Thoughts for this Lenten season

Mass in Seville, Spain

Which is not to say I have really thought of it in the past. Most of the time I don't do anything differently for Lent, to be honest.

I guess you could call me a reluctant Catholic. My mum, bless her determination, would wake me up at 6 am on Sundays to drag me to morning mass, my baby brother in tow. I attended Cathechism since the age of five, right up to my Confirmation when I turned sixteen.

There was a time in my (angsty) teenage years that I seriously considered joining another non-Catholic church. There were plenty of well-monied families in this parish, and that meant plenty of stylish, clique-y teenagers. My peers judged each other on the brand of each others' clothes, on how many members of the opposite sex they were friends with..the pressure was immense. I felt lonely and inadequate. I envied my friends in their other churches their allowances for casual dressing, their livelier, more upbeat services.

Now that I am older, most of my teenage insecurities are gone. And I know it really isn't right to say this, but my love for church oscillates with the parish priest. I used to go to a church in Miri where all the sermons the parish priest gave were on how guilty we should all feel for just spending an hour in church a week, for being uncomfortable in the stuffy church which was clearly undersized for the size of its congregation. I despised irresponsible leaders for preaching that "gays are just odd/weird/wrong" so dismissively to children, paving the way to mindless, "programmed" discrimination.

I still disagree with many of the teachings of the Catholic Church, like banning contraception and abortion in totality. I think no woman should be made to endure bringing up the child of her rapist. I think a child is better off unborn than to parent(s) who will mistreat or neglect them. I think divorce is better than subjecting children to a failed relationship, or even the affected couple to a lifetime of misery and bitterness. I believe that being homosexual is not a choice, that God made some of us this way. There, I said it. I believe in Evolution, that the Seven Days of Creation in the bible are not literally seven days, but seven generations of evolution that lead up to Adam and Eve, Homo Sapiens. I believe that the Word of the Bible, because it is written by man, is not to be taken literally. God gave us judgement and rationale and instinct, and that is what we should be applying every day and to these eternal debates. I believe that Science complements religion, not contradicts it, that it always has, just that most of us refuse to see it out of sheer convenience.

In Subang the parish priest encourages his brethren to speak up against dirty and unjust politics, and embodies the very spirit of Vatican II, where for the very first time, the Church admits that there is more than one way to reach God. Gone is the old teaching where the only path to the Kingdom of Heaven is through embracing Christ. Gone are the days when the number of candles on the altar mattered. Charity, in the light and shadow of Mother Theresa is what matters. Actions that truly affect the poor and the suffering, instead of just prayers and fasting. Real impact to real people. Standing up against injustices, like corruption and bullying. I have never felt prouder to be Catholic, not when the other Christian denominations are still threatening people with eternal damnation of they fail to convert now.

Spirituality is a mysterious thing, and so it should be.

Like I said, 'tis the season of Lent after all, and in the light of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, perhaps this season of (traditionally) fasting and prayer can mean much, much more than just bettering our spiritual selves.

Article from the New York Times.

Give Up Your Pew for Lent

By PAUL ELIE

AT 8 p.m. last night in Vatican City, Benedict XVI resigned the papacy. Now American Catholics should consider resigning too.

The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has caught the mood of the church, especially in North America.

Resignation: that’s what American Catholics are feeling about our faith. We are resigned to the fact that so much in the Roman Catholic Church is broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon.

So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en masse, if only for a time.

We are in the third week of Lent, a six-week season of reflection and personal sacrifice when Christians prepare for Easter by taking stock of their religious lives. In recent centuries Roman Catholics have observed Lent by giving up a habit or pleasure, whether red meat, chocolate, soap operas or Facebook, to simplify their lives and regain their independence from worldly attractions — their religious freedom, if you like.

Two years ago, Stephen Colbert gave up Catholicism itself. As the comedian told it, he swore off Catholicism on Ash Wednesday and made it as far as Good Friday, when he went on a “Catholic bender.” His riff inverted the old saying that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Mr. Colbert beat the pope to the punch.

In traditional parlance, Benedict’s resignation leaves the Chair of St. Peter “vacant.” So I propose that American Catholics vacate the pews this weekend.

We should seize this opportunity to ask what is true in our faith, what it costs us in obfuscation and moral compromise, and what its telos, or end purpose, really is. And we should explore other religious traditions, which we understand poorly.

For the Catholic Church, it has been “all bad news, all the time” since Benedict took office in 2005: a papal insult to Muslims; a papal embrace of a Holocaust denier; molesting by priests and cover-ups by their superiors. When the Scottish cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned on Monday amid reports of “inappropriate” conduct toward priests in the 1980s, the routine was wearingly familiar. It’s enough to make any Catholic yearn to leave the whole mess for someone else to clean up.

Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is a theologian. He would not have stepped down if he did not think he was setting a sound precedent: a resignation prompted by physical, not institutional, weakness. That he felt free to resign suggests that he thinks the church is doing fine. But countless ordinary Catholics know otherwise.

That is why this Sunday, I won’t be at the Oratory Church of St. Boniface in Downtown Brooklyn, even though I love it there — a welcoming, open-minded, authentically religious place.

Instead, I’ll be at the Brooklyn Meeting of the Quakers, who have long invited volunteers from our church to serve food to the poor.

Or I’ll be at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, an Episcopal congregation that hosted the Occupy movement’s relief efforts after Hurricane Sandy.

Or I’ll go to the Zen Mountain Monastery at Mount Tremper, in the Catskills.

Or I’ll be in Washington, with colleagues who attend Shabbat services at Georgetown, the first American Catholic university and the first (four decades ago) to engage a full-time rabbi.
Or I’ll knock on the door of the Masjid Ibadul-Rahman, a mosque on my block, or the Zion Shiloh Baptist Church, across the street, or L’Église Baptiste d’Expression Française, on the corner.

I hope and expect to return to the Oratory church the following Sunday. But I can’t be sure. To some degree, it’s out of my hands, a response to a calling.

A temporary resignation would be a fitting Lenten observance. It would help believers to purify and deepen our faith in the light of our neighbors’ — “to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness,” as the American writer Flannery O’Connor put it. It would let us begin to figure out what in Catholicism we can take and what we can and ought to leave. It might even get the attention of the cardinals who will meet behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel and elect a pope in circumstances that one hopes would augur a time of change.
And it might dispel the resignation we feel. Most ordinary believers have given up hope that the church will change its ways. But Benedict’s resignation reminds us of a truth we have known all along: change in the church can happen, even dramatically. If so hidebound an institution as the papacy can be changed, what can’t be?

Paul Elie, a senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown, is the author, most recently, of “Reinventing Bach.”