I hesitate to say, to explain, to mourn. My mother believed so much. You may not feel the betrayal that cuts my heart in two. You may never have been on the side of faith as I have. I don’t judge you. I have crossed the once unfathomable ocean and live amongst you now. Looking upon the church and her trinkets as foreign, wondering how I ever dwelt there.

Yesterday I found out that the priest who was the cornerstone of the Medjugorje Marian apparitions has been defrocked by the Pope. That means he will no longer be a priest. The reasons seem vast. Amongst them, at some point he got a nun pregnant but worst of all created the whole apparition phenomenon with those six children out of thin air. It’s all a farce. The main stream news is carrying it. The Catholic news is reporting it.

For those of you who don’t know, Medjugorje is THE modern place of pilgrimmage. Because Mary, mother of Jesus, was said to appear there to six children. With prophecies and messages and calls to pray the Rosary beads. Countless people I know have personally traveled there at great expense to be part of the miracle, to receive grace, to be a good Catholic. And it’s all a farce.

You can be a Catholic without believing all the bells and whistles. Few will tell you that. But spend enough time in a pew, with the people, you will quickly discover that it is the people who carry and push and desperately want to believe all the extras so very badly. And herd mentality, peer pressure, whatever you want to call it takes over.

My mother was one of those people. She spent the greater part of her last days believing God was asking her to be the very opposite of the person he had made her. I know what believing in this farce did to her. I know how it made her even sicker than she already was. I know how the church perpetuates it. It is fine to believe as long as it fills the pews. And yet now when the man responsible is found to be a charlatan, he is defrocked IN SECRET.

People, I am so sick, so weary, so disenfranchised, so betrayed. I am one of the faithful. I was one of the faithful. Now lost.

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Once upon a time a girl swung in a park.
She almost reached the trees.
Teasing those leaves with her touch,
She rebelled, embraced, dreamed.
And yet one day walked away.
Almost never to remember.
Until memory came flooding back
at the side of such a precious daughter
and dreamt the same dreams
under new leaves too familiar to be strangers.

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Of all the things that become my muse, humidity never seemed like a real candidate. And yet…

What does the slow steady whirl of a ceiling fan mean to you?

When it gets warm, we have no air conditioning and the fans are our salvation. For this reason, I can not be upset over sticky air. It gives me the chance to become Southern again, to feel my roots to the core of who I am, down into my toes and up to the gentle blowing strands of my hair.

Something about them bring me back unmistakably to just about every memory I have and every memory shared with me from my grandmother. I can – with ease – forget that laying on the back porch, large glass windows, stripped down to cotton underclothes laying down on blankets with my brothers and sisters for an afternoon getaway from the heat was not me. Underclothes were a lot skimpier in my time, cupboards took up most of the space on that porch when I knew it and I have no sisters. But you put a ceiling fan on, I can hear the rhythm of my grandmother weaving the story of her family into my heart.

Blow, blow me away.

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i’ve been trying to post this certain post for two weeks now and it won’t save. so this is my test post. *crosses fingers*

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Being that I just spent about ten minutes rummaging through all of Elizabeth Gilbert’s quotes on Goodreads and marking oh about a dozen into my list of favorite quotes, I think that I can say with ease that I adored Eat Pray Love.

while i can see the temptation to make it a bible for women’s liberation, i think it is so much more than that. it is a story of personal liberation. that she was a woman is just an extra scoop of ice cream on an already delicious piece of cake.

i enjoyed reading this book because it became a source of genuine deep difficult introspection. i think liz would approve.

last week i was passed over for a job promotion. my manager coming afterward to say that she was impressed with me was less balm and simply more sting.

rejection created a palpable desire to go back to school stat
ignoring the timing that makes sense
so what is missing that leaves me unfilled
and condemns me to busybodying myself
rather than see the truth for what it is

Guilt from losing my religion is so heavy
my prayer is to find god outside of religion
fill the hole meet him
catholics seem too caught up on ritual
as if it in and of itself will bring them to god
but when you come to god it’s on your knees

still on the journey
bear with me
i want ritual because i want god

he is the hole that i sense missing
but wait, no. i DONT want ritual.
i am a lover of symbolism, hater of routine and boredom.
including devotion, daily, of any kind or creed

i swear sometimes i create catastrophes in my life
because i am infinitely better at fixing them
than living day to day
maybe that’s a hint of what field of nursing i’d be good at
am i bound for ER or ICU?

please god teach me to live in the mundane
and not chase shiny things

for i know you are there
but i can’t slow myself down long enough
to see you
please god lead me to the rituals that will bring me to you

some days i feel young, some days i feel so old. my second greatest fear after not being loved would be standing still in one place. at the end of this journey, i acknowledge that my longing is a connection with my God, that my happiness is of my own making, that ritual is something that is both good for me and good for my happiness, that i need to find the devotion that fits my heart and that i am not the only idealist still alive on the planet. i leave with the most hopeful words i found in the book – all about the Augusteum in Rome.

“On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting–the Augusteum.  This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his family for all eternity.  It must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus-worshiping empire.  How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm?  Or, known that, with all the aqueducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of glory?

Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages.  Somebody stole the emperor’s ashes–no telling who.  By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been relocated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from Assaults by various warring princes.  Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we’re in the eighteenth century now), then a fireworks depository, then a concert hall.  In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the property and restored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place for his remains.  (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshiping empire.)  Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he’d anticipated.

Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in the ground.  The city has grown up around it over the centuries (one inch a year is the general rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris).  Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there–from what I can tell–except to use the place as a public bathroom.  But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.

I find the endurance of Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times.  To me, the Augusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life–who maybe started out as a housewife, the unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national politics–yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout every upheaval.

I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all.  It is merely this world that is chaotic, bring changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.  The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.  Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough–but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository.  Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”

{bold text my own addition}

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