I stopped going to Church two years ago.
Before that, I went to Church ever Sunday since the day I was born. I attended as every person born into a religious Catholic family was taught to. It was simply hour out of one’s entire week for God, an addition to St. Peter’s scoreboard for one to walk through the gates of Heaven.
Despite living in a Muslim dominant country for two years, my husband and I went to Church on Sundays. Even when we moved to the US and traveled out of state, we always found a church to go to on Sundays and spent an hour in front of the altar, going through the motions of the ritual - giving thanks, asking for forgiveness and praying for blessings.
You see, I live in a state that is part of the “Bible Belt” where every corner is dotted with a steeple of your choice of Christian denomination. Jesus is a way of life here. That even is an understatement. It wasn’t far from what we grew up to in the pre-dominantly Catholic Philippines.
But somehow something felt amiss here. Jesus was everywhere, yet at times, nowhere.
In March of 2020, the closures forced by the uncertainty of the new pandemic was then a great excuse not to go. We simply couldn’t. All churches, especially Sunday masses, the scant basic requirement we were supposed to attend, were forced to go online.
I walked to the living room, silenced my phone and tuned in to the Vatican’s YouTube channel. It was Holy Week, the holiest, most important time of the year to commemorate the very reason we revere Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. I attended mass officiated by Pope Francis himself straight out of St. Peter’s Basilica. Like the rest of the world, I prayed for answers. What was happening? Where we were headed? What does the future even look like? Is there even one?
Once mass ended, I exited YouTube then tuned in to the news. This then new virus closed down the world, required us to hunker down in our homes, mask up and remain six feet apart at all times, demanded those answers.
Only news of the then US President dismissing the scale and impact of the virus on the population, the shuttering of businesses we leaned on for conveniences and even loved plus people losing their jobs, the sharp increase of deaths, the hate crimes against the Asian American communities, the viral George Floyd death and uprisings against police brutality and racism as well as the insistence of some Church leaders that the virus was a hoax.
I was at a loss at the turmoil, lack of empathy and, dare say, outright hatred. How could Christians who aspire to follow the footsteps of Christ with love of neighbor be such? Did they believe in the same Jesus who asked us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves? More questions ran through my mind. More doubt cracked on the foundations of faith.
Eventually vaccines were developed, people were jabbed and indoor public spaces were reopened. And yet, I can’t get myself to return to the same Sunday habit.
It wasn’t just the hour of my Sunday that was lost, but that anchor of spirituality and soul.
When I first learned about how The Hierophant was my birth card, I was elated. The tarot birth card is similar to knowing your astrological sign. One’s sign is determined by the birth date and, should one want more detail, even birth time. The birth card is the same. (You can find out your birth cards here)The numbers of one’s birthday are reduced to a single number. Mine ended up with a five.
So today, it is apt to reflect on this card.
In the tarot’s Major Arcana, the fifth card is the Hierophant. He represented “the key to knowledge.” After all, historically, the Church was the once the said keeper of knowledge. The nerd in me nodded with agreement that maybe somehow I was meant to unlock something from all the rabbit holes I’ve been falling into.
But I learned that there’s more to the Hierophant than studying and knowledge. The Hierophant card was once called the Pope, even the Popess or the woman Pope. It also represents the structures which spirituality are built on. This includes the Church itself and all that it encompasses - faith, ritual, hierarchy, leadership and politics and the fact that this all comes with a lot of confusion, questions.
That God in His entirety is simply impossible for us to grasp.
In this modern age of information, it is still very much easy to get lost in the infinity of what we have within reach our fingertips. Oft we forget that there are limits to this information. That humans, our time, energy and attention, are limited. That there will always be things that we would never understand in our lifetimes. But, in the end, we choose which Gospel of Truth we subscribe to that dictates how we live in our day to day.
On my 41st birthday, as I’ve lived more years on this earth, more heartaches under my belt, the more I wrestle with what was taught to me and what I grew up with.
The Gospel of Sunday Mass.
The Gospel of Church.
The Gospel of Work is Life.
The Gospel of Productivity.
The Gospel of Womanhood.
The Gospel of Age.
The Gospel of the American Dream.
The Gospel of Loving Thy Neighbor.
The Gospel of Race.
The Gospel of Empires.
The Gospel of More.
The Gospel of Love.
I am at odds with all these. A great re-evaluation of what it all means to me with what I’ve gone through in the past two years. There are those with great influence from the pandemic that simply collapsed under the strain of what life could be for me. I am faced with the choice of holding on to these Gospels or the inevitability of release and discomfort of transforming, turning them around, shaping them into what fits best for me at this point in time in this place I now call home.
I still don’t go to Church. I thought of going to last Thursday, on Mother Mary’s birthday, but a large part of me still could not convince myself that I should. I could, but I didn’t. Instead, I realized how God and His Love’s mysterious, completely unknowable ways got through me this past year in the most unexpected place possible - the tarot.
Symbols of the Church and Christianity are all over the cards, which I’ve picked up in my study with Rachel Pollack’s “Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey.” All the catechism from a Catholic education started clicking in my head. Then more recently, I stumbled upon St. Anthony’s Tongue, a podcast that specifically tackles the relationship between Catholicism, mysticism and magic. And now, I await the arrival of “The Contemplative Tarot: A Christian Guide to the Cards” by Brittany Muller to supplement my learning of the craft.
But these have not completely absolved the constant questioning. Are questions even bad in themselves? Isn’t questioning about discovery and curiosity? That keen interest in life and living in this world. And why would God even gift us with reason if we were simply follow blindly without question?
There comes a point when we’ve exhausted all possible answers. Or so we think. Is this then the time we take stock that there can never be any answers in our lifetime? That maybe it will come up in the next one.
Just enjoy, trust and embrace what is. When the questions end, then that is where faith begins.
Speaking of learning, today I launch and share my FREE Lenormand Learning Guide. This guide I created to help ME learn reading Lenormand cards faster. Below are three documents for you: an introduction and the 2-part learning guide, as a thank you for simply being here.
What I’m watching:
I never watched “Bridges of Madison County” in my 90s childhood. It caused so much controversy back then with Meryl Streep’s character looking at her naked body, down to her pubic hair down there, in the mirror. I am glad I didn’t as it wouldn’t have made sense then. So watching it in my 40s just hit hard.
“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is a movie about the relationship between middle aged Nancy Stokes (played by Emma Thompson) and sex worker Leo Grand (played by Daryl McCormack.) Coincidentally, this is also about taking stock of what being a woman means and the sacrifices we make.