You might notice it looks a little bit different around here.

I finally wrote that About page and we cleaned things up a bit.  I say “we” because my husband did all the actual work.

I was happy with the basic design, I just wanted it to be a little simpler, cleaner, and for it to be easier to find my posts.  So now I have a widget on the side that has all my posts organized into categories.

Wait, don’t look yet.  I mean it will have them all organized.  Here in the next few days.  I swear.

See, when I moved my blog to wordpress, I never used tags and categories in any kind of way that made any sense.   Now I need to go back and assign a good portion of my posts to the right category.

I’ve been whining about it a lot, but it’s the kind of thing I actually enjoy doing.  I’m weird like that.

Anyway, I noticed that I seemed to be feeling extra pissy about my Being Catholic category.  Like, I actually wanted to get rid of it altogether.

I don’t think there’s any one reason for this exactly.  Maybe some of it stems from a desire to not have obviously political or religious things on my blog, other than a post here and there.  The internet is a strange beast when it comes to such things, and I’ve seen enough political/religious/younameit disagreements on twitter and in blog comments lately to make my head spin.

It’s not just the internet, though.  People in real life are just as likely to make judgments about what you believe or don’t believe based on affiliation only, for lack of a better word.

Just FYI, there ARE people of faith out there who don’t necessarily agree with each.little.tiny.part of our chosen belief system.  So we think and we educate ourselves and we pray and we gently push for change from the inside.

I would prefer if we didn’t have a death penalty.  Because I believe it’s up to God to take life, not humans.  Soo, umm yeah.  I toe the party line on that one, so to speak.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Jesus doesn’t give a shit if you love and want to marry someone who has the same parts as you.

But all that stuff was only part of it.  I’m going to tell you guys a secret.  I haven’t been to Mass in a long time.  Somehow all my Lent plans went awry somewhere, I never made it to Confession, or Easter Mass.  So it was almost a year ago.

Catholics reading this are crossing themselves and praying for me right now.  Like, they won’t finish reading the post until they finish their prayer.

The rest of you are all, that’s totally not a long time.

After sorting through all my “excuse reasons” why I wasn’t going (my Church is farther away now, I have to go to Confession first, general laziness) coupled with some things I realized on New Year’s Eve, I figured it out.  And it made me really sad.

It’s not my faith I’m disappointed in, it’s my parish.  Specifically, certain people in my parish.

I’m still hesitant to give much detail, but it all started when I took a job in my parish office.  Those who read my Parish Place blogs on myspace have an advantage in that they know the whole story, and I’m sorry that I can’t repeat it here.

In fact, I’ve abandoned all desire to ever repost them because I don’t want to relive it.  I’d like to print them all out and burn them.  Closure and all that.

But I watched what was once a close relationship with my pastor who guided me through an annulment and joining the faith completely fall to shit.  One of my crimes? Asking the other priest in the parish to be the main celebrant of our wedding and to do our marriage prep.

Why did I do that? Because having gone through one divorce I wanted to do our prep with the priest my husband related to and considered a friend.

One of the ways he showed his dissatisfaction was to schedule an appointment at the parish during my wedding so I would be sure to SEE him there, not co-celebrating my wedding.

He did, in fact, co-celebrate, but I later learned he had to be practically forced to.

Even after all that (that’s just one of many stories) there was enough good in all the other parts of my parish that I stuck around anyway, at both the job and my parish.  I eventually quit because I was offered a part-time job in my field.  They all knew about my medical issues and our problems conceiving.

Sure, some of them stayed in touch for a while, here and there.  But it seemed like more and more often, I was the one doing the initiating.  It eventually got old, so I stopped trying.

I mean, isn’t that what you do when you aren’t terribly interested in friendship with someone? You respond minimally when they contact you, and you never initiate contact with them.

Seeing as how I can read all these social cues, I was surprised when we were invited to what was basically a parish office party on New Year’s Eve.  Surprised and happy I should say.  I was looking forward to seeing everyone.

I was disappointed when I got there and my one friend wasn’t there.  It seemed odd because everyone else on the parish staff had apparently been invited.  I figured he probably had other plans.

And by friend, I mean friend friend, not just we used to work together friend.  We text, we chat, we facebook, we watch Caprica, and meet for drinks.  He’s called or texted plenty over the last year to see how I’m doing.

I felt vaguely uncomfortable for most of the party, and I couldn’t quite figure out why.  I mean, people were certainly talking to us and being friendly, but at the same time there was a subtle but definite message that I’m not in the “in crowd” anymore. Conversations trailed off or got steered in other directions when I approached.  That sort of thing.

That’s cool.  I don’t work there and I shouldn’t be privy to inner office workings anymore.  Nor do I want to be.

But.  The two or three people that I had been the closest to and had looked the most forward to seeing spent the least amount of time talking to me.  It just was… odd.

More than one person pointed out they “hadn’t seen me at Mass lately”.  So you’re paying attention enough to my life to know I’m not at Mass, but the idea of calling me to see how I’m doing completely escapes you?

After all that I probably still would have left the party just assuming I didn’t have much in common with them anymore, and that really they just invited me to be polite.

While we were thinking about leaving I got a call from my friend inviting us to the bar where he was.  Since it wasn’t even 11 pm yet, I was all over that.  He seemed surprised when I told him where I was because he didn’t know about the party.

Not that he’d have gone anyway.  That’s not the point.  The point is that he was the only office staff not invited.  The only one.

And when I said my goodbyes, mentioned where I was going, and invited an out of town guest that (I thought) we were both close to?  It was like I said I was going to go club a baby seal.  I was told in no uncertain terms that he hadn’t been invited to the party for “political” reasons and our out of town guest was not only instructed NOT to go with us, he went in a room and hid and didn’t come out until after we left.

I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him.  Odds are I won’t be seeing him again.

So, we got our stuff and left.

It made me sad.  I don’t know what could be so politically important that a group of Christians would purposely outcast someone who should be a member of the family from a holiday party.

I love my Church.  The thought of going somewhere else makes me sad.  But the thought of walking in with pairs of what I now know for certain to be judgey eyes on me makes me more than sad.  It breaks my heart with disappointment.

Tags: Being Catholic, changing churches, christian, hypocrites, judgmental, organized religion

This entry was posted by Cathy on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Being Catholic, Friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.