Life As a Catholic Priest.
1/6/06
Its got to be weird, being a Catholic Priest.
Being a priest, its got to be a hell of an exercise in self-restraint. In building a mask for others, for yourself. An isolated life. A life of hiding your own doubt in your chosen path. The growing belief that you can't push away, the one that swells more and more over the years, that you might be living a lie. Believing a lie. Selling lies to others.
You look at the book, and you see clearly it has no clear answers. No more than any other book.
You continue with this life path, though, because you don't know of any other. This is not your place, but its the only place for you. People looking upon you as if you're higher looking down when in reality you're just outside looking in.
Watching. Listening. Living your life through them, their stories.
So strange that life path must be, being so divorced from life and yet having such insight into it. Being able to see and know so much, more than any other singular person save for others like yourself, but at the expense of being separated from it, from life, from all but `professional' interactions with others.
In the confessional, everyone spilling their deepest, darkest secrets to you. Truly, you're on the outside looking in, but you use your mind to put yourself in their shoes. And this has become so easy, putting yourself in the shoes of others, walking through their lives, across their souls, a journey they tour-guide you through, taking you by the hand, drawing pictures in your mind with their words.
They can trust you with anything. I've never told anyone any of this before, they always tell you. I can't believe I'm telling you this, they always tell you. They can trust you with anything, and so they trust you with: everything.
After awhile, it seems you're a collector. You bag their dark shadows and you carry them on your back. Taking on their burdens, this is your job. This is the prerequisite life for being human. Life is the biggest classroom, experience is the best teacher, and each one of them is a lesson. A test. Not of your faith, but of your willingness to understand. Your ability to comprehend.
Maybe you grade yourself at the end. Decide where to go from here. Perhaps we are all our own judges, and we decide whether we graduate to the next level, take the next class, or keep taking this same one over and over until we pass.
This is your theory on death, on its transitory, cyclical nature, but you could never speak a word of it to them. By oath. By official oath. And you take that very seriously.
You're stuck here, and you know it.
Sometimes you fancy this as an escape from yourself, their stories as an escape from your story, but its not really. You take everything they show you by telling you with you. What they dump on you becomes part of you. This is why they came here: to rid themselves of this. To cleanse themselves, to wipe themselves clean of this.
You are their soap and water.
Each one of them, they're like Atlas putting the world on your shoulders one piece at a time, letting the sky fall on your back and drag you down. Its heavy but you still carry it. You're filled beyond capacity, but you keep taking more, and you take all of this very seriously.
Life is just one really long test of endurance.
Here in the confessional, your little booth, your office, people stripping themselves in a way much deeper than to mere flesh, they let their souls dance naked before you, they show you everything and yet you tell them nothing about yourself. You are the unseen.
Your gift is taking without giving.
You are the wall they talk to that whispers back half-assed advice and offers forgiveness. As if you could heal them through this wall between you and them, this wall they take you to be. They must fancy you blind, but that is seemingly beyond your power, so fucking far from the truth.
You see everything. Behind everything. And vow to keep silent. Silence is not a lie, though, omission is not a fallacy.
If everyone could read everyone else's minds, if each individual could see into the heart, mind and soul of every other individual, they would see the world you see more and more of. Your forever-expanding universe.
Everyone dances naked before you, but they don't see so much as your face here. They don't even look at you when they talk to you, and they show it all to you, let it all hang out. They bare their soul to you.
Their practice: exposure. Yours: spiritual voyeurism.
Looking at all their lives, life itself, life as a whole, through a pair of binoculars from outer space, that's what its like. Your life is serving them, not that hypothetical `him', the him in which your doubt grows with every passing day, in secret.
You, you're the adult that lets the kids believe in Santa even though you fill the stockings, even though its you who puts the gifts under the tree. But the kids pay for their presents by being good little girls and boys, these people pay for what they believe to be earning, that everlasting paradise after death, with confessing to you just what bad big boys and girls they've been. How bad they feel about it. Or how bad they feel they should feel about it but don't, but they feel bad about not feeling bad, so doesn't that count for something?
Its like another experience nowadays, in the modern age. On the internet, you watch her on your web-cam. Watch her strip herself of cloths, play with herself. Watch her smile at you watching, listening to her sounds through the cell phone beside you. And yet you've got no web cam. She cannot hear or see you.
