Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

I've had rather a long day due to several things:

--Staying up to almost three this morning, watching the last handful of episodes of Princess Tutu. Yes, I watched a magical girl anime: it's incredibly well-done, light-hearted and sweet, but with enough dark elements to balance it properly; it's got fairy tale tropes all over the place, it's beautifully drawn and animated, it's got ballet in it (proof of how well-done this anime is: the ballet steps and hand gestures/mime are clearly drawn from real ballet), it's got a great soundtrack that blends all sorts of clips from classic ballet scores and classical music. WOW!!

And it's got an awesome, creepy, string-pulling villain who, if you think about it, would give someone *else* a run for his money when it comes to messing with people's lives. It's one thing to mess with people who are pretty much fellow players in the world you exist in. It's another thing to mess with people in a world that *you* created...

--Appointment with my therapist and another very good one: I'm shocked at how well I've been the past few months, in spite of everything that's going on.

--Going to a talk by Patrick Madrid, at St. William's, this time on global aging; his sense of humor is still as crazy as ever and he can still take a dry topic and make it interesting. I wished I could have told him some of my stories from the trenches and told him how I'm already seeing the effects (ie. the Mrs. Tollivers I've had to deal with). And his crazy wit, which borders on playful religious satire, still manages to blow right past those with Sense of Humor Deficiency Syndrome:

He was giving a series of talks at a parish which had a statue of Our Lady of Fatima in the church's garden, along with three little statues of the three seers of Fatima kneeling before it. Patrick Madrid turned to his assistant and said, "Wow, Catholicism is such a great religion: not only do we worship statues, even our statues worship statues!" (Referring of course to the common misunderstanding that Catholics worship the images of the Saints/Our Lady) He used the story as an ice-breaker for one of the talks he was giving at that parish, and later some wonk got up during the Q & A session and pointed out that this was proof that Catholics really do worship "graven images". Buh?? :: Laughs::

I've mentioned that we usually go to Mass at a parish which has the pre-Vatican II Mass in Latin, plus the young pastor has revived a lot of the older traditions, such as sprinkling the congregation with holy water before Mass begins. Well, today, I was right in the line of fire during said sprinkling and I got a liberal shower over my head (fortunately covered by my black fedora) and my open missal. Even still, I got some holy water right in the eye (my right one, which is my weak eye to begin with). I'm fine, but it does hurt a little.

Also: still reading Rob Thurmann's "Deathwish", and to anyone reading this or who has read it, be sure and mark pages 188 and 189 for re-reading if you're ever having a bad day and need a lift. There is a really sweet (well, relative to the Dark and Edgy content of the series) Crowning Moment of Heartwarming on these two pages. I don't want to be too spoilery, but it involves the two of them recalling one of the bright spots in their rough childhood. Gotta love the bromance between the Leandros brothers, but these two pages just dial it up to Eleven in a good way.

Partly an addendum to my last post... Just been watching the televised version of Midnight Mass at the Vatican. At least for the recessional, they stepped up security: four men in suits, one of them the commander of the Swiss Guard, surrounded His Holiness, keeping eagle eyes on the crowd. Now, if they'd just done this to begin with...

This has inspired two things in me: the first and more serious (and more obvious) is to pray for the healing of that disturbed (and disturbing) woman. The second ties into one of the 12 Days of Fanfic ideas I'm tossing around: I'd decided to write a plotless sketch set in the Trinity Blood universe, centering around midnight Mass at the Vatican, with some mild Esther/Abel sweetness (mostly just friends, though I have a feeling the Church in the TB-verse may have relaxed the rule of celibacy in the clergy and the religious since the human population was partly wiped out). Now I'm holding a tracer bullet on a plot-bunny inspired by this evening's real-world incident; my concern though, would this fic be a little too close for comfort for some people, and would it come off like one of those wonkily-written "X disaster happens in the Y universe" fanfics that pop up every time there's some catastrophe, with X being the disaster/tragedy of the moment and Y representing the fanficer's pet fandom. Granted, my first publicly posted fanfic *ever* was a Matrix fic that I wrote during the aftermath of 9/11, when I was still trying to get my head around what was going on (the fic isn't my best effort, but one has to start somewhere...), I still hold some mental reservations about this kind of story: Does it take advantage or capitalize on a tragedy or a catastrophe? Or am I just overthinking things (as usual)?

