Ex-ex-Catholic

The Allure of the Convent

As I take back piece after piece of my Catholic heritage, I am now taking back monasteries and convents. In my youth I was always struck by how it felt to be in them. That atmosphere was one of the alluring things about becoming a woman of the cloth – an idea which both intrigued and terrified me. (I was attracted to tranquility from an early age.)

I needn’t have worried. Turns out you can be inside of one of these places easily enough without signing up for life. You can simply go and stay. For days. Weeks. Months, if you have the time. I don't think you even have to be Catholic. You don’t have to actively participate in any of the Catholic things that go on there; you can just hole up and drink in the peacefulness.

During my heathen years, I thought that monastics were wasting their lives – hiding out from the world because they couldn’t take it.

I knew nothing.

Now I understand what they are doing: They are individually and collectively cultivating peace. These places are peace factories. It’s not easy to achieve in the face of the utter chaos most of us live in the midst of. I’m not sure one could hold out against the onslaught of overstimulation if one didn’t withdraw. What you get by spending a few days with them is just a sampling of what they are creating.

It seems to me that they radiate peace outward from their location. I predict that what they’re providing will be more and more in demand in this world of growing chaos. I hope that instead of dwindling out, the pendulum will swing the other way – I hope the demand will become so great that they’ll have to build more of them. If there were more of them, more area would be covered. That’s my theory, and my hope.

If people knew how great it is to immerse oneself in that ambience, they would flock there.

Next I’ll tell about the last couple of times I went.

The Candle Method

No, we don’t really call it that. But yes, Catholics are heavily invested in candles. Of course we all remember those banks of candles in church. “Go light a candle for your aunt,” my mother would say, handing me fifty lire and thereby combining two of the greatest joys of childhood into one: slipping metallic tenderdiscs into slots, and setting things on fire.

 

The Tibetans have a similar tradition: Prayer flags. You used to see them strung across front porches in the hippie neighborhoods. Each time the flag flaps, it’s a prayer. I suppose the person who puts it up has a particular intention, I don’t know.

 

But that's how it is with lighting candles. You light it for something or somebody. So easy, because that way you don’t have to figure out what to say.

 

Will get back to the riveting topic of monastic life soon; but first, in view of the urgent circumstances at hand........ 

PS: god doesn't need a note. the note is just for the blog.

 

Get thee to a nunnery

I’ve been in plenty of them in my Catholic day. They were immaculate. You could lick the floor with impunity. The nuns had no junk. A single bed, a plain cross on the wall, a window, a dresser. You could smell the cloth. Ironed linen. And wool. The silence shimmered like silver. Like the surface of a springfed pond deep in the wilderness.

If I could visit an actual pond in the wilderness more often, I might not need monasteries. Those people who regularly escape to the wilderness? That is God they are going to, whether they call it that or not. They are going to where they can hear their true selves. I’m bummed that I can’t make that kind of experience a much larger part of my life.

Unfortunately, that requires planning. Time. Energy. Effort. And most importantly, an ability to get from A to B on the surface of our planet – a gift apparently dispersed while I was in the restroom.

At least if I get lost on the way to the monastery I can usually find a human who can help me. Oddly, Jesus hasn’t been terribly forthcoming in the geographical assistance department. God may be operating under the illusion that the arena of geographic orientation is being covered by those human beings sent here to invent maps and compasses. Those would be great if either of them ever matched up with my physical reality.

Whatever the case, I’m not going. Not alone, and not without another earthling certified in mountain rescue, first aid, and orienteering.

Hence, the monastery.

Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh

ok, yes, about the monastery, but wait. Today’s Epiphany. I had to post this, in honor thereof:

 

In case you can’t read the caption, it says:

Unbeknownst to most theologians, there was a fourth wiseman, who was turned away for bringing a fruitcake.

By Gary Larsen, used entirely without his permission, but God knows I’m not making any money off this blog, so I doubt he’d care. Thank you Mr. Larsen, fellow dispiser of fruitcake.

Honey made by nuns

It didn’t ruin my Christmas, but… I got sick late afternoon on Christmas day. I’ve been drowning myself in tea with lemon, and honey made by nuns. How could you not get well on honey made by nuns?

 

See the label? It really is made by nuns. The nuns make honey, the monks make fruitcake and date-nut bread, and each sells it for the each other. That’s how it works. The reason I know this is because, one, I was there; two, I asked one of the monks. I bought it from the boys’ monastery up here, which gets it from their sister monastery down in California.

Next time I’ll tell you what I was doing at the monastery.

A Gulash of Legends

To this day, I’m not sure whether to attribute the whole gift-giving thing to Saint Nicolas or the Three Kings. When I first arrived in Italy at age six I got more explanations than I could shake a bread stick at. First I heard that Santa didn’t cover Italy because they had La Befana, a witch who brought gifts on the feast of the Epiphany. (No mention of the Three Kings, the ones to put it on the church calendar in the first place.) Those Italians who admitted that some presents did in fact arrive on Christmas day credited the delivery to il Bambino Gesú. San Nicola was in charge of socks, in which you’d find either a coin or a lump of coal, according to your behavior. That story bothered me throughout my childhood, since I saw no way an item dropped down a chimney was going to land in a sock hanging from the mantel. As we rolled into the sixties, Santa apparently added Italy to his list, because I noticed he started showing up there under the alias of Babbo Natale. He too was said to gain entry by way of chimneys, another troublesome claim given that his girth outsized them all. It took me years to put it together that San Nicola and Babbo Natale were the same person. The weight gain was never explained, nor the shift to hiring scores of undocumented elves, nor the relocation of operations from Italy to the North Pole.