Lifetimes later, perhaps, you're still hiding, listening, watching. On the outside looking in. All by your own choice.
You've become just another story you tell yourself. Another downfall you document. Another anti-fairy tale.
`Forgive me, father,' they say, `for I have sinned.' This is the opening to the anti-fairy tale, the real world. Actual life. `Forgive me father, for I have sinned,' it's the negative form of, parallel to, `once upon a time, in a land, far, far away'. Only these things are right in the here and now, not once upon a time, not in a land far, far away.
And there are no happy endings. Where happiness is involved in anything one might call an end, it is only involved in the sense that everything seems to be, because such an ending is ambiguous. And anything we call an end, no matter how blasphemous it might sound to you, it seems to be just a transition to you. No death, not the way we see it, only change.
Only, the next stage.
And no real beginnings, then, either. But happy endings are what people want to believe in. Life hasn't been a fairy tale, let death be for them, at least their anticipation for it. Bless them. Forgive them. Let them do their hail Mary's. Let them believe what you are now almost certain is a lie. Assure them that if they keep doing this, spilling these things, confessing, that there will be a happily ever after. Eternal paradise. Bliss and joy without end.
Because its your job to alleviate their guilt. Your job. Your vow. Your duty. Your work.
But what have you really done for them. You've become their toilet. Have you really helped them or healed them? Is this all you have to contribute?
Its got to be strange being a Catholic priest, having people step into a booth and unload everything upon you. You, the divine target for catharsis.
Sometimes you can see them through the screen, the grate. In pixels. Sometimes you imagine right through it, see them clearly, without static, and it becomes a crystal clear window. Maybe you usually can't see them through the grate, you can't see their faces. Some of them think this hides their identity, but you know their voices. Maybe the lady in the red will come in this week. You know who they are, and now you know things about them, about everybody, that no one else knows about each other or even themselves.
You know who's having an affair with who. You know who's doubting and who believes. You know who killed this person, who didn't feel bad for that person dying. You hear from those who rape, you here from their victims. You hear stories from every side, every side of every story, and every time you play like you've heard the story for the first time, like you don't know its other angles, its other dimensions.
You learn to play dumb.
You know to guide but never inform, never intervene. You see the correlations in the stories, the hidden relationships everyone's a part of and has a puzzle piece of knowledge of but no one but you, and you alone, see in totality. You, you're there to hear, to listen, just listen, but you can't help but put the pieces together in your mind. To see the correlations. The greater story, the bigger picture, the human tale as a whole and where it seems to be going.
Inevitably going.
They say the truth shall set you free. Yeah. It shall liberate thee from any remaining hope for an answer to this complex mess. Anything but the vaguest, most fleeting delusion that some father figure is really out there, watching over us, giving a flying shit about us.
What we really need is faith in ourselves, faith in human potential. We need to save ourselves. Re-claim ourselves. Refashion our masks to better fit the unseen face behind it.
But this blasphemy, it stops at your mouth. Your ears are open, all three eyes are wide and unblinking, missing nothing of the physical and social, the mental and emotional worlds, but your mouth is sewn shut. By oath. Officially, and personally.
People just want to be heard, they want to know someone listens, not just hears them, but listens and wants to understand, and this is your role. Your role is to listen and understand but never be heard and understood yourself.
The priest, he becomes a backed-up toilet. The ocean that all rivers flow to, but there are none flowing out of. Holding so much of the world's pain, the world's dark secrets, this is the good he has done -- taking them on, holding these things for those who have come to confess.
But he eventually makes way back to his own pain, his own dark secrets. The ones he knows so well. Holds at the center of all this chaos given to him by others. This is the sun around which all else revolves. This nucleus, these are his sacrifices. All that could have been, but maybe. Well, maybe in another life. But he has to hold it, there's nowhere to let go.
Its got to be the greatest heaven and deepest hell for the Catholic priest.
People go to confess to the priest, but where does the priest go to unload, to alleviate his guilt, to confess? In the flickering candlelight at the shrine, he looks first at the picture, then at his own eyes in the mirror's reflection, those eyes that hold so much of what he's taken, and then he looks at his gun.
Where do I find release and resolution? This is what he thinks. Not here, he says to himself, that seems certain. So maybe in another life. Maybe in another life I'll pass this test. Not of faith, for faith is blind and despicable, but the test of my willingness to understand. My ability to comprehend.
