CATHOLIC, ATHIEST, BELEIVER, FOOL

Through no choice of my own, I was raised as a Roman Catholic in a convent, with all the brainwashing and ritual that involved.   My beloved (mad as a hatter) mother told me, don't ever given in to the nuns and don't ever let them see you cry.  It was terrible advice, I got battered for the entire 4 years I was there!   I just couldn't get the 'faith' bit, try as hard as I might, I couldn't get into the whole praising of statues, icons etc, and this weird love for a 'God' no-one could see.  I would often gaze around the Church during services to see how many had that crazed maniacal look in their eye.  Quite a few actually, it was scary.

Naturally, I denounced Catholicism the moment I walked out of it's dark satanic doors to the middle ages.  I clung onto 'unless someone can show me tangible evidence, a Roman God (I quite liked Bacchus) was just as credible as a Christian God.  How can you believe in something you cannot see?  Sure, there are all sorts of theological arguments, but that's what it boils down to.  

Having no faith can be quite tough actually.  Those times are when the words of Neitzche bring reality home.  God is dead.  There is no God.  You are all by yourself.  When that realisation hits you, you have to take a deep gulp, we need someone stronger than us, we need a higher power, shit, I don't want that responsibility.  I want someone else to take care of me.  That's the easy way, there's safety in numbers, follow the crowd, don't be the misfit thrown out and ostricised.  

I hate organised religion, not for how many they include, but for how many they shout out.  We are good people, with good values as preached by JC, but if you are not exactly like us you are not welcome.  That's always a mistake on society's part, because those thrown out into the cold, are usually the most creative, most entertaining and most innovative.  If I have lived before, I hope it was among the artists in Monmartre in the late 1800s or next door to Virginia Woolf in the 1930s.  That is, people on the outside who don't want to be part of the madness.

But I want to return to religion, faith and, hmmm, yes, believe it or not the Paranormal.  I change my religion on a regular basis, so nothing is ever caste in stone.  As I approach 63, I now describe myself as Agnostic.  That is, I believe there is something beyond..... drum roll.  Not one, all powerful God in the religious sense, no Saviour either, but an inner power that we rarely, if ever, call upon - our own.   At the first college lecture I ever went to as a mature student, we were told we only used 4% of our brains.  That blew me away.  We discussed, among many things, our ability to know, even when we have our backs turned and no mirror, that we were being watched.  We 'felt' it.  It went on to become a very lively and discussion, much deeper than I will go into here.

As I said at the start, I do not believe anything I cannot see.  I have out of curiousity, gone along to spiritualist and indeed, spiritual artist meetings,  that is, I have been among audience waiting, hoping, for a message from beyond.  I had a bit of hope myself when we went in, but it soon became obvious that the spiritualists were using information they had gathered at the tea and biscuits before the meeting.  Also how hard is it to google a town and pick up the names of the main industries.  Did anyone work at Tesco?  Actually seeing these people live made me more sceptical and  I pitied those they were exploiting.  

But things have happened in my life that are beyond reasonable and logical explanation.  Those who have watched 'The Secret' and understand the laws of attraction, will be familiar with the concept that you can wish for something, and have it happen.  Which is why 'be careful what you wish for' is loaded with foreboding.  If you follow your wish, your dream, you do things you are not even aware of, that make it happen.  Now I have several examples of this, in my own life, occasions when 'divine intervention' came to my aid.  I remember, as a single parent with two kids and no food, coming out of work one Friday night going to the cashpoint and praying that my wages would be in the bank.  They weren't.  As I walked away from the cashpoint, I found £40 in cash on the pavement.  Naturally I looked around for whoever had dropped it, but they were long gone. I took it, bought a big trolley of food and thanked every God there was.  

There have been times in my life where I have literally prayed, mostly to the Gods of Smirnoff and Gordons to make miracles happen.  And they have.  Not Smirnoff and Gordons obviously, which left me completely incapacitated, but I went to the higher powers above them.  The actual voice of my mum saying 'go on Lind, you can do it' and the voice of my dad saying 'are you telling me your stories', lol.  He rarely believed a word I said, ha ha.

I'm not going to impart all my paranormal experiences just now, of which there are many, but for the first time ever, drum roll........ I am going to recount the experience of looking after my terminally ill (mad) Mum.   We had been estranged for many years, I too had painted her 'bad' along with society and just about everyone.  Not my Dad though, he loved her no matter, even all the crazy.  It wasn't until a very wise work colleague told me 'she is as she is'. Those words had more impact than anything I had read or studied, I woke up.  I suddenly became aware that I should appreciate her just as she was.  I stopped scolding her, I stopped trying to tell her how she should behave (not that she ever took any notice) and I began to appreciate just how much fun she was!  When we were out and about, she in her wheelchair and brandishing a walking stick, having so much fun strangers would come up and ask to join in.  I always used to believe that her outrageous behaviour was embarrassing and offensive, but it wasn't.  I was delighted to discover she was loved by her neighbours and the local gay community, who loved and cared for her in her dotage and roared with laughter at her scandalous opinions!

