Losing My Religion

I was born into a Catholic family. We went to the local church every Sunday and sometimes during the week. We didn’t go to Catholic school because of the horridness of the first year teacher at our local Catholic primary school. So it wasn’t ’til we started homeschooling that we learnt in a methodical manner about the Catholic Faith. Not too long after that we discovered “Tradition”: The Latin Mass which perfectly expresses the Catholic Faith and has done so for over 1500 years. So unlike that Mass we had attended so regularly for so long, many of whose authors were not even nominally Catholic. When I was an early teen my brother and I read Sheehan’s Apologetics which goes through various proofs of the existence of God and demonstrates the reasonableness of Theism, Christianity and Catholicism. I was delighted by the clarity, the wholeness; how every piece fits beautifully and nothing is left out. 

By this point I was very enthusiastic about religion, about what the Church taught and about keeping her rules… but like many others I made up a few doctrines and rules of my own. For example, I decided that all modern music was evil and for many years I exclusively listened to classical music, Gregorian chant or folk music. It took me some time to figure out that few things are so clean cut as this. In the case of music, there may certainly be some music that is bad for a person, but there is plenty of variety both in the music and the individual. Music is a powerful thing and can impact our emotions and moods so some care should be taken about what and how much we listen to but at the same time we need to watch out that we don’t unconsciously set ourselves up as some caricature of a pope and pass judgements for all . 

Making a fact out of an opinion or unnecessary hard and fast rules are a good way to make our lives harder than they need to be. We can get all stressed out about breaking a rule that we made for ourselves and which only exists in our heads. Or get all hot and bothered because someone doesn’t agree with an opinion that we have raised to the status of fact. So I will endeavour to lose the extras that make up my own made-up religion along with anyone else’s additions and stick to the beautiful, whole, reality that is the Catholic Church.