Decolonization

The Center of the Onion

Author’s Note: An intermission from the Field Notes series.

A photo of the official missal in Catholic mass. Readings for 1/14/2024.

In Catholicism we have selected readings from the Bible at every Mass. Three per service. One reading from the Old Testament, one from the New, and one from one of the four Gospels. These readings, along with hymns to be sung and prayers to be said, are put together in a book called a “missal” to help worshipers follow along at Mass. Ostensibly the three passages chosen for a given service are suppose to address some common theme, like the love of God or his providence or the human propensity to sin. In practice however, honestly most of the time it seems like the passages were thrown together more or less at random.

In any case, and I’m not trying to brag here, I happen to have what some would call an “encyclopedic” knowledge of The Bible. I can’t quote long passages verbatim or anything but, if I’m listening to someone else talk about The Bible and they misquote it… I can almost always tell. This past weekend, during the readings at Mass, I thought I heard one such misquote. I opened the missal and checked, wondering if maybe it was The Reader’s mistake but no… there it was. In the book. Wrong.

Test in the Church Missal (see photo above):

“Brothers and sisters: The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.”

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him. Avoid immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the immoral person sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God. Do you not know that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.”

Text in the Actual Bible:

“The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

These omissions are certainly deliberate. It’s not a “new” missal or anything. I checked. These omissions have been left out of public readings in church for years. Quite long enough to make corrections, if indeed it had been an accidental mistake.

See… The Catholic Church is currently in the process of deciding not to care about sexual matters anymore. Maybe that’s good. Maybe it’s bad. Which you decide it is, is an opinion. What isn’t an opinion is that that is what’s happening. That’s fact. What the Church teaches is changing. What I just showed you above is example five-hundred and thirty-four.

I’m not mad about it. I’ve never been mad about it. Upset maybe. Confused. Discombobulated. A really good argument can be made that Christianity has cared way too much about “pelvic issues” in the past and far too little about everything else. Maybe the change is good. I don’t know. What isn’t good though is when we feel the need to deny that such change is happening, or that such change has always happened. That’s gaslighting. It’s lying. The whole “Unchanging Truth” and “Faith of the Apostles” shtick that The Church peddles is the real problem. Sets people up for failure and writes checks that can’t be cashed. The truth of the matter is that nothing is constant. “Universal Truth” is a moving target and Doctrine can change as easily as the wind.

It’s easy to do honestly. One might think that a religion which meticulously writes everything down might have trouble retconning their positions but no. Not really. See, it’s common knowledge that, whatever the field of study, almost nobody actually goes back and reads the source material. Literary students seldom actually sit down and read “the classics.” Takes too long. And, frankly, most of them are boring. Have you ever tried to slog through Moby Dick? It’s a nightmare. So, they read commentaries on the classics instead. Shorter, faster, and you still get the main ideas. In the same way philosophy students will talk endlessly about Plato and Kant and Kirkegaard without having ever finished a single one of their books. History students have rarely finished Plutarch, African Studies students mostly only skim Letters from a Birmingham Jail, and I never met a single physicist who had actually read the collected works of Isaac Newton.

People are Lazy.

They want the cliff notes. They want to be spoon fed.

So too with Christians and The Bible. Anecdotally, I’d wager maybe one in ten thousand of them has ever read their Holy Book all the way through. That’s not bad. People only have so much time and we get by in life through the division of labor. “Here… you read this for me,” is a perfectly valid life choice. It’s why we have doctors and lawyers. We simply don’t have enough lifetimes for each of us to become experts in everything and so if most Christians’ only exposure to the Bible is when somebody reads it to them from behind a lectern once a week…

Well. That’s to be expected.

In any field of study, creating an Expert Class is unavoidable, and mostly beneficial. The problem is though that, once any Expert Class reaches a certain level of sophistication… they can start manipulating things without anyone noticing. Some people call this Conspiratorial Thinking. I just call it real life.