Now, to the bit where it gets weird, and something I have never, ever revealed - mostly because it is so weird, and I don't want history to remember me as an OK writer til I crossed the Rubicon.  I have studied, maybe not to PhD level, but more than most, geneology.  I think, and study, for example, the faces all around me in my town, a town founded hundreds of years of ago.  How many of those faces that I see are exact replicas of their ancestors?  I am not a mathematian, but I'd say, a fair few.  That is, human beings still look pretty much the same as they did 500+ plus years ago, only taller and fatter.  But bloodlines can be traced as far back as we want them to be, isn't that mindblowing?  This is the good bit where racists discover their ancestors were black.  

Sadly, I have not paid too much attention to my roots.  I should have.  I always wanted to write a drama about Dundee during WWI.  My own Scottish great grandmother had six sons on the front line, the Western Front, there was a newspaper article about it. Four of those sons didn't come home, she got commenarative plagues in their memory.  Dundee is deserving of a 'Private Ryan' film all of their own, my own great grandmother, with 6 sons on the frontline, sadly, was not that unique, thousands of sons of Dundee were sent to their deaths. Happly, my own grandfather, my dad's dad, survived the Western Front, but was a terrible scallywag who had two wives, two families and multiple offspring.  It was quite disconcerting, at a family wedding, to bump into an exact clone of my Dad!  

But I digress, let's get straight to lunacy.That is the cowardly me there Bjorn, as I am sure you guessed, but then I think Covid-19 .v. Truth to power, and think, wtf I might die soon, and then I will never get a chance to say it. I'm not planning on dying soon btw, just covering all bases, might even google 'online confessions' to cleanse my soul and set up a subscription for an eternity in Paradise. Do Popes still sell them btw?  I toy with religion Bjorn, I describe myself willy nilly, as atheist, at one time anti-theist, Catholic when only a prayer and lighting of a candle will do, but mostly these days as agnostic. That is, I do believe there is something beyond.  I remember in one of my very first lectures as a mature student, being told we only use about 4% of our brains.  That blew me away.  It is surely inevitable therefore, that future generation will be able to tap into very, very, much more.  Mind blowing huh?  I have had signs, signs that cannot be explained in any logical, scientific way, that prove we have powers way beyond those we know.

Gosh, Bjorn you have given me an abundance of ideas for new blogs, plus, permission to write freely.  I know I sound like a bit of a diva when I describe myself as a tortured artiste, but honest to God, when it's your own self doing the tormenting, the next stop is off your head!

Since I have taken on the philosophy of accepting blame for everything that has happened to me and will happen to me, I have felt an enormous sense of relief. Akin, I would say, to Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers and realising her beloved 'home' was all around her. If I am honest, I have never been powerless, I chose every path I took, even those littered with men, liquor, drugs and parties.  Especially those, they were the most fun!

I have, on occasion, tried to hold back my inclination to wander off into stream of consciousness, but as readers of my blog will know, it gets through anyhow.  I guess it is all part of a bigger question that hangs over my head; 'just how much of the craziness, should I reveal?'.  At which point do I scare people away?

But I want to get back to the batshit crazy part, the part you all have been waiting for!  At the moment, my beloved mother passed away, I believe her personality transferred from her to me.  Nuts huh?  I suddenly felt free to use her exact words, her exact voice (we were virtually indistinguishable) and the exact way she would have behaved.  Before I would have been mimicking her, now I was free to take all her stuff, plus her big auld laugh and make it my own.  Did she take it all over from her own mother?  Was she passing it on to me.  It wasn't a great legacy, everyone who knew her, described her as a lunatic 

How do you deal with massive bereavement, major loss?  I truly thought I would die when I lost my beloved Dad, life had ended, there was nothing worth living for.  I survived, the first couple of weeks, by watching back to back episodes of Jerry Seinfeld and Father Ted.  

With my mother, who suffered terminal illness, it was completely different.  Physically, she was terribly ill, she had multiple infections and cancer affecting her mind as well as her body.  I felt grateful to God, if there is one, for sparing her the awareness of what was going on.  For once, being barmy was a good thing.  When I visited her, she told me stories of running wild with her siblings around the fields of Laurencetown.  They were as real as if they were standing right in front of her.  And she bickered with my dad.  Exactly the same pointless argumens they had years before.  If, like me, you are hoping in the afterlife that people move on, forget it.  

I am sure studies have been done, but if they haven't they should be, do those leaving this world, have a direct line to the next?

Ahhhh, freedom to write is so liberating!  As Jim Carey might say, somebody stop me!

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