interested anymore, probably because I had lost almost all interest in the Church. By that time I was sniffing around for a new spiritual home. It wasn't long after that I found witchcraft.

I'd run off with friends to bookstores and sneak pagan books home in my purse. Many of those books were written by men, but that didn't mean they were male slanted the way that Catholicism obviously was. I took great comfort in the idea of there being a feminine power that really controlled the universe. Of course, MOTHER Nature was not a dude and there's a reason people identify her as such.

I read all about the "history" of witchcraft, a lot of which was given a hippy accent, as much of it was revived in the 60s and 70s. I performed "spells," though I never asked for the selfish things most people would expect. I never once performed a love spell nor a money spell nor a revenge spell. I saw The Craft, I didn't want to be responsible for any poor bitches going bald in the locker room, no matter how nasty they were to me.

I did spells to achieve better enlightenment (or so I thought) or spells that thanked the Goddess, the plants, the animals. Though I did once perform a spell to encourage one of my school rivals to understand that being mean to people was harmful to herself and others....I was astounded when it appeared to work the very next day. She had always been rude and nasty to me, suddenly she was kind and polite. Ah, the Goddess listens, indeed!

A note about spells...they're not what you think. They're basically Sunday Mass for one. Depending on what you're focusing your energy on, you pick certain colors of candles, certain scents of oils or incense, certain days of the week or certain moon phases, place certain stones on the altar, say certain "incantations," or a prayer, ring bells at certain times, etc. There's really nothing magical about it.

It all felt very natural. Perhaps because Catholicism is so deeply rooted in paganism and ritual, I felt very comfortable with the tools of this new brand of spirituality I had found. Bells, candles, incense, chalices, tablecloths, all of these things were familiar and so indulged my inner child. I was finally able to be my own altar server and I didn't even have to wear an ugly robe. To top it off, I got to pick my own incense that wasn't the default Catholic Stank scent! How exciting!!

I stayed in this phase a few years until, like with most things, I got too lazy to maintain it. It got to be too much, maintaining a moon calendar, making sure I had all the right candles, scented oils, incenses, cloths, and whatever other embellishments I seemed to believe were necessary. It was all just too much.

I still have all my witchcraft books and even refer back to some of them once in a while. I do still find that certain scents, candles and stones seem to have an effect on my mood, and I enjoy having them around. There is something comforting about having a theme that stimulates all of your senses. I no longer believe I'm "channeling energy" or "casting spells," or doing anything else besides pleasing my senses, which should have always been good enough.

However, one of the main problems I had with witchcraft was the same as with Catholicism. I didn't feel "empowered" like I "should." Just like I never felt Christ's love burning in my heart, I never felt the Goddess' power coursing through my veins. I thought if I just worked harder on it, I'd be a better witch and would one day be filled with this blessing like so many others claimed to experience, but it never happened.

I think it all goes back to my inherently independent spirit. It's even a big joke in the family. Ever since I was old enough to have a sense of self, I've had one, and a very strong one. As young as age three, the family joke was, "There's the right way, the wrong way, and the the Katie way." My mother always joked that she should have named me "Katie Scarlet," after Scarlett O'Hara. My third grade teacher told my parents in a parent teacher conference that, "It's like Katie knows all this is bullshit." I didn't follow the beat of my own drummer, I WAS my own drummer. I had no need to follow or even to be followed.

This spirit is of mine is not interested in begging, beseeching, or humbling herself. This spirit knows that her values and her beliefs and her feelings are the only ones that matter. "Faith" of any kind will never empower this spirit for a very simple reason.

No one is empowered if she's always powerless, left begging, left pleaing, left sacrificing, left to be someone else's pawn in supposedly greater plan only to be discarded like an empty bullet shell just as soon as she's served someone else's purpose; left with the meager hope that someone else's use and abuse of her just won't be too painful, and left to believe that if it is, it's because she has done something unrighteous, or perhaps, regardless of how unbearable it may be, that she should still drop to her knees and thank someone else for making her suffer because she knows it's part of a higher wisdom that she is clearly too stupid, too small, and too insignificant to understand.

Goddess centered religions are no exception.

It's why I feel like so many feminists have cheated themselves by going into these Goddess centered belief systems rather than realizing the whole faith game is a trap. What's the point of giving a sex change to the one that holds you down? You're still beneath someone else, you're still someone else's pawn, you're still begging someone else for things that you could perhaps just as easily take initiative to achieve. If you were in jail for a crime you didn't commit, would you be so much happier being beaten by a female prison guard?

