Saint Michael
There was a statue of St Michael, The Archangel, at the entrance of the Catholic Church my parents attended in Long Beach California just after I was born in November of 1946. I was in the first wave of the Postwar Baby Boom that erupted in celebration of our victory over fascism and imperialism in the war that had just ended the year before. So, let’s praise the lord and jump in the sack! Many, many babies ensued.
Those were the days before sonograms when parents just flipped the biological coin and got heads or tails on the day of the coming out party when a boy or girl popped out of the tube.
(My first tube ride, dude!). So of course they named their babies after they were born, as opposed to now when the name, clothes, and baby room decor are known months before birth.
St Michael was an archangel, or head angel, together with the other arches, Gabriel (The one who blew the horn. Now how can there be a horn, a physical horn, in heaven, which is, of course, in the clouds?), Uriel, Raphael and then Michael. Michael means one who is like god, which according to teaching we all are. Revelation 12:7-9 says Jesus came to earth as Michael incarnate. But as I went through my Catholic education the very idea of an angel, even an archangel proclaimed as saint withered in the face of logic. And since we are all made in the image and likeness of god, and our minds give us the ability to think, that the logic there was probably infallible, like god, as well. How can an imaginary being be an arch-imaginary saint? Saints are usually real people who lived holy lives and had a certain number of “verifiable” miracles associated with their names. Sure that makes some sense. But an imaginary being can only live imaginary lives and, therefore, we can imagine that they lived holy lives and we can also imagine miracles from prayer to them. So, Michael is an imaginary saint who drove the imaginary Lucifer into imaginary Hell when he tried to tempt God (Arguably also imaginary.).
So I became Michael, one of the most popular Boomer names, and ranked as one of the most common names around the world and in the United States was number one from 1954 to 1998. I was raised in a Catholic family in the 50s and 60s, I attended Catholic Schools from the Fourth grade through college graduation and in that time went from devoted believer to atheist, or maybe agnostic, because the things they want us to believe started to look more and more like magical thinking. I mean, who doesn’t love a little magical thinking in their lives, a sort of “It could happen, I could win the lottery, I could be discovered, I got here all on my own. I had the biggest Inauguration crowd in history... ”
In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities.
In psychiatry, magical thinking is a disorder of thought content;[here it denotes the false belief that one's thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies commonly understood laws of causality. - Wikipedia
Magical thinking can have real societal implications, such as with “Christian” Fundamentalists, who suspended logic, ignored what their eyes had seen and their ears heard and supported Donald Trump as their ‘Savior”. This is the guy who said when you're a star, “You can grab em by the pussy.” Partied with Jeffery Epstein and uunderage girls, raped E Jean Carrol (and others as well.), and has been accused by nearly 30 women of sexaul abuse and assault. Had at least six bankruptcies, stiffed workers and contractors, and told an endless stream of pernicious lies, lies that would threaten the very foundation of our democracy, and looked past it all. It was god’s plan, Sure Trump is imperfect, and a sinner, as we all are, but he was sent by god to save us from godless socialism, homosexuality, transexual fears, big government. And why worry about climate change when the end of the world is near! Why? Because we have seen the signs. Signs like the coming apocalypse, unrest in the middle east, and the Second Coming of Christ that would bring on the rapture. Ah, the rapture, when only those saved “Christians”, would be raised up to heaven while the rest of us, the unsaved, the sinners would be left on their own to deal with the coming Armgeddeon. Just like with taxes, fundamentalists say, “I got mine screw you” when it comes to salvation as they are raptured straight into heaven. So, because of magical thinking, Trump became president. Magical thinking that he would grow into the role of president. Magical thinking that he alone can fix it. Magical thinking that was exploited by cynics seeking unlimited power, securing their place in the sordid history of authoritarianism.
Moreover, the entire fundsmentalist movement, being focused on being “saved” from hell, and spurred on by televangelist hucksters bought into the concept of the Gospel of Prosperity, whose mantra is again, “I got mine, screw you.” In short the entire movement is a heretical sect that has forgotten the basic teaching of their savoir to love thy neighbors. And, exploited by the fear mongers, bought into fearing and hating the “other”. Not very Christlike I would say.
We always went to Sunday Mass with confession and communion being the cornerstones of the faith and occasionally during the week like during Holy Week when we would marinate in the pain and cruelty, as well as the institutional induced guilt of the Crucifixion. When I was younger, we also would gather often around the bed in my parents’ bedroom, to pray the Rosary, which was strange symbolism on its own, in a family of seven. I always prayed that we only did one Rosary at a time, since those days we did multiple Rosaries, were brutal, and with that many kids already praying around the breeding bed seemed a little overkill. Like some sort of fertility prayer, thank god that it didn’t add any more siblings, since I am the oldest of seven! But around the bed was always a little strange.
Occasionally we would go to the huge Rosary Hours at the Colosseum where thousands would join in with the priestly voice over the stadium speakers. Must have said a hundred Hail Marys, following along with the human rosary chain on the stadium floor which would soon be the battlefield for the next USC or Ram football game the following day. (Strange how prayer and violence always seemed to be packaged together. Think Roman Empire.)
I was always praying for forgiveness of sins both real and imagined, starting with that great guilt builder, original sin. What a perfect control device. All they had to do was tell you, again and again, that we were all born as sinners, before we even had a chance to commit a sin!
It was a sort of Catholic admission of the science of evolution and biology; we were born in a state of sin because of Adam and Eve, who took a bite of the apple and so were part of the now infected spiritual gene pool. So from then on every human being ever born came into this world already guilty, already flawed, infected, our souls stained by this sin, this the first and “original” sin that we had inherited from Adam and Eve. So where did Adam and Eve get their first sin?
Since they were the first humans, we don't have to look very far - God. God “The Father” sent Jesus His Only Son to atone for our sins, both original and new, by dying on the cross. The only higher-up in this sin chain was God, so was it God who demanded atonement for this sin, who else could be offended? There’s nobody higher than god, so it must have been he who demanded the death of his only son to atone for our sins; future, new and original. This thinking created an atmosphere of guilt, guilt stacked upon guilt, not only were we guilty of the original sin, and all the sins we commit throughout our lives, now we were all also guilty of killing Jesus to cleanse ALL OUR COLLECTIVE sins, as well as the original sin that we didn't even commit. The Church then, being founded by Jesus, was the only true way to assuage our sins and find salvation. ( Again Trump’s, “Only I can fix it.”) Salvation was only possible through the sacraments: Baptism, Communion, Confession, and Confirmation. Confirmation is when we became Soldiers of Christ, because Jesus was all about peace and non-violence as we prayed for victory over our enemies and of course victory over the visiting team. Rah, rah, rah, yea God!
In a sense this is all a pretty powerful grift, create guilt in your followers and then make your organization the only organization that can forgive the guilt that the very same organization infected you with. Over time this has morphed into more cons and grifters working their marks, like TV evangelists. Take Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor”, who in the heights (Depths?) of the pandemic, with people out of work, unable even to buy food, she went on air and told her followers to keep giving her money, even if it hurt, even if you missed a meal, because she would then save you (A strange sort of quid pro quo, because you saved her, and her mansion, and her Bently, with your donations. So now she’ll return the favor and save you, if you just send a little more money.) Funny thing, Trump is a televangelist. Just look at the preposterous pompadour of fake hair, sculpted in multiple cans of hairspray, lacquered in place even in a little wind when it became a solid plastic wedge of plasticized hair color dancing in the breeze, like the Oral Roberts televangelist pomp, for example.
Back in the 80s, maybe early 90s, Oral had been making appeals for donations from his Prayer Tower that loomed over Tulsa Oklahoma. They had been very successful appeals as well, so he decided to double down and make the plea again. This time he was telling his listeners, his extremely gullible listeners, that the lord was going to take him if he didn’t get enough in donations to stave off the invented threat of an early demise. He was just getting up to full grift speed when, miracles of miracles, a lightning bolt knocked him off the air. Maybe real actual proof of God acting in human history for a better world, I like to magically think. Maybe.
That religion is a great control device is apparent, especially if your god is all seeing and all powerful. Means you are being constantly (and divinely) surveilled, so you tend to be on your best behavior. From an evolutionary point of view this fosters not only obedience but also cooperation, which is essential for a well-functioning society. The first big city-states of 12,000 years ago had big, powerful, all seeing and all knowing gods as the glue that bound society together in a highly functional dynamic.
The critical thinking skills they taught us started to focus its lasers on the religion they peddled, and so I had many questions, and still do to this day.
But, where did the original sin come from, how did we come to be born as sinners when we hadn’t committed any sins because we were either in the womb or too young to be guilty of sinning because we weren't capable yet of knowing what right or wrong really was, until we became seven. Seven was proclaimed as the Age of Reason when we became old and wise enough to know right from wrong, even though the prefrontal cortex is the center of knowledge, or foresight of what the consequences will be if we do certain things. In other words, wisdom. But now, according to the church, at seven we could commit a mortal sin, as opposed to a venial sin, and go to hell, forever - if we didn’t confess. And at seven years old, talk about being made even more guilty! Since we were on the end of the sin chain, who was at the head? God. And since we were made in the image and likeness of god, our first, or original sin had to come from -Tah Dah! - god. So if that’s true, then it’s god who is imperfect, a sinner who passed the first, original sin on to us in addition giving us the opportunity to commit even more sins, because, being made in his image, we have the ability (And desire, need, want...to commit sin because god put that in us?). But at seven I didn’t have those thoughts all I got then was the guilt.
There was a three part hierarchy, The Holy Spirit or Ghost being the third. I always thought ghost was more dramatic and mysterious, even spooky, or friendly like Caspar. Seems like we were constantly making the Sign of the Cross, where we would touch our foreheads, heart (Maybe stomach for some less precise sign of the cross makers.), and then each shoulder, starting with the left to sign a graphic cross while saying In the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. Everything started with the Sign of the Cross, multiple times a day, everyday. It became so ingrained, so reflexive that even today I have random urges to make the sign. At the time I didn’t see the obvious parallels with ceremony and repetition as indoctrination devices for cult building, it was just seen innocently as part of my faith. But, sometimes when stressed, I still have that automatic reflex, “In the name of the Father…”
I liked ghost because at least a ghost can scare the shit out of you, but they’re also kinda fun, which is valuable if you’re running a guild-based enterprise. The Father. The Son. The Holy Ghost. One God, three equal and distinct parts, personas, qualities, powers all wrapped up in one Super Deity: God. But this god was a god of guilt, a god to be soothed, cajoled, cried out to, prayed to for things like forgiveness and salvation that were based on the guilt of this Original Sin we got from...god. Seemed a mite unfair, a bit manipulative, like making a deal with the deity was required to be successful. If you say the prayers, make the sacrifice to god, then you can ask him for favors, like going to heaven, or that raise, or the house on the hill with a three car garage. And if you do that for me, god, I will stop swearing forever!
