Oprah Winfrey – Belief
Oct. 22, 2015
I’ve been watching Oprah Winfrey’s series on Belief. It has
been so interesting to recognize that the most bizarre rituals and practices of
the world’s religions are no more bizarre than the Catholic culture I knew. We
attend a ritual that turns bread into a body and wine into blood and then we
eat it! We don’t eat meat on Friday and used to fast before Communion. We used
to go to hell for missing mass on Sunday. Babies who died before being baptized
went to Limbo and sinners who died but didn’t quite deserve hell were sent to
Purgatory. We had prayer cards that if read, could knock out a certain number
of days for a loved one who might be in Purgatory. Sins were broken down into
mortal and venial and regardless of how you had lived your entire life, dying
after having committed a mortal sin (like missing mass), would send you
straight to hell. I have a distinct memory of having gone to confession then
gone to mass and having received communion. For just a few minutes after
communion, I was sin-free. So much
planning went into enjoying a few minutes of sinlessness.
Being raised mostly by my grandmother, who kept many of the
customs she grew up with in Italy, added a whole other level to some of the
strange Catholic traditions I learned. Catholic grade school, high school and
college, Catholic family and extended family and Catholic friends and neighbors
all kept me insulated and embedded in all things Catholic. While there is a lot
to be said for the wonderful education I received and the strict guidelines for
behavior that kept me out of a lot of trouble, I felt like I had stepped off of
a cliff when I got a divorce and found myself outside of the most powerful
force in my life.
At the time I divorced, I was forbidden to receive
Communion. In order to get back in to the church, I had to go through an
extensive and expensive legal process in the church. I started the process but
when my advocate started to explore ways to circumvent Canon Law in order to
get the annulment, I lost all faith in the Catholic Church. How can you fool
God? The church has since changed its stance on divorced Catholics but that
presented a problem too. The church changed its stance on a lot of things that
at one time represented eternal condemnation. What used to send you to hell was
now OK. How can you trust a religion
that can be that wrong about itself?
I began to study the Bible as opposed to the Catechism.
After 6 years of Bible Study Fellowship, I kept my Christian faith but realized
that there was a lot about my Catholic faith that had left indelible marks on me
and those marks would have to go if I were ever to find a genuine belief. Over
the years, I’ve questioned almost everything. As I think about dying, the issue
has become a little more acute. What has remained is a history between God and
me. My belief was bestowed upon me, nurtured, imbedded, enforced, and
reinforced. It was all I ever knew and so it was something I could not leave.
It had always been a part of me. However, all the trappings of the faith were
discarded. There hasn’t been a denomination yet, that I have totally accepted.
When I look back at some of the silly things I used to do as
part of my religion, the silly things I saw on the Oprah special were easier to
understand. We try to find ways to persuade God to answer our prayers. Whether
we jump from a cliff or climb stairs on our knees, fast, perform painful
penances or twirl like a dervish we use the culture we know to praise our God
and ask for help.
More important than how we worship is why. I think it is a combination of two
things. I think people often experience
a feeling of there being something else whether through déjà vu or coincidence
or a sense of something more. People
also often experience a sense of helplessness.
I might just be talking to myself but I feel like I am talking to God
and that He hears me. Perhaps I have my God because it is terrifying to think
that what we see is all there is.
Perhaps what I feel is a universal need and that is why religion exists
in all cultures. I cannot prove my God to anyone and while I acknowledge a
human need for there to be a God, I don’t see that as a reason to believe there
is not a God. I have personally experienced enough “God” moments to know there
is something beyond me. Apparently, a lot of other people have had similar
experiences. There’s a lot of faith out there. How that faith is expressed
probably depends upon where you were born, what your parents believed or any
number of random encounters that have led to one faith or another. Regardless
of what you call your God or how you worship your God or how you implore your
God for help, it is not silly, it’s just different from what I know.
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