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.

Flag Day

Every morning we gathered around the flagpole for Colors. The whole camp, standing in a circle, watched as the two flag-bearers carefully unfolded the flag, hooked it to the flagpole, and hoisted it up. Then it was time for breakfast.

Every evening the day ended there again, with Taps. The flag was lowered, ritually folded, and carried to its resting place in the Playhouse.

You were never supposed to let it touch the ground.

I learned all these things the first time I became a flag-bearer. I was nervous, with everyone watching; afraid I’d let a corner slip.

I see flags left up all night these days, and even though I believe patriotism comes dangerously close to jingoism, the sight makes me cringe a little – just like, though I’m about as far from being a Catholic anymore as one can get, the thought of chewing the Eucharistic host still bothers me.

And who knew that these symbols were so similar? The host not only represents, but is considered to be Christ’s body; the flag, as Congress declared in 1949, “represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.”

Good Friday reflections

I don’t think we went to church on Good Friday, but I think school (a public school) was closed. I remember the church on Holy Thursday, though, when my mother would take me there for confession to prepare for the all-important Communion time on Easter Sunday. (How awful it would be, if you had sins weighing down your soul, to have to sit there while all the holier people, looking at you sideways, edged their way up to the Communion rail!)

On Holy Thursday the church looked completely different. It fascinated me. All the statues and crucifixes and the Stations of the Cross along the walls were shrouded in purple. Everything was hushed, waiting.

I knew from catechism class that on Good Friday you were supposed to think about Jesus’ suffering on the cross between 3 and 4, but I never managed to do this. I guess these days watching The Passion of the Christ (I’m sorry if this is sacrilegious, but it always seemed like a homoerotic S&M orgy to me) might suffice.

I spent a year studying at a Quaker retreat center. Good Friday and Easter were somewhat controversial days over there, because they were never quite sure what they believed about Jesus. One woman I met, a “birthright” Quaker, meaning she was one of the rare ones born of Quaker parents, told me she had a really hard time going into Christian churches because of the gruesome crucifixes you had to endure. Maybe that’s why I liked Holy Thursday so much.

But this I really don’t understand: If we really live in a secular country, why is the stock market closed today?

Passover

“The abolition of profane time and the individual’s projection into mythical time do not occur, of course, except at essential periods – those, that is,
when the individual is truly himself: on the occasion of rituals. . . The rest of his life is passed in profane time, which is without meaning: in the state of ‘becoming.’”

This, from The Myth of the Eternal Return, by Mircea Eliade, explains why I should have been born Jewish. I love rituals.

You’d think that, growing up Catholic, I would have had my fill of ritual. But it seems like in Catholicism the priests, and sometimes the altar boys, got to do it all – raising up the host, chanting in Latin (and now it’s not even in Latin anymore), clicking out the incense. All we did was kneel and watch. Jews, on the other hand, do it themselves: building cool huts in the backyard, lighting candles one by one, and, most of all, the incredibly complicated Passover Seder.

I would have done all of it, except maybe the Q-Tip yeast-scouring yesterday and the lamb blood. Eating parsley and bitter herbs and matzo and a sandwich (not to mention a whole meal) and drinking all that wine in between; the four questions (does it have to be a child?); and, best of all, the spooky extra place setting for Elijah.

Why rituals? Because they take us out of ordinary, boring, quotidian time; connect us with history and our ancestors; and transport us to something special, something eternal.

Now I’m ready to count the Omer.