God the Father was the creator, the boss, the Zeus, or in the case of the Romans, Jupiter of the pantheon of three. It was Rome after all that made what was then the new kid on the block, early Christians, whom they cruelly punished and killed for entertainment in the colosseum, became the official state religion under the Emperor Constantine. Seems Constatine had a vision when he was on a bridge spanning the Tiber saw an apparition of the cross and heard these miraculous words, “In Hoc Signo Vinces” or “In this Sign Conquer.” and then took up the symbol carried by his armies and conquered, “Wow, this shit really works, let’s made it into the Roman State Religion!”
So the catholicism I was raised in was shaped largely by the Roman Empire and the pantheon of gods was replaced, largely, with Jesus, because, you know, whatever it takes to win. The church adopted the hierarchy of empire, with the Pope as emperor, and then cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, monks and nuns were the army of generals, captains, and grunts. This was top down enterprise, as opposed to the idea that each individual can find his own way to enlightenment, or salvation. The only true way was through them and their hierarchy.
He was all powerful, all knowing, all business, no messing around with God. He was Old Testament; flood the world and kill everyone he had created, except for Noah and his wife and all the animals because all the humans he had created in his image and likeness were sinners. But the animals were saved because they were innocent, didn't have Free Will and couldn’t go to heaven or hell? But they were all created by God, so why were the animals (and Noah) all free of sin? Damn, being an animal was awfully attractive. But wait, humans are really just animals with this free will thing that made us into sinners because we could theoretically choose to do right or wrong? (But, what if there really is no free will, what if free will is a delusion?) And do I want to be a human so I have the chance to go to Hell? This humans are animals thing was looking better and better. And what was Free Will?
“Free Will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.” - Google Dictionary
Free Will, in humans, is the power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints. The idea of Free Will is denied by some proponents of determinism as well as evolutionary biologists, scientists, free thinkers, and those attempting to break the bonds of guilt. You could say that we, as biological beings, are really controlled by our happenstances like where and when we are born, who our parents were, how we were raised, and how and where we were educated. It can be argued that we are actually just chemical robots, victims of memory, of the subconscious mind and that to a degree we may be predisposed to act in a certain way. So if we are to judge ourselves, or if god is to judge us based on our choices because of this purported free will, how can we be actually guilty? We really can’t help ourselves, so maybe a little empathy would be more realistic.
Or this God would command the Israelites to, say, destroy Jericho “You shall not leave anything alive”, god tells the Jews, which was kind of the first genocide, because the Jericoites were sinners who couldn’t be saved because they weren’t, one, Jewish, so they coudln’t have known the “One True God” because they only knew about Baal, or the Golden Calf, because they weren’t Jewish and only the Jewish God could save them and Jesus wasn’t to come to earth for hundreds of years, you know, Old Testament, so they had to die to atone for their sins by being slaughtered...that they got from God? Where’s the Free Will in that?
Then there’s Jesus The Son of God, whom God sent to earth through the virgin birth to a young peasant woman married to an older man who was a carpenter. Sent to earth to die for our sins, sins that were built into humanity, so kind of a frustrating fools’ errand for poor Jesus who would die a brutal death at the hands of the Romans as a sacrifice made to atone for our sins. This unlike Abraham who when commanded by God to sacrifice his son Issac, instead of the customary goat or chicken, placed his son on the sacrificial altar, held his knife in the air and was about to strike, when god stopped him and said like, this was only a test to see how obedient you were, and so take this goat, that magically appeared, and sacrifice it instead and we’re good. But why does anything have to die to please or appease this god?
Simple answer, heaven and hell. Seems like god the creator had an evil twin brother, who started ‘tempting his brother” to use his powers for all kinds of nefarious things. Things we have been living with since creation; famine, plague, pestilence and wars happened even if god didn’t actually succumb to Lucifer’s temptations. God apparently doesn’t have a name, except maybe the yahweh thing. So god throws Lucifer into hell, which apparently didn’t exist till then, and Lucifer didn’t have a Get Out Of Jail card and so is spending all his quality time burning forever, forever at least from the time of his incarceration. God decides that if there’s a Hell then there has to be a Heaven, to balance things out, creating the dualistic good, evil choices we have we make with everything in life.
So now with the sword of eternal damnation is hanging over all our heads, like the sword of Damocles. According to higher authorities, our souls (invisible storage units for all our actions) are marked by sin, and with enough bad marks ( How are they grading this test?) and we are cast into, gasp, hell. And what about poor Lucifer, who through no fault of his own, gets a little destructive? I mean, whoever made Lucifer and god, the biggest grand wizard god of all, then gave them the qualities in their personas. Not their fault then, they were both pre-programmed, which call’s the concept of free will and guilt into question even more. Maybe Lucifer couldn't help himself, maybe it was in his genes, cosmic genes of course.
With the threat of eternal damnation, burning in Hell for all eternity hanging over mankind, mankind responded with religion, organized religion, with strict rules and regulations, to keep us from going to Hell, if we just followed the rules and kept our noses relatively clean.
But, if there’s no Heaven or Hell, if we see them as mythic tales set to help control a sort of unregulated human who needs guidance, and rules, simple sticks and carrots, Stick; Hell. Carrot; Heaven. So what then is the purpose of religion that was created to save us from Hell if there’s no Hell. Not much other than a nice social gathering with music and communal singing.
Which, as far as ceremony, works really well. But is it any better than dancing around a fire with the whole community, chanting, dancing, singing, fueled by some magic psychotropic substance? Maybe not as cool. But, both are built around some sacrifice to the gods.
But maybe this impulse for sacrifice is programmed in us, maybe the pre-technology world that hadn’t yet been subdued by civilization, was a very scary thing. Crops need to grow, lands need to be secured and nature is working against you, and so you gotta sacrifice something to all the scary gods out there, maybe appease them so the crops grow. But growing crops is so important that maybe a chicken or pig won’t do, except maybe as warm up acts. We need to sacrifice something so precious, like humans, to get the god’s attention so he answers our prayers. and knows were serious. So, yes, let’s sacrifice humans, lots of humans, thousands of humans. Seemed to work pretty well for the Aztecs and Mayans, until it didn’t and they disappeared under the boots of the Spanish Conquistadors who saw them as savages that had to be converted to Catholicism to be civilized and saved. Or else just kill or enslave them because they are sub-human, which also could save them. Save them from what, living?
Same thing with the American Indian, and even blackpeople, who were seen as savages, subhumans to be exploited and killed by what can only be called White Supremacy.
Seems that with religion like this no sacrifice was too extreme to protect civilization and gain salvation.
What kind of god does this? Why? Was God insecure? Did he need to feel special? Did he need to feel obeyed as a sort of power-trip? The contradictions were explained away as God’s plan that we would have to accept as an article of faith, and if we questioned it we were then sinners. Sinners for using the critical thinking skills that also taught us, which we were to employ in our lives, unless it was faith that we questioned. The guilt got deeper and deeper, only constant Confession and Penance would save us. But then this original sin thing, the flaw that was built into man, made in the image and likeness of God, maybe it wasn’t a bug at all, but a feature. Built in, part of the package. so, how could this feature then be a sin? Faith my son, faith.
And then there’s the Holy Ghost, or Spirit, a more friendly, inspirational “person” of God who would come to represent inspiration, holiness, love, and also the gift of speaking in “tongues”, a weird sort of mumbo jumbo some folks would use to show just how enlightened they were, as well as the power of healing. This sort of softened the power and fear of God The Father, and the guilt of Jesus with mysticism, mystery even enlightenment. Now that’s more like a God I could get behind.
It wasn't until years later when in college we started looking into other major religions and their symbolism. The Church was defined by the image of Jesus on the Cross. The cross is on everything from buildings to books to fashion. The image of Jesus slowly and cruelly dieing nailed to a cross is the dominant Catholic symbol, really would be analogous to a Roman noose and scaffold or as electric chair, a constant reminder of the pain and suffering done in our name, a constant reminder of our guilt weighing us down continually, making us feel responsible for Jesus’ horrific death, the whip lashes, the crown of thorns, the nails in the hands and feet because of us, because of our sin. What a bummer of a symbol.
Later, I started becoming aware of the symbol of the Buddha, statues large and small, showing a man sitting cross-legged on the ground in stillness, with a slight rapt smile, and relaxed countenance exuding bliss, happiness, freedom from pain and guilt. And what did you have to do to attain this enlightenment? Nothing. Nothing other than to sit and breathe in and out and watch your thoughts without getting attached to them. And this was the path of enlightenment, as opposed to a path to salvation. That’s it. Pain, suffering and guilt versus bliss and enlightenment. Pretty easy choice. The Church should rethink its brand symbolism, methinks, maybe more resurrection stuff, Jesus walking, feet off the ground, glowing. Sure more magical thinking, but happy magical thoughts nonetheless. But still going for the guy sitting in meditation pose myself.
The Church did embrace the gospel of peace and charity for sure, which is the foundation of lots of good works done in Jesus’ name. After a little education it became apparent that Jesus was a Jew, as were the early Christians who saw themselves as Jews for the first decades after the Crucifiction. Not only that, Jesus was a radical Jewish rabbi with definite socialist leanings. There were the “missing years” when it was postulated that Jesus perhaps traveled to the East and maybe encountered Buddhism, which at that point was about 500 yars old. But this aspect of Christianity wasn’t what was taught or preached so much as the law and order kingdom on earth style of the institution it had become. Seems like the mystics didn’t fit in with the clerics, though mysticism looked much more attractive to me, just starting to wake from the control of the party line. Plus mystics didn’t fill the collection basket each Sunday, the mystics were, by design, all broke.
