The Pontiff and the Clerk

It's no secret that I left the Catholic church many years ago, for many reasons, most of which still exist.  At the time I left the church, John Paul was pope.  I had nothing against him personally.  Seemed like a nice grandfatherly kind of pope, though it was under him that the sex scandal broke and it was handled (or not) abominably.

During the time the sex scandals were going on, the extensive holdings of the church in Boston were transferred to Rome so that they could not be garnished during the sex trials.  Boston's Cardinal Law, forced to resign because of the sex scandal, was brought to Rome where he was given a high appointment by John Paul.  (There are rumors that he alleged left just hours before state troopers arrived with subpoenas seeking his grand jury testimony.)

When JP died, the ONLY Cardinal in the entire College of Cardinals that I prayed would not be elected was Cardinal Ratzinger, the most conservative, strictest of the cardinals with whom I was familiar (admittedly not that many).  But against my express wishes, they went ahead and elected him anyway.

Benedict XVI was everything I hated about the papacy.  He embraced the royalty of it, the jewels, the robes, the luxury accommodations, the limousines.  He had rings on his fingers and for all I know bells on his toes (but who could see them under those red slippers?)  Benedict led the move to take the church back to previous centuries.  He wanted to return to the Latin mass, he "reintroduced traditional papal garments."  I was thrilled when he resigned.

But along comes Pope Francis.  A man of simple tastes, who drove himself in his VW to the Vatican on the first day of his papacy.  He doesn't wear jewels or crowns, or gold or velvet.  He doesn't ride in a limo.  He doesn't live in a luxury apartment.  He seems genuinely concerned with bettering the world rather than puffing himself up.

I don't agree with all of his positions, especially about the gay community and women's place in the church, but he at least had a more conciliatory tone when speaking of these issues.

We had a Popeageddon here in this country last week and Frances was everybody's darling.  Everywhere he went throngs of crowds were there.  He spoke of world peace and the danger of climate change.  He kissed babies and turned down a fancy state dinner to eat at a homeless shelter.  He exemplified everything that I have loved about this pope .... not enough to bring me back to the church, but enough to make me feel more positive about the papacy again.

And then the religious fanatics brought her to Washington and in one press release it seems that all the good will that Frances brought with him was wiped out because he allegedly spent 15 minutes with the Rowan, Kentucky County Clerk.  Now that's all anybody is talking about.  People who were singing the Pope's praises a few days ago are now hating him for what that meeting showed.

James Martin, S.J. wrote an excellent piece which gave another way of looking at this meeting that is being so ballyhooed by the likes of the Family Research Council and other pro-life organizations.  He gives a possible scenario that I had wondered about myself.  There are no photos of the event and all the Vatican has acknowledged was that he did meet with her, but I'm wondering if he even knew who she was.  I envision the likes of New York's Cardinal Dolan in collusion with Mike Huckabee seizing the opportunity and rushing the clerk (who is not Catholic, by the way) to where the Pope was greeting a bunch of people.  Was he briefed on her story?  Or was she just another visitor who earned the right to meet him?  She says he told her to "be strong."  Be strong in her convictions to disobey the laws of the United States? or be strong in her faith?  Sounds like something he might say to anybody who came to shake his hand.  He asked her to pray for him, she boasts.  Heck, he asked EVERYONE to pray for him.  And this was at the end of several grueling days for the pontiff.  He might have been kinda tired.

Look, I have lots of complaints about this pope, but it's nice that I also have a lot of good feelings too (which I have not felt about Popes for a very long time) and I hate that some opportunistic politicians have used him for their own agenda....and that it seems to have negated much of the good will that he garnered in the time outside of that 15 minute secret meeting.

Let us hope that his vision for the world and his challenge to people regarding immigration, climate change, etc. and not one brief politicized moment will be the ultimate lasting legacy of this trip.

As my friend diane says : I met the previous Pope, shook his hand and was given a rosary. I doubt very much that he agreed with my feminism or views of the hierarchy, but he did what Popes do - shook my hand, muttered something meaningless and gave me the rosary. It's not a big deal. It certainly was not him validating any of my beliefs or actions - or vice versa!

Fat Tuesday

It's Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras (that's what "Mardi Gras" translates to, you know...Mardi is Tuesday, Gras is "fat").  A special day just for me!

