Two Revelations

What does it say about me that I've turned into an NPR listener? Disaffected leftist, unmarried urbanite, likes technology, craft beers, sex. Follows politics, too busy or nihilistic to volunteer. They need to start selling me on more products.

I listened to an interview today with a popular comedy actor. She described, adjacent to her terrible teenage moral oblivion, a "lapse" from Catholicism. I hear this phrase "lapsed Catholic" so often. I am tempted to call myself one but it's really that first part--the lapse--from which I turn.

A lapse implies a lengthy but temporary end or pause that still acknowledges the fixity of that-which-is-lapsed-from. (I want to use the phrase "ontological fixity" but I will keep this post PG-13.) Calling oneself a lapsed Catholic implies that Catholicism is still out there as a possibility, but you're just taking a break. Is there Catholic guilt ironically built into the phrase? Have they already won?

I did the Catholic thing when I was young: church every week, CCD, cold parental dysfunction, Catholic high school, sex obsession, and especially self-hatred. Like my other friends of the lapse, around high school (and for others it was a later age), I had a sudden, (god-)damning ideological break in which I instantly rejected theism and supernatural-spiritual beliefs.

If you would have asked me back then (and if you were the nice priest at my high school, Father Kevin, you did ask me), I would have said that Catholicism inflicts a need for love and a need for hate (specifically self-hatred) on its adherents. In choosing to reject the church, I chose to keep the love and reject the hatred.

But as I've gotten older, I believe that the "love," as in Christian, faith-inspired, god-given, etc. love is an ultimately untenable concept. It's nothing like the love I experience for my girlfriend, or for fulfilling things I do, like make friends and play music, and it's also nothing like the instinctual, protect the bloodline, protect the in-group feelings I get that aren't so easily put into words. If people use "love" to describe all sorts of good-time feelings, which is to say, everything, then it ends up not meaning anything. What I am not saying is that "love" is a pointless word. It's meaningful and important to use. But I think its use obscures and frustrates deeper thinking.

But on the other hand, I've kept the self-hatred after all. And I like it. I am displeased with myself, bored with myself, anxious to distract myself in various ways. But if I'm careful, these feelings can engender fun and meaningful thoughts. As I get older, I am doing much better than I used to at keeping aware of myself and my thoughts.