#114

This is going to be a long, weird post. It will no doubt serve as a good reason for many people to avoid my work, but what can I do? No different.

*

I was baptized a Roman Catholic, and have been in a crisis over it ever since I began to grasp its implications. Every second of every day of my life has been spent wrestling with them, whether directly in the forefront of my conscious mind, drunkenly wrestling with demons, or taking up a permanent place on my back burner. I was an atheist for seventeen years. Made no difference. 

Can't unknow. Or unlearn. Play pretend, try to forget. Live long enough, it'll catch up to you, or be the thing that kills you.

The Church and I have some problems between us. I've written a fable about it. Didn't feel much at my Confirmation, had a terrifying and incomplete First Confession, didn't feel anything when I accepted the Eucharist. Already it all seemed to me somehow some kind of front. Some bad stuff had happened to me in life and I had seen much worse happen to others by the time these ceremonies came around, and my Jesuitical education was perhaps too good at fostering a spirit of scepticism and scientific inquiry. Later in life I came across the writings of Sextus Empiricus and I was all "right, right. yup".

To make what is already too long of a story short, since I have a lot to get through yet, I do not trust the sacraments. More precisely, I do not trust other men to deliver the sacraments unto me. It gives me no particular pleasure to say it and I use no malice when I say that this Church is no one true Church. Popes are just men, usually even exceptionally venal ones; worse creatures than the human beings they treat like sheep and manipulate like sheep. Fuck popes, fuck this current pope in particular; I take this pope's bullshit very personally. Also, of course, foundation of blood, rivers of blood, oppression, slavery, children's crusades, pederasty, pedophilia, sexual slavery, child pornography, rape and protecting rapists, enabling or directly enacting many genocides, etc. 

Not to say that the Church is evil. It is made up of human beings and is human. It is responsible for some of the most wonderful events in history, some of the most wonderful works of art ever produced, has been a spiritual home for some of the greatest and most human individuals that ever breathed and spoke and thought and wrote. I would not change one thing about the history of the Church, about any part of the human story.  

God made humans. Humans make popes, and priests, and books, and limited conceptions of that which they name God. Human things. Beyond good and evil and under a doom of good and evil, compassing the heights and depths, the full spectra, and transcending being. 

Ultimately, what I believe is that God is in the infinite paradox, in the unavoidable correctness of supratotality. I believe in God because I believe that the universe is absolutely and without equivocation perfect, and so is every other universe. I have chosen to love everything in it, everything and everyone. 

Naturally we have our own immediate concerns, our challenges and duties, our limited perspectives to deal with and our pressures to survive. It's fine to sing universal love and the holy spirit permeating all existence, but on a more granular level, we have inheritances to deal with, and the eternally impermanent nature of the world means we always have battles to fight. I feel I cannot avoid being outside the Church, if I am to be a Catholic; and I am, because that is my inheritance, because baptism is done through water, and water is the holiest thing on this Earth, sacrosanct and fundamentally incorruptible. I am, for I also believe in the Resurrection, and the Ascension. I believe Elijah was carried up, I believe Isaiah spoke through a live coal, and I believe Moses looked upon the Countenance. I believe that Christ set us free, absolutely free, and therefore we are bound to answer for our choices.

So I believe in these, the times that we were born to, I must find ways to serve as my own priest, or to let the world serve as my priest, to deliver myself unto the sacraments rather than have them delivered unto me.

*

Therefore, in order to perform the sacrament of confession, I have determined to give confession to the world, that none may mistake me for what I am not merely because I whisper my secrets in the dark. I have determined to tell the truth about the evil, harm, and hurt I commit and that I cause, knowingly and unknowingly, as truthfully and completely as I can, unsparing.

*

Beginning with the primary qualities, and sticking to the brief and categorical deed-types they have been material to, using detail only for special illustration in the interest of saying everything I have proven myself capable from of childhood to now in one fell swoop: 

cowardice, hypocrisy, stubbornness, impatience, denial, disloyalty, rage, self-pity, hotheadedness, extreme drunkenness, gluttony, wastefulness, arrogance, laziness, lust, pride, vanity, selfishness, destructiveness, prejudice, contempt, hardness of heart, gracelessness, ingratitude, forgetfulness with negative consequences for others, lying to myself constantly and quite enough to be getting on with to others, desire to inflict pain as punishment, inflicting pain as punishment whether through specially calibrated words or in combat or slapping a friend or teammate upside his head, acting in vengeance, leading others astray, cold and calculated thinking and speaking, breaking promises, nonconstructive and willfully negative rhetoric, failing to think before I speak or act or refine my thinking and acting process skilfully, self-harm, standing in baseless judgment of others or things beyond my current scope of understanding, talking about something I don't know about as though I do, belittling others intellectually in order to make myself feel smarter and better about myself, acting as though my qualities and deeds put me above others, looking for fights, breaking the law because I feel like it, breaking rules just to fuck 'em, casual blasphemy (not just Christian blasphemy; if people believe it, I've blasphemed it), rudeness, edgelording, trolling, merciless and spiteful unfair mockery, emotional divorce of self, standing by with my hands in my pockets while terrible things happen right before my eyes, not raising my voice for what I think is right or important when really how little is that to ask, letting my paranoia get the better of me, submitting to the status quo or silence or someone else's will when I knew better, blurring lines of consent and allowing bad communication and bad faith with romantic partners and also breaking up with them in and at terrible wrenching ways and times, thoughts so hideous and abominable I shudder to recall even the shadow of them, abandoning friends even as I cry because friends have abandoned me, placing blame outside myself when have no business doing that, blaming myself alone when I have no business doing that, littering, excessively ugly cursing and casual use of racial slurs, thinking and acting like I'm too good or brilliant for a place or person and ditching out, copping a bunch of dang attitude, letting being an asshole be a kneejerk thing or going way overboard with it, hella bragging, baseless hostility, wallowing in self-pity, consciously acting like things are worse than they are or I feel worse than I do in order to get out of situations or avoid problems or labor, making decisions for people and abrogating their agency when it was not my place, knowingly risky behavior, enabling or talking soft to people and letting their shit slide and their thinking degenerate when I should have been firm and straight up and had the courage to correct them, cheating at card and board games, thievery, deliberate disruption of organized activity, trespassing, hustling, delinquency, truancy, pushing aside all feeling in place of true forgiveness or healing, minimizing other people's experiences, flippant or deflective stances when the sober truth would have served best, letting someone cover for my mistakes or bear the brunt of my bad decisions so I won't have to, shirking responsibilities in general, squandering opportunities, justifying and rationalizing my complicity and bad behavior and that of others, allowing others to abuse me, drunken ruckus such as screaming at people and public disturbance even to the point of an arrest on one occasion, drinking when I damn well know I am an alcoholic, burning all my bridges and throwing my life out the window which doesn't only affect me because I do not live in a vacuum, isolating myself out of preciousness or temper or pure foolishness, and doing the wrong thing entirely on purpose just because.

*

Worked hard to summon it all up and move my fingers to type. 

Very much felt something. Feeling lots of things right now. Lots of stories.


--JL