Seemed to me that Jesus was a teacher who gave us a practical code of behavior based on the love of our neighbor as the highest achievement, and the church certainly teaches that, for which I am grateful. They just confused and demeaned it all with the magical thinking and guilt. There’s more control with magic and guilt, love alone seemed not to be enough. Whatever happened to set free the ones you love?
Years later we were living In Solana Beach, Mary, our daughter and a couple of cats in a little beach bungalow. I was an art director at an ad agency and frequented many happy hours as part of the “Mad Men” lifestyle. One evening, after ample wine and a few tokes on a joint,
I came home feeling a wee bit high, inspired, even a little holy. One of our cats, Flip City Kitty, or Flips as we called him had been hit by a car. We had him on a towel in the guest bath, cone on his head, just laying there not eating or drinking. We thought we were going to lose him. Well, I thought, how about trying some hands on healing. We had been told that the power to heal was within us, and the Holy Spirit could work through us to heal. I was feeling pretty Christ-like at the moment, buzzed as I was. I knelt down next to Flips on the bathroom floor, laid my hands on his body, and told him in a low, soft voice, over and over, that he was going to be ok. That’s it, that’s all it took. Flips started eating, he got better and we got to be with him for a good while longer. The Power of the Holy Spirit, wine and weed. One toke over the line, dear Jesus, one toke over the line...
Our teachers, mostly nuns, would explain the mystery of the trinity like God was a consumer product, like a breakfast cereal. The new and improved Holy Trinity. Three. Three. Three Gods in one! Still I had a hard time with the Trinity concept, but kept the faith, went to Mass, sang the hymns loudly and on tune (Until I got a little older and then sang way of key and really loud just for fun. Or to show my friends that I wasn’t controlled by adult rules? Or just run of the mill teen rebellion.)
Confirmation was the next big thing when we turned twelve, most of us in the Fifth or Sixth Grades. The Church would define it as the sacrament of initiation into the Holy Spirit that anoints the recipient as priest, prophet, and king. Wow, that’s some big-time power all packed into a twelve year old! It was a big-time Sacrament, we would rehearse the pageant, marching into church in formation, singing special hymns, many in Latin since this was years before they switched Mass to English. We had to prepare for the Bishop coming to our parish, and in the ceremony, each one of us would ascend the steps of the altar, kneel at the feet of the Bishop who would lay hands on us and anoint us as Soldiers of Christ, you know, the Prince of Peace. Soldiers of peace. The irony escaped them.
I was pretty devout as a kid, lots of Confession, Communion (sometimes more than once a week) and lots of prayer, which meant lots of making the Sign of The Cross and genuflecting. We always took to one knee upon entering the pew. This was just before more rebellious phase kicked in, so I was sincerely moved by the ceremony, story, and practice of being a young
Catholic.
Walking home from one of the many religious services we had, probably practice for Confirmation, I had a religious, or really a spiritual experience. The nuns taught us a lot about miracles, about the apparitions of the Holy Mother Mary at Lourdes and Fatima as well as Don Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. This created a sort of fantasy in my mind, even entertaining the possibility of a miraculous apparition happening in my life. I sort of looked for it around each corner, in the next moment there could be a burning bush or a woman hovering in the air smiling at me, but of course, nothing ever happened. Seems I just wasn’t holy enough.
But this one day, walking home, something hit me. I was on the dirt and gravel path leading south on my way home from church, just past the bridge over the new 405 Freeway in LA, carrying my books and empty lunch box, don’t remember if it was Supermen or Batman, when this bright warm glow overtook me. My heart swelled and was beating loudly, nearly coming out of my chest, and I felt like I was elevated, my feet not touching the ground as I walked on, glowing. I was sure people could see the light radiating from me as I walked down the street.
Couldn’t they see I was a saint, or going to be?
I never told anyone about my mystical experience, except later in life I would share the story with my wife, a fellow Catholic School victim, and a few friends over wine and conversation.
I came to realize that what I experienced was an episode of elevated brain chemistry, like dopamine or serotonin that are happy chemicals associated with feelings like doing the right thing or helping someone. I found similar experiences with my experiments in psychotropic drugs and then meditation, particularly meditation.
I wondered if brain chemistry, like dopamine and serotonin, were responsible for our deep and varied religious beliefs, myths, and visions throughout history. Certainly, the Buddha didn’t call us to worship any gods, and cautioned us about the nature of desire as the cause of pain. Meditation was central to his teaching and so perhaps his followers experienced states of bliss and inspiration as a result of the practice. I also began to realize that any religious experience, like prayer, the signing of hymns, ritual and ceremony could all stimulate brain chemistry so that people had religious experiences. Maybe this was even true for civil ceremonies, assemblies and parades, maybe this same brain chemistry reinforced our needs to belong to groups, or to feel patriotic.
And then, when I became more aware of politics and history, I wondered about our “Christian” country and society. And how Jesus' messages of loving our neighbors and sharing our belongings had mutated into the “I got mine, screw you” attitude that prevails in today’s christianity, especially Fundamentalists, when Jesus was clearly a socialist. Just think about the Loaves and the Fishes story in the New Testament.
Jesus is preaching in the countryside and has gathered a huge crowd who have left their homes and wandered some distance to sit at the feet of the rabbi. It’s getting dark and the disciples are getting worried about the needs of the crowd around dinner time. They ask Jesus what to do, He tells them to bring all the food they have to him. They bring a few loaves of bread and a couple of fishes, clearly not enough for them and especially not for the whole crowd since they only had supplies for themselves. He tells them to distribute the loaves and fishes to the crowd, anyway. The disciples are stunned. But Jesus, they cry, we will run out in a few minutes and then what? Jesus demands that they just go ahead and hand out the food. As the story goes, they do and they don’t run out of food until everyone is fed.
The lesson for me was about society and government. The just government goes ahead and feeds the hungry, houses the homeless, tends to the sick without asking first how to pay for it all. Jesus was advocating for socialism, for sharing the bounty of the earth. Thus assumes that government is seen as the communal representation of each individual as a right of the governed, not for the benefit of the few, the white and the rich. How did we come to be the ownership society that hoards resources for profit and still calls itself “Christian”?
Much later on, in the early 2000s I got extremely ill, deathly ill, we thought I was on my last legs. By now I was an established designer and creative director working in San Diego. My neck and shoulders started hurting, badly, the pain was constant. I was always sweaty even though I was always cold. After a while I couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even leave the house or walk around the block. I would be wearing double sweatpants and shirts, socks and gloves, under blankets, shivering with cold during the warming spring in Southern California.
The pain got worse, 20 Vicodin a day at times and I still hurt. I had violent coughing attacks. This went on for months, it was like living in hell. We were worried, very worried. Visited many doctors, health specialists, holistic doctors. Nothing. Finally we went to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale for 10 days of testing. I was a lab rat; prodded, poked, stabbed with needles, hooked up to machines for 10 days. No diagnosis. Might be cystic fibrosis or a sinus infection. They released me without a course of treatment.
We had been going to Mass at our local parish in Solana Beach after not attending for many years. I was far from devout, I mostly went to Mass because my wife wanted us to go.
I viewed it more as a commemorative ceremony celebrating the life and teaching of Jesus, not so much as the miraculous and mysterious theology I had been marinated in. Being sick, I hadn’t been going to Sunday Mass, but one Sunday my sister-in-law put together a small family visit to a healing service at church, behind the altar after mass. An older woman whom I recognized conducted the service. She sat me in a straight backed wooden chair with a few friends, family and my wife behind me with their hands on my shoulders. She knelt at my feet and placed her hands on my heart while mumbling and whispering a prayer I couldn’t really hear or understand. Occasionally she would whisper Jesus, again and again. I started breathing deeply and quickly and then laughing and crying simultaneously for a few minutes, and then it was over and we went home.
Slowly I started feeling better, until the symptoms more or less departed as mysteriously as they had begun.
Why did I get better, I asked myself? Going back to my Christian education, Jesus said we could heal ourselves if we had faith. What was faith? Sure, it’s belief, but in what exactly. I had been back and forth about the existence of God, you know, the Biblical God, and in that I did not have faith. But the god of existence, the great foundation of the cosmos, the background hum of being that was everywhere and everything, well sure, that was closer to the yahweh, the name god without words or description, the God of the cosmos.
I did have this sense that we can heal ourselves and others. I did, after all, heal Flip City Kitty with mumbled words and hands on his body. So maybe the healing service with friends and family putting their hands on me and mumbling prayer took away my doubt, allowed me to believe I could be healed. I don’t believe that, as Jim Morrison said, you can petition the lord with prayer. You can’t ask for things, but maybe prayer is a vehicle that helps us suspend disbelief and these are powers we are all born with. Powers that can heal. Maybe that is what happened to me. I am eternally grateful for the people who also suspended their disbelief and doubt to perform the healing ceremony that Sunday behind the altar.
Turns out I had a really bad sinus infection, all my sinuses were closed off, filled with pus and polyps which was a huge and constant source of poison that was overwhelming my system. And now after 20 years I am healthy, because of four sinus surgeries. I now have no sense of smell, but I am alive and very active, the mysterious ailment growing smaller and smaller in the rear view. Cause of the infection was not diagnosed, but probably it was surfing.
I surfed as often as I could, before work, after work, weekends, sometimes three or four times a week, if the waves were good. Sometimes when the waves were small and nearly nonexistent, or it was windy, or if the tides weren’t right, which is what things are normally. Great waves are the exception.
Mostly surfed locally in North County San Diego, with occasional trips to Mexico, Costa Rica and Bali. Mostly Mexico, where the water quality was terrible and filled with raw sewage as well as toxic runoff. This is true for all urban, suburban beaches, people mean pollution, the more people the more the pollution. I surfed Cardiff Reef just after the rain, I could see the brown river running out to sea from the estuary at the beach where the reef is. I paddled out right next to the brown river of whatever came down the creek and into the estuary. Farm runoff, homeless camp effluent, animal waste, toxic sludge, leaked sewage, paddled right through it to get to the great, pumping surf out over the reef.
I got an immediate ear infection with orange foam billowing out when I put some hydrogen peroxide into my ear. My lungs filled with the infectious drip from my sinuses and I would have to go to emergency with pneumonia for breathing treatments that became recurring events. This seemed to start the cascading symptoms that got worse and worse until they just got better.
