Give it up
I received an email yesterday from a hardware store..
It’s almost that glorious time of year again
What? Valentine’s? No, that’s gone. Easter? Still some way off. Christmas? A possibility, the way they are going these days. I read the mail.
It transpires that the latest occasion we are to go on a buying frenzy for is Pancake Day. For fucks sake! They want me to clutter up my kitchen with stuff that I’m unlikely to use even once a year. It’s not that I dislike pancakes – they just never seem to cross my radar.
But Pancake Day heralds the start of Lent. And I hated Lent.
My mother was brought up in the Church of England faith but converted to Catholicism when she married my dad [yes, I’m not a bastard. Not legally anyway] and like most converts she became more catholic than the Catholics themselves. This meant strict observance of all the rituals which was a right pain in the arse.
The first thing about Lent is that you have to give up something you enjoy. Why? The catholic church is riddled with guilt, self denial, penance and general suffering so giving up on a pleasure was just part of it. As my age was in single digits, I usually had to promise to give up sweets. Masturbation and alcohol were yet to feature in my life so sweets it was. I couldn’t see the point in it but that was the rule. We must suffer.
Then there were the days of Fast and Abstinence [more denial] which seemed to crop up regularly during Lent. One meant no meat [vegetarians would love that] and the other meant that you had to starve for a day, having maybe a slice of mouldy bread and a drink of water from the toilet bowl to sustain you through your suffering.
Worse of all, so far as I was concerned, was that every morning I would be dragged out of my warm bed and have to cycle to the local Seminary for seven o’clock morning Mass. And school was no better. The De La Salle brothers used to go into religious overdrive so the class had to regularly walk the mile or so to the nearest church for Confessions and Benediction.
Anyways, I finally found something to give up for Lent. In fact I was to give it up all year around.
The Roman Catholic Church.
I was christened at six months of age and can’t remember the last time I went to Mass. I never once went to confession, and by now I couldn’t recall any of the really juicy stuff any way.
Dad was shipped off to a Catholic boarding school at about seven or eight years old. Naturally, he couldn’t wait to get out. (Those nuns were vicious with a yardstick.) He told me that while the yardstick on the knuckles was tolerable, the worst of it having to say “Thank you Sister” afterwords.
Like yourself, I was thoroughly indoctrinated into the system long before I had any say in the matter. By the time I reached my mid-teens I was disillusioned with the whole lark and at the earliest opportunity I adopted the ife of an Atheist. My mother was horrified, and my father’s attitude – at last the lad is thinking for himself! My father always did plough his own furrow.
I went through the grades in the public school system and didn’t do well. I got along ok but mostly just squeezed by.
There was a Catholic school acrost from the church we attended, and mom mentioned at dinner one evening that she was going to look into transferring me there. Dad said in no uncertain terms not just NO, but Hell no!
For one thing we can’t afford the tuition, second, we can’t afford the uniform, and most important is, no matter how much things may have changed this is not going to happen! (At which point I was thinking “thank you Father”!)
Good for you on junking religion. I’ve been an atheist since I was in my teens. Being a diligent youth, I decided that I needed the facts on the very important issue of religion, so I read the bible from cover to cover. The so called believers in my life had told me that this would explain everything. It did. The contradictions alone were enough to show me the true path and know that it is all bull. 🙂
I have always made a distinction between Faith and Religion. Faith is fine [though I still couldn’t define what mine is] whereas Religion is a man-made institution for the glorification of its seniors and has fuck all to do with Christianity or any other faith for that matter.
The problem I have had with biblical references is that everything seems to be open to interpretation.
Three people can read a passage and get three different meanings from it.