Crisis of Faith

As the COVID pandemic is ending (it hasn't ended, it's in the progressive tense of its final act), I've been poking my head outside my foxhole, as it were, sort of like a literal fox daring to step out into the wilderness after a devastating forest fire has run its course.  Most of what I see, though, is still barren land.

In the past three years, I've seen the American health care system collapse, a rising fascist movement of which January 6 was the first salvo, a deterioration of my social life caused by the pandmeic (though it left a good deal to be desired even before COVID hit),  the Supreme Court rolling back liberties for everyone except the greedy bastards who own this country, and American civilization (such as it was) bite the dust in a cloud of gunsmoke from the many mass shootings that have plagued These States.

I am suffering from a deep crisis in faith . . . in anything.  I am not convinced that I have any reason to have confidence in the future, and there is no easy answer.  If it just involved leaving the country, like s many did when Trump took power, that would be hard enough for me, but where would I go?  It seems that the whole world is on fire.

Sometimes I think I should return to my church, the Roman Catholic Church, which, despite the shameful periods of its past (and let's admit it, its present) still has a good deal to recommend about it for anyone seeking Christ.  Mainly it's the sobriety of the Mass, the beauty of the church with its depictions of the Gospels, and, for now, the good luck in having a genuinely caring man like Francis as pope.  It was the Church that liberated Eastern Europe, after all.  The thing is, I'd stuck to the rituals outside of Mass for years, even though I hadn't been to Mass since I was a kid (except for family funerals!), like Lenten sacrifices, which I stopped in 2020 when COVID made me sacrifice just about everything, including my clean mouth (six months into the pandemic, I started dropping F-bombs and have continued to do so). Perhaps returning to the Church in which I was baptized (but never confirmed) may help me (re)discover faith.

I don't know if I'm ready to return to the Church, though, but I know I'm not going to any other sects.  I spent nearly a year attending services at a Congregationalist church, but I found it unsatisfying and stopped going.  A bigger disappointment was a service of the International Church of Christ, which a "friend" invited me to on the Sunday after 9/11, which I regretted later on when I found out how controlling this particular sect is.

I've even studied the Mormon faith, inspired by the Latter-Day Saints' clean living, but that church's extremist conservative temporal agenda and its lay clergy turned me off.  I wouldn't want to confide my spiritual burdens to my bishop when he also happens to be my lawyer.  Or my dentist.  (I've also heard about their temple rituals, asn the less said about that, the better.)  And I've actually read the first chapter of the First Book of Nephi in the book or Mormon, which explains how Nephi, the Israelite patriarch who brought his people to the Americas (so they say) had to return to Jerusalem from a stop in Arabia to retrieve an item his father left behind.  ("And it came to pass that my father forgot his keys . . .") I have long given Mormons the benefit of the doubt of how their holy book came to,umm, pass - maybe it was an old Iroquois tablet that told a story remarkably similar to the stories of the lost tribes of Israel, but not so much after I actually read some of it.    

But then, maybe I should not bother with organized religion of any sort.  Perhaps I should instead remember the advice from George Harrison, when he told us to open up our hearts and chant the names of the Lord to be free. 

Though, if the Pope really did own 51 percent of General Motors, then the Vatican must have taken a bath when GM went bankrupt, shut down Pontiac and Saturn, and sold Opel.

Looks like I need to keep searching.

Or maybe I just need a cat.