Big Sky and Ballyhoo

I wrote this after breaking with the Catholic Church last year. In many ways, I was a happy Catholic, but as a gay (or postgay) man and a freethinker I was starting to feel squashed and didn't much like the sensation.

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In the hours since I've decided to break with the Church and once again investigate a broader spiritual landscape, I've had a feeling of exhilaration. I feel as if I've been standing in a room with a low ceiling for five years and I've just stepped outside to discover that there is a big sky, with stars and planets above. I'm not looking for another religion to join. I think that God is bigger than religion. Religions provide a structure,a model of Heaven to contemplate. But theologies, and especially Catholic theology, is so concerned with being self-consistent that I fear it makes up stuff just to fit the program.

For instance, I might buy the proposition that Jesus was born of a virgin. Well, why not? It strikes me as very mythological, like much of what is reported of the life of Jesus. But I'm willing to grant that in one, maybe even a few cases, the miracle of a virgin birth happens. Some sources also claim something like a virgin birth for the Buddha. But when I inquired of a friend who is a Jesuit priest whether Mary is still a virgin, he replied that she is eternally virgin. He didn't explain why such a thing would be, what decree might have been handed down to an adolescent Jewish girl by a mysterious God, he simply stated with finality that she is eternally virgin. That's systematic theology for you. I haven't read the books studied by my Jesuit friend, but I'm willing to bet that one of them frames virginity as an eternal metaphysical affair rather than the simple integrity of a mortal hymen: thus the Virgin Mother. Can't have Mary happy in Heaven, getting it on with St. Francis of Assisi, she's got to lay off the boys FOREVER.

I think it's like this. Sometimes I think of God as a great elephant of a being, unknowable and wild. And religion wants to put that elephant in a tent and charge admission. Some religious paint the elephant in garish colors and tell the marks terrifying stories about him. Some try to make the elephant stomp on their enemies, or haul logs, or build castles with its trunk. But the elephant is not for taming. The elephant can't be bought and sold with ballyhoo. The elephant is free and wild and ultimately unknowable and if I'm going to find him, I'm going to find him somewhere beyond the circus tent.