As an adult, I often feel I should have conquered my weaknesses by now. I become discouraged when I'm confronted by the same problems over and over again. Sometimes I get weary ...I'd rather be a hypocrite than jettison fixed standards of behavior.
Help me think of the cross you carried. Help me continue to hope that I can make the changes in my life I need to. You didn't give up. I can have the strength to get up again as well.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
On Religion and Hypocrisy
I'm Catholic. I'm also a hypocrite as are all Catholics. Of course we're hypocrites. That's the point. We believe in fixed standards of behavior and we are imperfect individuals. Hypocrisy comes with the territory. This dawned on me while attending Stations of the Cross this Lent. From the Ninth Station of the Cross, Jesus Falls a Third Time:
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My undergraduate years were full of explorations into Buddhism, Hinduism, theosophy and the like. I vividly recall a conversation I had with an Episcopal priest (back then, in 1968, the Episcopal Church was still Christian) about why I stopped attending church in my teens. This is how it went:
Fr. Anglican: Why don't you go to church anymore?
Apostatito: Because the churches are full of hypocrites.
Fr. Anglican: Isn't that where they belong?
batio: (BAY-tio; n) a measure of quality or effectiveness for artificial fishing baits, wherein the quantity of fish caught with Brand A is divided by the quantity caught with Brand B.
Secular, that's priceless. Also, I need to get Jacob off his fat can and have him start posting captchadefs.
I often hear people claim they stopped going to church because of the "hypocrites", but I think they're just using that as a cheap out. The real reason is that church is dull, dull, dull.
I'll be upfront. I quit going to church because it bored me stiff. I don't know if the priests ever actually gave any "moral instruction" because whenever I actually tried to listen to their homilies, I'd be out like a light. The only way I managed to stay awake was by being an altar boy for five years, and then I kept awake by looking at stuff, considering the architecture, and looking out over the congregation to count the people dropping off to sleep. There were a lot of them. Sometimes nearly 50%, when the priest was feeling particularly long-winded. To this day, I can't remember the topic of a single homily.
Also, spending time around the priests as an altar boy, all I saw was a bunch of old guys concerned with performing their ceremonies, being a bit curt and abrupt with people in the confessionals, and generally just trying to deal with the professional and social obligations of being a priest. They never actually mentioned morality, at least not while I was around.
Now, maybe the fact that we were at a rural church meant that we were getting the lower-tier priests who had lost their enthusiasm, failed to move up the ladder, and were so disillusioned that they were just going through the motions, but still, that's how it looked to me.
I always found the old story about the woman who felt horrible because ever time she went to confession, she was confessing the same sins. The priest asked her: "Oh, so you want you should be creating new ones?"
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