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[livejournal.com profile] miriammoules asked me about faith. I don't talk about this often, so ...

I was brought up a Christian, subtype Roman Catholic. Add to the mix that this was in Northern Ireland where faith is highly polarised and blurred together with political (tribal?) identity, and that my Dad's from a Protestant family (so a "mixed marriage" as they call it), and that made everything A Bit Complicated. The whole mixed-marriage thing meant that I was predisposed to be rather more accepting of other faiths than the pretty terrible baseline average in NI - Mum was actively involved in various ecumenical programmes, we had family friends who were involved in the Alliance party (the only significant party thereabouts that isn't aligned with either nationalists or unionists), and so on - but all the same I didn't really spend much time at all with non-Christians until I was 18, at which point I decided that whatever NI's future was it was probably not for me and moved to England for university.

For a while I went to the local Catholic chaplaincy, but at some point over the next few years I stopped going to church and started considering myself lapsed, mostly through apathy. In my early twenties, if asked, I'd probably have said that on the whole I believed in God but that was about it, or possibly that I was agnostic. I started drifting back in the direction of religion after getting involved with [livejournal.com profile] ghoti; we had our wedding in our local Catholic church, although I wasn't receiving communion at that point; by a year or two after we got married I considered myself fully Catholic again.

I'd be happy to admit that a lot of my particular flavour of faith is likely because I was brought up that way. Christianity forms the pattern of my thoughts in a number of ways, and that's hard to get away from: I believe in one God; in one Lord, Jesus Christ; in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life. That's just the shape of things. I can't be having with creationism or other such foolishness that denies the evidence of our senses; we have the faculties of observation and reason and I believe we were meant to use them. Given a divine creator, one who orchestrates the magnificent universe around us with its economical set of physical laws that give rise to such amazing emergent effects as intelligent life is so much more glorious than one who puts together the earth and its peoples like a toy train set and ends up with a hodgepodge that doesn't withstand superficial examination. God is not an amateur. Catholicism has many faults but it at least (nowadays) credits this, and the notion of the importance of rationality in Catholic thought goes back a lot further than many people think, even though it took a disgracefully long time to adapt to the scientific enlightenment.

I'm not a particular fan of the Catholic hierarchy in general. Among other things, women are still second-class citizens (excluded from the priesthood); its teaching on sexual morality is stuck in a bygone age; teaching on contraception has clearly done a great deal of harm, especially in poorer parts of the world; and it's made an utter hash of handling the horrendous mess that is clerical child abuse. I do have a great deal of time for many individual priests I've known who are clearly good men working very hard to do the best they can for their parishes, and at the other end of the hierarchy Pope Francis has been a breath of fresh air and has been taking a lot of steps in the right direction, probably about as quickly as is realistic even if I'd wish he'd go further.

Still, I find myself more comfortable in Catholic churches than elsewhere, and a good part of this is certainly that I know and love the liturgical ritual. The whole theatre of the Easter Triduum, especially the Exsultet during the Easter Vigil's Service of Light, reliably brings tears to my eyes. Although we don't get to go to one very often, over the last decade or so I've fallen in love with the (modern) Latin Mass as well, which probably has a lot to do with its music - I particularly love Credo III.

That's a fairly random assortment of thoughts, but I hope it goes some way towards answering the prompt.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!
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