It’s not even bad necessarily. For example, The Government appears to collude with Banks and Wall Street all the time in order to protect the economy from the rash stupidity of American Consumers. Good. I applaud them. The whole thing’s a Ponzi Scheme anyway and so I don’t see why we shouldn’t be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if it makes people believe the ship is going to stay afloat. Sometimes “The Experts” do need to step in and conspire. The public is stupid. Very often, they need to be protected from themselves.

Yes.

So make no mistake. They are conspiring. The above alterations to the text to exclude all of Saint Paul’s references to sexual sin are conscious and deliberate on the part of Rome. They know such talk is unfashionable and if there’s anything U.S. bishops want to avoid it’s being lumped in with Evangelicals. They like to be thought of as fancy and sophisticated… not like those rednecks in MAGA hats from the boonies who get all flustered about gays. More than that… the bishops know their congregations don’t want to hear it and have long since abandoned any concerns about birth control or sex out of wedlock or abortions. Why preach to a flock that won’t hear? Why make it difficult on yourself with troublesome readings? Just take those parts out. Nobody will notice. They’re Catholics. Lord knows they aren’t going to go home and read The Bible for themselves.

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…

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And a while ago such a thing would have really bothered me. You know, finding yet another instance of fraud and deceit, however small, in the place where I was trying to find refuge and solid ground. Largely I’ve spent my life looking for an anchor in the storm and I have drifted from this Tradition, to that one, to the one over there trying to find it. “Over here is the Unchanging Faith!” screams one prelate. “No. No, it’s over here!” shouts another. “We have the infallible book!” claims group A. “No, we do,” says group B. “As it happens, both of your books are infallible, but we’re the only ones with infallible interpreters of those books,” claims yet a third.

An endless chorus.

An infinite litany of voices claiming “We have the Truth.” “We, over here, have God.”

And I wanted to believe them.

I did.

Why preach to a flock that doesn’t want to hear?

I’m a simple man with OCD and perhaps a touch of Aspergers and I desperately wanted to be sure. And it made sense. Right? The Experts had to know better than me. The August Institutions. The men in robes. The giant organizations backed by millions of people and billions of dollars and thousands of years of history…

Surely, they knew better.

Surely Truth was there.

Well, maybe it was and maybe they did. Court’s still out on that. But if I found Truth in those institutions then it wasn’t in the form I expected. Reality tasted different than it smelled. The items on the menu weren’t the same things that ended up being brought to me on the plate. Those August Institutions? Filled with sneaky bastards. I do mean that lovingly. They were men who were lying, yes. But doing so because they thought it was the right thing.

It would’ve been too hard on me back then to hear that changing a two-thousand-year-old religion was as easy as changing a spark plug. That it required no greater lie than the lies of omission. As it turns out, all The Expert Class has to do is stop talking about whatever they want to go away. Whatever they want the public to forget. Stop talking about it long enough and the old generation raised on the old things will die and the next generation will have never heard about them and think those things sound weird. That’s it.

Literally all it takes.

It’s a process that’s been in play across the centuries, across the lives of all my ancestors. It’s why, religiously, my Family Tree seems so twisted and confused. Part of why I’ve always struggled to understand who I am.

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Like I said, a while ago that would’ve bothered me. That incident. Noticing that they’d deliberately altered the Bible to get rid of something they don’t like. I’d have brooded over it and spent days trying to figure out how so obvious a change to allegedly “sacred” scripture could be made in front of everybody and have no one remark on it or even notice.

But I’ve made my peace with it now.

Now… I feel I understand what’s going on.

What follows might seem somewhat jarring and out of place, but I wrote it at a time in my life when I was trying to work out these issues for myself and it did help me. I felt more at peace after writing it. Maybe even more whole. I’ve included it here hoping it may likewise help you. Maybe it will. How it’s connected to everything above this line I don’t know… but it is. Life in this world is about learning to be okay with being a bastard who doesn’t fit in. Being okay with being the red-headed stepchild whom God forgot.

