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Tuesday, December 28th, 2004

Losing My Religion, Part 1

I had planned to do this in one post, but it’s getting really long and digressive. I’m splitting it up; this is part one: up to age 12 or so.

This has been a rather difficult post for me to write, far more difficult than I would have thought.

I was raised by two very devout Catholics. My parents never showed a moment of doubt in their faith; they always presented articles of faith to us as fact. They tried hard to live up to their principles, and they set high standards for us: we went to mass every Sunday without fail, prayed the rosary once a week, followed the rituals of Lent and Advent, even held three hours of silent meditation from 12 to 3 pm on Good Friday. I attended Catholic schools until graduate school. I was passionate. I believed.

And yet, somehow, I drifted away.

In retrospect, I never completely belonged to the flavor of Catholicism I was raised in. As a child, I had a strong connection to nature, a deep empathy with animals, and a soul-touching appreciation for the summer thunderstorms. There was no place for this concern–no, more like a love–for the lowly physical world in the Catholicism I was given. The world I lived in didn’t exist in the religion I followed. If reality offends you , blot it out, for it is better to enter the Kingdom of Heaven without a firm grasp of facts and reality than be damned with your reality intact, isn’t it?

Then there were my imaginary friends, the games I played. I had read an encyclopedia entry on the Greek myths, and they captivated me. I dreamed the stories, saw the characters, acted out the scenes. These imaginary beings were more alive, more real to me than the faith I was so devoted to. I set up a flat rock in a corner of our back yard and placed the wheat-like tops of grass on it as a pretend sacrifice to Zeus. The names of the gods invaded my mind, even during the most mystical parts of the mass.

I tried to fight it. I knew that this was the worst possible “thought crime” in Catholicism: commandment number 1, in fact. I filled my mind and my idle hours with saints’ stories, picture bibles, and catechism books. I recited silent prayers every time my mind wandered, even quoted the entire Mass, start to finish, from memory. Eventually, these “evil thoughts” were driven from my head, and I began to forget they ever existed.

From that point on, I guess, my path away from the church was pretty much the same as most other apostates. I’ll get into that in part 2.

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