Some will argue that the Goddess is more peaceful and benevolent and doesn't encourage genocide, murder, sexism, racism, and violence, which does seem to be true from what I've read of her, but it's still a cult of the mind. There is no one, central definition of this Goddess, so how do I know? It's not like there's some kind Bible that tells us everything we need to know about her. Suffice to say, she still "has a plan" for you. She still plays favorites with her hurricanes and volcanoes. She still needs to be asked for basic humanity. She still answers extremely selectively. She still works in ways that are so mysterious they make no sense. Comparing God and Goddess is still comparing evils. Why bother with any evil when you don't have to?

Worst of all, it's all so painfully wasteful. I can never get back the years I lost to "faith," all that time I spent begging to be rescued or helped, wondering if anyone was listening and crying when no one did, enduring misery thinking that suffering somehow put me ahead of the game in the long run. All that time I could have been empowering myself to create the reality I wanted. So much damage, that years of counseling may never undo, has already been done.

Some will say that it's my fault, not religion's, for not knowing how to empower myself all along, but those that would are ignoring the self-imposed slavery that any and every faith encourages. Blowing the enemy doesn't make you superior to him....or "her." Pin It

Catholic jewelry

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Jews seem to think they have a monopoly on claiming their faith is more than faith, but it's a culture as well. Muslims are increasingly squatting on this territory with their claims of "racism" toward people who think Islam is a big joke worthy of mockery (it is, by the way). Both faiths even get their own special words that are equated with racist bigotry, "anti-Semitic" and "Islamaphobic." Christian faiths don't get to make claims of culture somehow. There seems to be no such thing as anti-Jesusic or Catholiphobia. I guess it's because Christian holy wars are global and not centralized, so they can't be pinned on a particular race, nationality, culture, etc.

Nonetheless, Catholicism is very much a culture, especially if you attended Catholic school. Certain ideas are beaten into you until you think of them as normal, functioning parts of who you are. Many of them take real efforts to extract. Despite my current enjoyment of all things blasphemous, there are still things that I can't bring myself to accept.

I cringe when I see anyone wearing a rosary as jewelry, even as normalized as it has become. I think of how, if this were a Muslim holy relic, heads would literally roll if people were making a frivolous fashion accessory out of it. Why are people allowed to do this to "my culture," but not someone else's?

When I was living in Japan a few years ago, rosaries were all the rage in men's fashion. I hadn't fully actualized being an atheist at the time, but I still found myself at war with the concept of one of "my" holy relics being used as a simple accessory. It did look "cool" on a lot guys, but at the same time, it was sacrilegious to my "culture," even if I didn't fully belong to that culture anymore.

Tokyo is full of small boutiques and accessory shops. One of my favorites, which I'm not sure still exists, was a small ¥1000 costume jewelry shop in Harajuku. Everything in the shop was ¥1000, about $10US. A lot of the jewelry was uninteresting. Typical flowers and sparkles for girls, typical crucifixes and fleur de lis for guys, but there was always one corner of really unique pieces. Every time I visited, I remember seeing one particular rosary, both admiring and despising the brilliant blasphemy it exuded.

It wasn't a true rosary. It didn't have the exact proper arrangement or number of beads (yes, I counted), but it was designed to look like a rosary, so in my mind, the crime had already been committed. As if it weren't sacrilegious enough, purely for its existence, the beads themselves brought an extra line of offense. They were dice, black and white alternating dice. Worst of all, it was made in Italy, the Catholic capital of the world. Holy blaspheme berries, Batman!

Yes, I realize that the Catholic church is no stranger to gambling, but to combine the two in such a blatantly offensive way was unheard of. Yet, for some reason, I had to have it. The day I bought it, I couldn't stop taking out, looking at it, smiling a devilish smile, then putting it away. This continued for quite some time until I eventually threw it in my jewelry pile. I didn't have a jewelry box as I was living pretty much out of a suitcase with minimal furnishings.

I still have this rosary, it's in a box now, and every time I pull it out, that same devilish grin returns to my face. Still, I have yet to wear it. There are a few reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that I don't believe in wearing religious symbols for fashion in general, lest people get the wrong idea. The second is that it doesn't really match anything I have and my accessories are usually perfectly coordinated. The last, and least obvious to anyone that doesn't know me intimately, is that some small Catholic part of me still clings to that idea that it's disrespectful and inappropriate to wear this sacred yet sacriligious relic.