Sidetrack: I've also confirmed my hunch that the creator of Trinity Blood, the late Sunao Yoshida, attended a Catholic high school; I'd suspected he was either raised Catholic or gone to a Catholic school, given how much he gets right about Catholicism (alongside how much he got sideways, not necessarily wrong. "Wrong" implies ignorance or coloring the facts or just plain ignoring the facts. For the last, see also "Dan Browned" on TVTropes.org). I've come to so much of an appreciation of the TB-verse that while re-watching the anime, I said under my breath, "If you're going to write about fictitious Vatican assassins -- and I swear, if you believed Hollywood and novelists of that bend, then the Vatican has more covert ops agents than the CIA, the KGB and MI6 combined -- this is the way to do it."

Also, there was a passage in His Holiness's sermon which made the Matrix fan side of me perk up its ears (yes, it still exists, even if the Matrix series doesn't quite hold the center of my fannish fixations right now). He spoke of "sleepers awakening from a dream world" and of course that made me think people awakening from the Matrix. I'm waiting for the translated text of the sermon to turn up on the Vatican's official website so I can share the exact words; I tried to find it elsewhere and I hit a couple of pages that made my anti-virus software go into defense mode. :: Growls::

And yes, I am up this late because I am waiting for someone rattling around the living room to Go To Bed so I can take my turn at being the Christmas Angel...

Just got our big tree into the living room! Unfortunately, this meant cleaning the living room, which was in dire need of a dusting, and though I was tackling bathrooms while my mother was dusting, I still got a lungful of dust which caused me to be pretty miserable for some time. Gaah... T'will be worth it, though!

And we're waiting with bated breath for the big winter storm that's on the way: the forecasters are predicting thunder-snow squalls, which are a rare but delightful sight: the crystalline beaut of snow and the power of thunder!

Change in plans in the 12 Days of Fanfic: I added a Trinity Blood fic to the list since I had a lovely idea pop into my head while I was taking a bath. I'm planning to start rewatching the series soon, and I'm also twiddling with a review of it from a Catholic perspective. In a few words: there's things that are off-kilter about how the Church is portrayed, but there's nothing to object about. If anything, it makes the Church look really cool and awesome and there's an element of what's been called "muscular Christianity", ie. strength in faith, in character and in defending the faith and the innocent, sometimes with words and sometimes with your fists or your guns... or your awesome Crusnik abilities. Some people might get tetchy about Father Tres Iques, but I think this is a case of the Church bestowing "honorary Holy Orders" on someone (or something with a certain amount of non-biological intelligence). This used to be done a long time ago, in that someone would receive Holy Orders, usually because they'd served the Church in some unusual capacity, but they were dispensed from the regular duties of the priesthood, eg. saying one Mass every day; the one instance that comes to mind was St. Jerome, who translated the entire Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Latin: he was given Holy Orders but because his health wasn't that great, he was dispensed from the regular duties of the priesthood so that he could continue his work.

The only other thing that raises my eyebrows is the female bishop and the female Cardinal: not likely to happen, though no doubt, there were nuns who stepped in to help serve the Church heroically in the wake of the apocalyptic events before the start of the series. This actually put me in mind of the crypto-Catholics who kept the Faith alive in Japan after the persecutions during the Tokugawa period, when dozens of priests were arrested or driven out of Japan: in the two hundred years between then and the reopening of Japan to the West in the 1800s, there were native priests and nuns who hid in the more remote areas and helped keep a small pilot light of Catholicism lit by teaching the Faith to those who would accept it and encouraging them to pass it on to their children. Of course, in time, the only sacrament that could be offered was baptism, but there was a village where one family kept a set of vestments, Mass books and sacred vessels hidden in their house and passing them on from one generation to the next, in the hope that some day the priests would be allowed to return to Japan. They also helped keep a vaguely defined small parish of sorts together, offering a rudimentary service on Sunday and praying the Rosary. They even repurposed statues of Kwan Yin as images of Our Lady and in some cases carved small crucifixes on the backs of Buddha statues (this actually pops up in one anime series, and from an odd source: there's a scene in Yami no Matsuei where the *main villain* of the series talks about this; I'm still puzzling over that, though I have some goo theories on it...).

