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.

January 20, 2009

Today the United States of America welcomed a new president. Congratulations to Mr. Barak Obama.

I was unable to watch the inauguration today because I’m hardly working, I mean hard at work. We were allowed to log onto a news website to watch the live coverage but unfortunately most places couldn’t support the crush of people wanting to watch the new president talk. I did manage to catch Mr. Obama’s speech on the local radio station though. The man sure can give a good speech. He is probably the most convincing public speaker I have heard in a very long time. I would have to say that Michelle Obama must be incredibly proud of her husband right now.

Today is a new day. The possibilities for the future are endless. Our lives will be what we make of them. Myself, personally I am going to try and be more positive about things and to really work on worrying less. I saw an interesting marquee at a local church the other day; “Why worry when you can pray.” I wholeheartedly agree and that will be my practice going forward.

Welcome 2009 and President Obama, I can’t wait to see what you have in store for me!

Marriage and Religion.

I wanted to expand on a comment that Cardiogirl left regarding my last entry. The wise lady said this:

Marriage and commitment are different to everyone, however, I agree that most people (here I am referring to Catholics because of the annulment issue) get married with the mind set that this is forever. Though I do think a few people (non-Catholics, again because of the lack of the annulment issue) look at marriage as something that can be undone through divorce. As in, well, if this doesn’t work out I can always get divorced. Just a different mind set.Having said that, I am not trying to imply that you, Webmiss, entered into marriage thinking you could get out of it if it got difficult, just pointing out that religious influences have a lot to do with the initial mindset of the person getting married

I am Catholic. I was raised Catholic, and received religious education through Catechism classes. I have vivid memories of going to church on Sunday’s with my grandmother and brother, and alter-serving at the morning Mass. TheEx on the other hand, grew in a household that started without religion, until his mother became a “born-again” and tried to push encourage her sons to have a relationship with Jesus. Both TheEx and his brother resisted this newfound religious passion, TheEx possibly more so than his brother. He had some very narrow minded ideals about religion, and about people of other ethnic backgrounds. I’m basically sugarcoating the fact that TheEx was/is a racist. You might be wondering what I ever saw in him, but I think TheEx represented a challenge to me. I wrongly assumed that if I loved him enough, and worked at it enough, I could change the kind of person he is. WRONG, wrong, wrong, little Webmiss! I am mentally kicking my own butt right now.

In my hurry to get married, and in an effort to please my future mother-in-law I got married in her Non-Denominational Christian church. It was a intimate ceremony with mostly family and just good friends, nothing too remarkable about it. Let’s fast forward 4 years. TheEx came home from work one day in tears. I was frightened, I didn’t know what had upset him and he was in no shape to explain it to me at that moment. Once he managed to calm down, he explained that while he was on his lunch break, sitting quietly by himself, he felt that God was talking to him and compelling him to change his life. He told me that he felt that he needed to accept Jesus into his heart. We talked for a long time about what that meant, and what he wanted to do going forward. I explained the basic precepts of Catholicism, and TheEx decided that he would like to take RCIA (Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults; the present program used by many Catholic Churches to prepare adults to receive the sacraments of Initiation: Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation) classes. He was about halfway through his instruction when our priest called and asked if he could meet with me.

Fr. Michael sat me down in his office and asked me if TheEx and I were planning on getting remarried after his baptism. I was puzzled and said, no we weren’t. It was then that Fr. Michael clued me into the fact that I had needed permission from the Bishop of our diocese to marry outside my faith, but on top of that because I had not been married in a Catholic church, my marriage to TheEx was not vaild in the eyes of the church, and therefore not in the eyes of God either. I can tell you that I was absolutely crushed to hear this news, and cried for a couple days afterward. TheEx told me not to worry about it, we’d just get remarried after he was baptized. I was comforted by this, and put myself to the task of planning our new wedding, and also trying to get pregnant a second time.

About 6 months after this conversation, TheEx walked out the door and told me he wasn’t coming back. I begged, pleaded, and tried to say everything I possibly could to get him to change his mind. I even went so far as to tell him that Catholics don’t believe in divorce and he was turning his back on everything he had learned in his RCIA classes. It didn’t matter what I said to him, he had made up his mind and was done with me. I had never been so happy as I was in that moment that my mom was watching after Bert for me. I fell apart completely. I cried until I made myself sick, I sat in the middle of my bed with my arms wrapped around myself in just absolute silence. I couldn’t even make myself fall asleep to escape from the misery. At 4am I ended up driving over to my mothers house and sitting in the rocking chair on her front porch until she woke up in the morning and came outside for a cigarette. She listened to me, and hugged me, and gave me a sleeping pill so I could fall blissfully into oblivion.

The next morning, I called Fr. Michael and explained what had happened. He offered to call TheEx to counsel him, and I found out later that TheEx never answered the phone nor returned Father’s phone call. I was curious as to what divorce would actually mean to me spiritually. Fr. Michael delivered the first bit of good news to me about this whole situation, and that was since TheEx and I were never married in the Catholic church, for all intents and purposes (spiritually) the marriage never happened. Not only do I not need an annulment, I am free to marry again in the Catholic church. While divorce was never an option for me in my marriage, I do have to be amazed at the way things all worked out so that I remained whole spiritually.

Ultimately, I think that TheEx and I having very different religious backgrounds was a disadvantage to our marriage. In my future relationships, I think I will be more careful about choosing someone with similar religious background to mine. I think Cardiogirl was on to something with the oppinion that Non-Catholics, but even more so, people without religious affiliation do not have the same attitude about what marriage truly means.

Several months ago I got curious (collective eyeroll right?) and asked TheEx if he had continued his RCIA classes or even just continued going to church. He shrugged it off and said that he just really hadn’t found the time to do so. I have to say, part of me wasn’t surprised to hear that. The other part of me was sad that he had turned his back on something that at one time had seemed so important to him. If God chooses to talk to you, that’s pretty serious don’t you think?

Tomorrow I’m going to try and blog on something that is a little less serious. Perhaps the fact that my future granddaughter might be named…(to be continued)