moonriver posted on May 19, 2007
| views: 211
Since I was 8 or 9, I had wanted to become a priest. Not just an ordinary religious cleric steeped in liturgical jargon, who ate circular wafers and drank Mompo wine during Sunday mass. I wanted to be a heroic missionary who would trek to the most outlying savanna of Africa or innermost rainforests of Latin America to serve "the least of our brethren." The yearbook articles and photos of the religious order that controlled our archdiocese always harped on the selfless heroism of its overseas missionaries -- mostly German, Dutch and Belgian -- and I wanted to be one.
Inspired by the lives and works of other missionaries who had earlier spread out into the Amazon and Congo, idolizing the priests of my mother's parish like they were demigods, and seeking the glamour of seminary life that I saw among my cousins -- all these led me, from age 10 onward, to draw a detailed blueprint of my future as priest. I was to attend a top-ranked Catholic technical school, go on to higher seminary, and volunteer for mission work among the Maasai of Kenya. I had even mentally imagined my own saintly death, tied up and boiled by cannibals in a huge vat, as the TV cartoons always showed.
I was armed with the right credentials -- a stolidly Catholic mother from a clan with deep loyalties to the said religious order, a child's precocious capacity to educate others, combined with a militant zeal to spread His Word throughout the pagan world.
Only, I had two problems. First, I was a normal red-blooded boy who was beginning to feel his raging hormones spurt all over. I tried to, but couldn't imagine a lifetime of celibacy. Second, I had an utterly scientific mind, and wanted to ground my religious beliefs on solid scientific foundation. I saw right off that these two factors were going to create a hell of a conflict of views and values inside me, considering the squat conservatism of the Roman Catholic Church.
The conflict soon expressed itself in my growing boredom at the tedium of Holy Mass and of my mother's obsession with Marian rituals and novenas. My deepening questions about the Biblical origins of the world, living things, and people, remained unanswered. I started to seek the veracity of Biblical miracles elsewhere, in more scientific explanations. From solidly Catholic, I gradually turned eclectic.
By the time I was 12, each Holy Mass I attended had become a terrible mental battleground. While the priest continued his boring liturgical drone, I concentrated in digging at "the real meaning" in the words of my Holy Missal. I couldn't. I shifted reading from English to Latin (my Missal was bilingual, with Latin on the left page and English on the right page) in my desperate effort to find a deeper meaning. I couldn't.
I stared for long minutes at the priest, at the main altar, at the crucified Jesus, and at the various saintly statuaries, to see any spiritual emanation emerge and hopefully to get a Message from them saying that it's all true. I began to imagine myself as one of the famous contemplative saints who sought holy ecstasy by focusing real hard on the spiritual. Most of them were shown in paintings rolling their eyes heavenward; I wanted to emulate them.
I must have succeeded, because during Holy Mass, after long minutes of hard staring especially at the statue of St. Paul, I could begin to see fluid shapes and spots around his haloed head and body, now in soft white, now in vivid green, sometimes flashing into pink and purple. And when I looked away, the dancing colors remained in my vision. The message! I was finally getting the message! Or so I thought. In reality, I was simply inducing astigmatism and myopia in my eyesight. And so it went, for maybe an entire year. I soon realized I wasn't getting any coherent heavenly message from my constant staring, only bleary eyes, blurred vision, and terrible headaches.
I was just about ready to stop going to Holy Mass. What held me back was the music, which began to include folk and rock songs sung by teenagers just a few years older than me, now allowed by Vatican II. I thought that was cool, and maybe by joining the Church choir I could rediscover my waning religious belief. My elder brother sometimes joined them as part-time organist. I wanted to be guitarist. But I was too young and too raw for their tastes. Thus I reverted back to hard staring at statues, now with increasing disbelief. And so, the Vatican II reforms failed to save my Catholic beliefs, let alone my normal eyesight.
After around a year of agonizing, and contrary to my life plan, I decided to enroll in a non-sectarian technical high school, and to aspire to become a scientist instead of a missionary priest. I stopped going to Church, and absented myself from the dusk Angelus and nightly rosaries. I began to openly debate with my parents about the veracity of Biblical stories, and ultimately, the existence of God himself. When their replies turned irrational and sanctimonious, my internal battle quickly ended. At 13, I had become a confirmed atheist.
Meanwhile, I noticed that I could no longer read what the teacher wrote on the blackboard, even though I was already seated near the front. I found it hard to recognize the faces of teammates and respond to lightning passes at basketball, much less to spot the ball at baseball.