1/6/06
Its got to be weird, being a Catholic Priest.
Being a priest, its got to be a hell of an exercise in self-restraint. In building a mask for others, for yourself. An isolated life. A life of hiding your own doubt in your chosen path. The growing belief that you can't push away, the one that swells more and more over the years, that you might be living a lie. Believing a lie. Selling lies to others.
You look at the book, and you see clearly it has no clear answers. No more than any other book.
You continue with this life path, though, because you don't know of any other. This is not your place, but its the only place for you. People looking upon you as if you're higher looking down when in reality you're just outside looking in.
Watching. Listening. Living your life through them, their stories.
So strange that life path must be, being so divorced from life and yet having such insight into it. Being able to see and know so much, more than any other singular person save for others like yourself, but at the expense of being separated from it, from life, from all but `professional' interactions with others.
In the confessional, everyone spilling their deepest, darkest secrets to you. Truly, you're on the outside looking in, but you use your mind to put yourself in their shoes. And this has become so easy, putting yourself in the shoes of others, walking through their lives, across their souls, a journey they tour-guide you through, taking you by the hand, drawing pictures in your mind with their words.
They can trust you with anything. I've never told anyone any of this before, they always tell you. I can't believe I'm telling you this, they always tell you. They can trust you with anything, and so they trust you with: everything.
After awhile, it seems you're a collector. You bag their dark shadows and you carry them on your back. Taking on their burdens, this is your job. This is the prerequisite life for being human. Life is the biggest classroom, experience is the best teacher, and each one of them is a lesson. A test. Not of your faith, but of your willingness to understand. Your ability to comprehend.
Maybe you grade yourself at the end. Decide where to go from here. Perhaps we are all our own judges, and we decide whether we graduate to the next level, take the next class, or keep taking this same one over and over until we pass.
This is your theory on death, on its transitory, cyclical nature, but you could never speak a word of it to them. By oath. By official oath. And you take that very seriously.
You're stuck here, and you know it.
Sometimes you fancy this as an escape from yourself, their stories as an escape from your story, but its not really. You take everything they show you by telling you with you. What they dump on you becomes part of you. This is why they came here: to rid themselves of this. To cleanse themselves, to wipe themselves clean of this.
You are their soap and water.
Each one of them, they're like Atlas putting the world on your shoulders one piece at a time, letting the sky fall on your back and drag you down. Its heavy but you still carry it. You're filled beyond capacity, but you keep taking more, and you take all of this very seriously.
Life is just one really long test of endurance.
Here in the confessional, your little booth, your office, people stripping themselves in a way much deeper than to mere flesh, they let their souls dance naked before you, they show you everything and yet you tell them nothing about yourself. You are the unseen.
Your gift is taking without giving.
You are the wall they talk to that whispers back half-assed advice and offers forgiveness. As if you could heal them through this wall between you and them, this wall they take you to be. They must fancy you blind, but that is seemingly beyond your power, so fucking far from the truth.
You see everything. Behind everything. And vow to keep silent. Silence is not a lie, though, omission is not a fallacy.
If everyone could read everyone else's minds, if each individual could see into the heart, mind and soul of every other individual, they would see the world you see more and more of. Your forever-expanding universe.
Everyone dances naked before you, but they don't see so much as your face here. They don't even look at you when they talk to you, and they show it all to you, let it all hang out. They bare their soul to you.
Their practice: exposure. Yours: spiritual voyeurism.
Looking at all their lives, life itself, life as a whole, through a pair of binoculars from outer space, that's what its like. Your life is serving them, not that hypothetical `him', the him in which your doubt grows with every passing day, in secret.
You, you're the adult that lets the kids believe in Santa even though you fill the stockings, even though its you who puts the gifts under the tree. But the kids pay for their presents by being good little girls and boys, these people pay for what they believe to be earning, that everlasting paradise after death, with confessing to you just what bad big boys and girls they've been. How bad they feel about it. Or how bad they feel they should feel about it but don't, but they feel bad about not feeling bad, so doesn't that count for something?
Its like another experience nowadays, in the modern age. On the internet, you watch her on your web-cam. Watch her strip herself of cloths, play with herself. Watch her smile at you watching, listening to her sounds through the cell phone beside you. And yet you've got no web cam. She cannot hear or see you.
