All About Eve

I should probably stop because I'm not practicing but I still try to explain Catholicism sometimes, especially to southerners since many of them didn't grow up around Catholics. Catholicism is as strange to them as it was to me encountering early televangelists and being dumbfounded by how anyone could buy that shit and how in supposedly conservative churches women could show up looking like prostitutes.

Probably shouldn't have said that but, whatever. Anyway, I can tell how weirdly Catholicism appears to some folks because they can't hide it. And they jump immediately to the sex scandal, an admitted disgrace, so I should probably not even try but let's take celibacy. A practice or tradition and not biblical, granted. Of course it creeps them out. Whereas thoughts of a pastor having sex creeps me out. No win there. 

It's all plenty weird. I appeal to a larger perspective. 

I say there's a Catholic outlook about the richness of life that doesn't underplay sex. The idea is not against sex it's against self-centeredness and overweening individualism. Against taking things for granted. Focus, and the story of Eve. Eve was living in paradise and she got obsessed with the one thing she was told she couldn't have. Say it was sex. Say it was the power to create life. Say it was anything. 

Get a grip, Eve. So, the Catholic perspective, I tell people, is that we're living in a miracle. We should wake up every day in wonder and amazement. In awe. I want to say in gratitude but, no. I think it's one step removed from the more primal experience of astonishment at the strangeness and absurdity everyone must or should feel at emerging into consciousness. Existentially and on a daily basis. 

Sacrificing sex for some good ... not that big a deal.

The compensations have to be there. And they are, in the kind of Catholicism that's a form of art. In ritual and music and beauty. We are intended to live fully human lives, lives of immersion in our humanity -- not to deny our ties to God. We reach God through our created nature. The whole package. Emotions and intellect. Sadly, balance is out of fashion. Humans are on a huge power trip, wanting what is God's. 

Perspective is the point -- wide angle lens, soft focus. In a state of awe and wonderment things fall into place. Humility comes naturally. Respect come naturally. Empathy and compassion come naturally. And the pure, innocent, non-compulsive enjoyment of the good things of life comes naturally. Denying any of these isn't too big a deal, as matter of discipline or in maintaining a perspective. We should all fast. 

You first. And God bless.