Perhaps I should have saved this for Easter, but this was one of the micro fictions from this week’s Smokelong Micro March Marathon that I’ve been doing that begged to be taken out and edited.
On the left is my Holy Communion photo, which was about the time of my Easter experience. On the right is me today, downward dogging, more than 50 years later, but still feeling the light of that long-ago Easter. The conversation with the bearded nun in the Sunday blog was more than 30 years ago, when I was 23 and seven years into lapsing into ex-Catholicism.
Wishing you a happy Sunday, and here’s hoping this spreads a little light in these dark times.
Sunday Blog
The nun with the small beard at University chides me for my bitterness at the Catholic childhood, the litany of endless sexual shaming, the nonsense tales of hellfire, the damnation and control. While at home the hellfire was more muted, but it still lapped at our feet, especially when puberty and normal sexuality emerged. Then it was essential to strangle this precious new side to ourselves.
The nun and I are supposed to be discussing literature, but now I’m seven years lapsed, it’s too tempting to challenge someone who’s right there and straddles the worlds of organised religion and academia.
“At least it gave you a system of beliefs to reject,” she said.
This phrase stays with me through the next decades, speaks to the nub of memory from age ten when I was washed through with the mystery of Easter that even the church couldn't fully conceal. A never forgotten moment in a church that has since been demolished, when I was old enough to immerse in the gruelling story of the scourging, crown of thorns and crucifixion and young enough to to understand it whole. To this day I recall the precious washed clean feeling on Easter Sunday, awakening to resurrection after three dark days.
By my teens my belonging to this rigid religious world was being demolished, brick by brick just as the church was.
But this rejected system of beliefs pushed me out into the world to immerse myself into New Age anything - yoga, meditation, energy medicine. Today I find this light, this washed clean feeling in downward dog, again and again, and I'm free to be all the juiciness that I am.
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