Accounting and Amends

I have a confession:

I was a rabid pro-lifer in high school and wore the ABORTION IS MURDER t-shirt to school regularly. I attended the March for Life in DC* with my youth group twice.

I am SO sorry, World.

Sometime in college it occurred to me through logical, empathetic thinking that unwanted pregnancy must be a very scary and difficult position to be in, and I couldn’t help but have the utmost respect for any woman who made a choice for herself and her life, whatever her choice was. That was a turning point for me, somehow suddenly recognizing the human—the woman—involved in the situation. I was skeptical about different aspects of the Church since** about middle school, but I had no support for those thoughts, and it took a long time to get to where I am today on my own.

There was no argument up to that point that could topple my righteous fight for the unborn, for whom their faceless mothers should feel compelled to give their lives at any cost because they had already had their shot, already made their choice. I believed it all. I'd been raised Catholic, attended Sunday school every week, every year up through the eighth grade when I was confirmed, and then was an active member of the high school youth group.

I was fed a lot of statistics about the relationship between abortion, depression, breast cancer, etc., and I believed it all. They (the youth pastors) told us too that there were far fewer abortions before Roe v. Wade, and that was proof that banning it would decrease the number happening, that the back alley abortion was an insignificant number, mythical almost. I’ve since learned international statistics don’t support that and that all the other stuff is false, too. Banning abortion does not decrease the number of abortions that happen; but it does increase the danger of the procedure and does kill more women.

I try not to dwell on the pain I perhaps caused and the misinformation I spread in the past because it would surely crush me. All I can do is learn more and say more, be informed and inform others, and hope that I will have a lifetime ahead of me to counteract my actions in the first 18 years.

*I have some beautiful pictures of the cathedral that I'll try to find and share.

**Or maybe younger. I know I asked my mom why girls couldn't be altar servers. My parish changed its policy after I was too old to serve.

Recommended reading: Here is a really well-written memoir about one woman's loss of faith in the pro-life movement because the movement is not interested in lowering the number of abortions or unwanted pregnancies. It's long but very informative with lots of good links throughout to support her assertions and statistics.

Demonization of the Flesh

You might have considered taking up residence in a cave to escape the daily bombardment from TV shows and commercials, movies, magazine covers and ads, and ads on the most innocuous websites (news and even grammar blogs?) lecturing about what’s wrong with your body and appearance and clothes and shoes and diet and even the way you make love, and how to fix it all in 10 easy steps. Or at least I have.

Home isn’t safe either when families, too, are critical of bodies. Maybe not yours directly, but we’ve all heard them going on about their own weight and their diet, their weight loss, and moralizing about food and size, directly preaching the insidious and preposterous notion that thin = good and fat = bad.

The Church, with a romantic history as a supposed sanctuary from persecution, is one place you can be sure of God’s infinite love for all his children. Except for you, Obvious Gluttonous Sinner. We learn from a very early age that gluttony, overindulgence in food and drink characterized (and often caricatured) as slovenly obesity, is one of the 7 Deadly Sins. (I’m speaking from the experience of being raised Catholic, but the concepts may be familiar.)

Maybe your faith community didn’t focus on it so much, but the message was taught nonetheless and accepted as an understood and easy to follow truth. It starts as a small drop in the deluge of body negativity indoctrination and justifies those who believe that obesity is proof of gluttony, immorality, personal weakness, and failing in order to prop themselves up as righteous in their ability to control their own bodies.

There will always be people invested in reaping unearned advantages from the seeds sowed by oppression. It’s much easier than actually trying to be a good person, cultivate talents, or do anything productive with their lives. 

Let them think their ‘hard work’ spent chasing after thin privilege is the same as working hard to overcome prejudice, or raise a family, or pursue greater or higher knowledge, or survive in the face of challenges. 

It’s easier to pant on a treadmill and think yourself better than someone else than actually do something that makes you a better person, friend, partner, or member of the community.  -Arte to life on Thin privilege tumblr

Supposedly Gluttony is wasteful and withholds from the poor. How can one’s eating habits affect his or her ability to donate money or canned goods to charity or volunteer at a food pantry or free cafeteria? This is a “sin” that doesn’t actually affect or hurt anyone else in the world at all (like most sins, really) and doesn’t matter unless you’re fat. That is to say, no one will question a thin person’s eating habits on the basis of looking at his or her body, although “everyone knows” that overeating leads to obesity is a myth. And that there’s a strong relationship between food insecurity and overweight. So it’s pretty far from charitable to use values (the 7 Deadly Sins) made up by a man in the 4th Century as the basis for concern trolling or shaming people of size.

On the one hand, food is a spiritual experience, bringing people together in celebration and worship in the sacrament of Communion, where one literally consumes the body and blood of Christ, who fed 4 or 5 thousand people by multiplying a few loaves of bread and fish for a hungry crowd and turned water to wine to celebrate a wedding. Food is a celebration of life and the gifts given by the Creator . . . but only to a point? How much can we eat and how much are we allowed to enjoy it without committing sin? The Church sanctions feast days and holidays celebrated by feasting until we feel we’re about to burst. But eating arbitrarily “too much” and gaining weight warrants Confession.

