I'm going to try something here that I usually don't do, because it usually backfires and gets brought up in every thread someone has a disagreement with me in for years to come as a trump card to discredit me, and share kind of a personal religious struggle with you guys. I'm going to trust you all not to use it to call me a fake Catholic next time we're discussing politics. 
Hopefully my trust isn't misplaced.
My background is Irish (American) Catholic. I can't even count all my cousins, let alone name them all- that type of Irish Catholic. Most, but not all, of the extended family comes from a fairly conservative vein of the Catholic tradition. A couple of them are priests. I was baptized and received my first communion and went to confession regularly and so on and so forth as a young child. 10 years of Catholic school.
As a pre-teen, I became an atheist or an agnostic or something along those lines. I wasn't sure God existed, and I was pretty sure I didn't like God if he did, because of things like the existence of hell that seemed like it'd be populated by a lot of good people (from my perspective), very strict rigid ethical codes that I wasn't sure were all ethical, and the existence of suffering in the world, later personal suffering would add to the abstract issue of other people's suffering.
I knew all the theological explanations, like that some people couldn't stand to be in God's presence and might put themselves outside of heaven because of that, but I couldn't quite accept it as being ethically okay for God to do that, because there is a middle ground between a heavily paradise in God's presence, and a place of intense physical and psychological torment for all eternity. For example, there is the idea of the limbo unbaptized infants are said to possibly enter, where there is the absence of God, but where there is no physical pain or suffering. Why couldn't that be hell instead? God could allow people who didn't want to be in his presence to go to their own personal paradises that had everything they might want except access to him. He could even allow them to repent later if they so chose.
There's this idea, too, that hell is a form of justice, but we don't accept torture (The Bush administration aside ) as an acceptable form of justice administration in modern western society. Even the Church says it's wrong in this world now. So we're moving ethically beyond it, but God isn't it?
And even if we were to posit that torture in the afterlife *is* just, eventually it can't be just to be tortured for all of time and eternity, torture that quite literally can never end, for sin or misdeed committed in a finite time on earth, can it? The bible speaks of an eye for an eye, but even if you live 100 years on earth and do horrible things the whole time, being tortured for more than 100 times 100 years would be so much more than an eye for an eye.
Further, Jesus himself said that we were to move beyond the concept of an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek instead. If God himself says that, and presents it as an ethical advance that we're to strive for, what's the justification for God setting it aside and not following his own advice in the afterlife? Why are we supposed to be more ethically advanced in our practices than God himself is? Shouldn't *he* be more ethically advanced?
Anyhow, eventually, I found myself drawn back to religion in my later teens and early twenties, and explored various different forms of Christianity, and became an Episcopalian for I'd say around three years, getting confirmed, attending the Eucharist every week, etc.. I have a great love for liturgy, theology, the look and feel and tradition of churches, religious history, and so on and so forth. And I like having spirituality in my life.
As an Episcopalian, for a time I could set aside a lot of what I didn't agree with God about, or even doubts about God's existence. Though the Episcopal Church isn't officially universalist, one is free to be universalist and be Episcopalian. My natural inclinations towards equality for women, homosexuals, and so on and so forth were shared by most of that organization, though my particular parish was fairly conservative. There were even female and gay bishops, priests, and deacons. Sure, there was still suffering in the world, but that wasn't something that was going to change no matter what I did, and it was a little easier to ignore God standing by and letting it happen feeling that God wasn't calling me to change my life beyond being more responsive and loving to people, and with the idea that everyone would wind up in heaven one day anyway, and that all suffering was temporary.
I'd always wanted to be married from a young age, and could never find a wife, so at the time their waning admonitions (they were clearly slowly moving toward a new more liberal theology of sex) against pre-martial sex and stuff were also appealing relative to Roman Catholicism. Not as much as an issue these days, as I've kind of moved on from dating for personal reasons I'd rather not discuss too deeply (Not that I rule it out, I've just in practice stopped pursuing it, and I'm not the type of person who gets pursued or falls into relationships by random chance, not that I'd be against either, so in practice I don't really date anymore.)- suffice is to say I wasn't in much demand and was really struggling to find people, and feeling less satisfaction with the people I found, and didn't see the possibility of the long-term future I wanted (Between poverty, health issues, a tough to handle personality, and a lack of traditionally well received looks, people's patience would wear thin with me quickly if they didn't immediately rule me out, which most did, and I couldn't really handle things very well), and the quality of the women I was finding was noticeably lower in the areas I found important as time passed. I think I can deal with just hanging out with my dog a bit and trying to make the best of it better than what was happening to me in the dating world, and pursuing a goal that was incredibly consuming, frustrating, and heart breaking to pursue and wasn't really getting me anywhere.
