Flannery O'Connor described the South as not Christian, but rather Christ haunted. She said this was the spirit of evangleicalism and extreme Protestantism that characterized the part of the country she lived in. Divorced from the first fifteen hudnred years of christianity and any real tradition it had the sort of outlines and wisps of Christianity.
Almost fifty years later I am agreeing with her and saying that it is all of America, Christ haunted, sort of thinking it knows about Christianity, attempting to make things simpler than they are--which was the source of Greg's question earlier on--having been brought up in a very watered down and unimaginative religion. We see this lack of appreciation for complexity whenever someone says, "I was Catholic, but then I realized I was too sexual and left the Church," or "I was a Christian, but I wanted to be a scientist so..." It is best seen in questions which state polarities that don't exist: "How can you be a Baptist AND a Democrat?" "How can you be pagan and Protestant?" "How can you be a queer Catholic?" So on and so on.
Only in America, the land of the simple and the home of the watered down do questions like this get asked about religion.
I hope we become truly American as time goes by, I mean in step with the Latin world down south. As they become more politcally and financially stable and learn from us, culturally and religiously we might want to learn from them. I think it would shock many American Catholics (and especially evangelicals and Protestants) to know that in Brazil devout Catholics hold festivals by the sea to worship the goddess of the sea every year, or that Indians in North and South America still pray to their ancestors and their tribal gods even as they go to Mass. Some people call this blasphemy--what is is not forsaking what you come from, not throwing the old away when you take on the new. If we can learn this from the Christians down south maybe they can learn from the growing pangs in the Catholic Church and new reforms among mainline Protestants how to accept queers in all their forms. Latin America is still horrible with the rights of the female and queer.
Like many little boys who grow up to be pagans or queers, as a child I was given to making up my own religious rituals and stories, going that extra blasphemous and familiar mile that my mother called "playing with God." She'd say "Don't play with God!" She had what many people have--a great fear of God. You came to HIM--always a HIM through the rituals set down by the minister, the priest, someone who knew better. Not on your own, not with a light heart, not with your own rituals, not listening to the voice inside or the voices without.
But playing with God is just that. God wants us to play, to expand, to reimagine. To run away from every faith where the small minded and bigoted enter, to take the words of foolish people for gospel truth and denigrate a whole religion because of that is foolish. There are Catholics who speak in ignorance of fear about the queer. There are evangelicals and Protestants who flat out hate us. And there are pagans, Hindus and Buddhists who do the same. As well as--yes--atheists. So there is no running away.
I am reminded of several groups of Catholic women who have restored the practice of laybrinth walking and coming together in sisterhood. There are women who, with raisin bread and wine gather in circles and practice the Eucharist away from men and the narrow interpretations of the Vatican. Maverick priests and nuns who plan out and perform elaborate and beautiful gay and lesbian weddings. These people are called fighters. They are fighting for their rights to be real Catholics. Real Christian. Ah, but I knwo what fighting is. It is exhausting and bitter work and love runs out quickly from it. They are not fighting. They are playing.
There is no running away. Don't run away.
Play.
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