The only vestige of my Catholic faith that I continue to cling to is Fat Tuesday.  It's an excuse to have pancakes without guilt, because isn't that what people do on Fat Tuesday?  Eat panakes?

Wednesday will be Ash Wednesday when it used to be that lots of people you saw every day walked around with big black spots in the middle of their foreheads, having gone to church and had the priest remind you that you were dust and to dust you would return....and then 6 weeks of Lent.

When did I stop paying attention to Lent?  I don't remember.   When I was a kid there was lots of Lenten observance.  We never ate meat on Friday during Lent or on Ash Wednesday.  On Fridays, the students in my grammar school were marched over to the church next door for the "stations of the cross," a ceremony where the priest visited and said prayers at each of 14 visual representations hanging on the walls around the church, of parts of Jesus' travel from being condemned to death to his burial in the tomb and including such events as Simon of Cyrene helping to carry the cross, Veronica wiping his face, the actual crucifixion, and ultimately placement in the tomb.

Each station came with prayers, standng, kneeling, genuflecting, etc.   And incense, of course.  Was there ever a Catholic ceremony that did not come with incense?

When I was old enough, we were supposed to fast on Fridays -- only one big meal, and two small meals.

And, of course, there was what you were going to give up.  It was traditional that you give up something you liked to do penance during the six weeks of Lent.  I always gave up candy and looked forward to the Easter Bunny bringing me lots on Easter morning, nicely mixing my religious vs. my fantasy beliefs!

My father always gave up liquor to prove that he wasn't an alcoholic.   He had a gin fizz first thing, after returning from Mass, on Easter Sunday morning. He probably would have had the gin fizz before Mass but in those days you couldn't eat or drink anything before Communion, so he would have had to give up going to Communion.

Going to Mass on Easter sunday was a Catholic's "Easter Duty" and if you didn't go on Easter Sunday, it was a mortal sin, I think.  I hate to think of the blackness of my soul since I can't remember the last time I was at any Mass, let alone an Easter Mass.

I wondered if it counted the day we got to church too late to get a seat, or to get standing room inside the vestibule of the church, so we had to stand outside, where we could neither hear nor see anything.  Did that count?  We were on church grounds, Mass was going on, and at some point we did get to go in and take communion....

This Lenten season, Catholics (and others) around the world will be thinking of the resignation of Benedict XVI.  I have to admit that I greeted the news with "it couldn't happen to a nicer person..."  I was not a fan of Cardinal Ratzinger and was very disappointed when he was elected Pope.  And he sent the Church reeling back to the 19th century and beyond, very firm on things like homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research and all those hot button issues.  Very liberal on priestly pedophilia and hiding the perpetrators.  

I am reading a book right now called "Holy Crosses and Nazi Flags" by Garry O'Connor, which is a fascinating look at the life of the about-to-be gone Pope.  It nicely complements the documentary, Mea Culpa, I saw recently about the sex scandal in the Catholic church.

I just hope that when the new pope is elected he will be someone I can feel comfortable with, and not someone who makes me sneer whenever I think of some of the hurtful things he has done to people I care about.

But in the meantime, I'll just eat my pancakes on this, Fat Tuesday!

St. Ursula

I always wonder, on quiet days like this, what I am going to write about when it comes time to put this journal entry together.  Today I resort to Catholic mythology.  Or Christian mythology.  Or German mythology.

Let me explain.

Walt found a PBS travel program of tour guide Bert Wolf (kind of a richer version of Rick Steeve).  He was taking a river cruise from Amsterdam to ... I can't remember where his ending destination was, but he was in Amsterdam last week and today in Cologne.  I missed the Amsterdam program,but watched the one on Cologne.

At first it was kind of your standard travelguide, and it was fun to see the interior of the magnificent Cologne cathedral again.

But then he visited another cathedral in Cologne, one that we hadn't heard about, and here is where it started to get weird.  As he toured the place with a priest guide, Wolf explained that St. Ursula and 11,000 virgins were slaughtered on this site by Huns some time in the 4th century.  The church is full of memorials to the martyrs.  Since the women supposedly were all beheaded there are lots of female busts on altars.  The tops of the busts are removable and inside are skulls supposedly found on the site, wrapped in cloth from medieval times.  In the basement the walls are filled with designs made out of bones, and even sayings written in bone.