I call this piece “Legion. For we are Many.”

Alternatively, maybe it’s called “Onions.”

Legion. For we are Many.

If you were unfamiliar with onions, you might expect to find a seed or a bean or a core in the middle. You don’t. It’s just more of same, all the way down.

European people are bastard children. Formerly pagan populations raped by militaries and foreign religion. The hot, austere faiths of Abraham rode into Gaul and Albion on the wings of Empire… and tore down absolutely everything in their wake. In his “City of God” Saint Augustine denied this. He was liar. So blinded by his holiness that he could not see. Vandals. Hordes. Soon after Christianity was made the official religion of Rome all the pagan religions were banned. In the years that followed, Christians, with the tacit approval of the state, ransacked and pillaged and burned. Temples were destroyed. Shrines were smashed. Sacred groves were burned and cut down and all over Europe idols and art and icons were smashed. Thor was banished. The temple of Apollo cast down. Christ had said that his Kingdom was not of this world and that therefore his followers should not take up the sword to spread it and yet, the irony… The most worldly and sword baring state, The Roman Empire, became the standard bearer of His Name.

Perhaps it had to be this way. Maybe there really wasn’t any other option.

From a certain perspective Christianity can be seen as destructive and parasitical by default. A force that creeps into your culture and steals it. Usurps what is there. A thing that twists your Yule Log into a Christmas Tree and your Spring Equinox into an Easter. A thing which sails to Mexico and casts down every priest from off his pyramid. I mean… imagine how the Jews felt.

Here they were. Minding their own business. A religion thousands of years old with a rich tradition of debate and exegeses of their canonical texts. An entire culture filled with rituals and myths and mysteries. A path for connection with their God.

And then here comes This Thing.

This Force.

Out of nowhere, all of a sudden these people were springing up claiming that no, actually, we are the correct interpreters of your religious texts. Actually, it is we that have The Messiah you were promised. No. No he doesn’t look or act anything like you thought he would but that’s because you got everything wrong. We know better. Unlike you, we have the Holy Spirit. We’re not blinded by sin. We’re taking your books and adding a whole new section onto them and we’re re-arranging them as well. We’ll do it with the full force of the state. We’re the New Israel. It is we who are the true Jews.

Intense. Brazen and bizarre.

Christianity is a colonizing force. Something which grows like a parasitical fungus over all that came before it. Merging with it. Claiming it for it’s own.

This process isn’t painless.

It hurts. It leaves scars.

The Temple of Serapis. Torn apart by Christians.

If you’ve ever tried to take your faith seriously then I suspect at times you felt them. Those old pains. The old wounds. The scar tissue… that sometimes oddly thin veneer of Jesus seeming to just barely cover all the old paint. You sat and struggled with how incongruous The Old Testament seems with The New. With how audacious it is to claim that the suffering peasant out of Galilee is the same as the vindictive and jealous Yahweh. Perhaps you’ve been hurt by the logical whiplash that results from taking an Abrahamic faith out of the desert and trying to force it through the sieve of Greek Philosophy. Pagan philosophy. The neck-snapping insistence that Paul has anything to do with Plato, or Augustine with Aristotle. Maybe you’ve felt the discomfort of being told that the God you love had a chosen people… and it wasn’t you. Or maybe you’ve felt the pull to Nature worship that all the tribes of Europe seemed to possess. Pagan roots never fully severed. A latent desire to pay homage to every oak tree or to be nude beneath the moon.

Normal.

Christianity is a Catastrophe. An attempt to pull something beautiful out of seventeen violent collisions.

And they were violent.

A violence which we’ve still not come to terms with.

Whether we like it or not (generally people don’t), Christianity is a White person’s religion. I don’t mean to say that non-Europeans don’t practice it, and I know that on the whole most of the world’s Christians aren’t White… still though, the Christianity we have today is inextricably linked with European culture and comes with all its baggage. The Religion may have started in the Middle East and was only later foisted on Europeans by force but, whether by accident, circumstance, or Divine Providence, Europe was where it grew, matured, and thrived. Its original home was largely occupied by Islam. In the East it never out-competed Buddhism. In Sub-Saharan Africa it did flourish, yes… but those cultures were scant in record keeping and never spread their version of the faith out by colonizing the world. For better or worse, if Christianity is a parasite, Europeans became its hosts.

