If you can read this you’re still alive

Botticelli's Mystic Nativity (with an inscription saying the world would end in 1504)

The world has been supposed to end only about 30 times,13 in just my lifetime, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that once again it didn’t, but if it did, this blog and this blog post are still around and, actually, so am I (but maybe not you, if you’re one of the 144,000 who got taken up to heaven already), assuming the Rapturous are correct, in which case I’ll have to write another post just like this next October 21, when the world ends for all the rest of us as the world goes up in flames. (Question: does cyberspace burn?)

Cheery people, those Camping followers. It should be a great fireworks show for them up there.

Of those 30 world-ending times, I think the funniest is the woman in 1814 who predicted she’d give birth to the Second Christ on Christmas Day that year. Trouble was, she was a virgin (which shouldn’t have stood in her way), 60 years old (still possible, I suppose), and (most difficult obstacle to overcome) she died on that day instead. Very precise prediction; too bad it was the wrong event.

Happy end times (and don’t forget, if Camping was wrong, we still have 2012 to look forward to)!

Mea culpa

Okay, I’ve been feeling bad about that last sentence in that last post, about how if you’re Catholic it’s important not to think too much. It was snarky and ill-considered, but the main problem with it is that it confuses two separate realms. I’ve written about this before: you can’t think your way into religious belief. Faith and reason are two different animals.

My problem is I’m just too firmly ensconced in the reason camp. I’m like Thomas: show me the wounds, and I’ll believe. I’m envious of people who don’t need this proof, who really believe there’s a god up there waiting for them, along with all their resurrected relatives. What troubles me, though, is the certainty many religious people have that they are right – not only about their god but about what other people should be doing and not doing. That was my experience with Catholic priests, and that’s where my snarkiness comes from.

Father knows best

My mother stopped going to church when they started saying the Mass in English. I would have too, except that I’d already thrown myself out in violent protest years before.

I loved the Latin, the incense, the fancy priestly robes, the rituals, the secret place they kept the chalice, the way they covered the statues in purple cloths, unveiling them on Easter. I just couldn’t take the dogma, the certainty that all those men knew best.

I especially loved my missal. It had Latin on one side, and English on the other. I’d read along as the priest intoned, trying not to look at the English till I’d figured out the translation in my head.

Dominus vobiscum.

Et cum spiritu tuo.

So beautiful.

“The Lord be with you,” the priest says now, in English, and the congregation responds, “And also with you.”

“And also with you?” How clunky, how ugly, and whatever happened to the spiritu part?

Now I see they’ve finally fixed it. “And with your spirit,” the congregation is told to say in the new Roman Missal – just like what I remember.

But lots of priests don’t like it, the Times tells us. As one of them says:

“The problem is syntax and word order. The sentences are too complicated, the pronouns are so far away from their antecedent you can’t even tell what the pronoun refers to.”

Maybe the problem is that the grade level of the new translation is 15, versus 9 for the old one, as a priest in Ireland discovered.

It’s important not to have to think too much, if you’re Catholic.