Anyhow, there got to be this point as an Episcopalian where I got very deep in prayer and theology, and couldn't deny that the Catholic Church of my birth was the Church founded my Jesus. I felt like maybe God had called me into the Episcopal Church because that's what I could accept at the time, but increasingly would feel God's voice in a quiet way (Not literally voices in my head), telling me it was time to move on. Passages in the bible or read at Eucharist services would just sort of leap off the page or out of the lector's mouth and give me this strong feeling that God was telling me my time there was over and I needed to return to Rome. I was starting to feel like a fake Episcopalian, but I didn't want to leave, and knew I couldn't stay.
Eventually, I did leave. I started attending Roman Catholic masses again and some of the hymns I grew up with- the "Though the Mountains May Fall", "Here I am, Lord", and "On Eagle's Wings" 70s-80s stuff everyone hates that they don't play anywhere else- really touched me. I even made a confession and received the Eucharist once, but it wasn't even a week before I wound up not being able to get back in the confessional and couldn't receive communion.
So, seven or eight years later, I feel like I've made no progress. I attended mass less and less as the years passed, I'm down to one every year or two now. I can't find peace with God and I don't agree with the way he is. I felt like I'd make progress on that, but I haven't. I feel further from God than I did as an Episcopalian. Some days and weeks and months and even years, I feel more like the atheist I was during my teenage years.
Seeing the child abuse scandal and the coverup from news reports and so on, and seeing a radically politicized Republican bishopric acting in what I feel are immoral ways that are contrary to the Catholic faith, even, at times, doesn't help, although they aren't my primary issues.
Seven or eight years is a long time. I'm moving further from rather than closer to the life of the Church. I don't feel like this is getting resolved. It's just been in limbo.
Often, I feel like trying to forget religion, and have tried, but I fundamentally am a religious person and keep getting pulled back. I couldn't stomach towards the end of being an Episcopalian when I felt I was faking it because I no longer believe it, but sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier and better off trying to do that and taking communion there (As they don't put restrictions on coming to the table, whereas I feel the need to respect Rome's teaching and not take communion when attending Catholic mass without prior confession) and being a part of a faith community that I could accept and feel uplifted by, even if I felt like we were all communing with a God who wasn't real, and that the real God was the Roman one. But I have trouble stomaching that concept, I am not good at faking things, and have trouble seeing that bring me any peace.
Yet, I can't seem to really reconcile with God as a Roman Catholic and truly be a confession going, weekly mass attending, full member of a Catholic faith community. It seems to go against my conscience in some way. I try to ease into it and never get there, and wind up non-religious for a while and trying to drift back and not quite getting there. I consider myself a Catholic, I was baptized a Catholic, but I can't seem to be a Catholic in many ways.
I've felt for years like I really should just, if I can't be part of the Roman Catholic Church as a "regular" and really get with the program, that I should just give up on religion, but something in me won't let me do that permanently, or go back to being an Episcopalian, but I can't really believe in that. I've often begun to wonder if I'm going to spend the next several decades caught in this limbo, and then dying and going to hell. If I'm headed to hell, I really as might as well not bother with this stuff, right? But my brain almost seems like it's in a dysfunctional loop that won't let me ignore it for long and also won't let me give myself to it.
To be honest, there's a strong chance I'd be Episcopalian again by now if they had a Saturday evening Eucharist. Early Sunday-only Eucharist times are tough for me to pull off schedule and health wise. I am really at low ebb and in a ton of pain that time of day, and it's not fun to try to get going for something I don't really believe in (Episcopalian) or something at some level I feel is ethically wrong even if it's right on the facts (Roman Catholicism). Of course, there are plenty of Saturday mass times for Roman Catholics, but if I get angry when I go and can't take communion, it just starts to push me further from a place of spiritual peace. I sense no advancement.