And… maybe that’s okay.

I try not to reflexively condemn anything.

Maybe that’s what God wanted. Who knows?

Either way, as I said, even though today the religion is practiced by all sorts of people all over the world, the version of it they inherited was in almost all cases handed to them by European invaders. In almost all cases, what they got was Jesus through a European lens. Understandable therefore as it is for people to speak of wanting to “decolonize” the faith, I must say I think such a project is impossible. Why? Because long before any European ever got on a boat the Colonization process had already begun. Europe itself was merely the first victim. The first “indigenous peoples” steamrolled by Empire and forced to convert, the first to lose the religion of their ancestors to the great Jesus Machine.

And…

You can’t undo it. At this point trying to rid the faith of European influence would be as hopeless as trying to rid it of the influence of Ancient Greece or Ancient Sumer.

It’s baked in.

You can’t take it out.

The Protestant Reformers already tried.

Recognizing that, indeed, over the centuries the faith had changed substantially and would probably no longer be recognizable to the Christians of the first century church, The Reformers took up a “decolonization” project of their own, trying to roll the clock back, knock off all the cultural and intellectual detritus which had accumulated over the centuries of war and debate and politics and forced conversion.

It didn’t work.

In the end, Martin Luther himself was the first man to decorate a Christmas Tree.

See, it is hopeless. All attempts at rolling back the clock, at “decolonizing”, at trying to return to some pristine form of the “True Faith” absent all the cultural dross of the centuries between you and Jesus?

Destined to fail.

Has to be. Because there is no “True Faith.” Such a thing simply doesn’t exist.

Paganism is never far away.

There’s no there, there. You start to notice, in your own lifetime, your religion changing fundamentally, and so you start to peel back layer after layer of it hoping to find the core… layer after layer of dogma and history and rhetoric hoping at last to reach The Real Center…

Only to find that The Religion is like an onion.

There is no center.

Just layers all the way down.

When you look you find nothing but century after century of conquest and compromise. A faith constantly evolving, merging itself to whatever the dominate culture is at the time. Saint John Henry Newman famously said that “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” In my opinion, to go deeper into history is to cease to think that history matters at all.

Because, if you look into it… really look into it… with an honest and objective eye… you'll be forced to conclude that all of Church History has just been people doing whatever. You know, last century’s Verboten is this century’s Mandatory. Last Council’s solemn decree is this Council’s anathema. As the joke among religious scholars goes, every change to Church doctrine begins with the phrase, “As the Church has always taught…”

When a council of Eastern bishops got together and explicitly and infallibly condemned the Western practice of creating religious statues on the grounds that they might be worshiped as idols… Charlemagne ignored them. Why shouldn’t he? He loved statues and he had more swords. Today? The Church has always taught that iconography was good. Until the 1500s Usury, the practice of loaning money with interest (any interest, not merely “excessive” interest) was a hard and fast mortal sin. Sent you to Hell. That’s why only Jews were allowed to do it. But then, strangely, as Capitalism began to emerge and dominate the world, suddenly Usury wasn’t so bad anymore. Today? The Church has always taught that bankers handing out thirty-year mortgages can be communing members. Not a problem at all. Why would it be? As recently as the 1860s it wasn’t a sin to own another human being. Church said so. Bible did too. But… then the tides turned. Power shifted. Public opinion changed and wars were fought. Now? Well, The Church has always taught that slavery is one of the worst possible sins.

Limbo used to exist and now it doesn’t. Once upon a time indulgences were sold and now they’re not. Previously homosexuals were damned, no questions asked.

Now?

Well… The Church has always taught.

