Faith Infiltration: Saint Stephen Catholic Church

This week we visited Saint Stephen Protomartyr Catholic Church. I’ll let Flimsy start out since he wrote his portion of this week’s Faith Infiltration before I did:

*Flimsyman:  So we finally hit a Catholic church.  A catholic friend of mine once gaped in astonishment at my story of a man I know who took extra-special care of American flags.  He never let them touch the ground, and never let the sun set on them.  When a flag was too badly worn or damaged to be flown respectfully, he would retire them.  This consisted of cutting the stripes off of the blue rectangle (at which point it no longer was an ‘American flag’), and burning each portion of the former flag in seperate piles.  The ashes of each pile were then buried a certain distance away from each other, to ensure that the ashes never mingled into the remains of a proper flag again.  My catholic friend heard all this, and with eyes wide with awe, uttered “Wow; someone’s really attached to symbolism.”

Now, I know that Catholic churches are almost certainly all different in some way or another, but this particular church was quite taken with symbolism and ritual; moreso than any other church we’ve been to.

I’ll let Ziztur cover the more mundane aspects of the service; the portion that caught my attention was the reading of Genesis 17: 17-21.  These passages are about God promising Abraham and his wife Sarah a son, Isaac, who will be the father of Israel.  I wondered if they would cover or even mention Genesis 22: 1-18.  This, of course, is the story of how God commanded Abraham to KILL Isaac as a human sacrifice as proof of his loyalty and fear of God.  They did mention it briefly, reading from a letter written later within the church about the incident.  All it mentions is that it was a possibility that Abraham knew God to be capable of bringing his son back from the dead.

I cannot overstate how abjectly repulsive this story is.  This is one of the first stories to genuinely disgust me when I first read the Bible.  I encourage everyone to read Genesis, Chapter 22 for themselves.  In verse 6, Abraham makes Isaac carry the wood for his own funeral pyre.  In verses 7 and 8, Isaac asks his father where the animal to be sacrificed is, and Abraham lies to him, saying that God will provide a lamb.

I have an enduring mental image of this horrifying story; Isaac looking up at his father with trusting eyes, that monster Abraham grinning a false, wolf’s grin as he leads his son to be killed.  And behind it all, God stands and watches, imminently pleased that he commands such mindless fear and amoral loyalty in those who worship him.

Let me be clear:  There are countless passages in the Christian Bible that virtually ensure that I will never worship the Christian god, but this is a good enough example.  Even if, by some bizarre chance, the god of the Bible proves himself to me, no matter how thoroughly, and he tells me to kill an innocent person, any innocent person, much less my own child, simply to prove my loyalty to him, I will literally choke God himself to death on my cock.

Ziztur:   There were several interesting aspects of this church: the architecture was really cool, with copius stained glass and small woodcarvings depicting various important Bible stories (Jesus bearing the cross, etc) lining either side. This is also the first Catholic church I have ever attended, so some of the rituals were a little unfamiliar to me – kneeling and crossing oneself before entering a pew, the carrying aloft of the Bible before it was read, the fold down cushions to kneel on – I had never seen this ritual in person.

One thing that really surprised me was the length of the sermon. I did not time it, but I would guess it lasted about five to seven minutes. The pastor seemed hurried – his speech got facter and his sentances more disjointed near the end, and his sermon had the least substance of any I have ever heard – the message was tired, vague, and uninspiring. In summary: The secular world is telling us that the holidays are over, and it is time to go on with our lives. To the church, Christmas marks the beginning, not the end, and we should all have a little Christmas in us year-round. Oh yeah and family – families come in different shapes and sizes. Sometimes Families include a man, a woman, and a child. Sometimes dad died, leaving woman and child. Families are important, so let’s not forget our family. Let us all be happy for our families even if some of our family has been taken away from us. The end.

The most amusing thing about the service was that several pews in front of us, an infant bobbed around and happily gummed the back of the pew. Mom just smiled, the pews are clean enough for babies to nom on I guess.