I hesitate to write on this subject because it’s both contentious and always at risk of turning into either a rant or a lecture. But, I shall brave these tumultuous waters in the hopes of calming a storm that whirls within my mind.
I was raised Catholic. For some of you, I need not say more. I would wake up promptly at 0800 every Sunday (roundabouts, though “promptly” might not be the right word. Perhaps “sluggishly,” always to my father’s chagrin) and get ready for mass, the catholic act of worship from the Latin “missa est,” meaning “it has been sent,” referring to Jesus. I attended CCD, Catholic sunday school, and served for a year or so as an altar boy (assisting the priest in mass by handing him things). If I misbehaved at church I was in trouble, I dare not miss mass or face my fathers disapproval. Granted, I had it easy in a lot of ways. I was never beaten for it, just a decade and a half of being mildly annoyed.
I think this was the experience for a lot of people raised Catholic, especially today. Usually this is coupled with traditionalist parents and a rather strict household with fine moral lines and a certain lack of tolerance for anything “ungodly.” When coupled with isolation on a farm, you have a kid with next-to-no knowledge of the real world outside his parents’ opinions and the conservative news.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention at mass. I didn’t really find my interest in religion until later, when I realized there was more to it. By that time, however; be it fortunate or unfortunate, I was already imparted with a gift of perhaps an unintentionally negative side-effect, in the opinion of my father (I’m sure): logic. I couldn’t just “believe” in something. I needed reasoning, evidence, something either tangible or sensational, in the bones, that told me there was something else. In a lot of ways, I had that. For all the skeptic I am, I’m also superstitious. Woe is the Catholic who believes in ghosts and the supernatural, but certain things you just don’t question. Especially if you’re from Appalachia.
I know I feel something toward my religion. Watching religious movies can bring me to tears and “fill me with the light of the Holy Spirit.” But it’s fleeting, but a flicker in the darkness. I can’t help but question religion. Growing up, my mother and I would regularly have conversations about faith and Christianity and religion as a whole. Born and raised a Methodist, only converting to Catholicism for my father, she was not as strict a practitioner. A firm believer for sure, but not lost in the dogma. We would discuss the bible, Catholic doctrine, other denominations and even other religions and how they relate.
As I learned more about different religions, creation myths, and the history of the world, I began to question my own religion, my own belief system and creation myth. At first it was enough to find science buried in the rough. Maybe “seven days” in Genesis is a reference to billions of years, not days, but God said days because ancient peoples couldn’t possibly fathom the concept of a billion? Perhaps Adam, and his wife, Eve, formed of his rib, simply alluded to the first single-celled organisms that divided and began life on Earth? Surely God, the creator of the heavens and the Earth, the inventor of the sciences themselves, could foresee the homo sapiens evolution from the first cellular organism?
And what of the thousands of years of religion before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? The Abrahamic religions composed, for the longest time, a minority in a world of hundreds, if not thousands of faiths. Moreover, Judaism did not simply begin all at once. In it’s oldest traditions, Judaism was very much a faith of many gods, with Yahweh, the One God in all three religions today, being but a second-rate warrior storm god in a small Canaanite pantheon. I struggle to conflate these two ideas of who God is. Is He the One True God and all others are demons or made-up? Or is He Himself a member of a larger, suppressed pantheon? Or Himself fictitious, purely a product of ancient tribal herdsmen?
Raised to think logically and approach problems empirically, I’m met with a most distressful problem: what do I believe when everything is impossible to prove, but I know it’s not nothing? Do I shut up and drink the Kool-Aid, or ask questions and decide what I want to believe for myself? At what cost should I get it wrong?
This is where I find myself: examining the paths before me, deciding which is right, and hoping I don’t chose wrong. I’ve been taught that to even entertain these doubts is a sin. God forbid I actually walk the trail that leads from Him. Here’s to hoping and praying He understands in the end.
My latest entries:
PAGAN NOMAD 
Leave a comment