and their teeny-tiny toes
Dec. 26th, 2008 03:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kleenexwomanEnded up going to midnight mass at the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak. It's been a while since I was in church on Christmas, or even at any time at all. Mom used to drag us to various churches when we were younger, but that's stopped in the past few years, so I went with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
josephwaldman after the Christmas festivities had wound down and I was still too full of cookies to sleep.
The Shrine is gorgeous. Mom has dragged me to a lot of churches in the past, and I always find it kind of annoying that the trend in these churches seems to be lots of bare wood and minimalist design. It's dull and makes the place look like a therapist's office. But oh, god, the marble and stained glass and gold and velvet paintings, and all the ornate little symbols worked into the ornate little designs...oh, and they had these alcoves with marble statues of saints and carvings depicting their symbolism and life, and little places to put offerings. The one of Mary was lovely--she had a crown, and people had put roses and little cards on her altar. I can see how it would be really comforting praying to someone like that, or to the saints they had scattered across the room. Lots of options.
The Mass was interesting, too. It started out very pagan--big altar with white and blood-red set up in the middle of the room, lots of greenery, guys in white robes doing cleansing things with a big metal incense ball...lots of ritual and pomp and circumstance and things that I wasn't quite sure of the meaning of, but that I could guess. It really did look like they were about to sacrifice someone or something. I guess they were symbolically, but it was a huge altar. Not even just man-sized. Cow-sized. Elephant-sized.
Then the priest gave a sermon about how Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Muslims all pray to the same god, but the Catholic god was better because they had God in a little piece of bread that they could eat. I kid you not, that was the gist of the whole thing, and he even held up the Host to prove it. Oh, and there was a tangent on anti-abortion that included the phrase "Every embryo is sacred, every embryo is great."josephwaldman can verify all of this. It was very impassioned, and I guess I wouldn't have been surprised at if if I'd just randomly gone to Mass, but it seemed like a weird topic for a Christmas sermon, particularly for a church that's kind of a tourist spot anyway. Even in the other Catholic churches I've been in, the Christmas sermons tend to be very inclusive--less about Catholicism specifically, and more about God's love in general. (My favorite was a guest priest who brought in pictures of nebulae and talked about awe at the beauty of nature. I can get behind that.)
The blessing over the Host seemed like actual magic. The lights went down low, the organ got into some serious subsonic ranges, and the priests and altar boys gathered around the incense-wreathed altar to hear the monsignor chant in Latin...I loved it. I wish there were still big pagan temples like that, huge courtyards and altars of marble and gold and painted wood, where you could go watch and take part in rituals to all sorts of gods. Why don't we have those? Are there any? There are so many neopagans in the U.S., there's got to be at least one somewhere.
I loved the ritual and drama and symbolism, and I love it when I go to Temple. Rituals and symbols are immensely satisfying for me, and I'm half-tempted to become religious just for that. The problem is that most religions with any sense of style seem to require literal belief, or at least the pretense thereof, and I know from experience that that's not going to work for me.
Are there any religions that don't require literal belief? Like, an acknowledgment of narrative and symbol and ritual for its own sake without having to believe literally in what they stand for? ...maybe the Unitarians? I might need to make up my own thing.
We did go out for hamburgers afterward, which was also satisfying and reminded me of an excellent book I'd read the week before which posited that one of the important functions of religion, ritual, and religious law was regulating and ensuring the distribution of food, particularly animal proteins, to the populace. The author concluded that the Aztecs had a reasonably efficient system for this considering their scanty resources.
On that thought, Happy Hogswatch to all and to all a good night.
josephwaldman after the Christmas festivities had wound down and I was still too full of cookies to sleep. The Shrine is gorgeous. Mom has dragged me to a lot of churches in the past, and I always find it kind of annoying that the trend in these churches seems to be lots of bare wood and minimalist design. It's dull and makes the place look like a therapist's office. But oh, god, the marble and stained glass and gold and velvet paintings, and all the ornate little symbols worked into the ornate little designs...oh, and they had these alcoves with marble statues of saints and carvings depicting their symbolism and life, and little places to put offerings. The one of Mary was lovely--she had a crown, and people had put roses and little cards on her altar. I can see how it would be really comforting praying to someone like that, or to the saints they had scattered across the room. Lots of options.
