HANGING IN THERE

I know a lot of wonderful people...really good people. They care about one another, they help when help is needed, they care about the environment, they vote, they listen, they learn......and very very few of them go to church. I don't go when I'm "supposed" to go, but I still consider myself a Catholic, and I think I always will. After attending Catholic schools all the way through grad school, lots of my friends are Catholic...and only a minute handful want much to do with the church. Anytime the subject comes up and someone says "are you Catholic?", I'm very accustomed to hearing " Well I used to be" or "not anymore"or "abba dee abba dee....no."

I had cousins visiting from Tennessee whom I hadn't seen for years, but always loved.

Their Mom was a "devout" Catholic until the day she died, but these folks said that they had all stopped going to church over the years. I kinda dragged them with me for a Sunday Mass because my men's choir was singing. The homily that day was about "indulgences"

and for twenty minutes we heard about how many days your time in Purgatory would be reduced if you did this or that, or said this or that prayer. Twenty minutes. After this torture was over the youngest daughter said "that's why I don't go to church."

I used to drag my partner to church once in awhile for the music also...especially Christmas and Easter. A few years ago the Easter sermon was about how gay people and their campaign for equal marriage rights was threatening the whole world. He rarely sits in a pew now. One of my best friends in the world took his new boyfriend to his hometown church last year, and when the priest railed on and on about homosexuals being sinners, they both walked out.

Now my theory is that I won't leave the church because I just might have more "clout" from the inside. I often feel as though I'm hanging on by an ever thinning thread...but I'm still hanging on. While the official church would say that I am in a gravely sinful relationship...I remember a wonderful priest who told me that while he'd be going through the rituals of Holy Thursday and I'd be facilitating a support group for people with AIDS, that he wondered if Jesus just might be even more present with me that night. Because of people like him, and another priest who feeds the homeless, lets them sleep in the vestibule (against the Bishop's orders) and works in Appalachia every summer....I just can't lump all the clergy

together. While I wait for the women to be treated as equals, there are still a few good men.