For most of my life, I have had at best an ambivalent relationship with religion and church going. At one point in my life, the rituals of the Catholic church held great solace for me, but that waned, and I have gone back and forth on its place in my life. I appreciate a lot of what my religious upbringing has given me, but find much of the structure and teachings of the church to be hard to accept. But I do feel there is great value in having the church play a role in the ethical instruction of my children, and want them to gain enough knowledge about it in order to eventually make their own choices about the place religion and church should have in their lives.
Both my sons have been baptized, and both will receive as many sacraments as they wish to. In the next year or two both of them will be of the age to qualify for first communion and confirmation, so we have decided that we should spend this year going to church regularly. We've been to mass every Sunday since the new year began.
I'm actually surprised that I am … enjoying (?) it. So far no one has said anything to piss me off, and our parish priest is a bit of a scriptural analyst, so he's doing the kind of exegesis with the weekly texts that I actually like – I don't always agree with him, but it has been refreshing to hear him.
It does give me a lot of pause though when I think of friends I have who would not necessarily be welcomed in our church, and at the lack of acknowledgment on the part of the church hierarchy to the crimes committed by its members. But not being able to resolve those feelings, or find a solution to those issues is not necessarily a reason to stay away from mass on Sundays…at least for this year and next. We'll see if things change.
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