Very creepy.

But the story gets better, and oh so Catholic, when I went to the Internet to check out St. Ursula.  The legend is apparently based on an inscription on the Church of St. Ursula in Cologne, built in the 4th or 5th century where it said that on this site "some holy virgins" were killed.

The number is supposedly closer to 2-11 virgins martyred, rather than 11,000.  The number 11,000 didn't come up until the 9th century. and may have been based on a mis-translation of the name Unidecimilla, a person, to mean 11,000, a number.   In fact, some speculate that there was one virgin martyr named Unidecimilla, a girl of about 11 years of age "which by some blundering monk was changed into eleven thousand."

And you thought spell check is bad TODAY!

The basilica of St. Ursula, which I am very sorry now to have missed, supposedly contains the ancient relics of the perhaps fictitious Ursula and her possibly nonexistant 11,000 companions.

I loved this quote:

[The basilica] contains what has been described as a "veritable tsunami of ribs, shoulder blades, and femurs...arranged in zigzags and swirls and even in the shapes of Latin words." The Goldene Kammer (Golden Chamber), a 17th century chapel attached to the Basilica of St. Ursula, contains sculptures of their heads and torsos, some of the heads encased in silver, others covered with stuff of gold and caps of cloth of gold and velvet; loose bones thickly texture the upper walls." The peculiarities of the relics themselves have thrown doubt upon the historicity of Ursula and her 11,000 maidens. When skeletons of little children, ranging in age from two months to seven years, were found buried with one of the sacred virgins in 1183, Hermann Joseph, a  Praemonstratensian canon at Steinfeld, explained that these children were distant relatives of the eleven thousand. A surgeon of eminence was once banished from Cologne for suggesting that, among the collection of bones which are said to pertain to the heads, there were several belonging to full-grown mastiffs. The relics may have come from a forgotten burial ground.

Whether Ursula and her 11,000 friends lived or not, whether they were slaughtered or not, the whole story is just so catholic, it seems, the delight in raising body parts to the status of holy relics and worshipping at the feet...perhaps literally...of people who may or may not have been the superheroes of their day. 

Can you imagine this appearing as a story in some tabloid newspaper, along with Bat Boy, alien abductions. and that story of the crazy town where you can be given a ticket for snoring in your own bed?

---

Today was the Big Game, Cal-Stanford (for those who don't know what "the Big Game" is), as well as the 30th anniversary of "The Play."  As for how the game went...let's just say there was no joy in Mudville this afternoon.

Good Friday

Bad person that I am, I don't usually think about Good Friday when it rolls around, since  I'm not aware of the passage of the church year, since I don't go to church.  Walt never comes home with palm fronds in his hands or ashes on his forehead, so I can't rely on him to give me clues.

But I was thinking about the Catholic church (again) today when I read this unbelievable headline:

Pope Says Couples Who Conceive Through In-Vitro Fertilization
Are Guilty Of Arrogance

The man who goes about in ruby slippers, a stylish big hat and dripping with gold and jewelry warns "against the 'easy income' that could be made from the 'fascination of the technology of artificial fertility.' Both scientists and the families who benefit from scientific advances in fertility treatment are guilty of 'the arrogance of taking the place of the creator,' Benedict said."

Now there is the pot calling the kettle black!  I can understand, though don't agree at all with the ban against any form of birth control, but now coming after infertile couples who are trying to have a baby...and especially calling them arrogant?

Does the pontiff mean to suggest that any manipulation of the world that God gave us is a bad thing? Is it a sin to use the intelligence that we were born with to make our world better?  Is it arrogant to even think of improving on God's creation?

God gave us wheat and he gave us grapes.  Are we arrogant for assuming that if we crush those things and mix them with other ingredients to get bread and wine we are arrogant for improving on the gifts that we were given?  Are we arrogant for adding sugar to rhubarb or lye to olives to make something edible out of something which is decidedly not edible to begin with?

Are milk chocolate bunnies evil because they come from processed cocoa beans.  And what about Peeps? How evil are Peeps??

In light of these statements, the Pro-Life Action League has staged a protest trying to block a fertility clinic in Naperville, IL and if they are not successful, they promise to "protest it just liked Planned Parenthood."

