Wishful dreaming
Last week, I was taking an evening nap after work. As I lay there, I had a vision. My heart and chest burned, at first with pain, and then with this sort of almost-unbearable orgasmic radiance that centered in my chest and radiated outward from there. I struggled to adjust my position or to make it go away, but it wouldn’t stop. My eyes were closed, but my field of vision filled with flames, and a loud insistent voice repeated over and over while the words appeared in flaming letters in front of me, “Numbers 119. Numbers 119.”
“All RIGHT!” I remember thinking. “I’ll LOOK it up in the Bible. I just want this to stop. I’m afraid.”
The vision and strange feeling stopped. Shortly after that….I woke up, finding myself lying on my stomach in the same position I had been during the vision, with my arms slightly asleep. I shook it off and decided that I had just had a terrifyingly vivid dream. A dream where I had the sort of strong, life-altering spiritual experience that so many people crave…but that I crave particularly right now.
Later that night, I pulled my Bible off the shelf so I could look up the passage that had been seared into my brain during the dream. Of course, if you know Scripture better than I do, you know that there is no Numbers 119. Numbers 1:19 and 11:9 are not terribly moving passages. Or passages of any interest at all to someone in spiritual crisis.
If God is out to prove Himself to me, making sense might help. Or maybe I really did have that vision, and the lack of logical sense was the message. Seems roundabout.
My subconscious likes to mess with me in these ways, and my subconscious is also a particularly pissed-off atheist.
In which satire gives me insight into my reversion
Spirit of Vatican II “Catholic” Faith Community makes me giggle hysterically. I admit it. I will read it and start laughing so hard that my atheist-raised roommate will look at me as if I’ve gone quite mad. I send her the pages I’m reading, but despite her abiding hatred of hippies, she doesn’t get the material or understand why so much of this blog is so wrong, but also utterly hilarious. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t raised in this kind of Catholic church would get it, or find it nearly as funny as I do. I was talking this over with a convert friend, and she admitted that she isn’t sure what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s real (or what’s exaggerated for effect and what really goes on in dissident parishes, I imagine.) I suppose she’s lucky in that way.
There’s a more serious side to why I find the blog (er, I mean the parish) so funny, though. The church I grew up in wasn’t quite so … nutty, but we had more than our share of forced hugging and group meditations during confirmation class, and I learned nearly all of the theology I know ten years after “graduating” from religious ed. Baptisms of children and adults were part of Mass and served the purpose of “welcoming infants/catechumens into our faith community.” Never mind exactly what that faith was in, which remained fuzzy and amorphous for me until well after I was confirmed. Doctrine, tsk! That’s so old-fashioned.
I found the forced camaraderie, the constant pressure to hug people I didn’t really like, the liturgical dance, the screechy syrupy recycled ’70s folk songs in our hymnals, .. everything…spiritually dry and sometimes even revolting. I liked participating as a guitarist (yes, folk mass. hush) and as a a lector. Indeed, a lot of things were nice about the parish I grew up in, and I also sometimes liked the bare-bones Mass we had in the Protestant chapel in college, but overall I just gave up on a certain level. I kicked around converting to Buddhism for a while, but that seemed like too much of a radical departure. Most of my college friends were neo-pagans, which didn’t appeal to me at all. I proclaimed myself “culturally Catholic,” and avoided Mass mostly in order to avoid my ex.
After I graduated from college, I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I was in the office during all possible mass times on weekends. It was a drudgery and I couldn’t stand going. I’d sooner pray on my own….provided that Anyone was listening, and as I became more lonely and depressed and discouraged about the present and about my future, I doubted that there was any deity at all. The parade of human suffering that I dealt with every day in the call center where I worked made a compelling case for that.
I moved to another city for grad school, but decided not to hang out with the Newman group on campus. I was 23, and they seemed so…young. After Pope John Paul II died, I felt compelled to attend Mass at the cathedral for some reason I didn’t quite understand. (So did a thousand or so other people, and a few local news crews. Mass attendance there is usually quite sparse.) I attended the cathedral parish on and off for about two years after that. I was drawn back even though I couldn’t articulate why. Now I realize that it was because the Masses there were reverent, traditional, and aesthetically pleasing. I attended the cathedral sporadically until sometime just after Ash Wednesday of this year, when something clicked in my brain and I knew that I needed to go back.
Poking around the Internet and reading blogs and forums made me realize–I’m not as weird as I thought. In the minority, perhaps, but not wrong. Not wanting to hold hands during the Our Father, disliking the Gather hymnal, or not having lots of sex with my youth group boyfriend were indeed not things that made me a bad Catholic, as my experience growing up had led me to believe. There wasn’t something wrong with Catholicism, or with me. The problem lay in the liturgically liberal, theologically moderate tradition in which I was raised–many people seem to find that fulfilling, but I don’t anymore.
The sadness I felt was in part a God-shaped hole inside of me, and returning to the Church according to her rules has left me serene and even content. If I want to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I can’t ever be completely sure again that there’s a God or that he’s holding us to Catholic rules.
Maybe in time I can be sure of that again. I hope to. A total loss of faith is hard to recover from. I keep the rules and habits that I should, in hope that the doubt will disappear someday. Moral guidance is important, as is ritual, but transcendence and salvation are far more important.
What does it say about me?