After graduation from Loyola High School and then University I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in Catholic theology of the liberal, scholastic school of the Jesuits, I got interested in Eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism and read a lot about spiritual teachers, gurus and the Buddha. My faith had begun to weaken in high school mostly through confession when the sexually perverse underbelly of the Church began to reveal itself.
One time in highschool, and in the confessional (Again.) confessing my sins as the result of a great date the night before when I had managed to feel some actual bare breast (not just side titty) and sadly felt it was a sin, as I had been trained to think. The confessional was a dark wooden structure in the old style granite church. The priest was just visible through the dark sheer curtain. I told him that I had touched a girl in an impure way, just as I was telling him my sin I saw beads of sweat form on his forehead, below his thin comb over and above his collar and cassock. He asked, “Did you get to the oil well? Well no, I said. Six Hail Mary’s he said.
Another time just after confession I asked one to the older priests if French Kissing was a sin, I guess because I had been doing quite a lot of it. He said French Kissing outside of marriage was always a sin, a Mortal sin. Well, a Mortal Sin is no small thing, it creates an indelible mark on all of our all souls, a mark that will cause shame when we meet God and he sees the stain of sin on us. Everyone else would also see the stain, or in my case multiple stains and we would be forever shamed, even though we were then, presumably, in heaven. And this stain wasn’t even the one I would have gotten if I got to the oil well! And, speaking of stains, what about masturbation? By now my soul must have been just one big stain that even daily trips to the confessional wouldn’t wash away. Needed stronger stain remover, also having stains on my invisible spirit body in heaven seemed to me a tad contradictory, so I started having some doubts, lots of doubts.
But back in Sixth Grade I was devout, enraptured, bathed in the happy brain chemistry of certainty. The nuns, on the lookout for recruits, noticed, and started to prime me for the seminary. This was just before my more true rebellious, or maybe just normal male nature started to show, so guess I was looking priestly to them.
They got me to sign up for an overnight tour of the seminary in Watsonville, which was a long, slow trip with other candidates in a yellow school bus up the 101 from Los Angeles. This would have been in 1959 or 60 so the state was largely undeveloped, just before the huge boom in growth that paved over the orchards and replaced the flowering fields with housing tracts, parking lots and shopping centers, just miles and miles of hills, trees, farms and ranches, my first trip up California was eye poppingly beautiful and enticing. Over the years I would make many more trips up and down the coast, mostly in search of surf. But then I hadn’t started surfing yet, so it was on to the seminary.
The seminary was the classic California Mission style, red tile roofs, thick adobe and stucco walls, arches, red-stained concrete floors or blcak linoleum tiles, with patios and verdant gardens. The priests were all in long cassocks, with sashes and crosses around their necks. We had dinner in the great hall, I’m thinking pot roast, potatoes, and peas that weren’t quite green, and went to bed in the dorm. Next morning was Mass, of course, then a guided tour of the seminary and a class about what the life of a seminarian was like, with a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys thrown in.
The trip to the seminary was eye-opening for me, my decision was clear, I was not going to be a priest. It wasn’t a repudiation of my faith just a sober assessment of the forces of biology, incipient maturity and the realization that sex was going to be the decider. I liked girls, girls liked me (Or I liked to think so.), so that was done. And, of course, the random erections, the constant reminder the penis sent the brain, “Hey, I’m down here, can you feel me?”. Yes, indeed, I could, as well as a growing awareness that this thing was good for more than just peeing.
Right about this time, sixth maybe seventh grade at St. Jerome’s, the boys going through puberty (When everything changed!) started getting spontaneous erections just sitting at our desks. Boom, boner, no reason. Embarrassing but also funny because they pushed out and bulged out against the salt and pepper corduroy of our school pants. Couldn’t hide, it was clearly visible, all we could do was just put our heads down on our desks, laughing along with the other guys as we waited it out, which in those days seemed like forever. (Oh, to have that problem today!) One day I was the boner victim hiding my head in shame and laughing, red faced along with the class when the teacher came in. Seeing me hiding my head, right off she says, “Michael, why don’t you come up here in front of the class and tell us about your summer vacation (I really don’t remember what she asked me to tell them, or maybe I was to read passage from a book, don’t really remember.) Anyway, there I was standing in front of the class, hunched over to try to hide the bulge in my pants, and the Sister says, “Michael, why don’t you stand up straight?”. I was panicking and searching for a reply, I knew my Dad would hunch over around the house when his back was bothering him, so I said, “Sister, it’s my back.” Well, about now the guys are starting to snicker and the Sister, sensing some sort of shenanigan, says “Stand up straight, Michael.” I stand up, showing a very visible protrusion, the class erupts in laughter, my face is bright red and I’m starting to sweat. She says, “Oh, just go a sit down.” turning her embarrassed face away. So, probably not going to be a priest, definitely not a priest.
I continued in Catholic school all the way through university, my unwavering faith wavering to various degrees the entire time, as the magical thinking began to lose it’s mystery and began to look like, well, magical thinking. Things like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, central to the faith, started looking silly, (But that could be the devil tricking me!), so I had to keep the faith, so to speak, and not think about the cognitive dissonance careening around my brain. The emotions attached to the pageantry of the ceremonies, the indoctrinating hymns sung with feeling in unison, the classes, the homilies and stories, and the friends and family all laid waste to rationality.
Then in college I began to see the institution of the church as an authoritarian and hierarchical medieval sort of feudalism of rank and privilege, as well as the huge amount of Church properties and accumulation of more than a thousand years of wealth - proudly displayed as necessary status so the church could impress states and monarchies as kindred world leaders. It was then that the Liberation Gospel, inspired by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, started creating rifts between the Traditionalists and the Liberal wings of the church. I remember a mass at a friend's place in Ojai where a few of us gathered around the priest, dressed in civvies, said a simple short mass with a loaf of French bread and some nice red wine as communion. This liberal wing grew in size and stature and with the bold actions of priests like the Berrigan brothers, who poured blood on draft files at the government Induction offices, began to swell the ranks of the antiwar movement in the church. That church was more like it, and so I hung on to my wavering faith with a very tenuous grip, the liberal wing making me temporarily comfortable as a member.
But thinking about the symbols doing battle in my head, the cruel bloody coss versus the happy enlightened man. I really seemed inclined towards the fool on the hill.
Fool on the Hill
Day after day, alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he's just a fool
And he never gives an answer
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
Well on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
He never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like him
The fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
Maybe god is nature, the universe that we are blessed with in a life that is a random accident, an accident that becomes our lived reality. Nothing summoned these feelings of the divine so much as nature. For this I have to thank my parents, not that they were naturalists or tree huggers, they weren’t. Dad had always taken all of us on trips to the Mojave desert, or to the Hollywood Hills. And since I was surfing, I certainly encountered nature onan intimate level, surfing with the kelp, fish, birds, seals, dolphins, whales and sharks. But the cathedral I would discover was in the Eastern Sierras.
My Mom sang alto in the church choir which became sort of famous in LA choir circles, and she became good friends with a cardiologist from UCLA, who she started working for in the 80s, when after a very long layoff, to have a big family, she went back to work managing the Cardiology Department for hr friend, now the lead cardiologist. They started going to June Lake, staying in rustic cabins right at the foot of Carson Peak, an eleven thousand foot mountain where we hiked to the summit, when I was very much younger! Mary and I joined the three families at June Lake sometime in the early 80s. It was there that I saw god and prayed in his cathedral of pines, firs, Aspens, Oaks and cottonwoods. It was a wordless prayer, or maybe just and oh my god, repeated over and over. Around each bend in the trail, each step through a high altitude meadow, hiking the forest floor thick with needles, soft and bouncy underfoot.
It was there that I discovered, or at least confirmed my suspicions, that god was in nature, god was nature, all of it, from atoms to mountains and planets, suns and galaxies. All of life is sacred, everything alive and knowing where it was and what it had to do to survive. I had inadvertently discovered the nature imperative.
“There is mounting evidence, from dozens and dozens of researchers, that nature has benefits for both physical and psychological human wellbeing,” says Lisa Nisbet, PhD, a psychologist at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who studies connectedness to nature. “You can boost your mood just by walking in nature, even in urban nature. And the sense of connection you have with the natural world seems to contribute to happiness even when you’re not physically immersed in nature.” - American Psychological Association
The pernicious idea of “manifest destiny” fueled the conquest of the continent, empowered the genocide of native Americans for their lands, and gave economic imputus for slavery. That much is clear, but it also fueled the seemingly unlimited growth of the extraction industry. There’s oil, coal, gas in that ground that I have a god-given right to to use, in this case fossil fuels, because the abundance of natural resources on this land was given to us by god for our benefit, and his gifts to us must be honored. This in turn fueled the massive destruction of nature in pursuit of that god-given resource, the overarching value of that environment not appreciated. Of course the astronomical profits helped a mite to, as a matter of fact, if you seek to protect our natural world, you are accused of being a tree-hugger, which is of course anti-labor, because lumberjacks need to eat too.
And so, by extension, we are doing god’s will in developing all the resources he left for us right there in the ground. Missing from this philosophy is the sun and wind, true energy gifts from creation, god if you will, for everyone. Not just landowners, everyone, making them the democratized source for cheap, clean energy. The fact that sun and wind are everywhere, for everyone, make them socialist, which is exactly why they are winning the energy battle today.
If we indeed are a government of, by and for the actual people, then sun and wind are indeed god’s gifts, gifts don’t destroy the environment or break the bank. Just the opposite, renewable energy has the potential to make people wealthier, and healthier. We just need the wisdom to end the fossil fuel plutocracy for a bright future.
Science has been telling us that we must cut our fossil fuel use in HALF by 2030, or else we face real and irreversible planetary warming with the epoc ending catastrophe guaranteed. We have been spending the future, a future that is not ours to steal, from our children and grandchildren. This is the one thing that I continue to pray for, praying to a god that doesn’t exist, or that doesn’t enter into human history to alter realities for the benefit of the prayerful. Nonetheless I pray. It’s like the automatic urge to make the sign of the cross when I’m stressed.
And I am stressed about this indeed, trying to avert extinction.
Dear god, that doesn’t exist, help us! More realistic to pray for massive demonstrations for rational and moral responses to this civilization ending emergency.