Once, during basketball practice, my vision simply exploded into a pulsing, blinding white light, followed by a splitting headache that lasted the whole day. Mama was sensible enough to rule out the possibility of my being stricken with the Damascus syndrome, like St. Paul himself. Instead, she brought me to an ophthalmologist, who quickly diagnosed the problem as simple astigmatism and myopia, and quickly fitted me with eyeglasses.
There is a common perception that a young person who wears eyeglasses is somehow smart, or at least bookish. It isn't true in my case. I had been bookish since I learned to read, but felt no need for eyeglasses. My eyeglasses are different. They were the result of childish ignorance, a stupidly wrong notion about spirituality. "Seek, and ye shall find," it solemnly said. I sought, and I found eyeglasses.
Despite my atheism, I continue to have many friends among priests, pastors and nuns. I can still talk their talk, sometimes even walk their walk. But I've never dared tell them the story of how St. Paul et al. gave me some really distorted visions, apart from splitting headaches. It would have been interesting how they'd react.
Comments
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gingersoul said on May 19, 2007....
Moon........this was pure elated fun to read.....and our experiences are amazingly similar...you wanted to be a priest, i wanted to be a nun.
Even because of pretty similar motivations: you wanted be a missionary to help, i wanted be a teacher nun, like the nun who was my beloved teacher in elementary, to help and teach and be a guide to others. Just like she was.
We even stopped goind to mass at the same time...13 years old. I stepped out of that Sunday mass and never put foot in church again, for religious reasons at least....it must have be our hormones having the best of us...lol....
I wrote in another post how my half sleepiness one afternoon led me to be convinced of having seen (and so clearly too) Jesus Christ
(here the link to the post).....
I guess St Paul (coincidence again) for you and the Chief of All the Saints for me didn't do any good ...... many of my friends who are believers had expressed they certainity about the vision i had....they are sure i saw Jesus that day...you had been tricked my blurry vision, my friend, but what about me then?
I think this is a question that lays silently in the back of my mind....because, i swear, anytime i remember that afternoon that vision is clear in front of my eyes...
I dont know...maybe we were predestined by our precociuos questioning minds to our agnosticism and atheism, i guess.....
The santity clan lost two possible fervent rapresentatives......
but mundan life is, oh, so weet....LOL.....{hugs}
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moonriver said on May 19, 2007....
ginger -- i have to admit this: i thoroughly read your "i saw jesus" post only now. did you clearly see the color of his hair? his eyes? i tend to agree that, in a person's most somnolent moments when she is most susceptible to suggestion and supernatural phenomena, a startlingly real image can appear in her field of vision, even accompanied by a voice.
i'm not saying that our minds merely project these visions and sounds. there must be some explanation that ultimately validates matter and energy. you might have seen a transcendental soul that could assume whatever form is most acceptable to you... even in the conventional image of jesus, portrayed like a caucasian hippie in flowing auburn hair instead of a wild-eyed, swarthy palestinian with curly black hair, an ascetic essene militant that he really was as a historical person...
atheist that i am, i remain very open to such spiritual phenomena. it's just that in my case, i know for sure it wasn't st. paul come to materialize in front of me. you would see dancing colored lights too if you stared hard enough at the stained glass windows of the cathedral with the sun shining behind it...LOL.
so you were also required to collect estampitas (those small iconic pictures), huh. and the confession box. did you always get to pray 5 "our fathers" and 10 "hail marys" as penance, whatever the venial sin? did you also get to light penance candles, bought from the rectory at bargain prices, to hasten your salvation? leave it to the catholic hierarchy to retain the most medieval devices to control people's minds...lol.
my equivalent of your nun mentor would be our parish priest, who was very close to our family, whom i idolized like a saint, and whom my mama and i visited regularly even when he was already retired. if it wasn't for him, i would have turned atheist perhaps a year earlier than you, and just as sudden...lol.
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silverwhisper said on May 19, 2007....
i imagine that must've been a hard, hard realization, moon. i'm not catholic, but i understand well the ability to talk the talk if the need arises.
ed -
moonriver said on May 19, 2007....
sw -- the hardest part wasn't actually my internal process of realization (apart from that bizarre and stubborn notion i had about staring at statues). the hardest part was in deciding to say it so openly in front of my parents and siblings -- in fact, even tactlessly, during dinnertime discussions, because i had begun to reject outright the customary prayers of grace before and after meals.
