Words on prayer

It was Christmas a few weeks ago, and every year like clockwork I find myself reflecting on my underdeveloped spiritual life. My attempts to connect with God often involve prayer, and a searching for something familiar that was lost long ago, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Every Christmas I get called back to my Catholic roots, and every season I recognize a deep conflict within myself.

As a tribute to the season, I had the pleasure of viewing a film that is a nostalgic favorite of mine called "King Of Kings". Jeffrey Hunter portrayed the most sympathetic and deliciously handsome Jesus ever captured on film. He is the Jesus of my youth, perfect love, and like Santa Claus, complete fantasy.

This movie evokes images of my father and his big wooden rosary that he used for prayer, and of a portrait of Jesus that hung in my childhood home. I’m strangely comforted when I watch this film, in part because it brings back warm memories of my father who died in my youth. But if I search myself more deeply it brings up great feelings of loss. I want the Jesus of my childhood to be real, and I grieve deeply when I realize that I can’t have my father’s Jesus, my fantasy Jesus.

I was baptized a Catholic without my knowledge or consent, and attended a Catholic School for 8 years. I learned everything that I ever needed or wanted to know about being a good Catholic. Most important of these lessons was that we could get to Heaven and have life everlasting if we were steadfast in our faith. Too bad for me then that faith is in direct conflict with my intellect.

Catholicism becomes a part of a persons DNA, and although I have searched other forms of Christianity, Eastern Religions, and even Wicca, I have never been able to shed the notion that once you’re baptized a Catholic, you’re a Catholic until death. I maintain a subtle fear of completely turning my back on Catholicism, because a voice inside always whispers, “what if they were right all along and I end up in eternal darkness?” I sometimes secretly envy those who have chosen to abandon logic and reason for an absolute and unwavering faith. In this abandon they find comfort and connection. In their faith, they have nothing to fear, not even death.

Isn’t that what we all really fear? The struggle for a relationship with God is based more on fear of death than it is on any other aspect of a spiritual life. I was spoon fed eternal life and salvation, and that’s what I cannot come to terms with.

It becomes a black and white proposition, and a schism within my self. I know that there is no God up in the sky waiting for me in my Catholic heaven. I know that my mom and dad and brother and husband and Golden Retrievers won’t be up there in the clouds waiting to greet me. I mourn the loss of these “truths”, yet still search for something to cling to.

Some people have said to me, “you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water”. You can go to church, take what you want from it, and leave the rest. Why doesn’t that seem like enough? Why doesn’t that seem fair? I want it ALL to be true, and if it’s not, then how can I make sense of any of it? The images are too powerful, too provocative, and create an anxiety within me that I find it difficult to bear.

In the final scene of “King of Kings”, Jesus returns to his disciples one last time before he ascends into heaven and I found myself crying like a child. Crying for my youth and innocence, for my father, and for the loss of something that was guaranteed to me by everyone who I respected and loved.