To ashes you will return.

Wednesday night after heading back from Mr. Nascar’s parole hearing, Bert© and I screamed into town on two wheels with just enough time to get to church for Ash Wednesday.

I know I’ve mentioned before that I am a practicing Catholic, but it’s only in my adult years that I truly feel a connection with organized religion and my belief system. I am one of those bad people who picks apart the “rules” of their religion and pieces those bits together with my values and beliefs to make a wonderful mish-mash of personal Catholicism!

For example: the Catholic church teaches that it’s wrong to be on birth control. Children are a gift from God and should always be loved and accepted. Whoops! I just renewed my prescription for my Nuva-ring. My bad.

The church also teaches that sexual intimacy is something that should only be shared between a man and a woman within the bonds of marriage. Pre-marital sex is a no-no. I vehemently disagree with that point of view. Why I don’t advocate people being promiscuous, I see nothing wrong with sharing a sexual relationship with someone you love and care about, regardless of being married. I think that the whole “We need to wait for marriage” mindset is influencing teenagers and young adults to make the decision to get married just so they can have sex. Now I could be wrong about that, I do live in the south and we appear to have a penchant for young teenage mothers, but honestly I don’t see any sense behind asking young people to wait, when we throw sex and sexual innuendo in their faces nearly 24 hours a day. My belief, and you all can hold me to this when Bert© comes of age, is that we need to stress sex education not in school but AT HOME! Our children should be educated about safe sex and how to properly prevent pregnancy by their parents not by school teachers or their friends. Then and only then can they make correct and informed decisions. While ultimately I would like Bert© to be under lock and key until she’s 80, I am cognizant of the fact that I would be convicted of child cruelty and therefore that is not a practical option. I want to be able to trust my child as a young adult and know that she is making the right decisions for herself and that if she chooses to have sex as a teenager, she needs to give that decision the due care it deserves and protect herself no matter what happens.

I believe I have been waylaid by my thought process and have diverted from the original intent of my post.

However I choose to believe, I do feel that since these are guidelines laid out by the church I am responsible to uphold myself to the consequences for breaking those rules.  I recognize that I am not within a “state of grace” under Church doctrine and because of that I cannot partake in communion. I could remedy that by heading off to reconciliation (doesn’t that sound much nicer than confession?) and explaining to the priest that I have sinned by taking birth control and for enjoying a physical relationship with Mr. Nascar (not recently mind you). The kicker is, I would have to be truly sorry for these sins and do everything in my power to not commit them again. That I’m afraid, I cannot do, because that my friends would be lying straight to the face of God.  Or at least that’s how I see it, because I know that as soon as Mr. Nascar comes home I am going to be doing my very best to sin, as often as possible

Anyway, I still attend mass on Sundays and participate in Holy Days of Obligation (or as my old priest was fond of saying: Holy Days of Opportunity), which includes Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season which we are currently at the beginning of.

I love the ceremony of a Catholic mass. I love going into a church, no matter how far away from my home parish, and being able to participate actively because the basics of the service will be the same. I find comfort in consistency, there is nothing I hate more than change. Instead of participating in the Eucharist, I go up with my arms crossed over my chest, opposite hand on each shoulder (the acceptable sign for not taking communion) to be blessed by the priest. While I feel a certain lack of fulfillment from that process, I am making the choices that keep me in that position so I have no one to blame but myself.

Ash Wednesday was particularly profound for me this year. While I did not participate in communion, I did go up to have the priest mark the sign of the cross in ashes on my forehead. The ashes are a sacramental, created by burning the palm fronds from the previous years Palm Sunday ceremony.

Bert© ever the inquisitive child wanted to know how many cigarettes Father Mike had smoked to make all those ashes!

I was touched, seeing all these people crowded into church for the 7pm service, streaming up to the alter to be marked, physically marked by their religion. Normally for most people religion is like an invisible layer that we carry with us. One cannot just look at a person and say “Oh, she’s Catholic, or he’s Baptist, or they’re Agnostic” It was so profound to me to be able to look around and see all these people actively practicing their religion, well it was a beautiful thing. I really felt for the first time in a long time, that although there is so much evil in this world, so many people who are making bad choices and hurting one another, that there also really is a lot of good too.

And that my friends, has given me a renewed sense of hope and faith in humanity.