Ash Thumbprints

I still go about Catholic holidays somewhat solemnly.  It's a habit that's hard to break.  Mostly, I guess, I don't want to break it.  Really, admitting these holidays are meaningless means also fessing up to the fact that all holidays are meaningless.  Really, there's no difference between a purely religious holiday such as Ash Wednesday and a commercialized religious holiday such as Christmas.  I mean, what's the point of partying for Mardi Gras if you're going to ignore Ash Wednesday?  They're inseparably connected as holidays.

I'm not saying that I really celebrate these holidays.  Obviously, that's not the case.  I don't go to any services, I don't kneel down and pray.  I don't do any of that stuff.  What happens, is that I get this odd feeling of reverence and awareness.  I always notice the weather.  Like how it always rains on Good Fridays.  It rained today.  I doesn't always rain on Ash Wednesdays.  It did on this one, in Boston.  And I am acutely aware of those ash crosses.

They made me so self-conscious in grade school.  Even though I was with 25 other kids and a teacher who had one, too.  I used to always try and wipe it away first chance I got.  You see, even when I was a Catholic, I was not very good at it.  But it was a part of my life, and it happened for 9 straight years.  By the time eighth grade was over, that was well over half of my life, and almost all of life that I could remember.

So when I see these other kids (most of them blatantly Irish or Italian, but a few not of one of the distinctly Catholic heritages), I feel weird.  They make no attempt to rub them off.  And I can't help but stare and feel a little empty, a little uncomfortable.  I even cringe at the sound in my head of the priest's thumb in my head, roughly moving ash across my forehead, one direction, then another.  It sounds like that sound of paper being creased between dry fingers.  I hate that sound so much.  I bothers me.

I actually used to really hate religion.  I don't think I do anymore.  Except when it does something really annoying, like steal my friend away and brainwash him, and make him call the Thai a lazy people (idles and idols, he said, were the two faults of the Thai people).  It used to really get under my skin though.  It was so annoying, it seemed so blatantly wrong, but I had no way to fully explain why without getting into the type of philosophical detail that one doesn't pay attention to unless one already believes what it's trying (in vain) to prove (or disprove).  But I always used to love to try.

Now I don't care anymore.  I don't believe that God exists.  I can't say I believe he doesn't exist, though.  I guess I'm an atheist in practice and an agnostic in theory.  That means that I act as if there is no God or gods, because this is what I believe is most likely (there is no real evidence to support existence, and I tend to take a skeptical view of things, with my view of the burden of proof being on the person claiming something does happen or exist... I don't take things on blind faith much anymore).

However, I will not rule out the existence of a God, and will try to remain open to any proofs that come my way.  Somehow I doubt I'll be that open, though, if "proof" comes my way.  The idea of God, by its nature (and very conveniently, to the old cynic inside of me), requires a leap of faith that I am now philosophically and intellectually opposed to taking.

It seems I've been hearing alot about religion for the past few weeks.  Alot of religious conversations / debates.  I used to love them.  Now I don't care.  These debates only bore me, or annoy me.  It's not something you can argue about.  You either take the "leap of faith" or you don't.  It seems strange that there has been so many of these debates in my life recently, though.  I guess most of it has been because of my J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis class.

There are those kids in there.  The techies.  Comp Sci majors (or whatever) who are in the class because they're avid fantasy readers, not because they're English majors who have always wanted to read Tolkien (like me).  Yes, I feel bad for saying it, but it's obvious.  They're geeks.

But they're like I was, some four years ago, with the obsessive atheist rants.  This comes up often in discussions about Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia because they are blatant religious allegories.  I do not mind, because it is completely ignorable (well, in the first four, anyway).  But it got under their skin.  And I saw them - how I used to be - from the outside, and I found myself always either getting annoyed and steering clear of the argument, or else siding with (I guess) the Christians.  As scary as that may be, they seemed to be the sensible ones.  Because one thing atheists have to realize is that it's not an atheist's job to prove anything, or to focus on what one believes, because it's about not believing.  It's about trying to separate religion as from one's life.

I'm far from accomplishing self-secularization myself, but at least I've gotten to the point where I don't bicker with believers.  Where I seem to be is a point where I don't have much radicalism involving religion one way or the other.  In fact, I have swung back quite close to that part of me which had been religious, long ago.  From time to time I am having those feelings of a God looking over me, then feeling cold and guilty in trying to push off the feeling for what my intelligence says it is.  And that's really where I think I should be.  If I can't look myself and the feeling instilled in my by nine years of Catholicism and say there is almost definitely no God, and that there is no reason that I should be believing in one, then I can't truly claim to be liberated from religion.

A perfect symbol is that ashen cross that I would always try to wipe off as a kid.  I felt so bad about wiping it off, but I felt so embarrassed about walking around with ash on my forehead at the same time.  What I need to do is face the ash, face that embarrassment, and face the guilt.  I must be able either to wash it off completely, or to admit that, in some way, I can't bear to lose it.