Lifetimes later, perhaps, you're still hiding, listening, watching. On the outside looking in. All by your own choice.
You've become just another story you tell yourself. Another downfall you document. Another anti-fairy tale.
`Forgive me, father,' they say, `for I have sinned.' This is the opening to the anti-fairy tale, the real world. Actual life. `Forgive me father, for I have sinned,' it's the negative form of, parallel to, `once upon a time, in a land, far, far away'. Only these things are right in the here and now, not once upon a time, not in a land far, far away.
And there are no happy endings. Where happiness is involved in anything one might call an end, it is only involved in the sense that everything seems to be, because such an ending is ambiguous. And anything we call an end, no matter how blasphemous it might sound to you, it seems to be just a transition to you. No death, not the way we see it, only change.
Only, the next stage.
And no real beginnings, then, either. But happy endings are what people want to believe in. Life hasn't been a fairy tale, let death be for them, at least their anticipation for it. Bless them. Forgive them. Let them do their hail Mary's. Let them believe what you are now almost certain is a lie. Assure them that if they keep doing this, spilling these things, confessing, that there will be a happily ever after. Eternal paradise. Bliss and joy without end.
Because its your job to alleviate their guilt. Your job. Your vow. Your duty. Your work.
But what have you really done for them. You've become their toilet. Have you really helped them or healed them? Is this all you have to contribute?
Its got to be strange being a Catholic priest, having people step into a booth and unload everything upon you. You, the divine target for catharsis.
Sometimes you can see them through the screen, the grate. In pixels. Sometimes you imagine right through it, see them clearly, without static, and it becomes a crystal clear window. Maybe you usually can't see them through the grate, you can't see their faces. Some of them think this hides their identity, but you know their voices. Maybe the lady in the red will come in this week. You know who they are, and now you know things about them, about everybody, that no one else knows about each other or even themselves.
You know who's having an affair with who. You know who's doubting and who believes. You know who killed this person, who didn't feel bad for that person dying. You hear from those who rape, you here from their victims. You hear stories from every side, every side of every story, and every time you play like you've heard the story for the first time, like you don't know its other angles, its other dimensions.
You learn to play dumb.
You know to guide but never inform, never intervene. You see the correlations in the stories, the hidden relationships everyone's a part of and has a puzzle piece of knowledge of but no one but you, and you alone, see in totality. You, you're there to hear, to listen, just listen, but you can't help but put the pieces together in your mind. To see the correlations. The greater story, the bigger picture, the human tale as a whole and where it seems to be going.
Inevitably going.
They say the truth shall set you free. Yeah. It shall liberate thee from any remaining hope for an answer to this complex mess. Anything but the vaguest, most fleeting delusion that some father figure is really out there, watching over us, giving a flying shit about us.
What we really need is faith in ourselves, faith in human potential. We need to save ourselves. Re-claim ourselves. Refashion our masks to better fit the unseen face behind it.
But this blasphemy, it stops at your mouth. Your ears are open, all three eyes are wide and unblinking, missing nothing of the physical and social, the mental and emotional worlds, but your mouth is sewn shut. By oath. Officially, and personally.
People just want to be heard, they want to know someone listens, not just hears them, but listens and wants to understand, and this is your role. Your role is to listen and understand but never be heard and understood yourself.
The priest, he becomes a backed-up toilet. The ocean that all rivers flow to, but there are none flowing out of. Holding so much of the world's pain, the world's dark secrets, this is the good he has done -- taking them on, holding these things for those who have come to confess.
But he eventually makes way back to his own pain, his own dark secrets. The ones he knows so well. Holds at the center of all this chaos given to him by others. This is the sun around which all else revolves. This nucleus, these are his sacrifices. All that could have been, but maybe. Well, maybe in another life. But he has to hold it, there's nowhere to let go.
Its got to be the greatest heaven and deepest hell for the Catholic priest.
People go to confess to the priest, but where does the priest go to unload, to alleviate his guilt, to confess? In the flickering candlelight at the shrine, he looks first at the picture, then at his own eyes in the mirror's reflection, those eyes that hold so much of what he's taken, and then he looks at his gun.
Where do I find release and resolution? This is what he thinks. Not here, he says to himself, that seems certain. So maybe in another life. Maybe in another life I'll pass this test. Not of faith, for faith is blind and despicable, but the test of my willingness to understand. My ability to comprehend.
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