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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Other Topics  |  Off Topic Discussion  |  Welcome To My Mind, Won't You Step Inside « previous next »
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Author Topic: Welcome To My Mind, Won't You Step Inside  (Read 1484 times)
ER
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The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« on: July 04, 2017, 11:00:35 AM »

Well, friends, it’s the Fourth of July, the kids are visiting their parental grandparents til one, the grass is cut, the laundry is done, the dogs are fed and brushed, my nails are painted, we’re having no party here this year for the first time in ages, and until the family gets back, I have nothing to do, so why not relax and free associate a bit longer among online buds ‘n pals, and my contact who scans these posts for secret codes (oh, quit worrying, they won’t get that) before we go watch my cousins’ dad, home from Aruba, have his massive fireworks display tonight at his crazy-intense big house?

Today’s thoughts, why I still love many Catholic customs, even if I am not cool with the Roman Catholic Church, under whose widespread wings I spent thirteen years eating the cracker-like body of Jesus, while learning conjugation and the Mohs hardness scale, and hearing why Pope John XXIII was such a nice fella, all the while wearing a short plaid skirt so men would not be tempted to lust.

Where shall I begin? How about lunch with a nun?

Okay, unlike my parents and even my oldest cousin, I had only one nun as a schoolteacher. We’d get substitutes sometimes, old dears brought in for the flu season from the Archdiocese’s Retirement Home For Religious, but just this one nun for a full-time teacher, and she was so elderly she turned in her chalk and hung it up about a year after I left the school. (I don’t think there’s a connection there, since I was a painfully good little girl.)

She passed away last winter in her mid-nineties, this nun, I miss her, but we shared many happy times together and if she’s right we’ll meet again someday, she long ensconced in Heaven’s reaches, me getting to its less-glamorous outskirts after walking on hot broken glass in Purgatory for a few millennia, and won’t that be a special day?

I loved this nun, she was funny and kind and had great stories about Easters during the Depression, and her four-foot-five-inch tall grandmother from Naples, and killer tornadoes hitting during fields trips, and so when I was older and driving and had my own money, I looked her up and asked if she remembered me (she did or at least faked it well for the next ten years) and I’d visit and take her to lunch, and nine times out of ten she’d want to go to Olive Garden, her favorite place, so we’d go, and she’d chat about why she became a nun, and how hot habits used to be, and her trips to Spain and Panama and Rome, and how her brother was a priest and an Army chaplain in Vietnam, and most charmingly of all, she was an ardent baseball fan, who’d rarely missed an opening day since the 1930s.

But then between courses she did sometimes like to pick on me “out of love” which used to make me wanna tell her “out of love” that her wimple was a bad fashion statement, but I kept quiet and listened to her detail how awful my future abode would be, down there with fire and Liberace and demons with darning hooks set upon collecting my eyes.

So out of love she would tell me the way I was living was going to send me to Hell, and I’d think, wow, swivvy a few guys before marriage and have a baby out of wedlock (not accidentally either) and then be burned for all eternity because of it? Even the Puritans only made you wear a scarlet letter, so the Catholic response to fallen womanhood was kinda harsh. After all, I could have aborted my daughter and she’d have been none the wiser, it would’ve even saved me a lot on soccer shoes, so ‘twas a bit of a low blow to tell me I was going to face eternal torture for having a mini-me, especially since I was springing for the check for her minestrone soup and limitless breadsticks.

If she only knew, her cautions “out of love” kind of backfired and still make me think it was a harsh penalty, endless fire for seventeen minutes of fun. Which set me thinking….could Roman Catholicism possibly suck much worse?

Well, I spent much of my life, most of it, perhaps, not believing in God at all, so my dislike of Catholicism was just more background noise across my agnostical, faintly anti-religious teens and twenties, but in my nascent thirties, 2010, actually, I faced a situation that focused my mind real sharply and left me super-consciously crying for help and made me think hard about life, the universe, and coleslaw, and somehow what arose from that was an understanding that perhaps I believed in something higher after all, a creator, whose judgment I just might soon be facing, which left me re-evaluating the religion I was brought up in. Could it work for me after all? Was it the path to reconciliation with the divine?

And you know what? Even then I found much I did not like about it, from bishops who hid pedophiles, to the idea that even if God forgives you, God is still gonna get you hard for every sin you ever committed: just…wow. Not that my rejection or acceptance changed reality, if Catholicism was God’s one true church, it was so whether I believed in it or not, but in short, it wasn’t a place I found pulling me very hard. Yet nor did I entirely reject it at that time, either.

Talk about confusion! What the hey, man, in the prime of my life, in good shape and happy, getting ready to get married in fact, I found out I might die an unpleasant death soon (long story, not related to health, let’s skip it), so what to do, right?

But even in my distaste for its central idea of sinners and non-Catholics burning eternally, I still liked many Catholic customs. I grooved on Advent, Easter, the lovely pre-Vat II churches, the ear-tripping turns of phrase in Latin like Gloria in excelsis Deo. And of course I liked lots of Catholics, like 99% of my relatives, and Stewie Griffin on TV.

Thus I lived and let live, had no problem going to Midnight Mass with my mom at Christmastime, and I played by the rules and unloaded a decade of meandering misdeeds in the confessional before I became godmother to my absolute singular, no competition best friend Gina’s daughter, Courtney, and again before I renounced Satan on behalf of my other absolute, singular, no-competition best friend Clare’s son, whose name I cannot often make myself say.

