Secrets. Shhh... don't tell anyone.

God and I have a love-hate relationship. Well, more to the point, I have a love-hate relationship with god. Ever just want to smack someone in the head and scream, what the fuck is your problem?... kinda sucks when that someone is... god. What makes it worse is when you actually have more faith in the Easter Bunny being real than god.

Yeah, I have issues. You must be new here if you've just figured that one out.

In any event, it's October 4. The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. This is the only Saint I have any affinity with - why that is, I don't know.

I suppose part of the reason is the prayer attributed to him which was actually written several centuries after his death:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace,
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.


With the exception of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria, it's the only prayer I ever bothered to memorize.

As for the rest of the reason, it would be that I have an odd fondness for the truly bat-shit crazy, yet harmless, people of this world. And, really, do you get any crazier than hermits who give up everything they have to wander about their known world barefoot, begging for their food, preaching peace and redemption?

The stigmata he "received" has always fascinated me. First of all, he tended to lepers early in his religious life, so I think he might have picked up the disease from them, leading to his "stigmata". However, I also think the human mind is capable of causing something like that to happen in the human body; a faith so deep, an empathic ability so strong, could cause someone to bleed.

Faith of this sort, that which it is said can move mountains, I have a great deal of respect for. I don't understand it, but I undertand the reality of it for the person who has it.

That makes no sense, does it? Ah well. I know what I mean. Which probably means I'm also bat-shit crazy.

Dogmatists and/or religious people just piss me off. There is no room in those people for the faith of others. "My way or the highway" attitudes piss me off in general, but when wrapped in religion it really steams me. Belief in god, a creator, whatever, is a deeply personal, intimate, thing. Codifying and structuring those beliefs just makes no sense to me. As far as I'm concerned everyone's path to god is right - as long as they don't try to make others conform to what they deem to be "right". Afterall, how could we be right about what god or the creator wants? How could human beings even begin to guess at the thought process of a being so far beyond us we cannot even conceptualize it?


See also The Canticle of the Creatures