First of all, care to take a moment to tell me how I've changed your life? It's a Wonderful Life (meme)

I've been in a strange mood recently where I've been seeking out the spiritual. This will be the third week or so I've wanted to go to Mass, but won't. The first week I didn't have my car. The second week I was working, this week I don't think there will be parking with the MSU craft show going on. Plus we're having a party in our apartment later today, plus I have a paper to rewrite and turn in tomorrow. I think, instead, I'll start an online retreat that I found on cacophonesque's friends page (because I was bored one day and reading my friends' friends pages). Maybe I'll at least learn to pray.

I think I want to become a student of the Catholic Church. I don't agree with a lot of things the Church says about contraception. I don't think we should be legislating against homosexuality and marriage for homosexuals. However, I do agree with the social justice teachings of the church. But all of my reactions are knee-jerk. I want to understand why these decisions and guidelines have been made. I want to understand the mechanics of them -- and make my own decision from there. I don't feel comfortable just waltzing into St. John Student Parish and joining the student group there. I'm going to be a second semester senior, graduating in May. It would be unfair of me to ask them to be friends with me. And I'm afraid they won't understand my struggle to understand and the positions I've taken in the meantime. (That sounds silly now that I've typed it.) But at the same time, I'm afraid to try to learn about the Church without any help or guidance. I think that my knee-jerk will take over, or that I'll become bogged down in the centuries of documents that explain our faith and way of life. I want to read The Theology of the Body, but that's a lot of reading that I'm not sure I'll fully grok by myself.

I'm trying my hardest to get Tim to understand that I feel lost in the Catholic Church, not put out of place by it. I am welcomed there, but I am not sure I welcome it. I want to. I want to welcome it, because I feel like if I gave up being Catholic I would be more lost than ever before. I joke about being a bad Catholic. But it's because I have an idea of how hard it is to be a good Catholic.

Advent starts today. At home, last year, the homily was about longing. I wasn't sure what I longed for last year, I had just gotten home from an amazing study abroad, where I had learned a lot about my vocation and my limits as an employee. I didn't really long for anything then. I know what I long for now. To be engaged, so that we can be married. For security, in the form of a job offer for May. Security in the form of being able to pay my bills. To understand my place within the Catholic community. All of these things, and more I don't really understand.

Maybe I can make a birthday candle advent wreath. It'll chill with Bridget's God-o-meter.

Yesterday, as I asked for vegetarian chili in the cafeteria, the guy at the Scossa station goes, "Are you a practicing Catholic?"

"Sometimes I pretend," I said. There were ashes on my head, but they came from my mother. She leaned her head with its ashes onto mine, and by contact I gained my mark. I'm not the best Catholic.

I'm uncomfortable with sharing my faith with others, because I feel that everyone's beliefs are their own business. In that sense, I am secular. And so, I don't think I ever posted this, though I know I shared the file with a number of people -- ones I was comfortable with.

I am posting this as a reminder as to why I'm Catholic. After this, I'm going to filter my discussions of religion. If talk of religion makes you uncomfortable, don't read it. If you'd like to be on the filter, please comment.

( My Sacraments, My Religion, Our Traditions )

Flannery O'Connor writes one mean short story.

I am specifically thinking of one, and I'm not sure which one. I think it was A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Anyway. There was a mean and bitter old lady, who spends the majority of the short story being mean and bitter and scared of this serial killer. The car breaks down, and the serial killer shows up. And staring down the barrel of the gun, she recieves grace. The serial killer sees that she's the kind of lady who needs a gun to her head to be a good person, and he kills her.

Don't be the kind of person who needs a gun to their head to be a good person.