Of Hells and Sky Daddies

 

 

It’s now been a few years since I bailed out of the Catholic Church, and today during the season of Advent, I’m doing just fine.  There are things to miss about the Church, at least the little corner of it with which I was involved.  St. James Cathedral is a beautiful and a holy place, and I always feel safe and welcome there.  Father Ryan, as I think I may have noted before, is a wise, funny, humane priest;  the sort of priest they try to portray on TV and always get wrong.  And I really got into the ritual of Mass.  In many important ways, in fact, I haven’t broken my ties with those aspects of my Catholicism. They represent the more grounded, human aspects of churchgoing with which I have no conflicts. 

 

The trouble comes when I start cranking up the theology and let it bounce off things in my soul.  What I’ve decided is that I don’t want any part of some blanket insurance plan for the human soul.  I simply don’t think it’s necessary, and I certainly don’t buy the story of Original Sin any more, if I ever did.  For a while, I found it to be a useful shorthand for talking about the fact that human beings are flawed, often tragically so, and that we need as much mercy and forgiveness as we can get our tragically grubby mits on. But I never really bought the economics of Christian salvation, which in its essentials is blood magic and Bronze Age hostage trading. Make no mistake, blood magic is real and its powerful mojo, but I don’t think its something with which I need or want to involve my 21st century soul.

 

Having said all that, I am paradoxically very comfortable with aspects of pagan spirituality.  I love the winter holiday season, and sing the carols of the infant Christ with great joy and verve, if sorrowfully off pitch. But I am not celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah as much as I am grooving on the Birth of the Sun and the hilarious truth of the Winter Solstice, the truth of renewal, the grave necessity of we human beings to be generous and forgiving with each other.

 

I think there is a great Mystery at the cosmic core, a field, being or energy who is old and wise and yes, even loving.  But I don’t conceptualize it as some kind of anthropic Sky Daddy.  My idea of god is more that of a wise and sapient ocean, through whom we swim, sometimes in joy and sometimes in a kind of terrible amnesia, like minnows.

 

Christmas, then, is a time set aside for breaking through that amnesia and waking back to our cosmic fishhood, and the crucial awareness that we travel, not alone,  but in schools.

 

Merry Christmas.  Happy Winter Solstice.  Kundun.

 

 

 

 

 

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