February 8, 2013

  • The Father which is not the Son which is not the Spirit which is not the Father is our God with the Son and the Spirit; the Lord is one.

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    There is something which gets stirred within me at the professing of that Sacred Mystery, every time.

    It is the same feeling I have when standing before the amazing architecture of the Library of Congress or reading Shakespeare or simply taking in a beautiful day or taking in a particularly ingenious intellectual argument.

    I've always maintained, to some degree (and this is growing as time goes on), that there is very little difference between all these things; this, I would imagine, can be used to bolster an argument for absolute morality.

    This has also led to the confusion some have had to how I've viewed being religious and being a secularist as being seamless.

    But I don't want to discuss any of those things, things which have either been discussed in detail before here or would require detailed discussion that would escape the point I do want to address.

     

    Rather, read the portion listed below. It'll help me make my point, in my usual round-about way of doing things (also, it contains potentially offensive concepts if you're of more restrained mind about thinking about God).

    An excerpt:

    Growing up outside the church, I'd drawn my ideas about the Catholic god from Fellini movies as being something like Anita Ekberg driving a red Ferrari. It had never occurred to me to ask the question "Is God fuckable?" because I never doubted the answer. It's one of the reasons I wanted to be Catholic.

    When I first started going to Mass, in my thirties, I'd been studying Saint Augustine and was soaked in his language of intense longing for God. I wasn't surprised at all that in one of the first homilies I heard, the priest said he wanted Jesus to be his lover. I didn't realize this was an extraordinary thing for a priest to say. The mystics are always saying stuff like that. Sitting in the pews for a few years, I figured out that when it comes to sex, parish priests more usually offer a mix of awkward shame and romanticism right out of junior high. Mostly, though, it's just not mentioned.

    Catholic religious imagery is intense, but after a while, it can become as unremarkable as a pair of slippers. You almost have to be an outsider, a newcomer, or in some sort of crisis to notice it. 

    Took me a while to slip into the slippers. Once when I was supposed to lector (read out loud) at daily Mass, I glanced at the reading beforehand and saw it was something about Jerusalem offering her abundant breasts to suck and fondling you on her lap (from Isaiah 66, I think). 
    The priest who was due to say Mass that day was a man I wasn't altogether at ease with, and I didn't really want to read this facing him across a small room. 
    I said to the guy who set up the daily Masses that I didn't feel comfortable reading this passage. 
    He looked at me, absolutely shocked. "But it's scripture," he said. 

    I knew he would read it if I insisted, but I thought, OK, fine, lepers or lambs, it's all the same, people don't even hear it. So I read it and the priest stared into space and I stared into space and I could have been reading the Lord's laundry list.

    The passion, the body, can get pretty drowsy and domesticated in church, like urgent desire does if you give it warm milk and don't poke it with a stick. Still, it's there if you want it, or if you need it, and if I asked most Catholics I know if God is fuckable, I think I know what they'd say. 
    They'd say something like, The world is a sacrament. Take and eat.

    Now, the idea of God being "fuckable" is something completely new to me. The author's assurance at how most Catholics would respond to such a question sort of makes me wonder what world they live in and where would one find it.

    Yet the questions of sex and, in particular, the religious rituals toward the end do strike a cord.

    While I have yet to find the strains of liberal thought I am so certain are within Catholicism (somewhere…), the openness about sex in the context of religious imagery certainly rings true within my knowledge. I once had someone try to tell me that notions of homosexuality in older texts were simply people misreading descriptions of encounters with God because such encounters can take on a seemingly sexual nature (which only serves to reinforce the sacredness of sex and its sacramental component). It's one of the many ways Catholicism seems to gray what is normally taken as strictly black-and-white concepts in religion (though never going nearly as far as some would like and always having an explanation that maintains the traditional viewpoint). It's hard to explain unless you have familiarity with such things (or, seemingly, familiarity with Catholic thought, which is funny to me given my own late blooming that I keep coming back to on this xanga).

    But there's something more.

    It's that last portion (which is really so beautiful, if understood in its context, that I can barely take it): "They'd say something like, The world is a sacrament. Take and eat."

    Someone once told me they couldn't see themselves part of any religious branch which didn't have some notion of the sacraments. I couldn't have understood it then but I have come to. And, for those unfamiliar with the concept of the sacraments, I could give you a description but I don't think it would suffice.

    Thus, for now, I shall simply address the sacrament which the passage is clearly alluding to: the Sacrament of the Altar, Holy Communion, the Eucharist (arguably, the focal point about which all of Catholicism circles; without, there is no Catholicism, no Church, no Faith).

    For some, this is a concept entirely bereft of familiarity (which, for me, makes it all the more singular and significant).

    To make allusion to the Eucharist (the literal embodiment of God offered to us as sustenance, both spiritual and physical) is not simply to say enjoy experience or "take the most out of life". It is to literally make this engagement a holy and spiritual act given to us, again in a spiritual context, by God.

     

    I have continually said that I like that Catholicism takes every experience into consideration in worship: we cross ourselves to engage our touch as we simultaneously speak aloud our belief in the triune God, we use all the visual glory that candles might give a service and incense to reach our scent, etc.

    This concept can go into all sorts of fascinating conversations about the state of human nature and its relation to the spiritual, etc. but I don't want to address those here. Rather, in that context, the sacraments take on a more defining conceptualization.

    They become a sort of testament of sorts, helping to define the religion. In the ways of symbolism so defining for Catholicism, defining the religion around the Eucharist (for everything that it is from having to physically enact it out to the fact that is the act of eating to the spiritual concept behind its action) sets, tenfold, fundamental concepts about the religion at its very foundation.

    Perhaps this is the best (for now) way to describe why we become so impassioned by our sacraments.

    And it explains why the recitation of that Sacred Mystery at the top can be such a high to partake in. Were I more of a Protestant, I suppose it'd be the same for reciting John 3:16. Or the love of life without the Spiritual for the Secular Humanist. Or that the Summation of Life is to give Life meaning for the Existentialist.

    And the reason the end of that above passage is so great is that it ties these other aspects of life into these defining concepts of the Faith as seamlessly as these definers illuminate the Faith (though the current hierarchy would protest to the fundamentalism I seem to see sex as having, even outside of matrimony).

     

    Anyway (in spite of the difficulty to understand some of the above unless you understand what certain concepts mean and feel like), all of this was to articulate this emotion and the potential reasoning behind it.

    And to say that, while I always have this religious-like experience with other religions or religious places (only part of why I was involved in interfaith activities), there is only one other religion (or religion-related to encompass when dealing with intellectualism, thus including my secularism) I have ever had a similar reaction to when encountering the whole of the religion and that is Judaism.

    And I'm not really sure what to do with it.