Heaven knows why it is, but I have always loved the term 'defrocked nuns'. I used to want to be a nun, you know. Sister Maria Splifferia Consuela or whatever. That ambition ended with puberty, but it wasn't just about the way Antonio Banderas went from greasy to suddenly very in-ter-es-ting - it was about that teenage condition which is common to us all, even those of us who didn't wonder what Antonio Banderas looked like naked - a sudden and violent mistrust of hierarchy.
In terms of my ongoing rupture with the church, the most important facets of that are the moral and the spiritual. Can a person take moral instruction from a hierarchical structure and remain moral, and hence pleasing in the eyes of God herself? Can a person be a spiritual if they are taking their spirituality in measured doses from a several-degrees-removed arbiter who dictates what's spiritual and what isn't? And can a Christian sect be anything but naughty when it suggests that struggles towards personal spirituality and morality are acts of pride, and if we don't want to go to hell we should surrender these personal struggles - surrender the possibility of personal revelation, in short - in favour of obedience to a hierarchical structure that has a repellent history of using the money it gouges out of its members to promote torture, bloodshed and suffering?
This is the big old question, and in my case one that was put often to the Catholic Church when my poor Daddy called in the priests to talk me down all those years ago. It was never really answered for me, certainly not by the priests, and it precludes me ever becoming Catholic again, or joining any Christian sect that doesn't abandon both human hierarchies and the idea that revelation is selective. But Daddy and I had a religious talk when he was last here, and 15 or so years into my rather self-consciously loud departure from the church, I finally got the balls to ask him how he could put up with all its iniquities. He explained that the Church was rotten, damaged, and corrupt, but that Catholics loved it and it was their job to fight the iniquities within the hierarchy to reform it. That satisfied me.
4 commenti:
I tried to comment, but it only led me to my own post!! Sorry if this is obnoxious (me putting an address in yr cmments, not the post!!):
http://securityout.blogspot.com/2007/10/defrocker.html
Not in the least!
You should talk to my sister who's a nun. I think she just likes the quiet.
In related news, yesterday the old film 'The Trouble With Angels' was on television. If Mary Wickes was the swimming instructress, I might have become a nun, she seemed like a lot of fun.
I'd love to. Nuns are interesting and keep their crazy celibacy in contemplative communities. It's just when they teach in schools that make me nervous. Swimming instructing too, probably, I should watch the film.
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