But wait! What fresh hell is this? As is turns out, the real Saint Nick (the dead one) is still in Italy, but he’s supposed to be in Turkey. Looks like a bunch of Italian soldiers stole his bones from his home town of Demre in the 11^th century, and now the Turks want him back. Meanwhile, back at home the Turks of Demre have cycled through no less than four statues of him since 1981, among them a huge plastic fat guy in a red suit.

Is there anything in this world that humans won't fight about, every step of the way? Name one. And I'm right in there flailing with the rest of them. That plastic Santa in front of a Byzantine church would've completely unglued me.

Dreaming of a junk-less Christmas

I didn’t really write anything about Christmas – which doesn’t mean that I skipped it. I know it happened. I partook in all the celebratory activities. Except shopping. Shopping is not one of the parts of Christmas that is required by the Catholic church -- for which I am supremely grateful. If it were, that alone would rule me right out, since I would rather join a cult of moonie-goonie-hari-kari-vudu-budu-koolaid-serving wacos than enter a shopping establishment.

In addition to shopping-avoidance, I managed to limit an increase in my material-possessions-load to exactly one item – namely, a hat -- knitted for me by my partner, who, for the protection of her privacy, I will henceforth refer to in this blog by the alias of “Lindi.” An excellent hat it is, a hat I couldn’t live without, a hat which has barely left my knob since I received it. My quality of life has definitely risen since acquiring it.

 My parents, wanting to de-emphasize the materialistic approach to Christmas, encouraged handmade gifts. Do any Catholics out there remember “spiritual bouquets”? These took the form of strips of decorative paper inside of a paper lantern, each strip holding a hand written promise like “three hail marys,” “one whole rosary,” or the like. I don’t know about you, but to me getting one of these was a major bummer of a present. Major. Even worse than receiving clothing, which didn’t count as a real gift because you knew your parents had to buy you clothing anyway, Christmas or not.

 Now however, I welcome a gift of clothing because a well-chosen piece of apparel is something I can really use and it means one less reason to go shopping. Hence my elation about the hat.

 Next time I’ll delve into: Who started all this Christmas gift-giving anyway?

 

Let’s just go along with it and simply move forward

For decades I used to get hung up on this stuff, thinking that I couldn’t go on as a Catholic unless I believed every bit of it. Is Jesus in the host? I don’t know. Is Jesus in the box? I don’t know. I will say that I sincerely would like it to be true. Plus I seem to be afflicted with this deep need for rituals. Here’s a ritual that I already know, that’s super old, that a bunch of other people also participate in. Since I need ritual in my life, why not this one? If god isn’t really in the bread, what have I lost?

Even if all of the mythology around Christianity was some day proven to be untrue, I wouldn’t consider my time wasted. The whole of my participation in Catholicism still counts as a meditation or a prayer, an expression of how I’d like the world to be, and of humans seeking to achieve their highest selves. I don’t think accuracy of fact was ever the point.

The Lion, the Priest, and the Wardrobe

I adore the idea that God could be contained in a box. Sounds ridiculous, but still. If god could be put in a box, would this not be THE box:

 

Once we’ve gone to all that trouble to establish that god is in the bread, we can’t exactly throw the leftover bread away, now can we? That would be so rude. So we had to come up with a suitable storage container --- and no, it can't be tupperware, or even remotely resemble tupperware. Hence the mini-closet in every church, known as the tabernacle.

 

What you see in the picture is the one at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland Oregon. If you were god, and your people made you this stupendous box to reside in, would you not be moved? Of course you might want to say “Oh stop. I am so way bigger than that box.” But would you? My guess is that if you were god, you wouldn’t want to hurt their little feelers; you’d just take it as a nice compliment and go along with it. You’d say, “ok, yeh, sure, I’m in there. I’m already everywhere, but if you want me to be in the box, I’ll be in the box. Whatever.”

 

I’m not exactly sure what happens to the leftover wine. I’m pretty sure the priest finishes it off after Mass.

Landing Pad for Christ

The Catholics differ from the Separated Brethren in that the Catholics insist on the veracity of the Real Presence. Why wouldn’t they, after all that work of making it happen? The entire Mass is working up to the Eucharist at the end. The Protestants would argue that Christ (or god or whatever) is already present everywhere, and that communion is just a symbolic act that recreates the Last Supper.

 

Well certainly no one is saying that God isn’t everywhere or that we need to eat this host in order to get god to take up residence inside us. I think what the Catholics mean is something like this:

 

that the Mass is sort of an engraved invitation to god, conveying the message that we especially want god to be here, and we’re preparing this nice little landing pad on the altar to make that perfectly clear – just in case he’s wondering if we really mean it. Perhaps the Mass is saying, hi God, we really want you here, look, we’re setting the table, we’re breaking out the fine china (i.e., golden goblets, etc.) and the best linens; you’re invited, we’re ready.

 

I’ve heard that god is not a meddling type of god, that he/she/it only gets involved by request. If that’s true, wouldn’t one want to be very clear and consistent about the invitation?

 

Next time: what to do with the leftovers?