A few days ago, I challenged a group of people to write the gospel according to them…to share what God has and is doing in their lives. We have the stories of what God did eons ago…we need the stories of what God is doing right here and right now. My own “gospel” will be in more than one part…I’m not sure how many…but I need to start with what my beliefs in God have been at different stages of my life.
As a small child, I believed in the God my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother told me about. This was the God who made heaven and earth, who lived waaay up in the sky in heaven and also in all Catholic churches and in the wafer the priest raised at mass (I wasn’t old enough for communion yet). I had to be good or He wouldn’t like me…particularly if I was disobedient. We didn’t pray to Him…at least not most of the time. We prayed to our guardian angel(who reported directly to God), to the Blessed Mother…and to Jesus, particularly at Christmas when we went to the crèche and asked Baby Jesus for anything we wanted.
When I was six, I was sent to instructions for first communion…I didn’t go to Catholic school. God changed a bit and became really scary. We learned about hell and about purgatory. We learned almost straight up that, although we had nothing to do with it, going to anything but a Catholic school was a sin and our parents would be sent to hell for sending us elsewhere. Great stuff to be telling six-year olds. I learned that there were mortal sins and venial sins and that if you died with a mortal sin on your soul, you went straight to hell. I believed in this God until I was about fourteen. Along the way I learned that God had a system. There were indulgences that could counteract sin. Say certain prayers, do certain things, and you had favor with God. Again, God was seldom the person prayed to. Instead we prayed to the Blessed Mother and the saints for intercession. Strange, this God, looking back, but very real while you’re living it. Die while wearing a brown scapula and you go straight to heaven. Go to mass and communion on nine first Fridays or nine first Saturdays and heaven was yours. Pray to St. Jude for the impossible, St.Thomas Aquinis for school. St. Theresa sent you a rose when she answered your prayer. All of this was shmooshed together under the category of God.
When I was a teenager, I began to question…big time…and big time I learned to keep my mouth shut. I asked a priest, a former Army chaplain, a question during a catechism class…whoops…his face got red…he began to sputter… until he boomed BECAUSE THE HOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH SAYS SO!!! That ended my questions …for then, at least. I didn’t go to college until I was twenty-one. One of the reasons was that I didn’t want to go to a Catholic college. This was pre-vatican II. My parents were dead set against me going to a Protestant school that would endanger my faith and besides, at some of them, part of commencement was held inside Protestant churches which were forbidden territory to Catholics. So I was twenty-one and still had questions I wanted answered. The Catholic chaplain at the university was known as the “Jazz Priest”. He had a syndicated column and was known world-wide. Suffice to say, I heard a lot of Brubeck and Ella and got no answers. And so it went. I drifted into intellectual agnosticism and stayed there for many years.
Looking forward to the next installment.
Good to see you back again………. waiting to hear what happens next.