“There is no moral difference between those children and the children being killed down the road at Planned Parenthood,” [Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric] Scheidler said at the council meeting, “and justice is due to those children. If that justice is not done by this council today then you must know, that justice will be done through public protest at Dr. Morris’ facility.”

As the church rushes headlong into the 12th century, I am reminded of happier, more innocent days when I believed in this crazy religion, when Holy Week meant spending a lot of time in church, when Easter meant that my father could rush home from Mass to break his lenten fast of alcohol and fix himself a gin fizz.  The years when Good Friday meant keeping "the 3 hours," which meant that we kept silent and prayed for the thre hours that Jesus hung on the cross (making adjustments, of course, for the time zone between Jerusalem and California).

Now, when you are in grammar school, and you are pumped full of religious zeal and wanting to participate fully in the spirit of Good Friday you start out with all good intentions.  A couple of blocks from where I lived in those years was a hill where we used to play a lot.  I think we called it a mountain, but it was really just a big hill.  There is now a big apartment building on the land, but in those days, it was a fun hill to climb, and at this time of the year the grass was already dying off and so we were scampering among the dried weeds.

I remember the year when a group of us, our bibles in hand (or maybe it was prayer books, since Catholics, as a general rule, don't --or didn't in those years-- read the bible) headed for the hill.  Our own little Calvary.  We each camped out a spot on the hill, resting up against our own rock, and we settled in to study our prayer books for three hours.

I don't know if we lasted three minutes but it wasn't long before there where shouted whispers back and forth and I'm sure it was before the end of the first hour that we were not only finished with our prayers but also starving and ready to go and find a snack.

I'm sure Jesus forgave us.  He forgave the apostles for falling asleep while he prayed for strength in Gethsemane, for Pete's sake.  We were just little kids with good intentions and short attention spans.

I don't think we ever tried that again, but I do remember spending 3 hours in Church, with our class, where the teachers should shush us or click those ubiquitous little clickers to keep us in check.

Oh God

I knew when I began sponsoring children through Compassion International that there would be eye-rolling moments being involved with a group of very primarily strongly Christian sponsors. I spoke with my friend Amy about this. She also sponsors through Compassion and had the same fears, but she says that she just doesn't let it get to her and she just doesn't mention religions in her letters.

A year or so ago, Compassion started a social networking site, Our Compassion, for sponsors who wanted to connect with other sponsors. I've learned so much there about other cultures and about how "my" children live. I've looked at photos and videos from sponsors who have made trips to visit their sponsored children, especially those trips that were to countries and/or areas where I have a sponsored child.

I've compared notes on good things to send to your children, on letter writing ideas, on how when and how to send things for the holidays, on where you can get good deals on things to send.

I was able to learn about conditions in Haiti within a day after the earthquake (and be relieved that my little Briana was not in the earthquake-affected zone).

I even joined a group on Bible studies just to see what sorts of quotes other sponsors are sending to their children, since, as a Catholic, I had never studied the Bible and I sorta figured at least some of my sponsored children were expecting me to share Bible verses.

Recently I started checking the section of Our Compassion called "journals." When I first saw this section long ago, I assumed it was like what I would consider a journal -- people writing their thoughts on whatever subjects interest them. However, I've discovered that the "journal" section functions more like a discussion forum. Someone posts a brief message and other people will respond to it. Mostly it's about people being happy about getting letters from their kids, or asking for prayers for special intentions, or showing off great bargains from the Dollar Store or Michael's Craft store that they have sent to their sponsored children.

I stuck my toe in the water and began to participate in the discussions. These are loving people, mostly women, but an occasional man as well, and I was enjoying getting to know some of them.

The other day I came across what I thought was a quote people would enjoy and I posted it verbatim. Maybe there was an evil glint in my eye when I did it, as I did wonder how people would take it. The quote is by Anne Lamott and this is what she wrote:

"When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility. "

The initial responses were positive, starting with "I love this quote. It couldn't come to me at a better time in my life. Thanks!"

This was the response I had hoped for, but the next comment asked who "He or She" referred to and when I said that it referred to God, there were several comments about how they liked the quote but were turned off by the "political correctness" of using "He or She."