I wonder if anyone has any ideas?
Hopefully my trust isn't misplaced.My background is Irish (American) Catholic. I can't even count all my cousins, let alone name them all- that type of Irish Catholic.
Most, but not all, of the extended family comes from a fairly conservative vein of the Catholic tradition. A couple of them are priests. I was baptized and received my first communion and went to confession regularly and so on and so forth as a young child. 10 years of Catholic school.As a pre-teen, I became an atheist or an agnostic or something along those lines. I wasn't sure God existed, and I was pretty sure I didn't like God if he did, because of things like the existence of hell that seemed like it'd be populated by a lot of good people (from my perspective), very strict rigid ethical codes that I wasn't sure were all ethical, and the existence of suffering in the world, later personal suffering would add to the abstract issue of other people's suffering.
I knew all the theological explanations, like that some people couldn't stand to be in God's presence and might put themselves outside of heaven because of that, but I couldn't quite accept it as being ethically okay for God to do that, because there is a middle ground between a heavily paradise in God's presence, and a place of intense physical and psychological torment for all eternity. For example, there is the idea of the limbo unbaptized infants are said to possibly enter, where there is the absence of God, but where there is no physical pain or suffering. Why couldn't that be hell instead? God could allow people who didn't want to be in his presence to go to their own personal paradises that had everything they might want except access to him. He could even allow them to repent later if they so chose.
There's this idea, too, that hell is a form of justice, but we don't accept torture (The Bush administration aside
) as an acceptable form of justice administration in modern western society. Even the Church says it's wrong in this world now. So we're moving ethically beyond it, but God isn't it? And even if we were to posit that torture in the afterlife *is* just, eventually it can't be just to be tortured for all of time and eternity, torture that quite literally can never end, for sin or misdeed committed in a finite time on earth, can it? The bible speaks of an eye for an eye, but even if you live 100 years on earth and do horrible things the whole time, being tortured for more than 100 times 100 years would be so much more than an eye for an eye.
Further, Jesus himself said that we were to move beyond the concept of an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek instead. If God himself says that, and presents it as an ethical advance that we're to strive for, what's the justification for God setting it aside and not following his own advice in the afterlife? Why are we supposed to be more ethically advanced in our practices than God himself is? Shouldn't *he* be more ethically advanced?
Anyhow, eventually, I found myself drawn back to religion in my later teens and early twenties, and explored various different forms of Christianity, and became an Episcopalian for I'd say around three years, getting confirmed, attending the Eucharist every week, etc.. I have a great love for liturgy, theology, the look and feel and tradition of churches, religious history, and so on and so forth. And I like having spirituality in my life.
As an Episcopalian, for a time I could set aside a lot of what I didn't agree with God about, or even doubts about God's existence. Though the Episcopal Church isn't officially universalist, one is free to be universalist and be Episcopalian. My natural inclinations towards equality for women, homosexuals, and so on and so forth were shared by most of that organization, though my particular parish was fairly conservative. There were even female and gay bishops, priests, and deacons. Sure, there was still suffering in the world, but that wasn't something that was going to change no matter what I did, and it was a little easier to ignore God standing by and letting it happen feeling that God wasn't calling me to change my life beyond being more responsive and loving to people, and with the idea that everyone would wind up in heaven one day anyway, and that all suffering was temporary.
I'd always wanted to be married from a young age, and could never find a wife, so at the time their waning admonitions (they were clearly slowly moving toward a new more liberal theology of sex) against pre-martial sex and stuff were also appealing relative to Roman Catholicism. Not as much as an issue these days, as I've kind of moved on from dating for personal reasons I'd rather not discuss too deeply (Not that I rule it out, I've just in practice stopped pursuing it, and I'm not the type of person who gets pursued or falls into relationships by random chance, not that I'd be against either, so in practice I don't really date anymore.)- suffice is to say I wasn't in much demand and was really struggling to find people, and feeling less satisfaction with the people I found, and didn't see the possibility of the long-term future I wanted (Between poverty, health issues, a tough to handle personality, and a lack of traditionally well received looks, people's patience would wear thin with me quickly if they didn't immediately rule me out, which most did, and I couldn't really handle things very well), and the quality of the women I was finding was noticeably lower in the areas I found important as time passed. I think I can deal with just hanging out with my dog a bit and trying to make the best of it better than what was happening to me in the dating world, and pursuing a goal that was incredibly consuming, frustrating, and heart breaking to pursue and wasn't really getting me anywhere.
