Monday navel-gazing
Jan. 5th, 2004 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundFirst sung Eucharist of 2004 yesterday. (Note for anyone who just joined us: I'm agnostic with pagan leanings, but I'm paid to sing at a Church of Ireland service every Sunday morning.) The mostly buttock-clenchingly inane and bland sermon was about new year's resolutions. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
glitzfrau could undoubtedly have worked it up into a witty and incisive satirelet, but I don't have her touch. (Quotes included "the world would be a nicer place if there were more smiles in it" - like, hello? - although I did perk up a bit when the vicar announced that Britain's sit-on-the-fence attitude with regard to the euro should be rewarded with unequivocal exclusion, because it's not nice to refuse to participate...)
Anyway. Part of what he was going on about was the idea of self-examination: that Christians should, as a matter of routine, examine their actions and attitudes to ensure that they adhere as far as possible to the law of god. So I was remembering the glum days at school when Confessions were on (Catholic upbringing: yes, a veritable spiritual hotch-potch, me), when we would all be frantically scouring our memories, trying to dredge up plausible sins to tell. I made stuff up, of course - we all did. Nice, normative, domestic-idyll-style sins. "I was rude to my mother. I took a biscuit from the kitchen without asking."
I find it odious that small children, in particular, be so encouraged to see themselves as bad in the abstract. (I will admit that I haven't been to Confession for perhaps fifteen years - not since the time when the priest held my hand and stroked it, ugh, for the duration - so my memories of it are perhaps not as balanced as they might be.) That actions have consequences is an essential lesson for children to learn, but black-and-white "rules" such as, for instance, "lying is a sin" (what about when a stranger stops you on the street and asks where you live?) are unhelpful.
And don't even get me started on the Anglican general confession (see the paragraph beginning "Almighty and most merciful Father" on this page if you are unfamiliar with its upbeat and tolerant approach). I'm not a fucking miserable offender, a'right? - and there is health in me.
But then I got to wondering what, in my agnostic and basically bleeding-heart-lefty-liberal-hippy life, might be the equivalent to this fetishised version of morality. What would I consider, as it were, "sinful"?
And that was as far as I got before the sermon ended.
But then this afternoon I was clearing out the fridge. And there actually isn't an enormous amount of health in me at the moment (fairly constant nausea - I'm going to the doctor tomorrow - coupled with what I'm pretty certain is a hormonal pit of gloom), so instead of carefully unpacking all the slimy spinach and dessicated carrots from their wrappings, composting the produce and paper and washing the plastic preparatory to recycling it, I just chucked the lot in the bin. The real bin. The landfill bin.
And that I do consider sinful. For a start, I feel deeply guilty, as a Westerner, whenever I let good food spoil and have to throw it out. It's an obscene thing to do, and it happens far too often in this house. Then there's the fact that I'm sufficiently well off to have a garden with space for a compost bin - not to mention sufficient leisure time to maintain it - and I feel a strong sense of duty to use it. The disposable culture, rooted as it is in the sick notion that we (the rich) need take no responsibility for our consumption, and can simply dump our waste "elsewhere" (whether that be the local municipal dump or a carbon dioxide sink in the former Soviet Union), is inimical to my moral code in practically every way you care to name.
So here I am confessing this transgression to my peer group, which I suppose might as well take the place of a priest as the arbiter of morality in a modern non-religious life. And this being LJ I think it unlikely, going on past form, that I'll be refused absolution...
But I still feel guilty about it. Damn :-)
glitzfrau could undoubtedly have worked it up into a witty and incisive satirelet, but I don't have her touch. (Quotes included "the world would be a nicer place if there were more smiles in it" - like, hello? - although I did perk up a bit when the vicar announced that Britain's sit-on-the-fence attitude with regard to the euro should be rewarded with unequivocal exclusion, because it's not nice to refuse to participate...)Anyway. Part of what he was going on about was the idea of self-examination: that Christians should, as a matter of routine, examine their actions and attitudes to ensure that they adhere as far as possible to the law of god. So I was remembering the glum days at school when Confessions were on (Catholic upbringing: yes, a veritable spiritual hotch-potch, me), when we would all be frantically scouring our memories, trying to dredge up plausible sins to tell. I made stuff up, of course - we all did. Nice, normative, domestic-idyll-style sins. "I was rude to my mother. I took a biscuit from the kitchen without asking."
I find it odious that small children, in particular, be so encouraged to see themselves as bad in the abstract. (I will admit that I haven't been to Confession for perhaps fifteen years - not since the time when the priest held my hand and stroked it, ugh, for the duration - so my memories of it are perhaps not as balanced as they might be.) That actions have consequences is an essential lesson for children to learn, but black-and-white "rules" such as, for instance, "lying is a sin" (what about when a stranger stops you on the street and asks where you live?) are unhelpful.
And don't even get me started on the Anglican general confession (see the paragraph beginning "Almighty and most merciful Father" on this page if you are unfamiliar with its upbeat and tolerant approach). I'm not a fucking miserable offender, a'right? - and there is health in me.
But then I got to wondering what, in my agnostic and basically bleeding-heart-lefty-liberal-hippy life, might be the equivalent to this fetishised version of morality. What would I consider, as it were, "sinful"?
And that was as far as I got before the sermon ended.
But then this afternoon I was clearing out the fridge. And there actually isn't an enormous amount of health in me at the moment (fairly constant nausea - I'm going to the doctor tomorrow - coupled with what I'm pretty certain is a hormonal pit of gloom), so instead of carefully unpacking all the slimy spinach and dessicated carrots from their wrappings, composting the produce and paper and washing the plastic preparatory to recycling it, I just chucked the lot in the bin. The real bin. The landfill bin.
And that I do consider sinful. For a start, I feel deeply guilty, as a Westerner, whenever I let good food spoil and have to throw it out. It's an obscene thing to do, and it happens far too often in this house. Then there's the fact that I'm sufficiently well off to have a garden with space for a compost bin - not to mention sufficient leisure time to maintain it - and I feel a strong sense of duty to use it. The disposable culture, rooted as it is in the sick notion that we (the rich) need take no responsibility for our consumption, and can simply dump our waste "elsewhere" (whether that be the local municipal dump or a carbon dioxide sink in the former Soviet Union), is inimical to my moral code in practically every way you care to name.
So here I am confessing this transgression to my peer group, which I suppose might as well take the place of a priest as the arbiter of morality in a modern non-religious life. And this being LJ I think it unlikely, going on past form, that I'll be refused absolution...
But I still feel guilty about it. Damn :-)
