bats and belfries

[Guest guest]

>> It's interesting to me that the Catholic Church got to you as a

pre-adolescent with such force...In retrospect I think that seeing

the priests and nuns on a day to day basis helped me to see that for

all of their theories they were as crazy and angry as the rest of

us.....the philosophy lost much of it's hold on me..." <<

Thank you for your further sharing on this. Yes, I noticed that many

of my friends who were born into Catholicism took significantly more

lightly than I did. I attribute part of the adverse power it had on

me to the fact that I became Catholic at the ripe age of about 12

(due to my mother converting our family en masse). I was only in

Catholic school for two years, and it was the 60s, the end of which

took place in my high school days, which gave me the freedom,

thankfully, to discontinue that association. It was also in my early

20's reading of Eastern spiritual works that I found real...hope,

joy, faith...etc., to go on. It really is helpful to begin with the

premise that we are good and then forget who we are, and the process

is then one of reconnecting, remembering. Much more useful to me (and

true to my own visionary experiences) than a premis that we are evil

and must ever watch over ourselves with at least several sticks. Much

later in my life I came to realize that good, done for the sake of

escaping punishment, is not really very meaningful, but it does

nicely dovetail with my childhood paradigm, another reason why it

"took" so powerfully. Thankfully...whew... I have moved beyond that

now...and have been recently given the grace to thank everyone and

everything (as upagurus) responsible for helping me to where I am

today. Ahhhh... Shanti ~ Linda