The Mass was interesting, too. It started out very pagan--big altar with white and blood-red set up in the middle of the room, lots of greenery, guys in white robes doing cleansing things with a big metal incense ball...lots of ritual and pomp and circumstance and things that I wasn't quite sure of the meaning of, but that I could guess. It really did look like they were about to sacrifice someone or something. I guess they were symbolically, but it was a huge altar. Not even just man-sized. Cow-sized. Elephant-sized.
Then the priest gave a sermon about how Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Muslims all pray to the same god, but the Catholic god was better because they had God in a little piece of bread that they could eat. I kid you not, that was the gist of the whole thing, and he even held up the Host to prove it. Oh, and there was a tangent on anti-abortion that included the phrase "Every embryo is sacred, every embryo is great."
josephwaldman can verify all of this. It was very impassioned, and I guess I wouldn't have been surprised at if if I'd just randomly gone to Mass, but it seemed like a weird topic for a Christmas sermon, particularly for a church that's kind of a tourist spot anyway. Even in the other Catholic churches I've been in, the Christmas sermons tend to be very inclusive--less about Catholicism specifically, and more about God's love in general. (My favorite was a guest priest who brought in pictures of nebulae and talked about awe at the beauty of nature. I can get behind that.) The blessing over the Host seemed like actual magic. The lights went down low, the organ got into some serious subsonic ranges, and the priests and altar boys gathered around the incense-wreathed altar to hear the monsignor chant in Latin...I loved it. I wish there were still big pagan temples like that, huge courtyards and altars of marble and gold and painted wood, where you could go watch and take part in rituals to all sorts of gods. Why don't we have those? Are there any? There are so many neopagans in the U.S., there's got to be at least one somewhere.
I loved the ritual and drama and symbolism, and I love it when I go to Temple. Rituals and symbols are immensely satisfying for me, and I'm half-tempted to become religious just for that. The problem is that most religions with any sense of style seem to require literal belief, or at least the pretense thereof, and I know from experience that that's not going to work for me.
Are there any religions that don't require literal belief? Like, an acknowledgment of narrative and symbol and ritual for its own sake without having to believe literally in what they stand for? ...maybe the Unitarians? I might need to make up my own thing.
We did go out for hamburgers afterward, which was also satisfying and reminded me of an excellent book I'd read the week before which posited that one of the important functions of religion, ritual, and religious law was regulating and ensuring the distribution of food, particularly animal proteins, to the populace. The author concluded that the Aztecs had a reasonably efficient system for this considering their scanty resources.
On that thought, Happy Hogswatch to all and to all a good night.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-26 11:49 pm (UTC)But if instead you go after the forms, you have rightly pointed out that that can be done for its own sake, and the truth is that wherever those symbols are used in defiance of the principles of any religion, then you will never find out the truth of that religion by using forms and symbols that it forbids.
That's why most of the people in churches don't know God at all, despite often wishing they did; they are stuck in a system that derives from an attempt to force a pagan form of priesthood on Christianity. Prior to that council, Christianity thrived, and wherever Christians renounce what that council taught, they thrive, but wherever churches act as specified at Laodicea, they are dead, dead, dead, and the knowledge of God can only get into the congregation by accident or by leaving.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-27 07:28 am (UTC)I did; to be honest, I'm getting impatient with the whole thing, and in the meantime some perfectly good alternative answers have presented themselves to me (which may, in fact, be the answers I was looking for in the first place). The problem I see you describing with the priesthood is less the existence of the symbols in themselves than it is the authority which determines their use for the rest of the population, and symbols do become meaningless, negative, or both if they're forced and manipulated that way.