A Remedy for Moral Injury?

Once a month? Is that how often I’m doing these now? Doesn’t seem good enough.

I’m in the middle of something that is confusing for me, and if I write about it, anyone who reads it will probably also be confused, because it’s “not like me.”

But it actually is. And that’s what I’m in the middle of.

I’m back in church, again at St. Paul’s. But it doesn’t feel like the return I made during Trump’s first term. It feels a lot more open. I’m not sure how to explain what I mean by that, except that I feel like my mind is wandering in a giant, half-dark room but doesn’t really feel the need to stop and make anything super clear at the moment. I’m here, I’m taking it in, and I’m tentative but continuing.

In essence, it has dawned on my that this moral injury I feel is being re-opened on a daily basis probably only has one cure, and that’s to find other people who are feeling injured in the same way, and allowing myself to take refuge with them. That last post was a purge but it was also a last-straw moment. I do NOT believe that a giant portion of the human race is evil, no matter how stupidly and cruelly they are behaving in our time. I went back, did some reading, and confirmed that the reasons I don’t believe this, that I reject it on instinct and against all evidence, is because I am Catholic.

I have spent 45 years denying this fact only to come full circle and realize this thing that I was taught and that I refuse to let go of, is not something everyone was taught, for better or worse. I can’t purge this belief any more than I could wrench my fucking heart from my chest and throw it in the dumpster. So I’m back at St. Paul’s, walking through some things I never bothered with last time (like praying, like going to Mass every weekend, like finding an advisor to answer my millions of doctrinal questions) and I’m feeling things that I’m not ready to write about yet because I’m still so uncomfortable with the language around a “conversion experience,” which is what I am having. I almost equivocated, but yes. Wow.

I have been a secular humanist/atheist for a very long time, always believing what we all do, that I don’t need an “imaginary sky daddy” or the threat of hell in order to adhere to a moral code or be a good person. But being a good person is a lot harder these days, I guess. I don’t see that the moral code among secular humanists is working very well these days. Probably working better than a lot of religious moral codes, yes. But it no longer reflects my personal bugaboo, as stated above. Confronted with the horrific error and moral sickness of many, many of the religious and the cynical, the humanist moral code now only embraces a portion of humanity as “good.” That, to me, is not a workable proposition and I gotta look elsewhere at this point.

The biggest problem with all of this is that being an “out” Catholic is not exactly a popular prospect with my crowd, and I don’t plan to change my crowd, even as some things about me might change and my crowd might expand. The Catholic church has a lot to answer for (and there are wide efforts there to answer for it and change, but progress is too slow, and I definitely respect the opinions of people who reject it all for those reasons). So I’ll write about it because I need to, but I won’t email the posts. Maybe they will be found after I’m dead and people will shake their heads and wonder, WTF?

Because yeah, I seem to have acquired faith in the last month or so. The dog days are over.