Twitter is both a terrifyingly addictive blackhole of time, and an amazing place to meet people that, otherwise, you might never come across. It was there that I discovered Hazel Dooney, an Australian artist. She wrote an interesting blog post on self-sanctification. Like me, she was not brought up in a religious family, but also like me, she is drawn to religious rituals. For a wonderful read, please hop over to Sanctify Myself.
Themes of faith, ritual and religious transcendence through pain and other ecstatic practices are always lurking in my stories. Sometimes at the periphery, sometimes they are a central theme, as in The Splinter.
I still don’t consider myself religious, and yet I believe quite deeply in trying to keep the soul, which I will adamantly deny I have, clean. Often in an attempt to do so, I hurt myself, I deny myself, I punish myself in order to purge myself of what I feel are unkind or destructive thoughts, or acts. This is the essence of Catholic penance, but, not being Catholic, I don’t feel at all comfortable of availing myself of the mechanisms it offers its adherents.
So this is my altar,
the place where
I do my penance
where I make my
sacrifices.
I lie on the cool tiles
at her feet,
breathe into the pain
and wait for it
to teach me
something new.
You know, of course, that this resonates with me. Thank you.
elise
I’m Jewish in my own pantheistic way. The philosopher is Catholic (lapsed, of course). We both relish ritual and made heavy use of it in our doomed relationship. I learned a lot from them, from the rituals he would devise to deal with tricky situations, to cleanse me of guilt, and fear, to cleanse him of anger and jealousy which (the latter especially) he denied he had.
My Master is another lapsed Catholic. I worship him intensely. I go to Shabbos services on a Friday night and find my mind turning the prayers effortlessly from God to him. One day I rewrote a psalm in order to address it to him as my Master. I think I only had to change 3 words.
He laughs at me, but enjoys it in his own wryly dark way.
I suspect my attitude towards him is, in some ways, more like a normal religious person’s would be towards God than mine is. I’m pretty vague about my idea of what God is, if God is it all. But my Master definitely exists – large and corpulent, powerful and sadistic, he controls my life, holds the power of my life and death the way I could never believe any deity could.
It is glorious to have that sort of faith – as long as he doesn’t decide to let loose a bolt of lightening.
I know of course, that poetry is a deeply personal thing, where even the words have deep significance, but i found the metaphor “suck up the pain” sort of jarring and not in keeping with the lyrical flow. Maybe there was a reason for this tho?
Just wondering.
Hi Nana,
I agree with you, it does jar.
Kuan Yin, goddess of Mercy? Beautiful poem.