There was a statue of St Michael, The Archangel, at the entrance of the Catholic Church my parents attended in Long Beach California just after I was born in November of 1946. I was in the first wave of the Postwar Baby Boom that erupted in celebration of our victory over fascism and imperialism in the war that had just ended the year before. So, let’s praise the lord and jump in the sack! Many, many babies ensued.
Those were the days before sonograms when parents just flipped the biological coin and got heads or tails on the day of the coming out party when a boy or girl popped out of the tube.
(My first tube ride, dude!). So of course they named their babies after they were born, as opposed to now when the name, clothes, and baby room decor are known months before birth.
St Michael was an archangel, or head angel, together with the other arches, Gabriel (The one who blew the horn. Now how can there be a horn, a physical horn, in heaven, which is, of course, in the clouds?), Uriel, Raphael and then Michael. Michael means one who is like god, which according to teaching we all are. Revelation 12:7-9 says Jesus came to earth as Michael incarnate. But as I went through my Catholic education the very idea of an angel, even an archangel proclaimed as saint withered in the face of logic. And since we are all made in the image and likeness of god, and our minds give us the ability to think, that the logic there was probably infallible, like god, as well. How can an imaginary being be an arch-imaginary saint? Saints are usually real people who lived holy lives and had a certain number of “verifiable” miracles associated with their names. Sure that makes some sense. But an imaginary being can only live imaginary lives and, therefore, we can imagine that they lived holy lives and we can also imagine miracles from prayer to them. So, Michael is an imaginary saint who drove the imaginary Lucifer into imaginary Hell when he tried to tempt God (Arguably also imaginary.).
So I became Michael, one of the most popular Boomer names, and ranked as one of the most common names around the world and in the United States was number one from 1954 to 1998. I was raised in a Catholic family in the 50s and 60s, I attended Catholic Schools from the Fourth grade through college graduation and in that time went from devoted believer to atheist, or maybe agnostic, because the things they want us to believe started to look more and more like magical thinking. I mean, who doesn’t love a little magical thinking in their lives, a sort of “It could happen, I could win the lottery, I could be discovered, I got here all on my own. I had the biggest Inauguration crowd in history... ”
In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities.
In psychiatry, magical thinking is a disorder of thought content;[here it denotes the false belief that one's thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies commonly understood laws of causality. - Wikipedia
Magical thinking can have real societal implications, such as with “Christian” Fundamentalists, who suspended logic, ignored what their eyes had seen and their ears heard and supported Donald Trump as their ‘Savior”. This is the guy who said when you're a star, “You can grab em by the pussy.” Partied with Jeffery Epstein and uunderage girls, raped E Jean Carrol (and others as well.), and has been accused by nearly 30 women of sexaul abuse and assault. Had at least six bankruptcies, stiffed workers and contractors, and told an endless stream of pernicious lies, lies that would threaten the very foundation of our democracy, and looked past it all. It was god’s plan, Sure Trump is imperfect, and a sinner, as we all are, but he was sent by god to save us from godless socialism, homosexuality, transexual fears, big government. And why worry about climate change when the end of the world is near! Why? Because we have seen the signs. Signs like the coming apocalypse, unrest in the middle east, and the Second Coming of Christ that would bring on the rapture. Ah, the rapture, when only those saved “Christians”, would be raised up to heaven while the rest of us, the unsaved, the sinners would be left on their own to deal with the coming Armgeddeon. Just like with taxes, fundamentalists say, “I got mine screw you” when it comes to salvation as they are raptured straight into heaven. So, because of magical thinking, Trump became president. Magical thinking that he would grow into the role of president. Magical thinking that he alone can fix it. Magical thinking that was exploited by cynics seeking unlimited power, securing their place in the sordid history of authoritarianism.
Moreover, the entire fundsmentalist movement, being focused on being “saved” from hell, and spurred on by televangelist hucksters bought into the concept of the Gospel of Prosperity, whose mantra is again, “I got mine, screw you.” In short the entire movement is a heretical sect that has forgotten the basic teaching of their savoir to love thy neighbors. And, exploited by the fear mongers, bought into fearing and hating the “other”. Not very Christlike I would say.
We always went to Sunday Mass with confession and communion being the cornerstones of the faith and occasionally during the week like during Holy Week when we would marinate in the pain and cruelty, as well as the institutional induced guilt of the Crucifixion. When I was younger, we also would gather often around the bed in my parents’ bedroom, to pray the Rosary, which was strange symbolism on its own, in a family of seven. I always prayed that we only did one Rosary at a time, since those days we did multiple Rosaries, were brutal, and with that many kids already praying around the breeding bed seemed a little overkill. Like some sort of fertility prayer, thank god that it didn’t add any more siblings, since I am the oldest of seven! But around the bed was always a little strange.
Occasionally we would go to the huge Rosary Hours at the Colosseum where thousands would join in with the priestly voice over the stadium speakers. Must have said a hundred Hail Marys, following along with the human rosary chain on the stadium floor which would soon be the battlefield for the next USC or Ram football game the following day. (Strange how prayer and violence always seemed to be packaged together. Think Roman Empire.)
I was always praying for forgiveness of sins both real and imagined, starting with that great guilt builder, original sin. What a perfect control device. All they had to do was tell you, again and again, that we were all born as sinners, before we even had a chance to commit a sin!
It was a sort of Catholic admission of the science of evolution and biology; we were born in a state of sin because of Adam and Eve, who took a bite of the apple and so were part of the now infected spiritual gene pool. So from then on every human being ever born came into this world already guilty, already flawed, infected, our souls stained by this sin, this the first and “original” sin that we had inherited from Adam and Eve. So where did Adam and Eve get their first sin?
Since they were the first humans, we don't have to look very far - God. God “The Father” sent Jesus His Only Son to atone for our sins, both original and new, by dying on the cross. The only higher-up in this sin chain was God, so was it God who demanded atonement for this sin, who else could be offended? There’s nobody higher than god, so it must have been he who demanded the death of his only son to atone for our sins; future, new and original. This thinking created an atmosphere of guilt, guilt stacked upon guilt, not only were we guilty of the original sin, and all the sins we commit throughout our lives, now we were all also guilty of killing Jesus to cleanse ALL OUR COLLECTIVE sins, as well as the original sin that we didn't even commit. The Church then, being founded by Jesus, was the only true way to assuage our sins and find salvation. ( Again Trump’s, “Only I can fix it.”) Salvation was only possible through the sacraments: Baptism, Communion, Confession, and Confirmation. Confirmation is when we became Soldiers of Christ, because Jesus was all about peace and non-violence as we prayed for victory over our enemies and of course victory over the visiting team. Rah, rah, rah, yea God!
In a sense this is all a pretty powerful grift, create guilt in your followers and then make your organization the only organization that can forgive the guilt that the very same organization infected you with. Over time this has morphed into more cons and grifters working their marks, like TV evangelists. Take Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor”, who in the heights (Depths?) of the pandemic, with people out of work, unable even to buy food, she went on air and told her followers to keep giving her money, even if it hurt, even if you missed a meal, because she would then save you (A strange sort of quid pro quo, because you saved her, and her mansion, and her Bently, with your donations. So now she’ll return the favor and save you, if you just send a little more money.) Funny thing, Trump is a televangelist. Just look at the preposterous pompadour of fake hair, sculpted in multiple cans of hairspray, lacquered in place even in a little wind when it became a solid plastic wedge of plasticized hair color dancing in the breeze, like the Oral Roberts televangelist pomp, for example.
Back in the 80s, maybe early 90s, Oral had been making appeals for donations from his Prayer Tower that loomed over Tulsa Oklahoma. They had been very successful appeals as well, so he decided to double down and make the plea again. This time he was telling his listeners, his extremely gullible listeners, that the lord was going to take him if he didn’t get enough in donations to stave off the invented threat of an early demise. He was just getting up to full grift speed when, miracles of miracles, a lightning bolt knocked him off the air. Maybe real actual proof of God acting in human history for a better world, I like to magically think. Maybe.
That religion is a great control device is apparent, especially if your god is all seeing and all powerful. Means you are being constantly (and divinely) surveilled, so you tend to be on your best behavior. From an evolutionary point of view this fosters not only obedience but also cooperation, which is essential for a well-functioning society. The first big city-states of 12,000 years ago had big, powerful, all seeing and all knowing gods as the glue that bound society together in a highly functional dynamic.
The critical thinking skills they taught us started to focus its lasers on the religion they peddled, and so I had many questions, and still do to this day.
But, where did the original sin come from, how did we come to be born as sinners when we hadn’t committed any sins because we were either in the womb or too young to be guilty of sinning because we weren't capable yet of knowing what right or wrong really was, until we became seven. Seven was proclaimed as the Age of Reason when we became old and wise enough to know right from wrong, even though the prefrontal cortex is the center of knowledge, or foresight of what the consequences will be if we do certain things. In other words, wisdom. But now, according to the church, at seven we could commit a mortal sin, as opposed to a venial sin, and go to hell, forever - if we didn’t confess. And at seven years old, talk about being made even more guilty! Since we were on the end of the sin chain, who was at the head? God. And since we were made in the image and likeness of god, our first, or original sin had to come from -Tah Dah! - god. So if that’s true, then it’s god who is imperfect, a sinner who passed the first, original sin on to us in addition giving us the opportunity to commit even more sins, because, being made in his image, we have the ability (And desire, need, want...to commit sin because god put that in us?). But at seven I didn’t have those thoughts all I got then was the guilt.
There was a three part hierarchy, The Holy Spirit or Ghost being the third. I always thought ghost was more dramatic and mysterious, even spooky, or friendly like Caspar. Seems like we were constantly making the Sign of the Cross, where we would touch our foreheads, heart (Maybe stomach for some less precise sign of the cross makers.), and then each shoulder, starting with the left to sign a graphic cross while saying In the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. Everything started with the Sign of the Cross, multiple times a day, everyday. It became so ingrained, so reflexive that even today I have random urges to make the sign. At the time I didn’t see the obvious parallels with ceremony and repetition as indoctrination devices for cult building, it was just seen innocently as part of my faith. But, sometimes when stressed, I still have that automatic reflex, “In the name of the Father…”
I liked ghost because at least a ghost can scare the shit out of you, but they’re also kinda fun, which is valuable if you’re running a guild-based enterprise. The Father. The Son. The Holy Ghost. One God, three equal and distinct parts, personas, qualities, powers all wrapped up in one Super Deity: God. But this god was a god of guilt, a god to be soothed, cajoled, cried out to, prayed to for things like forgiveness and salvation that were based on the guilt of this Original Sin we got from...god. Seemed a mite unfair, a bit manipulative, like making a deal with the deity was required to be successful. If you say the prayers, make the sacrifice to god, then you can ask him for favors, like going to heaven, or that raise, or the house on the hill with a three car garage. And if you do that for me, god, I will stop swearing forever!
