Lent is a season of fasting and repentance, usually happening in the cold beginnings of Spring, or rather, for Central Oregon, the heart of winter. Dutiful Catholics revere this sacred time of Jesus Christ's death and rebirth by using it to increase their piety by making personal sacrifices. They wean themselves from ungodly vices and make practice of fasting and diligent prayer. Some Catholics give up drinking. Some Catholics give up happiness. It's like a New Years Resolution that only lasts 40 days.
My Lent sacrifices this season include: cussing and eating out at restaurants; two of my very favorite vices. Actually, my favorite vices are beer, the internet, making out, and raucous Irish music. I can never give these things up, however fervent my beliefs.
Truth be told, I haven't gone to church since I was thirteen. My family and I just fazed it out one year.
Church is boring.
Before this time I was very Catholic, going to church frequently. I was once a substitution on a youth Catholic trivia team which rivaled other youth groups in Oregon. I went to youth group retreats, meetings, mass, was baptized as a baby, received the Eucharist when I was ten (the privilege of receiving the bread and wine during mass) but fell short of the sacrament of Confirmation. Confirmation traditionally happens when folks are about fifteen and have the ability to make a conscious choice of accepting the church.
For Mexican Catholics this is known as a "Quincinera" and it's kind of a big deal. Just ask my friend Jessica. You get to wear the most beautiful dress you can find and everyone in the world is invited to your Quincinera party.
It's funny because fifteen is really a time when conscious decisions are made, at least more conscious than when we were kids doing what our parents wanted. Some kids become emo, others discover punk rock or join a Protestant church (THE SHAME!!). When I was fourteen I became atheist and vegetarian. It literally happened overnight. My mom doesn't belive it's possible for me not to believe in god and I'm realizing she's right. It's harder to not believe in god then believe in it. God, however, is a very relative term. Her mother, my grandma, still has Irish Catholic connections in Northern Ireland and the passing of Catholicism, I imagine, is similar to the passing of a sacred family heirloom. My Mom bears a sense of remorse for having three grown unconfirmed children with hardly any relationship to the church.
But if you talk to my brother (Gary, who gave up soda) and I, despite our beliefs; his in technology and mine in what has become a magical desitic humanism, you will find us still discussing Lent and calling ourselves Catholics, albeit, nonpracticing. My friend Patrick will take a fighting Irish stance if he ever heard someone denouncing his Catholic faith regardless if he hasn't been to church since he was maybe four. I heard in France nearly eighty percent of the French are Catholic but only a small percentage actually attend weekly mass. Someone who never goes to synagogue may still be considered Jewish even after generations.
For my brother and I it's kind of like that, more of an identity than a practice.
So, do I believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior? Kind of... I believe in Jesus the way I believe in Socartes or the Buddha. Other people wrote about them and their message has evolved over time to accomadate our needs as a society. I don't need Jesus's forgivness. When I do something bad, I need to be accountable for it and take responsibilty. Be nice to people. Be generous. I need to live a life of honor and service regardless if Jesus is watching me. The church is within you. This is something I can relate with. This, of course, makes me a bad Catholic because to Catholics, the church is everything.
Since, this year, I have curiously decided to recognize Lent, my Mom insists I start attending church because, she said, I'd be a hypocrite not to. So. For the first Sunday of Lent my Mom and I went back to church attending Ye Old St. Francis on Franklin and Lava. Funny how you can leave something for nearly ten years and return to find everything exactly the same: the same prayers, same order of events, same wafers. The crowd was exactly as it was when I last went to church made up of mixed races, hardly anyone my age, young families, choir ladies with their clouds of fluffed hair, teenagers in pajamas, a million old people and the most missed of all, wailing children. A church, designed for acoustic sound does well to project the restless cries of Catholic children.
Listening to the reverberating squall brought me back to my days as a small Catholic child munching on zip-lock baggies of dry cereal, crawling on the ground, and picking at the orange carpet. I remember how church, which lasts about an hour, seemed go on forever and ever. Now, this week, next to my mom, hungover and in my Sunday best, with exception of a run in my nylons, church seems relatively short and painless. Morning announcements are made, we stand and sit and kneel, the readings, prayers, we sing, profess our faith, sing again.
There's nothing really odd about Catholicism in practice the way I hear some people speak of it as "culty." Growing up Catholic I was never duped into believing or asked to believe in things beyond my own reasoning. In youth group I first learned about Buddhism and Hinduism and it was never mentioned they were absurd or irrelevant. I was taught fairly and openly about the church and when my family gradually stopped going we weren't excommunicated or anything. No one except our amazing next-door-neighbor Missus Kennedy (who gave me my first glow-in-the-dark rosary) probably noticed.
What I'm trying to say is, church is church; some people rely on it to feel succesful, to lessen the burden of free will, to find inner peace. They use it as a pedestal to do really awesome things and then some not awesome things.
As we all sit in hard wooden pews listening to the sermon the priest speaks slow and paced allowing our early morning brains to absorb the information. He tells a little joke about a camel and discusses the temptations of Christ and the concept of, in the season of Lent, man not living on bread alone. He emphasizes a point that we ought to make sacrifices to reflect the sacrifice of Jesus fasting for 40 days while he prayed before his death. Compared to not eating or drinking for forty days not cussing, eating at restaurants, and drinking soda are pretty petty sacrifices. While is wasn't a fire and brimstone sermon it was as much as my small tired mind could handle at that point. But still, just as I remember, it was very boring. And I was out of cherrios in the first five minutes.