"talk the talk if the need arises"...lol, yes, i read a few of your blogs on this.
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secretlife said on May 20, 2007....
i am sure that your friends the priests and the nuns would laugh at this story.and at least, st paul brought you.......eyeglasses.when i was a girl, we used to play 'nuns' with the neighbor kids who went to catholic school. we would put towels or pillowcasrs on our heads and be the obedient novices ...praying at the statues of mary and st jude, st anthony, st francis, st joseph....my mom was big on novenas....and we'd go for the rosary and then the novena on monday nights.as a teenager, like many many teenagers, i began to doubt all of it, and pull away. i even went thru a stage of attending the folk mass, hoping it might give me the ooomph to keep going to mass. it did not.i was 'away' from the church for many years, and truthfully returned to get married because i knew it meant the world to my mother and also to my future in-laws.but i guess moon, i'm different than you....for while i may have lost interest in the church, i never lost my belief in God.great story. -
moonriver said on May 20, 2007....
secret -- that might really be true, i'll have to try it one of these days (about telling my cleric friends about this story...) you know, when i wrote this blog, it was only then i realized, that despite my atheism, i actually have more close friends among priests etc than ordinary people. maybe because i've clung on to the original spiritual wellsprings that fed my childhood catholic zeal, and which later in life continued to feed my irrepressible optimism in the goodness of people.
i have this really close friend, a benedictine priest and a truly great intellectual and poet (he has a book of non-religious poems published under a nom-de-plume, and is often invited to lectures). left the priesthood, joined the rebel ranks, then returned to become a priest again. he never lost his faith in God, it simply evolved and even expanded to encompass other spiritual dimensions. whenever we get together, we always have this friendly, almost intimate discussions about spirituality (and poetry, and politics, and girls too...lol) over bottles of beer. like me, he is also crazy about bach and chopin.
hey, you were into folk mass too? even when i had stopped going to sunday mass regularly, i still dropped by occasionally just to hear the choir, hang around and hope they'd recruit me in...LOL. i loved their songs, which later included brazenly non-catholic songs like the theme song from mash (suicide is painless... it brings on many changes... and i can take or leave it if i please)
novenas, ah novenas... once my mother or aunt launched into those endless ora pro nobis litanies, it would take all of my energy just to keep mumbling the "pray for us" responses instead of flying into the cloud-cuckoo land of dreams.
towel habits, pillowcase wimples? ...hahaha! i can just imagine you...
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secretlife said on May 21, 2007....
i will make you laugh that we also sang the them from MASH in our folk masses!
LOL...how silly is that? i don't know how they snuck that one in...
but i remember Morning Has Broken and Blowin In The Wind...
I even had a pair of folk mass singers at my wedding mass. you should have heard how they put to music the prayer of Saint Francis
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love:
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.(I can still sing it!)...
I did novenas for a few years only before having to give up on the whole concept.
My mother would say if you had a wish, and you went to 10 novenas, God would grant that wish. at the time i thought it was kind of like the magic genie thing...of course that proved not to be true!
You aren't the first non-believer to tell me that he has great friends in the ministry. i think most religious love the interaction with all peoples of ideas. Remember Spencer Tracy in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? He was an atheist, but his best friend, golf and drinking buddy was a Roman Catholic priest!!!
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moonriver said on May 21, 2007....
secret -- urhmm... haven't seen guess who's coming to dinner yet... lol at the theme from m*a*s*h sung at holy m*a*s*s in churches at the opposite side of the globe. from this, i can only conclude that irreverent mash had a more universal appeal than sacred mass... ;-)
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queenparanoia said on May 24, 2007....
i'm so sorry but i have to laugh at this statement!!!was to attend a top-ranked Catholic technical school, go on to higher seminary, and volunteer for mission work among the Maasai of Kenya. I had even mentally imagined my own saintly death, tied up and boiled by cannibals in a huge vat, as the TV cartoons always showed. -
moonriver said on May 28, 2007....
queenie -- don't be sorry. i always chuckle to myself too whenever i remember this funny notion of martyrdom for missionaries. cannibals don't boil their victims in a big vat like that. the preferred way is to skewer them on poles and roast them over coals like pigs. (in fact, among some new guinea forest tribes, human victims of cannibalism are called, literally, "long pigs". later, pieces of tough meat might be mixed into vegetable stew.) so. are you still laughing, queenie? lol... i hope you are :-)
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queenparanoia said on May 28, 2007....
yes!! and ewwww!!! human barbeque??? gross =)
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