The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Bee In My Bonnet

We'll be going to my parents in about an hour. Truce officially called between my mother and myself, the much-needed break ended. It is a holiday weekend, though it has come to mean something different to everyone I know than what it should. It ought to be religious, but it isn't. Good Friday has become a reason to eat fish and stay home. It gives birth to a sandwiched Saturday, the sweet filling between slices of unleavened solemnity, except for the Easter Bunny and his basket of chocolate. I don't know anyone who dyes eggs anymore, and if they did, I don't know anyone who would care to eat them. We have slowly managed to leave Jesus out of things, and we've brought a giant, invisible, Cadbury-pushing bunny in. Sometimes I wonder about us.

The snow from the beginning of the week has left, though. It's green again, the birds are euphoric and the open window next to me lets in soft wind and the gentle slither of random tires on the road beyond the yard. I wonder how much longer we're going to get away with it, though. I wonder how long until the government and the atheists and the party-poopers take it all away, these holidays of ours. They'll eventually start to hammer the point that no one is really celebrating these days with the proper enthusiasm or intention anymore, and they'll be right about it. They'll talk about the elephant in the room, the reality that people just don't subscribe to traditional ideas these days and that God isn't as much an influence as He/She used to be. I question it all the time, and I have stopped feeling badly for doing so. I haven't been to church in a very long time and I've stopped knowing what makes me a Catholic. I've yet to baptize my child, which is a huge oversight given that she goes to Catholic school and she's meant to have Communion in a few years, but neither M. or I can get motivated enough to get to a Church and claim it as our own. It's just one of those things we keep forgetting to do.

Why send our child to Catholic school, then? Easy. It's what I did, what I know. The curriculum is tougher (Public school supporters will negate this, but it's fact if they care to look it up. Kids from my school took their tougher courses at public high schools so that they'd get a higher mark. My parents wouldn't let me do that, but I got into the schools I wanted to, anyway, because of where I went). I want her to have something of a religious foundation which she is free to make choices about when she is old enough to do so. I look at religion as a cultural thing, rather than a holy thing, and Catholicism is what I identify with culturally, that's all. M. is the same, a half-Catholic who was baptized in a church but who ended up defiantly staying home whenever his father dutifully went off on Sunday mornings to his local parish. Does he believe in God? I asked him this a while ago, and he thought about it for a few minutes before he answered. He said that when his dad died, something happened which made him believe there is more than this life. Before that he was open to the idea, but didn't really think there was much to believe in. That day, he said, there was some kind of electrical surge in his body as he held his dying father's hand, that at the moment of his father's death, he felt as though his father's soul had come into his body and commanded it. I asked if maybe it could have just been trauma, but he shook his head and said no. He intuitively felt as though his father had actually come into him and gone home, inside his son, to his home in Le Vesinet. Once there, M. said he fell to the floor and felt his father suddenly leave his body. Weird, M. said, but true. Whatever is after this, whatever is powering this earth, it makes its presence known on occasion, he said. I like that.

I feel like a hypocrite, though. I identify with a religion I no longer follow, but I think it's because I have always felt the religion itself needs to make some adjustments. The people who create its rules need to wake up. We're all just people, and I don't think any of them are more divine than I am. I think a lot of priests choose their vocation because of fear or expectation. I'm certain there are many who really want to follow God or who have a natural affinity for preaching but there are many who are just in it because it's a place to hide where they can talk down to others. Not very respectful of me, I know, but it's what I feel. I won't even go into the alter boy molestations or the priests who are actually fornicating with the nuns because that's too easy. They're human, I expect as much. I think that the Church once represented a kind of power which was alluring to people of a certain nature. It's lost that power now. The government has it. Celebrity has it. The internet has it. The Church, not so much.

I'd love to be religious if I truly believed in everything it stood for. I see no reason to turn my back on meaning or hope. It's just that it's all so tainted, and my logical brain always needs proof.

At least there's chocolate on this holiday, though. I'm all for any holiday which employs the seductive power of chocolate.