I don't know why I can't seem to let go of it. Recently, one of my few celebrity heroes released his own jewelry line and I found myself thinking slightly less of him when I saw a rosary in his collection (this is after I had already reduced my view of him for endorsing a rather run of the mill, douchey looking jewelry collection; in fact, I think he must have been inspired by the same cheap ¥1000 Harajuku boutique that I used to frequent, but I digress). He's not the only one. I see lots of celebrities, particularly men, wearing them now, and each one of them elicits a knee-jerk, negative gasp of offense from me. I try to reason it out of myself, but it rarely works.

I guess you can take the kid out of Catholic school, but you can't take the beatings out of the kid. Pin It

Thought contraception

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I distinctly remember in eigth grade, after we had sex ed. in Catholic school, which was a pretty hilarious ordeal to begin with, a friend of mine named Carrie (all names changed to protect identity) and I were talking about sex and birth control. She maintained that there was no point in using any birth control at all because, "No method is 100%. If it's God will you get pregnant, then it will happen anyway."

I tried telling her, "What if you use two methods? That's more than 100%"

"But it's 198% out of 200%," she explained, she she was correct mathematically, but not logically.

We went around and around in circles until eventually agreeing to disagree. I never thought much of her argument, but I never forgot it either. Recently, with all the Obama vs. Catholicism contraception kerfuffle, I've been thinking about it a lot. We were just kids, 12 years old, and already one of us had been brainwashed by Catholic thought contraception. We went to the same school and I never had that attitude, which means it came from home.

Her parents were big time, old school, hard core Catholics and all around Jeebus freaks. I even remember her mom bragging about how much going to see Billy Graham "rocked." I also remember, even as a kid, thinking, "Lame." The reigns were tight at their house. Even during Robinhood: Men in Tights, during the scene where Robinhood is serenading Maid Marian in front of a screen and the shadow of his sword makes it look like he has a raging boner that would put John Holmes and Ron Jeremy to shame, her dad said, "I dunno, this is getting suggestive," and made us turn off the movie.

Doubtlessly, the attitude toward birth control was coming from home. What scares me is how early it begins. If she had already been brainwashed by 12, when did the programming begin, age 10, age nine, even younger? It's a miracle any girl graduates Catholic high school without a couple of kids clinging to her teets! I guess God is good at picking which ones really need to have kids.

On a side note, I didn't continue to Catholic high school, but one of the girls I went to school with did, got pregnant, and has a child that is now a student in the very school that I attended kindergarten through eight grade. My mother is a teacher a that school and upon seeing the little girl's last name on her class roster said, "Oh, you must be Angie's daughter (name changed)."

"No," the little girl said confused, "Angie's my sister."

The more I think of the "it's not 100%" attitude, the more it scares me. If you can apply "God's will" to equate a 1% chance with a 99% chance, isn't that just encouraging reckless endangerment? You'd think with the Catholic church's zero tolerance policy toward suicide that reckless endangerment would be strictly governed as well. Sadly, it's not.

Seat belts aren't 100%, nor is a helmet, nor a sidewalk, nor any kind of health treatment, nor medication, nor exercise program, nor riding a unicycle across a tight rope over a tank of sharks and crocodiles. So, if it's God's will for you to die, it will happen. Of course, if you do die, do you burn in Hell for suicide? Technically, it wasn't suicide because you weren't trying to kill yourself, you just happened to die doing something you knew was likely to kill you. Wait, if God considers that suicide, why would God will you to die? Just so he can send you to Hell? What a dick.

So, go ahead, kiddies have sex without condoms. We'll see if it's God's will that you get knocked up, get an STD, or turn into a total skank. Maybe if you're lucky, you'll get all three! How's that for a holy trinity? Pin It

Ass Wednesday

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Ah, the old Catholic tradition of walking around all day looking like the douchier sector of your friends tried to Hitler you and missed.

This day-long embarrassment is followed by 40 days of refusing to do something you enjoy and swarming Captain D's every Friday. Supposedly, the 40 day "sacrifice" is supposed to mimic the way Jesus chose to deal with his negative body image. He "fasted" in the for 40 days before starting his public ministry. Well, what else was he supposed to do? It's not like they had Spanx back then. Of course, not eating Hershey Kisses for 40 says obviously very comparable.

Then again, maybe giving up a food item is really just making up for all the donuts you ate on Fat Tuesday. How perfectly religious. Engorge yourself the day before making a minimal sacrifice, but still somehow convince yourself that the sacrifice has outweighed the engorgement and made you more holy. This is a whole set of customs I've never understood.

Even growing up in Catholic school, I thought this whole idea was, in a word, retarded. I didn't see how not doing something I liked made me love Jesus more or made me more like him. I usually would lie about giving something up, or I'd give something up for about two days and then go back to doing it. Though, bearing the sign of a true Catholic, I did feel guilty about it....not enough to stop, just enough to feel ashamed of myself.