God the Father was the creator, the boss, the Zeus, or in the case of the Romans, Jupiter of the pantheon of three. It was Rome after all that made what was then the new kid on the block, early Christians, whom they cruelly punished and killed for entertainment in the colosseum, became the official state religion under the Emperor Constantine. Seems Constatine had a vision when he was on a bridge spanning the Tiber saw an apparition of the cross and heard these miraculous words, “In Hoc Signo Vinces” or “In this Sign Conquer.” and then took up the symbol carried by his armies and conquered, “Wow, this shit really works, let’s made it into the Roman State Religion!”
So the catholicism I was raised in was shaped largely by the Roman Empire and the pantheon of gods was replaced, largely, with Jesus, because, you know, whatever it takes to win. The church adopted the hierarchy of empire, with the Pope as emperor, and then cardinals, bishops, priests, deacons, monks and nuns were the army of generals, captains, and grunts. This was top down enterprise, as opposed to the idea that each individual can find his own way to enlightenment, or salvation. The only true way was through them and their hierarchy.
He was all powerful, all knowing, all business, no messing around with God. He was Old Testament; flood the world and kill everyone he had created, except for Noah and his wife and all the animals because all the humans he had created in his image and likeness were sinners. But the animals were saved because they were innocent, didn't have Free Will and couldn’t go to heaven or hell? But they were all created by God, so why were the animals (and Noah) all free of sin? Damn, being an animal was awfully attractive. But wait, humans are really just animals with this free will thing that made us into sinners because we could theoretically choose to do right or wrong? (But, what if there really is no free will, what if free will is a delusion?) And do I want to be a human so I have the chance to go to Hell? This humans are animals thing was looking better and better. And what was Free Will?
“Free Will is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.” - Google Dictionary
Free Will, in humans, is the power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints. The idea of Free Will is denied by some proponents of determinism as well as evolutionary biologists, scientists, free thinkers, and those attempting to break the bonds of guilt. You could say that we, as biological beings, are really controlled by our happenstances like where and when we are born, who our parents were, how we were raised, and how and where we were educated. It can be argued that we are actually just chemical robots, victims of memory, of the subconscious mind and that to a degree we may be predisposed to act in a certain way. So if we are to judge ourselves, or if god is to judge us based on our choices because of this purported free will, how can we be actually guilty? We really can’t help ourselves, so maybe a little empathy would be more realistic.
Or this God would command the Israelites to, say, destroy Jericho “You shall not leave anything alive”, god tells the Jews, which was kind of the first genocide, because the Jericoites were sinners who couldn’t be saved because they weren’t, one, Jewish, so they coudln’t have known the “One True God” because they only knew about Baal, or the Golden Calf, because they weren’t Jewish and only the Jewish God could save them and Jesus wasn’t to come to earth for hundreds of years, you know, Old Testament, so they had to die to atone for their sins by being slaughtered...that they got from God? Where’s the Free Will in that?
Then there’s Jesus The Son of God, whom God sent to earth through the virgin birth to a young peasant woman married to an older man who was a carpenter. Sent to earth to die for our sins, sins that were built into humanity, so kind of a frustrating fools’ errand for poor Jesus who would die a brutal death at the hands of the Romans as a sacrifice made to atone for our sins. This unlike Abraham who when commanded by God to sacrifice his son Issac, instead of the customary goat or chicken, placed his son on the sacrificial altar, held his knife in the air and was about to strike, when god stopped him and said like, this was only a test to see how obedient you were, and so take this goat, that magically appeared, and sacrifice it instead and we’re good. But why does anything have to die to please or appease this god?
Simple answer, heaven and hell. Seems like god the creator had an evil twin brother, who started ‘tempting his brother” to use his powers for all kinds of nefarious things. Things we have been living with since creation; famine, plague, pestilence and wars happened even if god didn’t actually succumb to Lucifer’s temptations. God apparently doesn’t have a name, except maybe the yahweh thing. So god throws Lucifer into hell, which apparently didn’t exist till then, and Lucifer didn’t have a Get Out Of Jail card and so is spending all his quality time burning forever, forever at least from the time of his incarceration. God decides that if there’s a Hell then there has to be a Heaven, to balance things out, creating the dualistic good, evil choices we have we make with everything in life.
So now with the sword of eternal damnation is hanging over all our heads, like the sword of Damocles. According to higher authorities, our souls (invisible storage units for all our actions) are marked by sin, and with enough bad marks ( How are they grading this test?) and we are cast into, gasp, hell. And what about poor Lucifer, who through no fault of his own, gets a little destructive? I mean, whoever made Lucifer and god, the biggest grand wizard god of all, then gave them the qualities in their personas. Not their fault then, they were both pre-programmed, which call’s the concept of free will and guilt into question even more. Maybe Lucifer couldn't help himself, maybe it was in his genes, cosmic genes of course.
With the threat of eternal damnation, burning in Hell for all eternity hanging over mankind, mankind responded with religion, organized religion, with strict rules and regulations, to keep us from going to Hell, if we just followed the rules and kept our noses relatively clean.
But, if there’s no Heaven or Hell, if we see them as mythic tales set to help control a sort of unregulated human who needs guidance, and rules, simple sticks and carrots, Stick; Hell. Carrot; Heaven. So what then is the purpose of religion that was created to save us from Hell if there’s no Hell. Not much other than a nice social gathering with music and communal singing.
Which, as far as ceremony, works really well. But is it any better than dancing around a fire with the whole community, chanting, dancing, singing, fueled by some magic psychotropic substance? Maybe not as cool. But, both are built around some sacrifice to the gods.
But maybe this impulse for sacrifice is programmed in us, maybe the pre-technology world that hadn’t yet been subdued by civilization, was a very scary thing. Crops need to grow, lands need to be secured and nature is working against you, and so you gotta sacrifice something to all the scary gods out there, maybe appease them so the crops grow. But growing crops is so important that maybe a chicken or pig won’t do, except maybe as warm up acts. We need to sacrifice something so precious, like humans, to get the god’s attention so he answers our prayers. and knows were serious. So, yes, let’s sacrifice humans, lots of humans, thousands of humans. Seemed to work pretty well for the Aztecs and Mayans, until it didn’t and they disappeared under the boots of the Spanish Conquistadors who saw them as savages that had to be converted to Catholicism to be civilized and saved. Or else just kill or enslave them because they are sub-human, which also could save them. Save them from what, living?
Same thing with the American Indian, and even blackpeople, who were seen as savages, subhumans to be exploited and killed by what can only be called White Supremacy.
Seems that with religion like this no sacrifice was too extreme to protect civilization and gain salvation.
What kind of god does this? Why? Was God insecure? Did he need to feel special? Did he need to feel obeyed as a sort of power-trip? The contradictions were explained away as God’s plan that we would have to accept as an article of faith, and if we questioned it we were then sinners. Sinners for using the critical thinking skills that also taught us, which we were to employ in our lives, unless it was faith that we questioned. The guilt got deeper and deeper, only constant Confession and Penance would save us. But then this original sin thing, the flaw that was built into man, made in the image and likeness of God, maybe it wasn’t a bug at all, but a feature. Built in, part of the package. so, how could this feature then be a sin? Faith my son, faith.
And then there’s the Holy Ghost, or Spirit, a more friendly, inspirational “person” of God who would come to represent inspiration, holiness, love, and also the gift of speaking in “tongues”, a weird sort of mumbo jumbo some folks would use to show just how enlightened they were, as well as the power of healing. This sort of softened the power and fear of God The Father, and the guilt of Jesus with mysticism, mystery even enlightenment. Now that’s more like a God I could get behind.
It wasn't until years later when in college we started looking into other major religions and their symbolism. The Church was defined by the image of Jesus on the Cross. The cross is on everything from buildings to books to fashion. The image of Jesus slowly and cruelly dieing nailed to a cross is the dominant Catholic symbol, really would be analogous to a Roman noose and scaffold or as electric chair, a constant reminder of the pain and suffering done in our name, a constant reminder of our guilt weighing us down continually, making us feel responsible for Jesus’ horrific death, the whip lashes, the crown of thorns, the nails in the hands and feet because of us, because of our sin. What a bummer of a symbol.
Later, I started becoming aware of the symbol of the Buddha, statues large and small, showing a man sitting cross-legged on the ground in stillness, with a slight rapt smile, and relaxed countenance exuding bliss, happiness, freedom from pain and guilt. And what did you have to do to attain this enlightenment? Nothing. Nothing other than to sit and breathe in and out and watch your thoughts without getting attached to them. And this was the path of enlightenment, as opposed to a path to salvation. That’s it. Pain, suffering and guilt versus bliss and enlightenment. Pretty easy choice. The Church should rethink its brand symbolism, methinks, maybe more resurrection stuff, Jesus walking, feet off the ground, glowing. Sure more magical thinking, but happy magical thoughts nonetheless. But still going for the guy sitting in meditation pose myself.
The Church did embrace the gospel of peace and charity for sure, which is the foundation of lots of good works done in Jesus’ name. After a little education it became apparent that Jesus was a Jew, as were the early Christians who saw themselves as Jews for the first decades after the Crucifiction. Not only that, Jesus was a radical Jewish rabbi with definite socialist leanings. There were the “missing years” when it was postulated that Jesus perhaps traveled to the East and maybe encountered Buddhism, which at that point was about 500 yars old. But this aspect of Christianity wasn’t what was taught or preached so much as the law and order kingdom on earth style of the institution it had become. Seems like the mystics didn’t fit in with the clerics, though mysticism looked much more attractive to me, just starting to wake from the control of the party line. Plus mystics didn’t fill the collection basket each Sunday, the mystics were, by design, all broke.
Seemed to me that Jesus was a teacher who gave us a practical code of behavior based on the love of our neighbor as the highest achievement, and the church certainly teaches that, for which I am grateful. They just confused and demeaned it all with the magical thinking and guilt. There’s more control with magic and guilt, love alone seemed not to be enough. Whatever happened to set free the ones you love?