Well, that wound up as more than a few words. :: laughs::

"Wear the old coat, buy the new book." -- Attributed to Erasmus

Been a bit of a busy book-buying week for me. Tuesday night, my mom had an appointment at Lahey Clinic, so I hitched along and went to the Burlington Barnes & Noble: the "Strange Brew" anthology -- featuring a new Dresden Files short story -- had just come out and I was determined to get a copy. I hear it's currently number 1 in Fantasy books on Amazon.com. And it looks like SMeyer has currently fallen off the NYT Bestsellers list, ousted by Charlaine Harris, she of the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries.

And then yesterday, as I was browsing the book section of a local WalMart, I found "Strange Brew" on the shelf next to the Twilight and the House of Night novels! I guess the manager of this particular WalMart realizes that urban fantasy sells -- especially better-written stuff.

Also nipped into the Used Book Superstore in Burlington, since I had a gift card that still had some money on it: there's someone who likes to unload their World of Darkness novels there: I picked up a two-in-one collection of Werewolf: The Apocalypse novels this time, and before, I've found a couple Vampire: The Requiem novels.

Friday at the gift shop at St. Joe's, I picked up two teen novels from Sophia Institute Press's new Imagio imprint: while I might be irritated with the Church, I'm still philosophically and culturally attached to it, so reading well-written Catholic novels helps boost my spirits a little. I just get a little depressed when I find better Catholics between the covers of a book than I do in real life. Well, enough angst: the books are part of their new "John Paul 2 High School" series, dealing with a group of teenagers attending a small group home-school of sorts started by a group of parents who decided to take the matters of their kids' education into their own hands. I've only just started reading them, and so far they're pretty good.

Unfortunately, the thread I copied this -- my post -- from got locked due to people having hissy fits over what it means to be male or to be female and trying to imply that if you are same-sex attracted in any form, then you really aren't male or female. I wrote this in response to another poster who feels as lonely in the Church as I do and for the same reason. I was hoping a few people would offer a little affirmation to what I had to say. I know people are going to disagree with me on some of the points, but that's okay: we can agree to disagree. I just felt like sharing what I had to say, since I feel this is one of my better pieces of writing on something that is so fundamental to who I am:

( Cut for length and a sensitive subject )

Taking a break from writing to share with you a bit that someone posted to the MxO forums: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24598508 It seems the Vatican's official astronomer has said to believe that there might be intelligent life on other planets is *not* incompatible with the Faith. Try telling that to the rigorist types who are down on people like me for believing there's other forms of life besides humans and angels, but this gives me a lot of hope. St. Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest best known for his martyrdom in Auschwitz, believed that there were other intelligences besides us in the universe, and he even drew up some quirky little designs for a rocketship to send to any distant planets, for missionaries to share the Gospel with them. I bet he's thrilled to know one of the officials in the hierarchy has made an official statement on this!

I was going to post a rambling quietly ranty bit about the Catholic (or rather, the quasi-Catholic) elements in "Hellsing", but I realized I owed you this post about the fate of my parish and its home.

Some of you have suggested that the folks who want to keep the church open should have staged a sit-in prayer vigil. This idea had been raised several times, but the general consensus among the leaders of the group trying to keep the church open was that things like this constituted "apostasy". I know, you're all thinking, "Bzuh? How is that an act of apostasy?" My reaction as well. I looked into it. I looked in the Cathechism of the Catholic Church. I looked in the Code of Canon Law. Didn't see an explicit statement that holding a prayer vigil in a closed church in an effort to force the hand of the diocesan powers that be to reopen it constituted an act of apostasy. Here's Wikipedia.com's definition of apostasy, or at least the first paragraph of the article:

Apostasy (from Greek αποστασία, meaning a defection or revolt, from απο, apo, "away, apart", στασις, stasis, "standing") is a term generally employed to describe the formal renunciation of one's religion, especially if the motive is deemed unworthy. In a technical sense, as used sometimes by sociologists without the pejorative connotations of the word, the term refers to renunciation and criticism of, or opposition to one's former religion. One who commits apostasy is an apostate, or one who apostatises. In older Western literature, the term typically referred to baptized Christians who left their faith, thus, according to some Christians, were never "Christians" in the first place. Apostasy is generally not a self-definition: very few former believers call themselves apostates and they generally consider this term to be a pejorative. One of the possible reasons for this renunciation is loss of faith, another is the failure of alleged religious indoctrination or brainwashing.

