by Phighter » Tue Jul 21, 2015 3:48 am
Okay, here we go.
I was raised Catholic and brought to church every Sunday when I was little, and I even had CCD where I learned and received the sacraments. In the fifth grade, I was supposed to receive confirmation, but that week I had the worst illness of my life (a strep throat that was so severe, we thought it was appendicitis). So I missed getting confirmed, and my religious life gets interesting from there.
My church-life dropped off a bit after that, even though I thought to myself that I would go back and get confirmed, I never have. When your parents stop forcing you to go to church, praying before going to bed works just fine. After all, the world has baseball and sometimes football on Sundays, church has tons of old people and crying babies. The entertainment aspect of literally everything else compared to an hour of church is only magnified when there's no one there your age. It's like finding out at work/college that nobody is into the show you're watching. The show is still the show, but having no one to bond with over it kind of sucks.
Two years ago, my father passed away from an eight-month battle with stage-four lung cancer. During that time, I leaned very heavily towards either atheism or agnosticism. You hear in church a lot growing up, "God has a plan for you", but I thought that if God's plans were to take a loving family man who loved the hell out of his two sons, was a devout Catholic, and all-around a pretty decent person, then God was seriously messed up. The quote from Bruce Almighty stuck out to me a lot during this time period - I don't remember it exactly but it goes something like, "God is a kid on anthill with a magnifying glass and I'm an ant. And he's sitting there, just burning my feelers and enjoying it."
The emotional effects of being your father's caretaker are quite huge, as you watch a man that you love go down a path that I will tell you just flat out sucks - it's watching everything you love about them slowly disappear over time, replaced by a human being that you would never hang out with if you had just met them instead of loving them your entire life, and you find yourself faced with absolutely crippling social responsibility that, for me as a high-schooler, was doable, but absolutely life-sucking. When my father finally passed, I entered a state of grief-related depression. God wouldn't have made my father and I suffer like this -- not the God I learned about, the loving and caring one. Someone religious during this timeperiod made the mistake of saying "God has a path" again, and I cut off of religion. I prayed to my Dad to watch over me.
Fast-forward to my time in college, which is now. I go to a Jesuit university, and Jesuits are a different type of Catholic and I was not thrilled about going to a Jesuit university at all (I went for many other reasons). Sitting through the opening masses reminded me of everything I hated about church - the hopeful optimism, things like that. I was strongly encouraged by many to give church a try again, but it wasn't happening for me.
Funnily enough, my love of singing comes into play here. Or more importantly, my lack of singing ability. I suck at singing, and when I got to college, I auditioned for two acapella groups, still thinking that I could sing plenty well. I can't. I did not get into either group, and I asked what I could do to improve - they told me that the Chapel Choir could always use more members, and had people of varying skill types. Since I do theatre and need to get better at singing, I figured dedicating an hour Tuesday and two hours Sunday wasn't so bad, so I went to Chapel Choir rehearsal for the first time.
Rehearsal was kind of weird, because there were a lot of people (maybe like, thirty) and they were all around my age singing, and they were happy as shit about singing all this God praise and what not. I took it as kind of crappy vocal lessons, but when you're around happy people, even if your view of life is on the more negative side, I think it starts to rub off on you a little bit. They were going on a retreat the third week I was in the group to prepare for the big mass of the year, and as a new member, I was more than welcome to join the retreat. Seeing the excuse to get away from the university for a few days (being at a new place alone is scary), I took it.
I was not a big fan of how religious the retreat was, and especially not of going to the evening mass. But there was something really interesting about that evening mass that changed my perspective. My peers read the first and second reading, my choir director read the gospel and talked about what it meant to her, as a person of regular faith. There were no priests during this mass. She talked about how she had went through abuse, how she was a lesbian, and all of these things, and she was still close to God and God liked her as who she was and she liked God.
We then gathered up in a circle and shut our eyes. There was this really simple exercise, we all held hands, and we'd all stand there and anyone who felt inclined to speak, spoke. We prayed for those people, as after they were done, we said "pray for us". At first, fairly-standard, if not cliched, things people said. "For families struggling", "for the veterans", "for kids dying in Africa", basically stuff that didn't relate to me. Then a girl, one of the less-popular of the group (she is a major ass-kisser), said "for those battling with depression to find strength". That hit me in a weird spot - here she is in front of thirty people, WHO KNOW HER, and she just admitted to that like it was no big deal, she was so comfortable. And I think it had that effect on others in the group, because some other things started to come out - people praying for different family members, etc.
Then this one guy (whose birthday is coincidentally today) spoke up. Now this guy, we called him Jolly Joe, because he was the happiest of all these weird Jesuit choir people, and his laugh is so infectious that if you hear it, you will laugh too, regardless of any way you feel. He's the definition of happy, and it was his constant prodding during rehearsal (he's a bass, and he was a senior, so he was the leader of the bass section who sat next to me and gave me a lot of advice during my time in Chapel Choir this year), that got me to go on retreat in first place. There was something wrong in Joe's voice as he spoke up.
"For my mother, who has breast cancer."
What an emotional thing - and surely nothing any of us really knew. "Pray for us", and we kept going for another couple of minutes. I stood there dumbfounded as people contributed their emotions, really putting themselves out there - like why the hell would you do that in front of people you see every day? This is college for crying out loud, this is madness - and it kind of, I guess washed over me. These people didn't care what others thought. They wanted the spiritual support of their brethren, and the support of God. They believed. That was the magical word that popped in my head and has shaped my belief.
I had to give a much-shorter statement of this for a religious class I took, and I think the best way to describe my religious thoughts now is that God is support. God is not going to fix your shit for you. God is not going to cure your cancer, find your lost cat, help your sports team win the game, or anything like that. That's not God's job, and if it was God's job, God would be one really busy guy and how the hell do you answer all those requests, y'know? Not just deciding who of the millions of prayers for cancer cures gets served first, but what if both sports teams pray to God? I really hope He isn't playing favorites hahahaha.
No, God is a support figure. God is that friend that you call at 2 in the morning, when you've had too much to drink and are feeling extremely low, and God is that person you talk to, and He doesn't answer or talk back -- just sits there and listens, and you just talk, and you cry, and you talk, and you cry even more, but at the end of it, you just have this feeling that at least - at least you're not completely alone. Someone is there for you. They're not going to tell you what to do - all of that's your call. But at least when you are feeling the shittiest of shitty, and you feel like you don't really have anywhere else to go, God is there so you have a shoulder to cry on and someone to talk to. God will not fix your shitty situation, but He will at least make you feel like you're not alone, like you've got someone. And that's a humongous thing in this world.