I've never heard of her, but if she's that politically correct in her books, too, I would find it difficult to read them, even if the sentiment is good.

Oh, c'mon! This woman had written wonderful books about her own development of faith and people would be turned off by using a non-gender specific term to refer to the Almighty?

It got me thinking about what are our expectations of God. Is God male? Does He have male genitalia? Does he shave? Does he like to watch football? Is there any reason why God has to have a gender at all? And if you are wedded to the idea of a male deity, what color is His skin? Is it all pink and Caucasian-y? Is it dark? Does he have oval blue eyes or slanted brown ones? Why is it offensive to admit that you don't know for certain that there is a gender involved and be politcally correct? "He or She" sounds a lot more personal than "It."

I joked yesterday about Oprah Winfrey being the Second Coming and people just not recognizing her. But seriously, what do you suppose people would say if God did come to earth as a middle-aged African-American woman? Would anybody believe her? How about if God came back to earth as a Mexican trying to cross the border into the United States, or a Chinese business woman. Or are we so locked into our mental image of an old white man with a long beard that we can't see any other possibility?

I did not, of course, say that in the discussion, but wisely backed out, realizing that I was NOT preaching to the choir there! It did make me realize that discussing what is most on my mind about my sponsored children would be a Very. Bad. Idea. I sponsor an 18 year old girl in Uganda, a country where you can be murdered for being gay, and where you can be imprisoned for not letting the police know of someone that you suspect of being gay. The atrocities committed against the gay community are terrible, yet there is no way to mention this sort of thing to my sponsored child and I suspect I would be harshly chastised if I were to bring it up.

Of course when it takes 4 months for an exchange of letters (2 months each way), it's not likely that such a discussion could be productive anyway, but just based on the reaction to "He or She" I know better than to even hint at such a thing.

Only 10 Days Left Til Christmas

No, don't go running to your calendars and don't think I've finally gone off the deep end, but if you want to participate in what seems to be a nice program to help make a good Christmas for kids who might not otherwise have a good Christmas, you only have 10 days left. Let me explain, and then at the end of this entry, I want to talk about my guilty feelings about this and about Compassion International.

There are lots of ways to give to underprivileged kids at Holiday time, but I kind of liked this organization that you may have heard of. It's called Samaritan's Purse and the idea is that you fill a shoe box with goodies for children for Christmas. You wrap the box and take it to a drop-off site and it is combined with all the other boxes and they are shipped to children around the world.

This morning I went to give blood (successfully, this time...yay!), then had my hair cut, and then went to the Dollar Store to see how much bang I could get for my bucks. (Ironically I saw my "real" hairdresser down an aisle, and tried to hide so he couldn't see that I had obviously just had my hair cut!)

I had four piles of things in my basket -- one for me (just a pair of Christmas socks, since I don't think I have any to wear this year), one for the Compassion kids (coloring book, stickers, and a puzzle), and then a stack for a young boy and one for a young girl.

You really can get a lot for a little amount of money. I bought coloring books, crayons (64 pack, not that cheap 8 pack!), Christmas pencils, warm gloves, kid-patterned tooth brushes, brightly colored bandaids, bubble soap, kazoos, and Christmas candy for both boxes. Then I got a little car, ball, and Spiderman digital watch for the boy and a little stuffed puppy (of course), and headbands for a little girl. I will add more things after I fill a shoebox and see how much room is left over.

I wanted to do this last year, but by the time I found out about it, it was too late.

This is, of course, a non-denominational Christian group which is running this program, as is the group which runs Compassion International.

I got my second letter from Fred, in the Philippines, yesterday and I must admit to feeling some guilt about the whole "Christian" thing. One thing that is stressed over and over again is how important our sponsorship is in the Christian development of our sponsored children and we are always encouraged to pray for our kids and to encourage them to go to church.

Well, my problem is that I believe there is a supreme being, who may be God or may be Allah or may be Buddha or may be Mork from Ork (or is more probably "S/he who has no name" because I also believe that s/he has no gender either!)

I believe there is more to existence than this one life and I believe there is an afterlife. I have to hang onto that because I'm determined to ground Dave and Paul for all eternity for being so stupid (tho s/he who has no name may have already taken care of some sort of "Stupidity Consequence" by now).