But now in 2017 Anno Domini something has arisen that has suddenly troubled me, and that is my oldest child (she whose 2008 conception before the 2010 wedding would have sent me to Hell) has decided she wants to be received and confirmed in the Catholic Church, when my two youngest offspring appear on course to be indoctrinated as Methodists by my very pushy monster in law.

It’s not the divided household that bothers me, I don’t think God’s gonna smite you based on the Christian denomination you go to, only for being a Freemason or something, and we’re not gonna become our own little Belfast, it’s the idea that….I love my little girl, and do I really want her to have the heavy guilt and extraneous weight of those Roman Catholic customs that I grew up with laid on her sweet little shoulders?

I keep thinking maybe I should de-rail this and follow the advice the rabbi told my now ten-year-old cousin who wants to convert to Judaism. The rabbi said with much gravity and kindness, “Think about your wish, talk about it with your parents, and see how you feel when you’re thirteen.”

Sensible people, Jews!

Thing is, my daughter’s heart is set on this, she keeps showing me websites of little girls in lacey confirmation gowns, she talks about how she can’t wait to go to confession (um, for what? Besides back-talking her mother.) and receive communion and even though last month I let her go across the continent to the funeral of her father’s first true love, we’ve recently clashed over my supposedly being all mean and not letting her do other things, like shave her legs with her friend from soccer (good God you’re eight, slow down and enjoy being a kid) and go on a field trip to a place that irked me, so I think she’d truly say I was terrible if I tried to intervene here and detour the course of her quest for immortality in a rose-shaped Papist paradise.

Life was once so simple….

It all began last year when we started going to Mass with some family friends, invited by my godson and his grandfather to see my godson be an altar server. I continued going because my daughter enjoyed the Sunday morning ritual of being with them and then going out to eat after, plus I reasoned, we got to be together, she and I, and it took her away from her parental grandma and her high-pressure country club Methodism. But it backfired and my daughter declared she wanted to join up. (I thank God there aren’t nuns anymore, because I can just imagine her in a habit.)

She even has a sponsor, (this part may be hard to follow) a woman named Bethany, who is the grandmother of my godson, the mother of one of those two absolute and singular best friends I mentioned, a gymnast extraordinaire named Clare. Plus I spent a good portion of my younger life starry-eyed in love with Bethany’s son, and she spent a lot of her time wishing I would acquire boils and madly roam the wild places of the earth like Sméagol.

We’ve have a complicated relationship.

But that’s another consideration in all this, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I ‘let’ my daughter have Bethany as sponsor and she enters the full communion of the Roman Catholic Church, the world won’t end or anything, (but should she make that big of a choice at so young an age?) I am placing one of my four most treasured human beings in the spiritual care and keeping of someone who spent a good portion of the last decade and a half wishing I would suffer an attack of plague, and yet if I stop her, I risk alienating Bethany after we’ve reached the lofty height of actually nodding tepidly to one another without true hate intruding into the exchange.

For all I know Bethany will be getting my daughter alone and saying, “Do you know your mom drove my son crazy and ruined his life? Come, child, let me tell you a story about the 1990s, and the one-time Catholic school teenaged seductress whore from whose dastardly loins you sprang…”

Shrug, you never know.

But Bethany does seem to adore my child and she can be a sweet person---I’ve never seen but I’m told she can be---and perhaps it’d actually all work out and she’d be good for my daughter, make her happier, better, more homework-doing. Of course her husband and her virgin-despoiling son before him advised me be careful of Bethany, she is a manipulator.

Quite a dilemma.

I don't think she’d do any of that, I do think her interest in my daughter is proxy-grandmaternal in a way and she cares about her and would be a caring confirmation sponsor, but again….do I want my girl to be taught Catholic dogma?

Wow, being an angsty, neurotic parent is hard.

Okay, party coming up, it’s a big day, I’m still thrilled my much-loved little second cousin is home from a graduation trip to Argentina, where he gay-sexed his way across Buenos Aires, I gather, so, time to split.

Happy Independence Day to all Americans, hard luck having to work today, to everyone else!

« Last Edit: July 04, 2017, 11:54:28 AM by ER » Logged

What does not kill me makes me stranger.
javakoala
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Does ANYBODY remember this guy?


WWW
« Reply #1 on: July 04, 2017, 11:45:19 AM »

 Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout Buggedout

 Cheers
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I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago.
indianasmith
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A good bad movie is like popcorn for the soul!


« Reply #2 on: July 04, 2017, 12:25:23 PM »

Posts like this are why I love ER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not just "Who thinks like this?" - it's  "Who takes the time to write it all down???"

Great, thoughtful post!
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"I shall smite you in the nostrils with a rod of iron, and wax your spleen with Efferdent!!"
Flangepart
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« Reply #3 on: July 05, 2017, 04:04:56 PM »

Posts like this are why I love ER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's not just "Who thinks like this?" - it's  "Who takes the time to write it all down???"

Great, thoughtful post!
And nice she has a comfortable place to express herself.
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"Aggressivlly eccentric, and proud of it!"
bob
I survived Bucky Larson
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Torgo watches you masterbate!


« Reply #4 on: July 05, 2017, 08:13:55 PM »

That is the longest post I've seen since I joined this forum. Also one of the most interesting.
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