Years later we were living In Solana Beach, Mary, our daughter and a couple of cats in a little beach bungalow. I was an art director at an ad agency and frequented many happy hours as part of the “Mad Men” lifestyle. One evening, after ample wine and a few tokes on a joint,
I came home feeling a wee bit high, inspired, even a little holy. One of our cats, Flip City Kitty, or Flips as we called him had been hit by a car. We had him on a towel in the guest bath, cone on his head, just laying there not eating or drinking. We thought we were going to lose him. Well, I thought, how about trying some hands on healing. We had been told that the power to heal was within us, and the Holy Spirit could work through us to heal. I was feeling pretty Christ-like at the moment, buzzed as I was. I knelt down next to Flips on the bathroom floor, laid my hands on his body, and told him in a low, soft voice, over and over, that he was going to be ok. That’s it, that’s all it took. Flips started eating, he got better and we got to be with him for a good while longer. The Power of the Holy Spirit, wine and weed. One toke over the line, dear Jesus, one toke over the line...
Our teachers, mostly nuns, would explain the mystery of the trinity like God was a consumer product, like a breakfast cereal. The new and improved Holy Trinity. Three. Three. Three Gods in one! Still I had a hard time with the Trinity concept, but kept the faith, went to Mass, sang the hymns loudly and on tune (Until I got a little older and then sang way of key and really loud just for fun. Or to show my friends that I wasn’t controlled by adult rules? Or just run of the mill teen rebellion.)
Confirmation was the next big thing when we turned twelve, most of us in the Fifth or Sixth Grades. The Church would define it as the sacrament of initiation into the Holy Spirit that anoints the recipient as priest, prophet, and king. Wow, that’s some big-time power all packed into a twelve year old! It was a big-time Sacrament, we would rehearse the pageant, marching into church in formation, singing special hymns, many in Latin since this was years before they switched Mass to English. We had to prepare for the Bishop coming to our parish, and in the ceremony, each one of us would ascend the steps of the altar, kneel at the feet of the Bishop who would lay hands on us and anoint us as Soldiers of Christ, you know, the Prince of Peace. Soldiers of peace. The irony escaped them.
I was pretty devout as a kid, lots of Confession, Communion (sometimes more than once a week) and lots of prayer, which meant lots of making the Sign of The Cross and genuflecting. We always took to one knee upon entering the pew. This was just before more rebellious phase kicked in, so I was sincerely moved by the ceremony, story, and practice of being a young
Catholic.
Walking home from one of the many religious services we had, probably practice for Confirmation, I had a religious, or really a spiritual experience. The nuns taught us a lot about miracles, about the apparitions of the Holy Mother Mary at Lourdes and Fatima as well as Don Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. This created a sort of fantasy in my mind, even entertaining the possibility of a miraculous apparition happening in my life. I sort of looked for it around each corner, in the next moment there could be a burning bush or a woman hovering in the air smiling at me, but of course, nothing ever happened. Seems I just wasn’t holy enough.
But this one day, walking home, something hit me. I was on the dirt and gravel path leading south on my way home from church, just past the bridge over the new 405 Freeway in LA, carrying my books and empty lunch box, don’t remember if it was Supermen or Batman, when this bright warm glow overtook me. My heart swelled and was beating loudly, nearly coming out of my chest, and I felt like I was elevated, my feet not touching the ground as I walked on, glowing. I was sure people could see the light radiating from me as I walked down the street.
Couldn’t they see I was a saint, or going to be?
I never told anyone about my mystical experience, except later in life I would share the story with my wife, a fellow Catholic School victim, and a few friends over wine and conversation.
I came to realize that what I experienced was an episode of elevated brain chemistry, like dopamine or serotonin that are happy chemicals associated with feelings like doing the right thing or helping someone. I found similar experiences with my experiments in psychotropic drugs and then meditation, particularly meditation.
I wondered if brain chemistry, like dopamine and serotonin, were responsible for our deep and varied religious beliefs, myths, and visions throughout history. Certainly, the Buddha didn’t call us to worship any gods, and cautioned us about the nature of desire as the cause of pain. Meditation was central to his teaching and so perhaps his followers experienced states of bliss and inspiration as a result of the practice. I also began to realize that any religious experience, like prayer, the signing of hymns, ritual and ceremony could all stimulate brain chemistry so that people had religious experiences. Maybe this was even true for civil ceremonies, assemblies and parades, maybe this same brain chemistry reinforced our needs to belong to groups, or to feel patriotic.
And then, when I became more aware of politics and history, I wondered about our “Christian” country and society. And how Jesus' messages of loving our neighbors and sharing our belongings had mutated into the “I got mine, screw you” attitude that prevails in today’s christianity, especially Fundamentalists, when Jesus was clearly a socialist. Just think about the Loaves and the Fishes story in the New Testament.
Jesus is preaching in the countryside and has gathered a huge crowd who have left their homes and wandered some distance to sit at the feet of the rabbi. It’s getting dark and the disciples are getting worried about the needs of the crowd around dinner time. They ask Jesus what to do, He tells them to bring all the food they have to him. They bring a few loaves of bread and a couple of fishes, clearly not enough for them and especially not for the whole crowd since they only had supplies for themselves. He tells them to distribute the loaves and fishes to the crowd, anyway. The disciples are stunned. But Jesus, they cry, we will run out in a few minutes and then what? Jesus demands that they just go ahead and hand out the food. As the story goes, they do and they don’t run out of food until everyone is fed.
The lesson for me was about society and government. The just government goes ahead and feeds the hungry, houses the homeless, tends to the sick without asking first how to pay for it all. Jesus was advocating for socialism, for sharing the bounty of the earth. Thus assumes that government is seen as the communal representation of each individual as a right of the governed, not for the benefit of the few, the white and the rich. How did we come to be the ownership society that hoards resources for profit and still calls itself “Christian”?
Much later on, in the early 2000s I got extremely ill, deathly ill, we thought I was on my last legs. By now I was an established designer and creative director working in San Diego. My neck and shoulders started hurting, badly, the pain was constant. I was always sweaty even though I was always cold. After a while I couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even leave the house or walk around the block. I would be wearing double sweatpants and shirts, socks and gloves, under blankets, shivering with cold during the warming spring in Southern California.
The pain got worse, 20 Vicodin a day at times and I still hurt. I had violent coughing attacks. This went on for months, it was like living in hell. We were worried, very worried. Visited many doctors, health specialists, holistic doctors. Nothing. Finally we went to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale for 10 days of testing. I was a lab rat; prodded, poked, stabbed with needles, hooked up to machines for 10 days. No diagnosis. Might be cystic fibrosis or a sinus infection. They released me without a course of treatment.
We had been going to Mass at our local parish in Solana Beach after not attending for many years. I was far from devout, I mostly went to Mass because my wife wanted us to go.
I viewed it more as a commemorative ceremony celebrating the life and teaching of Jesus, not so much as the miraculous and mysterious theology I had been marinated in. Being sick, I hadn’t been going to Sunday Mass, but one Sunday my sister-in-law put together a small family visit to a healing service at church, behind the altar after mass. An older woman whom I recognized conducted the service. She sat me in a straight backed wooden chair with a few friends, family and my wife behind me with their hands on my shoulders. She knelt at my feet and placed her hands on my heart while mumbling and whispering a prayer I couldn’t really hear or understand. Occasionally she would whisper Jesus, again and again. I started breathing deeply and quickly and then laughing and crying simultaneously for a few minutes, and then it was over and we went home.
Slowly I started feeling better, until the symptoms more or less departed as mysteriously as they had begun.
Why did I get better, I asked myself? Going back to my Christian education, Jesus said we could heal ourselves if we had faith. What was faith? Sure, it’s belief, but in what exactly. I had been back and forth about the existence of God, you know, the Biblical God, and in that I did not have faith. But the god of existence, the great foundation of the cosmos, the background hum of being that was everywhere and everything, well sure, that was closer to the yahweh, the name god without words or description, the God of the cosmos.
I did have this sense that we can heal ourselves and others. I did, after all, heal Flip City Kitty with mumbled words and hands on his body. So maybe the healing service with friends and family putting their hands on me and mumbling prayer took away my doubt, allowed me to believe I could be healed. I don’t believe that, as Jim Morrison said, you can petition the lord with prayer. You can’t ask for things, but maybe prayer is a vehicle that helps us suspend disbelief and these are powers we are all born with. Powers that can heal. Maybe that is what happened to me. I am eternally grateful for the people who also suspended their disbelief and doubt to perform the healing ceremony that Sunday behind the altar.
Turns out I had a really bad sinus infection, all my sinuses were closed off, filled with pus and polyps which was a huge and constant source of poison that was overwhelming my system. And now after 20 years I am healthy, because of four sinus surgeries. I now have no sense of smell, but I am alive and very active, the mysterious ailment growing smaller and smaller in the rear view. Cause of the infection was not diagnosed, but probably it was surfing.
I surfed as often as I could, before work, after work, weekends, sometimes three or four times a week, if the waves were good. Sometimes when the waves were small and nearly nonexistent, or it was windy, or if the tides weren’t right, which is what things are normally. Great waves are the exception.
Mostly surfed locally in North County San Diego, with occasional trips to Mexico, Costa Rica and Bali. Mostly Mexico, where the water quality was terrible and filled with raw sewage as well as toxic runoff. This is true for all urban, suburban beaches, people mean pollution, the more people the more the pollution. I surfed Cardiff Reef just after the rain, I could see the brown river running out to sea from the estuary at the beach where the reef is. I paddled out right next to the brown river of whatever came down the creek and into the estuary. Farm runoff, homeless camp effluent, animal waste, toxic sludge, leaked sewage, paddled right through it to get to the great, pumping surf out over the reef.
I got an immediate ear infection with orange foam billowing out when I put some hydrogen peroxide into my ear. My lungs filled with the infectious drip from my sinuses and I would have to go to emergency with pneumonia for breathing treatments that became recurring events. This seemed to start the cascading symptoms that got worse and worse until they just got better.