I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of my friends and acquaintances are genuinely shocked that I’ve started attending Mass again. Educated single people with no kids don’t do that, after all! They know better!
Tripping the switch
Since I started getting serious about reversion during Lent, my struggle with going back to confession got worse as I examined my conscience more. The last time I went was 10 years ago, when I was required to before my confirmation. I’ve been trying to gather up the courage to do it for months now, but always failed. I had an incentive today, though…I’m busy all day tomorrow, attending my first Tridentine Mass this Sunday, and I wanted to do so able to receive communion.
“Joan,” I told myself in the car as I fought the urge to go to the pet store instead, “being an adult means making yourself do things that you don’t want to do, even when only you and God are watching.”
Finding a church with open reconciliation hours I could make it to has been really tricky, since most churches around here only have about half an hour on Saturdays, if any time at all. (Doesn’t anyone in the Northeastern USA confess?) After some digging, I found a chapel that has priest taking confessions all day, from 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM. I went to mass yesterday for the Ascension at the same chapel, to check out the layout and the atmosphere.
It was my first time confessing with a screen separating me and the priest, which I found wonderfully liberating. Apart from the sacrament, I found the priest’s empathy and advice much more useful than that of my last few psychotherapists.
I feel so serene, from both the absolution and the way I framed and categorized the last few years of my life and saw the threads of my various weaknesses that seem to have intertwined and formed a net that I didn’t even realize was there.
Enough serious talk. There was one funny thing–in the reconciliation room, when you kneel down, there’s a doorbell button set in the cushioned bench, so it sets off a bell and the priest knowsthat someone is there. I found this very funny for some reason.
*Ding-dong!* “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Welcome back. By the way, everything you knew is wrong.
I’m feeling very tired for most of this week, both physically and mentally. I suffer from debilitating migraines, and I’ve had a tension headache since…Thursday, I think. Maybe Wednesday, but I think I had just been hung over from too many margaritas at my birthday party on Tuesday night. (The strawberry ones are so tasty, but I need to remember to order them without alcohol later in the evening…)
Anyway, the muscles of my forehead ache as if they’ve been strained, which leads to dizziness, nausea, and just plain feeling tired. I can’t get any relief from it with painkillers, either, unlike a migraine. “Maybe I thought too hard and I sprained my brain,” I joked to my mother earlier today.
Sure, it’s not medically possible, but it feels like that’s what happened. On top of preparing to graduate and some general work woes, I’m at a spiritual impasse and feel terribly confused.
I didn’t quite realize what I got myself into when I decided to formally revert if one can do “formally” do such a thing. There’s no ceremony, and it’s not like I left the Church–I only left regular practice.
I grew up in a church that was liberal to a fault, and my religious education was severely lacking, though my mother was able to fill in some gaps. As I correct a lot of the incorrect things I learned, and fill in the remaining gaps, I become very anxious and start to wonder what, exactly, I’m doing, and whether I’d be better off, or at least happier, going back to my life as a lapsed-Catholic agnostic.
I can’t do things by halves. When I take on a project or start a new hobby, I go all out or not at all. But I’m not sure I can do what’s demanded of me if I go whole hog back into practicing Catholicism. Yet easing in isn’t really an option either, since I have one hurdle to jump. I learned only a short time ago that I’m not supposed to receive the Eucharist with mortal sins on my slate. Seeing that the last time I went to confession was in 1997, I have…a few. Regular confession isn’t something that I was ever taught was required; it was something to be done only when someone forced us to.
I’ve taken the route of simply not going to mass for the last few weeks. The local offerings that don’t conflict with my weekend job range from “annoying” to “rampant liturgical abuse,” and I’m so tired and frustrated lately that I just think, “well, if I shouldn’t receive, then I lose the only thing that makes going to Mass worthwhile.” Most people I know would overlook this and just receive anyway, but I wouldn’t be writing this blog or worrying myself sick about other theological issues if I were “most people.” I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, these days.
I recently learned that some local Franciscans have a lovely chapel in a strip mall; they have about eight hours of open reconciliation time every weekday, and a few daily Masses.
I thought that I would welcome this news, but it’s only increased my stress. This news removes the one excuse I had left–no times convenient to my schedule for confession–and increases my anxiety.
It would be so much easier to turn and run away, and write off the last few months as an ill-fated experiment in devoutness.
The right thing to do is, of course, rarely the easiest.
Inching rightward
I’m starting to think that Catholics need an equivalent term to Baal Teshuva, meaning a young person who adheres to a stricter tradition than that in which they were raised, or who return to faith when they had previously left. It should be a Latin word, but my Latin is…nonexistent.
I’m thinking of this because of something that I put in the mail with my bills today. I ordered my first Latin-English missal and a few other odds and ends from OLRL, a group that is…um, pretty far to the right, just short of sedevacantism, as far as I can tell. Which is admirable, if that’s their thing. I’ve never owned a missal at all. We had seasonal missalettes at my church growing up, which had the text of the Mass, readings, prayers, and some other useful things in it. I remember following along when I was first learning how to read, which was helpful. My church phased them out because they switched to a different translation of Scripture, but they’re still around for those who want them. I think part of the reasoning was also to make Mass more oral and participatory, rather than having people follow along in the book.
I’ve never owned a scapular, so I ordered one, and some pamphlets. Yay, shiny new book toys!