I do distinctly remember a much better suggestion during one of the many Ash Wednesday services I was forced to attend. One priest said that giving up something in this land of plenty hardly showed our love of Christ or made us more Christlike. Anything we could give up would be a miniscule sacrifice by comparison. Instead, to become better Christians, indeed, better people, doing something proactive to help ourselves, each other, the community would be more purposeful and would more closely fit Christ's mission in life.

He suggested doing things that most people reserve for Christmas time. Donating money to charity, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, doing canned food drives. If we weren't healthy ourselves, we could exercise daily, start diets, which are like giving up candy for Lent, but then stay on them after Easter. If we had friends going through grief, to be there for them. He explained that the whole idea of self indulgent suffering was silly.

It was one of very few sermons that truly touched my heart, and as a kid who spent kindergarten through 8th grade in Catholic school, I heard a LOT of sermons (most of them sucked). What a great idea! Improving oneself! HELPING others! Surely, if Jesus (well, the figure of Jesus we were supposed to believe in) were alive today, he wouldn't want us sacrificing stupid things like bubblegum or individually wrapped peppermints. He'd want us building bridges together, helping each other, making ourselves better people, making the world a better place. I couldn't wait to get home and tell my mom this brilliant notion..

Of course, as a young child, ideas are usually squished by the nearest adult. I remember going home and having my parents be the sacrifice enforcers. I understand why they did. What a pain in the ass. We have to take our kids to go do something every day? No. They're already in softball, basketball, tennis, art club, and theatre. Plus, with my dad being out of town for work so much, this meant mom had to do it all. So, once again, I ended up sacrificing orange creamsicles and learned nothing of it, since the day after Easter, I'd doubtlessly be given whatever it was I had sacrificed for 40 days prior.

Despite my childhood inability to accomplish it, the idea remains solid. If you want to "celebrate" Lent and you believe Jesus a Ghandi+hair kind of guy, then don't give up ice cream, or dirty words, or masturbating. None of that makes you a better Christian human being and it's incredibly selfish to think it does. Giving to someone else is better than taking from yourself. And don't wait for the calendar to tell you when to do it! You could be doing this every day. Alas, if you need the calendar to tell you, then at least 40 days a year, you could do something good for humanity. Besides, if you're going to go around all day having everyone think you've been Hitlered, wouldn't you at least like to get a better sense of self from it? Otherwise, you've just spent a whole day looking like an ass. Pin It

Lent: Mindless Fridays

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My parents had me over for dinner last night...well, actually, I invited myself, but they were happy to have me. Mom made a roast chicken and was telling my dad to take it for lunch the next few days, then stopped herself and said, "BUT don't forget, NO MEAT on Wednesday because it's Ash Wednesday." I have a long standing tradition of giving my family the business about Ash Wednesday and meatless Fridays during Lent, a tradition that I imposed long before I became atheist.

First, came the objection to fish. I didn't understand how fish was not meat. Somehow, with no degree in biology, food science, or bioethics, the pope is able to distinguish these highly debatable concepts to a level of certainty that Catholics trust. Fish isn't meat because the pope says so.

Then came (and still often comes), the idea that, okay, the pope says fish isn't meat, but you still don't have to eat fish. I've always liked fish and didn't have a problem with that as a child, but I did have a problem with my folks constantly whining, "Oh, it's so hard to drop by Captain D's during Lent. Oh, fish is so expensive this time of year. Oh, I'm so tired of fish.....oh, blabla, similar whining, whiney whine waaaaah."

As someone who's gone mostly vegetarian, I have lots of advice to give a couple of folks that think meat at every meal is not only preferable, but a human necessity. I love being told my health philosophy is wrong by two obese people with arthritis, body aches, and type II diabetes, by the way. I told them to stop agonizing over fish. They could try omelets, quiches, stir fry, noodles, veggie stews, veggie soups, falafel. Hell, I even told them to order pizza with no meat toppings and THAT wasn't good enough either!

One Friday a few years ago, I distinctly remember practically forcing my mom to make eggplant parmigiana (I would have gladly made it for them, but my mom is a control freak about the kitchen at times). She was all distraught about what to make because it was a year my dad was out of work and the family couldn't afford fish. I, again, presented the argument that you don't have meat at every meal anyway, and that you don't have to have fish. I told her how cheap eggplant was, printed a recipe, and put it in front of her.

"Oh...it's really easy! I thought it would be difficult."

