Who I am, Part 1: Dominus Vobiscum

We start with the cosmological. I am, by birth, bearing, and constant choice, a Catholic. I say "constant choice" because I'm not always completely happy about it. Being a Catholic, in this day and age, can suck fish guts sometimes. To begin with, there's the litany of annoyances practicing Catholics are required to put up with: proselytizing evangelicals who know Scripture but not much else, whining lapsed Catholics with their ever-topical nuns-with-rulers routines, condescending atheists and humanists, the C&E crowd who crowd the churches twice a year to recharge their hypocrisy, self-righteous neo-pagans, pederast jokes, and worst of all, those knuckleheads who bolt from Mass as soon as communion is handed out. I mean, really. Where are you people in such a rush to get to? It's SUNDAY!!!





Yet even if all of those were to be dispensed with (and in truth, I've exaggerated the true level of discord any of them causes. Different strokes for different folks, as they say), being a Catholic would still not be a walk through the park with a pair of bikini models, if you receive my meaning. We're talking about a faith whose central event is the nailing of it's central figure to two pieces of wood, by a disinterested authority at the behest of the very people he had been sent to enlighten. The story of Christ's Passion is such a typically menschlich tale of petty jealousy, mindless tribalism, and amoral politicking that one would laugh if one wasn't constantly confronted with the image of a man who'd committed no wrong dying that gruesome, painful death for public entertainment, with a witless piece of mockery above his head just to apotheosize the hatefulness. And we're asked to do what he did. To smile in the face of humanity's cruel stupidity, to patiently endure the banal interations of tyranny and vandalism that constitute human history, to keep walking down the good road even as the tollbooth operators step out and kick us in the bits and pieces.





Is being a Catholic demanding? Sometimes frustrating? Yes, and yes. Is it better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints? Seems that way quite a lot of the time.





So why do it?





For one thing, I've never heard anyone able to truly refute the Marquis de Sade's dictum: that if there is no God, everything is permissible. Without a universal value, all values are ephemeral, and thus doomed to be undone by the next big thing. We are stuck with a meaningless universe as described by the dragon in Grendel: nothing coming from nothing leading to nothing. One of two things is true: either death is eternal, or life is eternal. If life is eternal, death does not matter. If death is eternal, life does not matter.





All of which gives one reason to grasp at Eternity and hope that Eternity breathes, but why Catholocism? There are plenty of other faiths out there, some stretching back well beyond the time of Yeshua bar Joseph. Why dance with the one that brung ya? It's not like there's an Inquisition that's going to punish me if I break ranks.





I like Catholocism for a lot of reasons, the most immediate being their aesthetic. Stained-glass windows, incense, organs, these things remind me of my earliest memories of church. The low sonorous melodies of Gregorian chant, the veneration of the Eucharist, genuflecting, holy water, tithes, all of these give me a sense of participation in something ancient and deep, and are enought to make me put up with the occasional dull homily or unmelodic hymn.





A second reason, less apparent but more compelling, is the deep subset of rationalism in Catholic theology. Catholocism is perhaps the only major world religion that accepts human reason as a means of determining Truth. Not that other faiths are specifically anti-rational, but their cosmologies are solely dependent on revelation, not logic. The Catholic insistence on Tradition as well as Revealed Truth gives humanity and human reason a part to play in the ongoing Creation. In what other theological body could both Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assissi co-exist, even admire each other?





Finally, we have Catholocism's essential maturity. No institution has been as assaulted, as undermined, as consistently thwarted in so many of its goals as the Catholic Church. From the brutal persecutions of the Romans to the destructive savagery of the Germanic tribes to the Arab conquests, the institutionalized corruption of feudalism, the high-handedness of kings and emperors, the implosion of the Protestant Reformation, the acidic disdain of the so-called Enlightenment and its post-modern heirs, it amazes that the hierarchy has survived. Yet it has. It's even grown and learned from its mistakes, to the point of apologizing for it's historic errors. The Pope still intones in Latin upon the bones of Peter. The sacraments are still performed, promising a fusion of the human and divine. The poor are still given alms and care. The Lord's Prayer is still spoken. Crusades have foundered, Inquisitions have run out of control, but the gates of hell have not prevailed against the Church.





All of which doesn't make this journey any easier. There are days when I'd love to just kick back, dope up, get a girl and use her badly, throw aside all responsibility, all sense of connection to a world beyond me. I'd be good at it. I wouldn't be alone, either. And if Pascal's wager lands tails, it won't matter anyway, right?





But I am constantly reminded in such moments of the Jewish scholar who said that a God who doesn't try to order your finances and tell you what to do with your privates isn't worth having. I'm no saint. I've done my share of selfish things and will likely do more. But I know what runway I'm aiming for, and that keeps me going.





Thank you, drive through...