My thoughts on Church....

This blog entry has NOTHING to do with faith. It has to do solely with the actual, physical Church, the building itself and the experience one got in the building, not the religion in general.

I know more about religion than almost any other person I know. Why? Because I was very, very religious growing up and as a young adult. For reasons unknown to everyone including those who forced this upon me....I was raised Catholic....but attended a Lutheran school for ten years...ten formative years.

For those of you who don't know jack about the reformation it was started by a little known German monk dude named Martin LUTHER(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_luther)...hence the Lutheran Church...if any break-a-way Church is anti-Catholic, you can pretty much bet that the Lutherans are at the top of that list.

So I attended Lutheran school by day and Catholic Church on some weekends....Catechism for Communion was fun. I never understood why the Catholics hated the Protestants and why the Protestants hated the Catholics...I mean yeah, there was some selling of indulgences and stuff...but I was just a tad confused growing up.

Let me tell you a little something about my Catholic Church I attended growing up, Holy Family, in North Miami, Florida. (http://www.holyfamilynorthmiami.com/) You'll notice from the picture it looks like a rolled up receipt. That place was round, round and HUGE....very huge. The acoustics were great! You could hear every whimper from every baby, every second of every mass. The only thing I liked was the pipe organ. I still dig me a pipe organ.

Our Priests, never spoke good English. There were always hundreds of babies there, crying, so even if they did speak English I never heard a word they said. The only person who forced me to go was Mema...and Mema told me, and I believed her, that there was "no bathroom" in Church.

NEVER tell someone with a hyperactive bladder that there is no bathroom! I of course spent every second of Mass each time looking from my seat in the painful pew for a bathroom. I never did find it. I was not, of course, allowed to get up and look for it. I'm sure it existed...somewhere...somewhere in that void on that holy ground there had to be a bathroom!

So I equate Church with the pain of a full bladder and the fear of wetting ones self. Fun huh?

Our service was never short. It was long...over an hour. Mema liked to get there early too. I had to pee before the processional even started!

As a young Catholic, you sit, stand, and kneel and more importantly watch on as everyone gets up, stands in line, and gets their very own communion wafer. You wonder what it tastes like, and when you'll get to sample some. You attend classes to prepare for eating said wafer. Finally the day comes....you get up to the front of the line and the Monseigneur offers you the body of Christ and it tastes like.....stale puffed wheat...it also sticks to the roof of your mouth. You're not supposed to chew it, or dig at it once it's stuck with your finger, so it lingers...stuck....for a pretty good period of time.

Despite all that, it's still fun. You're finally a real member of the Church. You're practically an adult! So you almost look forward to sitting with a full bladder while babies scream and Priests from the eastern block talk about the same stuff every week....until your Mema tells you another tall-tale...."You can't have communion if you missed the prior week of Church."

This is bogus and there was nothing I could do. As neither Mema nor I had a car, we had to rely on others to drive us to Church...and others NEVER drove us two Sundays in a row! SO....I never got Communion again until twenty six years later....after Mema was dead and I actually at my own will entered a different Catholic Church. Guess what? I did not implode! Nor did I spontaneously combust...nor did I burst into flames....nor did the wafer poison my throat.

So now when I think of Church, I think of full bladders and starvation! Oh, and back pain. Why? Because I have mild scoliosis. Did anyone in my family tell me? NO! LOL! I thought it was normal to gimp around with a bent and bruised spine my entire life. Spending every week in my Lutheran Church at school, seated in wooden pews and then what seemed like every 'other' Sunday at Catholic Church did a number on my spine. All that wood rubbing up against me for years and years meant I had a perpetual cut and bruised spine. Don't get me started on my knees! YES, what 12 yr old has bad knees? Well, me.

I'm a klutz. I bang my knees, often! One in particular, my right, gets banged badly, every two years or so. Four years ago I managed to crack the darn thing. That was fun. I wore a knee brace for years in my 20s...kneeling was not an option. Okay so now Church equals full bladders, starvation, back bruising and knees that pop so loud when I kneel even the Priest who speaks no English stops yapping and the babies stop crying.

