Writer's Block Already?

If you want a boring life, I think your best bet is to start a blog. As soon as you do, all the crazy things that happen to you and the people in your life -- the things that you thought you'd love to blog about -- will stop happening. Or maybe they -- and your life -- will suddenly seem less interesting, and two weeks into the blog you'll feel like you've got nothing to say.

But maybe I'm just not ready to expose all the crazy things that happen to people in my life yet, and nothing recently has provoked me to the point of spewing my political, social, religious, or sexual guts yet.

Or maybe it has. I didn't think I'd end up writing much about religion, because I'm about as un-religious as it gets. Especially here in the South, where everyone seems to have a "church home" and ministers approach you in the grocery store and invite you to theirs. Not the type of "home" that I'm used to having a man invite me to -- or the type of man I'm used to being invited by, but that's another story.

Lately either the pressure of living under the buckle of the Bible belt or subconscious lingering doubt about the fate of my soul has started me on a half-hearted search for a "church home." I'm a recovering Catholic with a laundry list of complaints about the current state of that particular faith, so I turned my attention almost immediately to the numerous Protestant possibilities. A brief stint of being married to a Baptist convinced me that wasn't the direction to go. Not because I have anything against Baptists, even the one that I married, but because going to Baptist services made me miss the familiar Catholic Mass. Some people might argue that I want churchgoing to be a mindless ritual rather than a deep religious experience, but I find it hard to experience religion deeply when I'm worrying about saying the wrong prayer, standing when I should sit, or reading aloud during the parts that only the minister should read.

After attending a funeral at an Episcopal church, I thought I'd found the perfect solution: a service that was as comfortable as last century's jeans in a denomination that's living in this century (or at least some of it is). But there's no Episcopal church in my small town, and I realized that I needed to be practical above all else: I have a much better chance of getting to church on Sunday if I minimize the effort required. I decided that I would check out the local Catholic church, try to have an open mind and thick skin, and concentrate on deep religious experience rather than deep resentment of Catholic doctrine.

My decision hit a brick wall when I turned on NPR the next day to hear their series of stories on the scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church, and I realized that I'm not ready to forgive, forget, and support with my collection dollars all the practices, preachings, and ideas that drove me from the Catholic Church in the first place.

I don't believe the people who say that in order to embrace a faith you have to embrace all of its laws and teachings wholesale. I believe in coming as close as I can to doing right and having a long talk with God about the times I fall short. But I realized that there wasn't much about the Catholic Church that I could embrace anymore that wouldn't leave me feeling a little bit dirty and a lot bit disillusioned.

I do credit my thirteen years of Catholic education for teaching me how to have those long talks with God. And for helping me to become an intelligent person capable of questioning and drawing my own conclusions rather than swallowing what I'm fed. Maybe their success in that is part of what's led to the Catholic Church's decline.

So I'm still church-homeless, though I'm taking another look at an Episcopal church that's not too far from the couch where I spend my Sunday mornings now. In the meantime, I'm sticking to long talks with God and hoping for the best.