In The Name of The Father

Imagine with every decision you made your entire life there was a small voice in your head judging that decision. Sometimes, that voice was right, but often it was simply confusing. This voice tells you you're a bad person even if you're not hurting anyone, not even yourself. Sometimes this voice tells you that you're doing the right thing. Growing up as an Irish Catholic was definitely formative to my life. At the age of 4, I began attending St. Joan of Arc Catholic School in Boca Raton, Florida. St. Joan was an extremely large parish with a beautiful church and a pre-K-8th grade school run predominantly by a group of nuns that came together in County Cork Ireland before immigrating to the United States to run this school in South Florida. The motivations for this specific group of nuns running this school remained unclear to me throughout my time there, but I'm not here to say that they had any bad intentions. Many of these nuns were well into their 70's and 80's by the time I was at St. Joan, and while they were definitely stern and intimidating at times, they were extremely committed to their faith and were very loving individuals. My faith shaped much of my early life, I prayed before every single class with my classmates, before bed, before meals, and every weekend at church. I genuinely loved church mainly because of the singing. Ms. Morgan was our school music teacher and she used to absolutely jam on the organs during services while the choir met her with equal enthusiasm. The two most important parts of mass are the Gospel, when a story from the Bible is read, and then the Homily which is basically the priests deciphering of what that story meant. Some priests were able to deliver really strong Homilies that left much of their own opinion out while delivering a message about faith or love or community. Other priests were incredibly dull and difficult to sit through, and some would bring current events and politics into it and put a hard Catholic twist on the world around them. It's important to note that these priests were very well paid, lived in nice apartments in a rectory directly adjacent to the church, and effectively lived in a bubble of faith. That didn't stop some of them from publicly denouncing things like gay marriage, abortion, and premarital sex. Catholic school was an extremely confusing experience during the age of the internet when information was liberated, and I often questioned things I read directly to both nuns and priests. Things like pornography, rap music, drugs, and even topics like the end of the world were becoming incredibly more pervasive, and as many of my classmates and I reached middle school we became far more restless during things like religion class, DARE, and mandatory services. Times were clearly changing, but we were still being told that if we had sex before marriage we were going to go to Hell, and cannabis would turn us into junkies that would wind up dead or in jail. My experience in Catholic school shaped my entire understanding of the world. I was convinced I wanted to be the pope in fourth grade. When I left Florida, and found myself in an all boys boarding school in New England receiving arguably one of the most liberal educations in the country, my world view began to come crashing down. I realized quickly that I had grown up in a bubble, and while that bubble had provided me with a loving community, great friends, and strong lessons about how to live my life and treat people, it was clear that my education up to that point had been incomplete. No matter how hard I tried to shake it, I lived with a lot of subconscious guilt around how I began to live my life after leaving Catholic school. I know for a fact that I'm not a bad person, but I know I'm not a saint, and when that is what you aspire to be in your youth, there will always be that little voice in your head to tell you you're fucking up. These days, I find faith creeping back into my life after ignoring it for a long time. I treat others the way I want to be treated, probably the most useful lesson I took out of being Catholic. I find myself compelled to make religious art, partly because it is important to me, but also partly as a way of making money off of imagery that is the most important thing in the world to some people while also being extremely polarizing to others. This yin and yang of religion is something I find myself diving deeper into. I have my own relationship with a higher power now, and not necessarily the kind I was taught to have. Life is good, and I'm not afraid of admitting I believe in God, but I also don't define God the same way I did in religion class. God always had to be a man, which I think is a cop out. There's zero chance an all present, all knowing, eternally forgiving force fits into a simpleton human model of gender. God is everything, God is everyone, and God is you. By taking this approach in my life and seeing the unlimited potential in everyone and everything, I have found peace. My faith and relationship to a higher power is dynamic, and I will continue to explore it throughout my life. I see myself now as an eternal being in a dying animal body. My Catholic faith promised me an afterlife, but it did so from a place of instilling fear. You had to fear death to make sure you kept going to church so that you were a good person. Lame. Do not fear death, because no ones making it out of here alive. The inner monologue that allows me to type this without saying a word is the focus of my faith these days, consciousness. Does this voice inside my head and all our heads turn off when I die? If it doesn't, then am I even dead? These may be the ramblings of a crazy person, but I think they're legitimate questions. My faith taught me to believe. Believe in the power of yourself, in the power of others, in the power of God or the universe, or quantum physics, or whatever it is that makes everything tick. Maybe it's nothing, and maybe this is all pointless, but that seems like a pretty depressing stance to take. Just believe in the good, and it will begin to manifest before your eyes. You shouldn't have to go to church every Sunday to do this, but if you do, I get it, and I still love you.