Then there is the boredom. Here's how my Church went....pipe organ, my favorite part, processional, always made the hairs on my arms stand up...song, some muttering in a foreign tongue, a reading from the book of who knows because all I hear is the baby behind me screaming at the top of it's heathen lungs, some more talk by the Priest who I couldn't hear, another song that I couldn't sing but thankfully the choir could, step class...and then...the story of Communion.

It was the same story every week, obviously, it'd not changed in 2000 years. It took 30 minutes to tell. A wafer would be held up to the sky light over the alter, a bell would be rung by a alter boy, then the blood of Christ would get held up, another bell...then some stinky incense would be released thus gassing us all nearly to death. Then 2000 people who I know for a FACT did not attend the Mass the week prior got up and took their Communion while I was forced to kneel on bad knees and NOT take the Communion I worked so hard to earn because the week prior our ride fell through!

All I would think about was a toilet...which was easy to do as our Church was so plain. See, Church's are supposed to be beautiful, right? Ours was......plain...........minimalist..........it was decorated by Ikea I think. Red carpet...tan walls....and the gorgeous stained glass windows? Um no. These were solid colored stained glass cubes scatted throughout the circular building. The colors were red, blue or green, and since there were no walls really they were just...there...in no particular order. I always wanted to sit in the front but Mema liked the back. The back was good because I could stake out a path to a potential albeit fictitious bathroom that way but the front would have a nicer and different view of the skylight over the alter, and closer to the choir. But no, never happened.

Fast forward many years. Ohio is a very Catholic state. They say that most people in SW Ohio are Catholic, yet I'm surrounded by Protestant Churches. I did some research and found a Catholic Church in my town, my very small town. It was founded in the mid 1800's...so, it's old! It's older than dirt! Unlike the rolled up receipt, this one looks traditional, with dark brown brick and real stained glass windows.

For reasons I won't mention, I made a promise that I'd attend Church one Sunday if something 'good' was done for me, which it was, so I went.

First I was struck by its size. It's tiny! Very tiny! I'd never been in such a small Church before. I thought all Catholic Churches were gigantic....nope! Second, it was gorgeous! The walls inside were a subtle gray and there were beautiful stained glass windows, mostly blue in color, with events from the bible depicted in them. Same painful wooden pews of course...oh, and the kneeling. LOL...which now I cheat and lop my butt onto the pew...(yes I said butt and pew) and fake kneel, I doubt anyone will care.

There were babies but the acoustics made it so they didn't dominate the sounds. There was no pipe organ! Shame...no room for it! There was...........a piano.....a dude with an electric guitar and....a drummer. Yup...their very own Tommy Lee. I was...shocked. The Priest, was American, and happy...he smiled...a lot! He waved to everyone. Despite its size the place probably holds 200 people or so, and he seemed to know a lot of them.

Yeah we sang some song, well they sang, I don't sing...some dude read from the Bible....and then the Priest talked....about.....well I don't even recall on that day as it was three yrs ago, but he talked and he was funny. He talked about normal every day stuff and in the end tied it into Christian doctrine. Then, some people carried the wafer down the aisle to him...and he read another passage and everyone got up to eat. No long drawn out story, the same story....no bells, no incense. Is this a Catholic Church? I assure you it was!

I stood up and after not attending Church in 7 yrs and I took Communion. I even gave a dollar in their "beg" basket. Then, it was over! We sang a song and poof, done! Forty whole minutes! I was shocked. I thought to myself, wow, that wasn't bad, not bad at all!

I went again last weekend, with William. I was terrified he'd cry and ruin everything for everyone. Instead he farted. Man what I would have given for those incense. We sat in the last row, at the end of the pew...the painful pew which killed my spine and tail bone....there was standing room only behind us, all of them no doubt staring at my gorgeous baby, who I wore in a sling, nice and snug.

I once again took that wafer! I listened as the Priest talked about the importance of fathers, it was after all Father's Day. Father Manning is a plump man of older age. He smiled, a lot and had great stage presence. It was obvious he wanted to be there. He was happy to be there. He made jokes and smiled and laughed....I thought it was a sin to smile in a Catholic Church.

So, in the end, after all those years...I thought I hated the Catholic Church. No, I thought I hated Church in general. Turns out...I didn't hate the Catholic Church....I just hated 'that' Catholic Church. The one that I'd always gone too....

Still though, despite my going to a different Church, I never did find the bathroom....