Mother Mary Said to Me...

I'm listening to Bright Eyes singing "Waste of Paint". So angry/sad:

So now I park my car down by the cathedral,
where the floodlights point up at the steeples.
Choir practice was filling up with people.
I hear the sound escaping as an echo.
Sloping off the ceiling at an angle.
When the voices blend they sound like angels.
I hope there’s some room still in the middle.
But when I lift my voice up now to reach them.
The range is too high,
way up in heaven.
So I hold my tongue,
forget the song,
tie my shoe
start walking off.
And try to just keep moving on,
with my broken heart
and my absent God
and I have no faith
but it's all I want,
to be loved.
And believe,
in my soul.

It's not in church. It's inside us. I sing in a church and I don't believe in all of it. I believe in little bits, but not the whole elaborate construction that weighs it down. They pay me to sing at the church. My fundamentalist cousins didn't know what to think when I told them that.

There are a LOT of religious people -- mostly Catholic and Mormon -- on Blogger. A LOT. It's intriguing, actually. I get the feeling they see it as a new, less overt way of witnessing. For some of them, I wager there's some pressure to 'get the word out'. Why not do it on the Internet where, potentially, millions of people could get the message about how right their path is? Having come from a fairly devout, if not fundamentalist, religious background, I can understand the seduction of assurance -- of being told that one's faith is exactly what's needed to bring meaning to a life. And then the high of sharing it with others.

I just have waaaaaay too many doubts. My belief, such as it is, is that there may be some greater force out there which connects everything, does inexplicable things, brings us into existence for some purpose, but there's not much point in defining it. As far as I'm concerned, trying to explain it just imposes our own wishes upon it, which then transforms it into a being of our own construction rather than simply its inexplicable self. Besides, isn't this attempt at explanation presumptuous and arrogant? It also necessitates further explanation to explain the first explanation. Layer over layer, agenda upon agenda, assertion and rebuttal 'ad nauseum'. I say, "Let it be." And let yourself be. Love yourself and love others. 'Nuff said.