After graduation from Loyola High School and then University I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in Catholic theology of the liberal, scholastic school of the Jesuits, I got interested in Eastern religions of Buddhism and Hinduism and read a lot about spiritual teachers, gurus and the Buddha. My faith had begun to weaken in high school mostly through confession when the sexually perverse underbelly of the Church began to reveal itself.
One time in highschool, and in the confessional (Again.) confessing my sins as the result of a great date the night before when I had managed to feel some actual bare breast (not just side titty) and sadly felt it was a sin, as I had been trained to think. The confessional was a dark wooden structure in the old style granite church. The priest was just visible through the dark sheer curtain. I told him that I had touched a girl in an impure way, just as I was telling him my sin I saw beads of sweat form on his forehead, below his thin comb over and above his collar and cassock. He asked, “Did you get to the oil well? Well no, I said. Six Hail Mary’s he said.
Another time just after confession I asked one to the older priests if French Kissing was a sin, I guess because I had been doing quite a lot of it. He said French Kissing outside of marriage was always a sin, a Mortal sin. Well, a Mortal Sin is no small thing, it creates an indelible mark on all of our all souls, a mark that will cause shame when we meet God and he sees the stain of sin on us. Everyone else would also see the stain, or in my case multiple stains and we would be forever shamed, even though we were then, presumably, in heaven. And this stain wasn’t even the one I would have gotten if I got to the oil well! And, speaking of stains, what about masturbation? By now my soul must have been just one big stain that even daily trips to the confessional wouldn’t wash away. Needed stronger stain remover, also having stains on my invisible spirit body in heaven seemed to me a tad contradictory, so I started having some doubts, lots of doubts.
But back in Sixth Grade I was devout, enraptured, bathed in the happy brain chemistry of certainty. The nuns, on the lookout for recruits, noticed, and started to prime me for the seminary. This was just before my more true rebellious, or maybe just normal male nature started to show, so guess I was looking priestly to them.
They got me to sign up for an overnight tour of the seminary in Watsonville, which was a long, slow trip with other candidates in a yellow school bus up the 101 from Los Angeles. This would have been in 1959 or 60 so the state was largely undeveloped, just before the huge boom in growth that paved over the orchards and replaced the flowering fields with housing tracts, parking lots and shopping centers, just miles and miles of hills, trees, farms and ranches, my first trip up California was eye poppingly beautiful and enticing. Over the years I would make many more trips up and down the coast, mostly in search of surf. But then I hadn’t started surfing yet, so it was on to the seminary.
The seminary was the classic California Mission style, red tile roofs, thick adobe and stucco walls, arches, red-stained concrete floors or blcak linoleum tiles, with patios and verdant gardens. The priests were all in long cassocks, with sashes and crosses around their necks. We had dinner in the great hall, I’m thinking pot roast, potatoes, and peas that weren’t quite green, and went to bed in the dorm. Next morning was Mass, of course, then a guided tour of the seminary and a class about what the life of a seminarian was like, with a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys thrown in.
The trip to the seminary was eye-opening for me, my decision was clear, I was not going to be a priest. It wasn’t a repudiation of my faith just a sober assessment of the forces of biology, incipient maturity and the realization that sex was going to be the decider. I liked girls, girls liked me (Or I liked to think so.), so that was done. And, of course, the random erections, the constant reminder the penis sent the brain, “Hey, I’m down here, can you feel me?”. Yes, indeed, I could, as well as a growing awareness that this thing was good for more than just peeing.
Right about this time, sixth maybe seventh grade at St. Jerome’s, the boys going through puberty (When everything changed!) started getting spontaneous erections just sitting at our desks. Boom, boner, no reason. Embarrassing but also funny because they pushed out and bulged out against the salt and pepper corduroy of our school pants. Couldn’t hide, it was clearly visible, all we could do was just put our heads down on our desks, laughing along with the other guys as we waited it out, which in those days seemed like forever. (Oh, to have that problem today!) One day I was the boner victim hiding my head in shame and laughing, red faced along with the class when the teacher came in. Seeing me hiding my head, right off she says, “Michael, why don’t you come up here in front of the class and tell us about your summer vacation (I really don’t remember what she asked me to tell them, or maybe I was to read passage from a book, don’t really remember.) Anyway, there I was standing in front of the class, hunched over to try to hide the bulge in my pants, and the Sister says, “Michael, why don’t you stand up straight?”. I was panicking and searching for a reply, I knew my Dad would hunch over around the house when his back was bothering him, so I said, “Sister, it’s my back.” Well, about now the guys are starting to snicker and the Sister, sensing some sort of shenanigan, says “Stand up straight, Michael.” I stand up, showing a very visible protrusion, the class erupts in laughter, my face is bright red and I’m starting to sweat. She says, “Oh, just go a sit down.” turning her embarrassed face away. So, probably not going to be a priest, definitely not a priest.
I continued in Catholic school all the way through university, my unwavering faith wavering to various degrees the entire time, as the magical thinking began to lose it’s mystery and began to look like, well, magical thinking. Things like the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, central to the faith, started looking silly, (But that could be the devil tricking me!), so I had to keep the faith, so to speak, and not think about the cognitive dissonance careening around my brain. The emotions attached to the pageantry of the ceremonies, the indoctrinating hymns sung with feeling in unison, the classes, the homilies and stories, and the friends and family all laid waste to rationality.
Then in college I began to see the institution of the church as an authoritarian and hierarchical medieval sort of feudalism of rank and privilege, as well as the huge amount of Church properties and accumulation of more than a thousand years of wealth - proudly displayed as necessary status so the church could impress states and monarchies as kindred world leaders. It was then that the Liberation Gospel, inspired by Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, started creating rifts between the Traditionalists and the Liberal wings of the church. I remember a mass at a friend's place in Ojai where a few of us gathered around the priest, dressed in civvies, said a simple short mass with a loaf of French bread and some nice red wine as communion. This liberal wing grew in size and stature and with the bold actions of priests like the Berrigan brothers, who poured blood on draft files at the government Induction offices, began to swell the ranks of the antiwar movement in the church. That church was more like it, and so I hung on to my wavering faith with a very tenuous grip, the liberal wing making me temporarily comfortable as a member.
But thinking about the symbols doing battle in my head, the cruel bloody coss versus the happy enlightened man. I really seemed inclined towards the fool on the hill.
Fool on the Hill
Day after day, alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he's just a fool
And he never gives an answer
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
Well on the way, head in a cloud
The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
But nobody ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to make
And he never seems to notice
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings
But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
He never listens to them
He knows that they're the fools
They don't like him
The fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning 'round
- The Beatles
Maybe god is nature, the universe that we are blessed with in a life that is a random accident, an accident that becomes our lived reality. Nothing summoned these feelings of the divine so much as nature. For this I have to thank my parents, not that they were naturalists or tree huggers, they weren’t. Dad had always taken all of us on trips to the Mojave desert, or to the Hollywood Hills. And since I was surfing, I certainly encountered nature onan intimate level, surfing with the kelp, fish, birds, seals, dolphins, whales and sharks. But the cathedral I would discover was in the Eastern Sierras.
My Mom sang alto in the church choir which became sort of famous in LA choir circles, and she became good friends with a cardiologist from UCLA, who she started working for in the 80s, when after a very long layoff, to have a big family, she went back to work managing the Cardiology Department for hr friend, now the lead cardiologist. They started going to June Lake, staying in rustic cabins right at the foot of Carson Peak, an eleven thousand foot mountain where we hiked to the summit, when I was very much younger! Mary and I joined the three families at June Lake sometime in the early 80s. It was there that I saw god and prayed in his cathedral of pines, firs, Aspens, Oaks and cottonwoods. It was a wordless prayer, or maybe just and oh my god, repeated over and over. Around each bend in the trail, each step through a high altitude meadow, hiking the forest floor thick with needles, soft and bouncy underfoot.
It was there that I discovered, or at least confirmed my suspicions, that god was in nature, god was nature, all of it, from atoms to mountains and planets, suns and galaxies. All of life is sacred, everything alive and knowing where it was and what it had to do to survive. I had inadvertently discovered the nature imperative.
“There is mounting evidence, from dozens and dozens of researchers, that nature has benefits for both physical and psychological human wellbeing,” says Lisa Nisbet, PhD, a psychologist at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who studies connectedness to nature. “You can boost your mood just by walking in nature, even in urban nature. And the sense of connection you have with the natural world seems to contribute to happiness even when you’re not physically immersed in nature.” - American Psychological Association
The pernicious idea of “manifest destiny” fueled the conquest of the continent, empowered the genocide of native Americans for their lands, and gave economic imputus for slavery. That much is clear, but it also fueled the seemingly unlimited growth of the extraction industry. There’s oil, coal, gas in that ground that I have a god-given right to to use, in this case fossil fuels, because the abundance of natural resources on this land was given to us by god for our benefit, and his gifts to us must be honored. This in turn fueled the massive destruction of nature in pursuit of that god-given resource, the overarching value of that environment not appreciated. Of course the astronomical profits helped a mite to, as a matter of fact, if you seek to protect our natural world, you are accused of being a tree-hugger, which is of course anti-labor, because lumberjacks need to eat too.
And so, by extension, we are doing god’s will in developing all the resources he left for us right there in the ground. Missing from this philosophy is the sun and wind, true energy gifts from creation, god if you will, for everyone. Not just landowners, everyone, making them the democratized source for cheap, clean energy. The fact that sun and wind are everywhere, for everyone, make them socialist, which is exactly why they are winning the energy battle today.
If we indeed are a government of, by and for the actual people, then sun and wind are indeed god’s gifts, gifts don’t destroy the environment or break the bank. Just the opposite, renewable energy has the potential to make people wealthier, and healthier. We just need the wisdom to end the fossil fuel plutocracy for a bright future.
Science has been telling us that we must cut our fossil fuel use in HALF by 2030, or else we face real and irreversible planetary warming with the epoc ending catastrophe guaranteed. We have been spending the future, a future that is not ours to steal, from our children and grandchildren. This is the one thing that I continue to pray for, praying to a god that doesn’t exist, or that doesn’t enter into human history to alter realities for the benefit of the prayerful. Nonetheless I pray. It’s like the automatic urge to make the sign of the cross when I’m stressed.
And I am stressed about this indeed, trying to avert extinction.
Dear god, that doesn’t exist, help us! More realistic to pray for massive demonstrations for rational and moral responses to this civilization ending emergency.