Everyone raved about how delicious it was. How many subsequent times has she made it? Zero.

No, apparently, they'd much rather complain than solve their problems simply. Such is the life of a Catholic. They seem to take some sort of petty pleasure in knowing they've suffered. On a side note, never get two suffering Catholics in a room together. It will become some kind of weird, masochistic pissing contest to determine who is suffering more.

As if fighting the American institutionalized OMG MEAT mindset weren't difficult enough, always the question of religious tradition came and was, in their minds, defeated by being ignored. For young parents out there that know they have a reasonably intelligent kid, don't subject them to ridiculous rituals and expect not to have to answer a few questions. Alas, my parents never did and to this day never do address it.

My mother is main culprit. My dad kind of rolls his eyes and says, "I dunno," which in this case the pacifistic marital euphemism for, "I don't actually give a shit, but your mom does all the shopping and all the cooking, so she decides." Once in a while, he'll do what any decent husband should do and stand up for her, even when he knows she's being ridiculous, and say, "It makes your mom feel better, so let her do it."

How doing something that totally inconveniences one's life makes one feel better is beyond me. Again, I claim it's that Catholic affinity for suffering. Just ask Mother Theresa. Still maintaining the silliness of it all, in adulthood, my questioning has gotten to be bolder, "Mom, why do you do this? You don't go to church, you don't say the rosary, you don't even know what's in the Bible -coughandmeatlessfridaysaren'tintherecough-, you don't even like doing this because you always complain you can't get fish, but you refuse to eat vegetarian, and you know exactly how silly it is because in your life time, eating meat on any Friday went from being a mortal sin to being a venial sin, and even at that, now it's only a few weeks a year. Why do you bother?"

Every time we get on the topic, her body and mouth visibly tense up, as if the strain of thinking about these things is too much, and the answer is, "Because!"

Shortly after, we get to the argument that any child above age three has had with at least one parent, "Why?"

"Because."

"Because why?

"Because."

Somehow, in the mom mindset, saying, "Because," with determination means you win.

WORSE! She informed me last night, "Well, technically, I don't have to do it because of my age."

"When did that happen?" I asked. I honestly never knew there was an age limit.

"You only have to do it ages 14 to 59," she said. She likely never told us this because as children, my sister and I would have objected and she certainly wasn't going to provide separate meals for us.

"Since when?"

"Since always," she said.

Then I remarked how it added yet one more layer of ridicule to the whole practice, but of course it got me nowhere but the Daytona 500 of why/because.

In my unmentioned number of years on this planet (I don't like to share my age, but let's say I'm at least old enough to have been drunk a lot) I have yet to get an answer beyond that. Sometimes, perhaps when she doubts it herself, she'll actually say something to the tune of, "It's the last straw. If I don't at least cling to this, then it means I have no connection with the Church."

...which is exactly my point. Of all the finer points of Catholicism, THIS is the one that proves you still have faith? How obscene. Speaking of obscenity, why should a meddling, young woman stop her mother from doing something that gives her mother "great comfort?"

I have seen the direct harm clinging to faith has done to her and the rest of the family. Though she doesn't do it the traditional, Catholic way with beads and and pre-written monologues, she claims to pray. She knows there is no power in prayer. She's been praying for a good decade and a half for my parents' economic situation to improve. It never has. Yet, she keeps holding out, keeps clinging, thinking there may yet be a silver lining on this 15 year storm cloud, thinking that God is watching and waiting for the precise moment when it's perfect to help them. Meanwhile, my heart breaks as I watch them both deteriorate, getting closer to returning to the earth's crust from whence they came, never stopping to embracing these autumn years as they should, but rather victimizing themselves while helplessly hoping to be rescued.

She has seen the direct harm it has done to the family. In fact, when I was a child and questioned when her parents visited (they lived in Michigan, we lived in Georgia), why her father never went to church. She avoided the question for years, using the why/because defense as usual. Eventually, when he was close to death and I was still worried for his soul, she told me her father didn't go to church anymore was because one of the many times he had cancer and he and my grandmother struggled to survive physically and financially, the Church told them to just keep supporting the Church financially, and all would be as it should be. He got angry and never returned. How that message never penetrated the females of the family is beyond me. I know that even as a fairly young child, it shook my reality a bit.

So, despite all knowledge to the contrary, they cling to this suicidal hope that someone is going to rescue them. I watch them starve themselves emotionally. If there were anything in the world I thought I could do to change the situation, I would, but they're set in their ways strictly as a matter of principle. They'd rather die than admit they're wrong, and sadly, I know they will. Pin It