But the last time I actually prayed was after Gilbert died. I took his relatives to lunch in Chinatown, dropped them off at the restaurant, parked across the street from my favorite Catholic church in San Francisco and stopped in to say a prayer for him. I don't think I've officially prayed since, though I may have said words in unison with other people when the time was appropriate.

I feel I am a spiritual person, but I've had such problems with organized religions -- lots of them. So I don't go to church, and I don't create an alternate church-like "thing" that I do on a regular or irregular basis to ritualize any sort of worship of a higher power. I just try to live a good life, do what I can when I can do it, and hope that this is the plan that I'm supposed to be following.

But I do feel like I'm kind of an in-the-closet non-Christian. It's not that I'm a non-Christian. I think there are lots of wonderful people who are Christians, just as there are lots of wonderful Jews and Muslims and atheists, etc. I believe that Jesus lived and died, whether he was actually "god" or simply "god's messenger." I just have not, to use the proper terminology "taken Jesus Christ into my heart as my Lord and Savior." That doesn't mean I haven't unofficially done so. It's just that I haven't had that religious transformation that so many speak about.

But I admire what these missionaries are doing for children in need and I think that they probably need my money more than they need my piety....and you don't see a lot of non church types out there running schools for poor children.

But it makes it feel awkward to speak in "tongues" (as it were) and to answer Fred's mother's question, which was "How's your life for being Christian. What year you've been a Christian?"

I think I'm going to tell her that I was born into a religious family and learned about Jesus in school. And then I'll send Fred a sheet of stickers that I found at the Dollar Store today, which are designed for religion school kids. Think that will work without actually lying about anything?

The Lord's Day

As I write this, Sunday is winding down. It started the way it always does, this Lord's day. I sat here at my computer, drinking coffee, puppies sleeping on my feet, and Walt went off to Mass. I haven't attended Mass since the kids were all still living at home. Well, there's been a wedding or a funeral here or there, but "church" hasn't been a part of my life for a long time, which is strange because I was such a church-oriented person when I was growing up.

I hesitate to bring the word "spiritual" into this because I do still think of myself as a spiritual person. I just dropped the organized religion thing.

It was quite different when I was growing up. It seems like it was nothing but organized religion.

Going to a Catholic school meant there were no arguments about whether to have prayer in school or not--it was a given. We had regular religion classes. Our school was on the grounds of our church, which was handy.

We regularly contributed to the support of the missions during our weekly "pagan baby" drives, where we bought "pagan baby stamps." kind of salmon colored with pictures of saints on them, I recall, to fill a book. There were little 10 cent ones and big 50 cent ones. In my mind's eye I can even see, I think, a picture of St. Dominic on one of the larger stamps. Kind of like green stamps. With green stamps, when you filled a book, you got to pick out a prize. When you filled a pagan baby stamp book, you got to name your own personal little black pagan baby and I laugh to think about all the "Tammys" and "Billys" there should be running around Africa these days. (You don't suppose the nuns actually misled us, do you?)

On Sundays we went to the 9 a.m. Mass and all the school kids sat together. We lined up outside the church in two groups, those who were going to receive communion and those who were not. You couldn't receive communion if you had put anything in your mouth that morning. If you accidentally swallowed a bit of water while washing your teeth, it was a sin to receive communion. I still remember the day I got in the wrong line, forgetting that I'd had a glass of water, but being more afraid of Sister than I was of God, so damned my eternal soul by receiving communion with the sip of water in my stomach.

Now you could probably walk up to the communion rail munching a Big Mac and still receive! Despite its rigid adherence to the word of the Bible on homosexuality and how it is absolutely forbidden to go against those ancient and not exactly clear laws, other laws seem to come and go on a whim.

We regularly had religious events that involved the little kids dressing in white and carrying chrysanthemums in their hands (I always think of Church when I smell chrysanthemums) and processing into the church until we lined the outside aisle. I'm not too clear on which events required processions, but we seem to have had a lot of them. I remember lining up in the church basement, my stomach in knots, waiting for the procession to start. I had performance anxiety even then.

