Not Rome’s B!+<# Anymore

It’s been a grisly week, Dent Squad. It’s not so much that I had nothing to say but more that I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for saying it.

Our across-the-street neighbor died suddenly last Wednesday afternoon from a combination of pneumonia, bad lungs and a dodgy heart. He left two teenaged sons, 18 and 16 years of age, for whom he had custody after an ugly divorce battle that dragged on far too long. The whole thing is so sad because those two boys have been through so much in the past five years. Mark’s death will re-open the legal battles between his ex-wife and his brothers.

The funeral mass was this morning at a local Catholic church. Having grown up Catholic, the order of mass was as familiar to me as my parents’ faces. It has been many, many years since I practiced Catholicism. In the intervening years between my schooling at a Catholic women’s college and now, I sang in an Episcopalian choir. It’s been nearly seven years since I gave that up, however. Since then, I’ve been on a barely focused, totally haphazard spiritual quest to fill the void left by my departure from Rome’s fold. At times I even wondered whether I belonged back at an Our Lady of Something Unlikely. Mostly, though, I recognized that those longings for the good old days of belonging coincided closely with my visits home to my parents. I would watch them drive off to mass looking as if they were missing something significant in the back seat (yours truly) and feeling like maybe I should give it a try again.

As I sat in the sanctuary of St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic church this morning I knew that I have left all that behind for good. The rituals are so blatantly pagan that I could hardly believe their origins were so successfully veiled from me for so long: the wafting of incense on the corners of the altar representing the element air and the four compass directions of the wind, the rebirth into flesh from the uterine chalice of the element earth in the form of bread, the water element mingled with wine and transformed through magical incantation into ritual blood to spill for the appeasement a god with a taste for the stuff that borders on vampirism, and the Easter candle burning its elemental watchfire over the entire ritual. Perhaps more disturbing to me than the bloodthirstiness of this particular deity is the complete success Rome has had in removing any suggestion of the Feminine from its rituals, despite the residual water, chalice, and blood components.

Growing up under Rome's supervision, I always had a sense I was second class. As I matured, that sense grew into a painful shoulder chip. I recognize just how very unwelcome I am in Rome's inner circle, thanks to the mistake of my natal gender. What’s amazing to me is that I am no longer angry about this. Eh. It is what it is and I am done with it. Jesus taught the world Forgiveness. For that, I truly admire and am grateful to him. But I will not permit a bunch of old guys in linen dresses to misinterpret his words or the world's great spiritual symbols for me anymore.

That seven letter word for nothing left to lose? That’s a very good word indeed.