Priest: "The mass has ended, go in peace." Everyone: "Amen" Dismissal song: 431 "On Eagles Wings."
My Lent sacrifices this season include: cussing and eating out at restaurants; two of my very favorite vices. Actually, my favorite vices are beer, the internet, making out, and raucous Irish music. I can never give these things up, however fervent my beliefs.
Truth be told, I haven't gone to church since I was thirteen. My family and I just fazed it out one year.
Church is boring.
Before this time I was very Catholic, going to church frequently. I was once a substitution on a youth Catholic trivia team which rivaled other youth groups in Oregon. I went to youth group retreats, meetings, mass, was baptized as a baby, received the Eucharist when I was ten (the privilege of receiving the bread and wine during mass) but fell short of the sacrament of Confirmation. Confirmation traditionally happens when folks are about fifteen and have the ability to make a conscious choice of accepting the church.
For Mexican Catholics this is known as a "Quincinera" and it's kind of a big deal. Just ask my friend Jessica. You get to wear the most beautiful dress you can find and everyone in the world is invited to your Quincinera party.
It's funny because fifteen is really a time when conscious decisions are made, at least more conscious than when we were kids doing what our parents wanted. Some kids become emo, others discover punk rock or join a Protestant church (THE SHAME!!). When I was fourteen I became atheist and vegetarian. It literally happened overnight. My mom doesn't belive it's possible for me not to believe in god and I'm realizing she's right. It's harder to not believe in god then believe in it. God, however, is a very relative term. Her mother, my grandma, still has Irish Catholic connections in Northern Ireland and the passing of Catholicism, I imagine, is similar to the passing of a sacred family heirloom. My Mom bears a sense of remorse for having three grown unconfirmed children with hardly any relationship to the church.
But if you talk to my brother (Gary, who gave up soda) and I, despite our beliefs; his in technology and mine in what has become a magical desitic humanism, you will find us still discussing Lent and calling ourselves Catholics, albeit, nonpracticing. My friend Patrick will take a fighting Irish stance if he ever heard someone denouncing his Catholic faith regardless if he hasn't been to church since he was maybe four. I heard in France nearly eighty percent of the French are Catholic but only a small percentage actually attend weekly mass. Someone who never goes to synagogue may still be considered Jewish even after generations.
For my brother and I it's kind of like that, more of an identity than a practice.
So, do I believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior? Kind of... I believe in Jesus the way I believe in Socartes or the Buddha. Other people wrote about them and their message has evolved over time to accomadate our needs as a society. I don't need Jesus's forgivness. When I do something bad, I need to be accountable for it and take responsibilty. Be nice to people. Be generous. I need to live a life of honor and service regardless if Jesus is watching me. The church is within you. This is something I can relate with. This, of course, makes me a bad Catholic because to Catholics, the church is everything.
Since, this year, I have curiously decided to recognize Lent, my Mom insists I start attending church because, she said, I'd be a hypocrite not to. So. For the first Sunday of Lent my Mom and I went back to church attending Ye Old St. Francis on Franklin and Lava. Funny how you can leave something for nearly ten years and return to find everything exactly the same: the same prayers, same order of events, same wafers. The crowd was exactly as it was when I last went to church made up of mixed races, hardly anyone my age, young families, choir ladies with their clouds of fluffed hair, teenagers in pajamas, a million old people and the most missed of all, wailing children. A church, designed for acoustic sound does well to project the restless cries of Catholic children.
Listening to the reverberating squall brought me back to my days as a small Catholic child munching on zip-lock baggies of dry cereal, crawling on the ground, and picking at the orange carpet. I remember how church, which lasts about an hour, seemed go on forever and ever. Now, this week, next to my mom, hungover and in my Sunday best, with exception of a run in my nylons, church seems relatively short and painless. Morning announcements are made, we stand and sit and kneel, the readings, prayers, we sing, profess our faith, sing again.
There's nothing really odd about Catholicism in practice the way I hear some people speak of it as "culty." Growing up Catholic I was never duped into believing or asked to believe in things beyond my own reasoning. In youth group I first learned about Buddhism and Hinduism and it was never mentioned they were absurd or irrelevant. I was taught fairly and openly about the church and when my family gradually stopped going we weren't excommunicated or anything. No one except our amazing next-door-neighbor Missus Kennedy (who gave me my first glow-in-the-dark rosary) probably noticed.
What I'm trying to say is, church is church; some people rely on it to feel succesful, to lessen the burden of free will, to find inner peace. They use it as a pedestal to do really awesome things and then some not awesome things.
As we all sit in hard wooden pews listening to the sermon the priest speaks slow and paced allowing our early morning brains to absorb the information. He tells a little joke about a camel and discusses the temptations of Christ and the concept of, in the season of Lent, man not living on bread alone. He emphasizes a point that we ought to make sacrifices to reflect the sacrifice of Jesus fasting for 40 days while he prayed before his death. Compared to not eating or drinking for forty days not cussing, eating at restaurants, and drinking soda are pretty petty sacrifices. While is wasn't a fire and brimstone sermon it was as much as my small tired mind could handle at that point. But still, just as I remember, it was very boring. And I was out of cherrios in the first five minutes.
Priest: "The mass has ended, go in peace." Everyone: "Amen" Dismissal song: 431 "On Eagles Wings."