There were novenas, 9 days of prayer, where we gathered together in the church every day (or night) for 9 days. I remember being at a novena at St. Dominic's church, a big tall Gothic thing one night, with my mother, when an earthquake struck. I still remember the priest reassuring us that we couldn't be in a better place....but I dunno. I think I would have preferred to have been somewhere that wasn't in danger of raining thousands of pounds of stone down on me!

Every Friday afternoon we were marched over to the church to go to confession. We stood in line waiting our turn in the black box where I confessed the same 3 sins each week because I couldn't think of anything else: I disobeyed my mother and father, fought with my sister, and told three lies. (Even as a kid, I had no ability to create a more interesting plot!) And the priest always gave the same penance: 5 Our Fathers and 5 Hail Marys. If I had to confess anything else, I got so nervous standing in line that invariably I wet my pants.

During Lent we went to the Stations of the Cross on Friday afternoons, when we sat, stood, knelt or genuflected as the priest prayed his way around the 13 stops which represented Jesus' processing from his trial to his death and being taken down off the cross.

When we were in the older grades of grammar school, we sang in the choir, climbing the tall steps to cluster around the big pipe organ and sing Gregorian chant. I can't pull one of those chants out of the top of my head, but if someone were to start one, I know I could sing it flawlessly. I remember being jealous of one of my friends once when she felt faint and got to leave Mass to get some fresh air. I decided to get faint the next week, but Sister knew I was faking and I had to stay and sing anyway.

I wanted to be a Carmelite nun when I was in grammar school. I read lots and lots of biographies of saints and I was particularly drawn to St. Therese of Lisieux. I think I liked her picture on the holy card. Or maybe because she was a modern saint (well, late 1800s) and this was an actual photograph, not an artist's representation of some of the earlier saints. Or it might have been her sad childhood and tragic death from tuberculosis. I don't know what it was, but I was determined to be just like St. Therese. I think I even visited a Carmelite monestary in San Francisco once.

By the time we got to high school, my school had its in-house chapel and we frequently had Mass in the chapel. At noon a group of us went to the chapel to say the rosary together. I belonged to the Sodality and the Legion of Mary. And we had retreats. A retreat was a period of time -- usually a weekend -- where we had talks by the priest, prayed a lot, went to Mass, did not speak to anybody and at the end, when we could finally speak, we got to ask the priest any questions about religions that we wanted. Most of them involved how far you could go with a boy before it started to enter the territory of "sin."

Also, by the time I was in high school, I was a bit more social and didn't need the "safety" of a cloistered order of nuns, so I was more attracted to the Daughters of Charity, "God's geese." The Daughters didn't have to stay locked in a convent, but went out and did stuff. They ministered to the poor, they taught school, they were nurses. And besides, Sister Anne was a Daughter of Charity and I felt I would be able to work with her if I joined up. My father wasn't too happy that they were never allowed to visit their home after they joined the order, but I was determined I was going to become a Daughter of Charity.

Cooler heads prevailed, specifically Sister Anne, who talked me into waiting and thinking it over, so I did...and then I didn't go and went to UC Berkeley instead, where I became active with the Newman Club, where I spent most of my time. There was choir and Mass and more retreats...and no religious order to join this time.

After we got married, we continued to go to Mass at the Newman Center, or then to our parish churches (where I sang in the choir). I took a Bible Study class with Char, which was fascinating.

But somehow when we got here, things slowly started slipping away. I began questioning the teachings that I'd taken for granted for all of my life. I saw people hurt by the beliefs of the Catholic Church. There were several contributing factors, but the straw that broke the camel's back was when a priest and nun were forbidden from ministering to the gay community. If that had been a single incident, I could have gotten past it, but it was just too much. And when the College of Cardinals elected Cardinal Ratzinberger, the most homophobic man in the Catholic Church to be the new pope, I knew there was no going back. Ever.

Sometimes on Sunday morning when Walt leaves for Mass, I feel a little guilty. You don't go through a lifetime of indoctrination about the sin you are committing by not going to Mass without it sinking in. The problem with having been raised a Catholic is that you don't feel comfortable looking for another church (that's a sin too). If we lived in San Francisco and I could attend the Metropolitan Community Church, I'd be there every week, but I'm not into church shopping.

So I keep the Lord's day in my own way. I minister to God's creatures, who cuddle in my lap, give me puppy kisses and don't judge anybody for anything other than how well they skritch behind the ears.