Anyhow, there got to be this point as an Episcopalian where I got very deep in prayer and theology, and couldn't deny that the Catholic Church of my birth was the Church founded my Jesus. I felt like maybe God had called me into the Episcopal Church because that's what I could accept at the time, but increasingly would feel God's voice in a quiet way (Not literally voices in my head), telling me it was time to move on. Passages in the bible or read at Eucharist services would just sort of leap off the page or out of the lector's mouth and give me this strong feeling that God was telling me my time there was over and I needed to return to Rome. I was starting to feel like a fake Episcopalian, but I didn't want to leave, and knew I couldn't stay.
Eventually, I did leave. I started attending Roman Catholic masses again and some of the hymns I grew up with- the "Though the Mountains May Fall", "Here I am, Lord", and "On Eagle's Wings" 70s-80s stuff everyone hates that they don't play anywhere else- really touched me. I even made a confession and received the Eucharist once, but it wasn't even a week before I wound up not being able to get back in the confessional and couldn't receive communion.
So, seven or eight years later, I feel like I've made no progress. I attended mass less and less as the years passed, I'm down to one every year or two now. I can't find peace with God and I don't agree with the way he is. I felt like I'd make progress on that, but I haven't. I feel further from God than I did as an Episcopalian. Some days and weeks and months and even years, I feel more like the atheist I was during my teenage years.
Seeing the child abuse scandal and the coverup from news reports and so on, and seeing a radically politicized Republican bishopric acting in what I feel are immoral ways that are contrary to the Catholic faith, even, at times, doesn't help, although they aren't my primary issues.
Seven or eight years is a long time. I'm moving further from rather than closer to the life of the Church. I don't feel like this is getting resolved. It's just been in limbo.
Often, I feel like trying to forget religion, and have tried, but I fundamentally am a religious person and keep getting pulled back. I couldn't stomach towards the end of being an Episcopalian when I felt I was faking it because I no longer believe it, but sometimes I wonder if I'd be happier and better off trying to do that and taking communion there (As they don't put restrictions on coming to the table, whereas I feel the need to respect Rome's teaching and not take communion when attending Catholic mass without prior confession) and being a part of a faith community that I could accept and feel uplifted by, even if I felt like we were all communing with a God who wasn't real, and that the real God was the Roman one. But I have trouble stomaching that concept, I am not good at faking things, and have trouble seeing that bring me any peace.
Yet, I can't seem to really reconcile with God as a Roman Catholic and truly be a confession going, weekly mass attending, full member of a Catholic faith community. It seems to go against my conscience in some way. I try to ease into it and never get there, and wind up non-religious for a while and trying to drift back and not quite getting there. I consider myself a Catholic, I was baptized a Catholic, but I can't seem to be a Catholic in many ways.
I've felt for years like I really should just, if I can't be part of the Roman Catholic Church as a "regular" and really get with the program, that I should just give up on religion, but something in me won't let me do that permanently, or go back to being an Episcopalian, but I can't really believe in that. I've often begun to wonder if I'm going to spend the next several decades caught in this limbo, and then dying and going to hell. If I'm headed to hell, I really as might as well not bother with this stuff, right? But my brain almost seems like it's in a dysfunctional loop that won't let me ignore it for long and also won't let me give myself to it.
To be honest, there's a strong chance I'd be Episcopalian again by now if they had a Saturday evening Eucharist. Early Sunday-only Eucharist times are tough for me to pull off schedule and health wise. I am really at low ebb and in a ton of pain that time of day, and it's not fun to try to get going for something I don't really believe in (Episcopalian) or something at some level I feel is ethically wrong even if it's right on the facts (Roman Catholicism). Of course, there are plenty of Saturday mass times for Roman Catholics, but if I get angry when I go and can't take communion, it just starts to push me further from a place of spiritual peace. I sense no advancement.
I wonder if anyone has any ideas?
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