My only guess as to why they came up with this is excuse is that to be praying in the church after it got closed would be to disobey the orders of the diocese, the very people that we're supposed to be standing up to. And since much of this parish is traditionalist-style Catholic (I'm a traditionalist in aesthetics, but I'm certainly not one in thinking. I've been accused of being one by liberal Catholics, and extremist traditionalists, or "traddies", as I call them, have accused me of being liberal. Which I'm not.), ie, they believe you have to obey what the priests/bishops tell you, even when it's a fine-point matter that really doesn't work for you.

Now, I can follow what a priest or a bishop tells me as long as it doesn't clash with the teachings of the Church. But when it has to do with where and how I'm going to worship within the bounds of the Faith, or it has something to do with what I should be doing with my life that doesn't clash with the moral code, and it doesn't square with what works for me, I know enough to draw the line. I know enough not to let anyone push me around in this regard. I'm like St. Katherine Drexell in this regard: she wanted to be a nun, her family -- which was very well-to-do; I think her father was a Pennsylvania coal and oil baron -- wanted her to find a nice man to marry; she spoke to a priest about it, who told her to go along with what her family wanted for her. She quietly resisted and went on to found an order of teaching Sisters who worked with American Indians and Blacks in the West, helping them raise their quality of life.

I know, the people in my parish are screwed in the head. They're trying to appeal their case, but it's bogged down with the usual legal red tape. I don't think the church is reopening any time soon, and if it winds up that it never reopens, I can't help wondering if these people who refused to let themselves be a little civilly disobedient wound up gutting their last chance. If it never reopens, they may have their own stubbornness and resistence to change to blame. It's a zero-sum game between two groups of rules-lawyers, is what it is.

...I've been having a hard time posting lately. Please don't think I've dropped off the face of the Internet, I've just been wrestling with a lot of tough stuff.

My disillisonment with the Catholic Church -- as an organization -- is still eating at me, and I'm seriously looking outside it for some other path to follow. Granted, I've spoken to a couple of priests about it, and they keep telling me to not let the organization get in the way of Christ, to focus less on the fanclub, and more on *Him*. But I'm afraid this isn't working for me. The fanclub is just too loud and too obnoxious, between the rules-lawyers, the smug-marrieds-with-kids, the polite borderline homophobes who have trouble discerning having a same-sex attraction quirk and acting on those attractions and everything else. I bet even Christ Himself would agree with Oscar Wilde when he said, "Heaven preserve me from my followers." Right now, the only faiths that attract me are Taoism (which, like Buddhism, is more like a philosophy than an actual faith/religion), and Druidic Paganism. But I'll admit, I'm hesitating about embracing the latter on two counts:

1.) My dad will throw a fit over it, since he tends to be very rigid about religious identity. I've already spoken with my mom about her; she said she could accept it, but she'd be wondering why and wondering what she did wrong when she raised me. I told her, this is my decision if and when I make it, and it's no reflection on her as a parent; I'm a semi-adult and I have to find my own way through this universe and beyond.

2.) Fluffy pagans... Mind you, if you're pagan and reading this, and your approach to the Craft is more light-hearted, that's your way of doing things and I respect it. It's the people who inSIST fluffiness is close to Goddess-liness that bore me to tears. I like my goddesses with their at times anything but metaphoric fangs and claws intact. On the other hand, I can't abide the femi-nazi-like pagans who insist that the bitchier goddesses (ie. my personal favorite, the Morrigan, are reactions to OMG teh repressive male deities. By all accounts, it seems the Morrigan is bitchy because she *is* bitchy.

I'm going over some really rough ground right now, is all...

One of my co-workers asked me at the end of my shift, "How do you do it, Renee?" meaning, how I managed to get through my work shift without getting exhausted on an insanely busy day. I told her I practise Tai Chi, which helps me re-set everything once I get home.

Needless to say, I didn't manage to squeeze in my Tai Chi form: I nipped up to St. Joe's to attend Good Friday services. I got there late, but at least I made it. Spent some time afterward meditating and reading more of Francois Mauriac's "Holy Thursday".

And I am now the proud owner of my pre-ordered copy of "White Night", book 9 of the Dresden Files.