Faith of our Fathers

Gordon B. Hinckley died last week. I had never heard of Gordon B. Hinckley, but knew that his death brought much sadness to a new friend, who is one of the transcriptionists for the Morning Stories project. On Hinckley's death, she wrote:

My heart isn't breaking in quite the way I've long imagined it would when I received this news; I am wounded but not devastated. My tears are falling and I don't expect them to stop for a while, but at my center I feel the balm of gratitude and a simple quiet. I love you, President Hinckley. You are one of the people I have loved best in all the world. Thank you for the difference you've made in my life. I am changed for the better because of your care and your influence. I feel so good, knowing that you are right at this very moment encircled in the arms of safety and love. God be with you (and all of us) till we meet again.

I didn't realize until I read her blog and went looking to find out more about this man that Hinckley was the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to Wikipedia, Hinckley was the fifteenth president of the church and the oldest person to lead the Mormons in the church's history.

There has been much interest in the Morman religion since Mitt Romney has become such a strong contender for the Republican nomination. The concerns about what his religion would bring to the presidency are strongly reminiscent of the same comments that were made about John F. Kennedy.

I basically know nothing about the LDS Church, except that occasionally clean-cut looking young men in suits show up at my door and try to convert me. They are always very polite and take my "thanks, but no thanks" with good graces, going on about their way without trying to press their case.

During my years with La Leche League, working with breastfeeding women, I frequently encountered Mormon families. I began to note that whenever there was a woman I really admired, 9 times out of 10 it turned out she was a Mormon. All I really remembered was that my Mormon friends had huge closets full of stored food!

Suffice to say, I know little to nothing about the Mormon religion, so it was with interest that I watched 60 Minutes last night, which ran an old interview with Hinckley that Mike Wallace conducted about 10 years ago.

One of the first things Wallace asked Hinckley was about the belief that God and Jesus appeared to a 14 year old boy in the backwoods of New York state and told him to found this religion.

"Yep," smiled Hinckley, benignly.

"And you believe that?" Wallace asked.

"Yep," Hinckley replied.

"Really?" Wallace asked again, somewhat incredulously.

(This is not a transcript--I'm remembering the essence of the interview.)

It got me to thinking about Mormonism and Catholicism. How can we find odd this belief of Mormons that God and Jesus appeared to Joseph Smith and told him to start a new religion when we believe that an angel appeared to a Jewish teenager and told her that somehow she had become impregnated by God Himself?

I started thinking about other beliefs of the Catholic church which are the foundation of the religion.

Jesus was the son of God. He was killed by men. His body was buried, but it came back to life on the third day, walked with his friends and then rose up into Heaven again.

He gave us the sacrament of holy communion which means that when the priest blesses wine and bread they become the real body and blood of Jesus which can then be eaten by the people who choose to participate. Holy cannibalism, Batman.

When you break core religious beliefs down into the lowest common denominator and attempt to explain them to someone who has never heard them before, Mormon beliefs are no more weird than Catholic beliefs.

Mormons have prophets, Catholics have saints. When I was a kid, you had to be dead a very long time before you could become a saint. When John Paul XXIII died, they were ready to canonize him almost instantly. Same with Mother Teresa. Neither is a saint yet, but they are definitely on the fast track to sainthood.

Apparently the head of the LDS Church is its prophet and whatever he says goes. How odd is that when you look at "papal infallibility" in the Catholic church. Some guy at some point decided to declare all popes infallible when they make pronouncements about faith and morals and it's been that way for centuries. It's the papal equivalent of "Because I'm the mom, that's why."

I know nothing about the religions of Islam or Buddhism (and shame on me for that), but I don't doubt that I would find many of those beliefs strange.

But, bottom line is that all religions are based on what may seem very weird beliefs to outsiders. It's why they call it "faith." I don't see where Mormonism is any weirder than Catholicism. I guess we are all so desperate for something bigger than ourselves to believe in that the guy who can sell his ideas better than the other guy is the one who wins all the followers.

However, I think I could be more easily convinced that God and Jesus appeared to a 14 year old boy and asked him to found a church or that God Himself impregnated a young Jewish virgin than I can accept the story of some extraterrestrial named Xenu and the existence of thetans.