Enjoying food, even lots of it, isn’t inherently immoral (nor for that matter are other things that make your body feel good, such as masturbation, sex, and blended fabrics). Consider the narrative, “I ate SO much! I feel like such a pig!” Pfft. I ate SO much because that food was freaking delicious and we were having such a great time. Food has important emotional, social, and cultural meanings and value outside of nutritional value alone that are necessary to recognize.

“Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating.” -Ellyn Satter

You need food to live, and your body, too. Your body is not a weak, traitorous lump of flesh divorced from the mind and designed to tempt you to evil. You are one being, you are whole, finely tuned over thousands of years to be the best human you can be.

And, frankly, spending a lifetime at war with yourself is no way live.

Mom, Dad, I'm atheist.

I identified as agnostic until halfway through the second speech of the night on Friday at the UTD Secular Convention. Something the presenter said made it clear to me that I only lacked the vocabulary to explain my awe and wonder at the universe as something other than capital G- God. It's really just science and all of creation.

And anyway, atheism doesn't mean certain belief in no god but a lack of certain belief in gods, which is about right for me. We are not currently capable of proving without a doubt that there is or is not a deity, and if there is, I don't really care. Because I'm not going to worship one as petty and cruel as the Christian god.

Growing up in the Catholic Church was uncomfortable, and living under the yolk of infinite guilt and shame was downright traumatic. I wonder now if the taught guilt is what caused my generalized anxiety and whether I might not be a better functioning person without having developed it.

I first began questioning in elementary school after my First Reconciliation. Why did I feel such an abhorrence for a blessed sacrament, one of the big 7, no less? By 12 I had figured out that it was fucking ridiculous to require an intermediary to grant God's forgiveness. And looking back, compelling a 7-year-old girl under penalty of eternal damnation and hellfire to tell an old man that she touches herself is morally repugnant and wrong in every way, though I think I lied about this most times. And I believed that my doubt would be my holy burden to bear.

I went through the sacrament of Confirmation, which means receiving the Holy Spirit and becoming an adult member of the church, dedicating oneself to the Catholic Church once one has reached the age of discretion, an age that varies between dioceses and was 13 in mine. Because 13-year-old children are capable of logic and reason enough to have found their way out of the last dozen years of daily indoctrination. Not.

Anyway, I was pretty excited about the honor at the time. Part of the preparation is to choose the name of a saint and write a report about him or her. I don't remember the purpose, but the saint would be one you admired, and their name became a part of yours, typically a second middle name. I think I wanted to choose a man's name but was discouraged. So I chose Eve because I felt she was misunderstood and overall a pretty badass lady for being the mother of mankind and taking all that blame for The Fall. (A youth minister once told us that Satan tempted Eve first because he knew she was stronger and that Adam would be a sure thing.) It seems now to have been some sort of oversight because I can't find mention of her as a saint anywhere.

In high school, my dearest darling loved and adored friend came out as gay. And I just couldn't believe in a God that would have this child live a loveless life or be cursed for eternity. "Love the sinner; hate the sin" was and is a shitty philosophy. That a gay person could only be absolved by never acting on his or her feelings was deeply upsetting, especially as I myself began to question my attractions.

And then I dated a smart and kind young man off and on through senior high school, off because things moved too quickly for me, physically, and on again because I loved the boy and our attraction was strong. When the only choice was abstinence until marriage, I had no blueprint for not fucking up my teenage romantic relationship by drowning in guilt for loving and wanting to physically express that to a really nice young man who was mostly wonderful to me, at least as much as teenage boys can be. The cognitive dissonance of loving and sinning was adequately traumatic for an impressionable young woman. For years and to this day I still feel guilty not for the things I did with him, but for letting my faith keep me from loving him freely, as I wanted and he deserved.

Also in high school, our youth pastor gave a talk one day about how priests go to seminary school for so many years to learn to interpret the Bible correctly, the point being that lay people couldn't be trusted not to misinterpret the Bible. Great big bullshit alarms sounded in my head. That lay people and I, a rational, smart, logical woman, could not be trusted to read a book, especially because women cannot be priests, was DEEPLY offensive. And it conflicted with what we had been previously taught about each person's relationship to God being unique. Surely a person's unique relationship would lead to unique interpretations as befitted each person's life and individual needs, and that would be a good thing overall. And if that book was open to so much conflicting interpretation, then it couldn't really be worth very much, could it?

I left home for college and briefly attended mass with a classmate, but it was painfully obvious that I had only been attending for so long in order to see my friends and that I had no idea what I truly believed, only the things I had been taught to believe, so it was imperative that I set out to learn the truths of the world, the universe, and spirituality, to find out what I could believe in.

Hell and scaring people into obedience was a terrible tenet, and so many behavioral studies proved that punishment is an inefficient motivator. Heaven, however, seemed rather dull, and there should be some form of cosmic justice. So I briefly tried on a belief in reincarnation, initially because soul age theory rang true and described me well, but I think I knew most of the time that I only believed in the thing because I liked how pretty, poetic, and comforting it was.

Multiverse theory was an easy replacement. It means that there are a possibly infinite number of universes very similar to ours and that somewhere out there is a prima ballerina me, a NASA researcher me, and maybe even a happy wife and mom me.

And I just can't bring myself to believe in a vain, petty, cruel god like the one in the Bible. If there is a creator, it gave me my questioning mind and my free will to live this life as makes me happiest. And what makes me happiest is not condemning consenting adults for whatever they want to do. And not living under the oppressive yoke of fear and guilt for LOVING.