The Road More Travelled

So, I suppose the thing to do if you want to know where a person is going is to figure out where they’re coming from. Well, I’m coming from lots of places, really, but some are a little more relevant than others. I apologize in advance for any details I may have changed or left out – I have a feeling that sometimes I’ll end up restructuring my account in order to preserve people’s privacy and, to some extent, my own. In case anyone is wondering why I’m going to re-tell my own life story, with which I am already quite familiar, it’s mostly because I process information better when I’ve written it down.

Since this is a ‘religious’ journal, the place I’m ‘coming from’ is the Roman Catholic church. Born and raised, as they say; all grown up and moved away. My mother attended church sporadically with us when we were children, until I asked her if we could go every Sunday. So I was a church-freak from the beginning. The rest of my family consists of non-observant cultural Catholics, with a few vehement atheists thrown in for good measure. Therefore, none of this can be blamed on someone else’s excessive fervor. Oh darn, and here I thought I might have found a scapegoat!

Growing up, I didn’t ‘want’ to be a priest; I thought I was ‘going’ to be one, that this was my life and God’s plan and that somehow the church was going to catch up between then and now. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen that I realized my idea was, almost certainly, impossible. The thing is, I have breasts. Therefore, even though I’m not well endowed enough to make vestments hang ‘funny,’ it turns out that I was supposed to back away meekly into the shadows anyway. From thence, I began the painful and ultimately doomed process of attempting to get God to tell me to go be a nun instead. For future reference, God seems rather hard to convince: cajoling, begging, threatening and bargain-making do not appear to be a part of His vocabulary. Neither does the current state of reality, apparently.

Anyway, I persisted under the feeling of what I was compelled to do with my life, possibly because I had no other visible alternative or, more likely, out of an enduring sense of loyalty to the places where I had come to know God. I lived in hope, hope that somehow the Roman church could change, hope that I might see it or maybe even be a part of it. I had a lot of unfounded hope, which I guess is more or less in line with the Gospel message – you know, blessed are they who do not see and yet believe.

When I was nineteen, I incurred a permanent impediment which meant that, under the canon laws of the church, I could not be ordained even if I was a man. I was, and am, well aware of this fact. The pertinent question then becomes: why in the name of all things did I still engage in my persistent whining about the ordination of women? The simple answer is, as in a platitude, hope (again). The hope thing is a problem. Anyway, I refused to believe that my experiences were false, void of promise, or that God – for indiscernible reasons – had been lying. So, I really had no choice but to ‘keep on trucking’ in my annoyingly persistent attempts to speak what I see as the truth.

Then his holiness Benedict XVI, bishop of Rome, was installed in the office of the Papacy, having gained a promotion from his previous position as head of the Holy Inquisition. The hope faltered. Then it turned around and looked at me in disbelief as I urged it on. Then it fell off a cliff because it wasn’t looking where it was going because it was confused about why I was urging it onwards, and so was still looking back at me. Oh well. It was a remarkably long fall before it reached the bottom. Though splattered (and so messy to clean up), it was still mostly in one piece (except for its extremities); nevertheless, I decided to leave it at the bottom since I suspected it wouldn’t survive the climb back up. And if it fell off again, it wouldn’t be so lucky.

So, I took my splattered and mostly-intact hope and started walking. Well, I guess not so much ‘walking’ as staring up in bewilderment at the giant cliff I’d decided not to scale in a vague attempt to remain standing in one spot without actually going back up. This is where I currently am. So me and my slowly recovering hope are hanging out in the nowhere-space of an identity derived from falling off a cliff I have no desire to re-climb and the actual process of picking it up and carrying it somewhere else – ideally, a place with some kind of hope-hospital.

The thing is, I don’t actually hate the Roman church: my entire formation, in fact, belongs to it, and I remain who I am. I still love that church – from a distance, but strongly nonetheless. I suspect, however, that I’ll never manage to get far enough away that my hope doesn’t get a little forlorn and bedraggled when I see her stumbling backwards, away from the places I had thought she was going.

There you have it. I am excommunicated (automatically under the law) for apostasy, and I have no desire to go back. I also suspect that if I were tried for heresy I’d be found guilty, but that’s neither here nor there. I should point out that, contrary to popular belief, my decision not to climb back up has nothing to do with holy orders: remember, I am forevermore not suitable, which I fully expect to hold in any place I find myself. It has more to do with the fact that I feel bad for my poor exhausted, crushed and somewhat crippled hope, and I desperately don’t want it to die. Therefore, I have to find it water somewhere and it’s damn well not going to be back at the top of that cliff. So. The Roman church can’t sustain my hope for a variety of reasons, some of which are deeply self-centered and personal and some of which are more objective, like the fact that the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is the most dangerous heresy ever promulgated in the western Church.