You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Well, I tried.

I promise, I did. I suppose it’s true what they say: you can take the girl out of the church, but you can’t quite scrub her clean of the remnants of that soul-sucking faith. I grew up within the Catholic church’s orbit of influence and the death of Pope Francis has scratched at old existential wounds.

I have made peace with that past, for the most part.

There is something about the papacy, though. It’s insistence on itself, all pathos and ceremony. I mean, the extreme melodrama of it all. If it were anything else, relieved from the weight of its own brutal, storied history, and its central role in the making of much of the modern world, it would not – could not – be taken seriously. Consider the conclave, the arcane ritual through which a new pontiff is elected, after the death (or unfortunate retirement – cough cough) of the Holy Father. The college of cardinals sequesters its members, only emerging once they have elected a new father, signaling this by emitting a plume of white smoke from within the chapel. It’s deeply weird, and it is made all the weirder by the reality that, in this church, which is built on the backs of the largely voluntary work of hordes of quietly pious women, only men can vote for a pope.

The much-lauded movie CONCLAVE highlights the absurdity at the heart of Catholicism. Even apostolic sects let women lead flock. Come on, with your smoke and ballots and boarded up windows.

Not in Rome, however. Not now, perhaps not ever. Watching this strange papal ceremony, I am struck by how it’s not so much the misogyny that defines Catholicism, but a stubborn and deep misanthropy. It might seem that a religion that places at its centre a human man and prays via the spirit of a human woman, the mother of Christ, centers people. The pope is human, and so was mother Mary. But imagine how little one would have to think and expect of human beings to see these exalted lives of complete sacrifice and denial of basic human drives as the only way to God. Catholicism sees us all as flawed and filthy. Our only hope at absolution is that we constantly admit this to ourselves, before our God and before his chosen clean-enough emissaries. And what a life those emissaries lead. Removed from some of the most human things that keep the rest of us tethered to this earth, with singular devotion to their faith.

I have no inkling of how difficult a life of the cloth is. But I struggle to imagine any faith that imposes those kinds of limits on human beings as one that views those beings in high regard. You have to really hate people to see distance from them as the closes possible thing to godliness.

And honestly, no matter how hard that life of limits must be, could it be any harder than being a full human being in this world? Take a look around. There’s pain and suffering to spare.

As Mary Oliver puts it, to be a part of this beautiful, brutal world of ours, you have to be a part of it. You have to give all of yourself to it, taking up your place within it. How else can you lead a life of devotion and ministry?

Reader, it may shock you to discover that I am not an observant Catholic – or Christian or anything else. My deepest faith is in human beings and my devotion is to doing what I can to make the world better for my fellow flawed flock. That might seem lacking in piety or gravity, but, again. Take a look around. It takes guts to love humanity in this world. It’s brave to see all the darkness and insist that the light is down here, within reach, not in a cloister in the Vatican, on ballots of men.

Featured photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash