What would Jesus do?

So I think I understand what Hilts is saying to a point, and I think his attitude towards the Church resembles lots of Catholics', and that that's great. I'd like to point out that when I blather on about the Catholic Church, I'm not trying to turn anybody away from it just because I turned away from it, but deep down that might not be true because in my heart of hearts I'm still pissed Mum just converted. But in my conscious head at least, I'm not trying to turn anyone away from it.

Sugar may disagree, and so may millions of others, but I feel like religious faith is a beautiful thing - that most spiritual disciplines, except the very stupidest, offer some sort of helpful framework for approaching your relationship with the world and your fellow man, and that for children especially it can be really helpful - a sort of series of parables instructing you on how to love when your raging id just wants to slash and burn. I'm glad I grew up Catholic for what Hilts talked about - the way it taught me to love people for their humanity if nothing else, to figuratively speaking turn the other cheek (though I usually didn't), and a sort of beautiful pantheism teaching me that anything I hurt is all of us, or God, or whatever, so it's best not to hurt things.

So I spent my childhood thinking Catholics should act in love and tumbled out of Catholicism when that thought smacked up against the reality of the Church. The love of women that could be communicated through ministry is devalued completely with no good excuse. The love between a man and a woman is treated as a distraction from God rather than as a reminder of Her superpowers. And that's ignoring the distinct lack of love present in so many of the Church's actions and policies over the last 1000 years. Coincidentally since they stopped letting priests get married, to make sure there weren't any disputes over the inheritance of 'Church' property. Men have always told me not having sex for awhile makes them lose their minds a little bit and I think the history of Catholic ministry is a good way for them to argue that case. 'Babeeeeee . . . I'm hurtin' . . . . you're going to make me set up an anti-papacy in Avignon. . . '

And so much of it for crass, worldly political expedience. Liberation Theology was shot down by the Vatican when the people who needed it the most, needed it the most. The choice of an old-fashioned (if pretty fucking hot when he was young) Pole to lead the Church during turbulent times because he was an anti-Communist from a Communist country. The assassination of John Paul I, who would have let us all wear condoms even if it meant cutting down on the growth rate of the flock . . . not that all those impoverished people aren't going Evangelical these days anyways because it's so much more fun with the singing and the dancing and the babysitting and the useful social assistance and whatnot - okay, I'm getting a bit anti-Mel-Gibson here, but ten bucks says it was an assassination. Come on, it's the Catholic Church we're talking about here, not Mohatma Fucking Ghandi.

Hilts isn't quite sure if he believes in God as such - I do - I can't explain it, beyond saying that I always feel that there's a great warm beautiful overarching thing in the universe that desperately, desperately wants us all to not fuck up. And my relationship with that thing will always be more or less Christian because I was raised with a great bloody loving Jesus as a daily figure. It will also always be more or less Catholic because the Church has so many ways to help us approach that figure that are part of my brain forever and that I wouldn't part with, like the saints and his mum and meditation and mysticism and all the rest of it.

But Daddy is right - the Church is rotten - and the people who love the Church need to struggle to reform it so it really is about love again, even if it's just one parish at a time, even if it results in Colonel Ratzinger and his Flying Monkeys excommunicating them. I bet that's what Jesus would do.

Defrock me, mariachi

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.

The Probation of Mistress La Spliffe

Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and all I can say is that Dorothy Sayers is way, way better than Agatha Christie. But then Dorothy Sayers is way better than everybody. Nice twist there, Agatha. You could tell she was pretty proud of it. In fact, it was way too easy to tell how proud she was. Still. I suppose it was a big innovation at the time. Blah.

Getting into a bit of a funk. I wish my probation was over; I wish I'd been getting any sort of feedback besides a periodic 'oh, great market report' or 'oh, good story.' Yabbut . . . are enough of the market reports good? Are enough of the stories good? Are you going to sack me, or are you going to keep giving me lots of money every month so I can get my eyes operated on and have a comfortable old age? Today being October 10, I believe, we're down to the wire. 20 more physical days - October 30, it ends. The normal probationary period in Belgiumland is three months, not six, which means I could have started really emotionally settling down here three months ago. But I do see that wouldn't have been realistic. I wasn't doing all my job yet three months ago.

They'd better not sack me. One of the girls there just bought a Wii and I want to be able to go to her place after work to get high and play with it. And I'm starting to like it there, too. Oh well. We'll see.

Orson Welles smacks down

Magnum has proposed to his lady friend, a good one, and I hope they get married soon so I can go home for a bit. I'm a touch homesick these days. Belgium has beautiful spots of colour but there is nowhere, absolutely nowhere like northern Ontario in the fall - chilly enough to make the mosquitoes die, good crisp sun, and miles and miles of continuous and startling orange and red hues across the landscape. When I think about climate change, I think about that - how awful it would be if that landscape were to change - since I somehow refuse to wrap my head around island nations sinking and Australian-type drought.

Watched Orson Welles' Macbeth last night - it ran a little roughshod over some of my favorite scenes, but I really liked it in terms of the acting and and loved it in terms of the interpretation, and so I thought about how much I hate Kenneth Branagh. Well, hate is a strong word. How little I like Kenneth Branagh. He didn't really add anything to filmed Shakespeare besides lots of shouting and millions of dollars.

What I liked best from him was Henry V, which had the least shouting and as far as I can tell the fewest millions of dollars, despite some fighting sequences. But even that was a bit shit compared to Orson Welles' Macbeth, and I'm not sure if that's down to direction (though the use of a set more suggestive than representative worked really well in Macbeth) or if it's just down to Orson Welles being motherfucking Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh not being Orson Welles. Probably a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

PETA sucks.

I've always felt that way - could never bear the preoccupation with attacking/using celebrities in their promotions and could never bear their cock-eyed perspectives on the rights and wrongs of a human being's relationship with animals; it all comes off as such superficial trash when organizations like Greenpeace actually do stuff instead of contenting themselves with getting Pamela Anderson to shoot her mouth off about the battery farming of chickens by KFC. I mean, the very name - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - when the ethics of a person's relationship with animals is far too variable a thing to base the foundation of an organization on - it's fucking lame.

But I might never have bothered to think that out if I hadn't heard about this. Puke. The foundation sinks to the level of an intrusive gossip blog run by a moronic 19 year old who thinks he has a good enough grasp of the personalities of the famous to decide he knows what's best for their pet dogs, or else who is just desperate, desperate for any kind of media mention and isn't afraid of sounding like a fucking incompetent to get it.

Try going out and saving some whales, you gaggle of parasites. That's be a fuck site more 'ethical' than being pathetic twats. I don't really eat meat anymore but I'm so disgusted I think I'm going to search out some foie-gras covered veal for lunch.