None of this is judgement by the way. I’m not mad at you for being gay or working for a mortgage firm or carving statues of Mother Teresa. I’m just pointing out that “The True Faith” has always been in flux and, as Charlemagne showed, subject to power and influence.

Very often, dogma is dictated by a gun.

And I don’t mean to single out Catholics here. They simply have a longer history with more examples. Many Protestants are just as bad about changing their beliefs, if not more so, and the Eastern Orthodox do it too but they hide it a little better. Wisely, in The East they realized that if they couched every statement in a bit of ambiguity and said the word “Mystery” a lot there’d be less they’d ever have to walk back. If you don’t draw hard lines in the sand, you never have to worry about them being crossed.

And yet…

And yet for all that the world is still full of Christians desperately trying to make sure they’re right. That they’ve got it. That they’ve found the real faith. Mostly I suppose this is out of a desire to be certain they’re good with God and going to Heaven and doing the right things but… in my experience anyway… such a quest is always a Quixotic one. One that leaves you tilting at windmills. Arguing in circles.

Like I say, The Religion is like an onion. Layer after layer of confusion and compromise and conquest and culture.

And? If there is a center?

Then it’s just the one inside you.

That’s it.

At the end of the day that’s all any of us have. The still small voice within our souls. The heart that knows what God wants, even when the mind doesn’t. The place you can go within where you’re not a bastard… where you’re not the result of seventeen chaotic collisions, where you can sit with the stillness of your own being and simply say, “I am.”

That’s it.

That’s the only place you are whole.

℣: Truly we are all God’s Children.

℟: And he hath left us in a hot car.

If you’re honest with yourself… if you’re not simply cutting off parts of your heart and mind to avoid being in conflict with the present day, constantly in flux form of your Tradition…

Then you’re going to be a mess.

As I said you’re a rape baby. The child of a pagan people who had Christianity forced upon them. The result of Judaism given a coercive twist. You’re a student of Socrates forced to learn the teachings of Abraham and a schizophrenic raised to believe the God of the Old Testament was in anyway related to the God of the New. Your ancestors were Christian for over a thousand years and yet somehow still invoking “Jove” in the time of Shakespeare. They were preaching love for enemies whilst constantly making war. You are the offspring of a million doctrinal fights in which men and women were burned at the stake over issues we can’t possibly imagine ever mattering. You are the descendent of fiercely zealous monotheists who nonetheless adorned their churches with pagan Green men and wrote love letters to Athena. Your forebears alternated furiously between literal interpretations of their holy books to regarding the whole thing as nothing but a metaphor. They believed deeply in the unity of all things yet constantly split into innumerable sects.

On paper?

None of it works.

Intellectually… none of it ever works.

It’s all a mess and always has been and there is no solid ground.

And yet here you are. You.

Because Biology is greater than Theology and because Life is not constrained by Logic. Because every tree is at least as true as any dogma.

This is infallible. Church Councils? Not so sure.

And all those pieces? All those layers? Those disjointed and waring parts that you somehow inherited? That Legion of history and soul?

Well somehow they all come together. They all come together in you.

You’re the answer to the riddle see? You’re the place where Heaven and Earth meet and where all the conflicts are resolved. The answer isn’t “out there” and it’s not on paper. It’s not in history books or the sayings of some spiritual father and it’s not in fancy “Thomistic” logical arguments.

It’s in you.

The man of many warring parts whom God has made whole.

You, the gay man who yet knows God loves him. You, the rationalist who finds Jesus in the Eucharist. You, the pagan hiking to commune with waterfalls who somehow finds that by so doing he also worships God. You, the soldier shooting his gun who finds he does indeed love his enemy. You, the woman who identifies with Israel despite being Irish. You, the man who listens to the story of The Crucifixion and hears within it the glories of Hector and Achilles and Rome.

Colonization?

Baptism?

Two words for the same thing.

You my friend are how Christ is working the world out. You, part of his mystical body, are the vehicle by which all of these confusing and conflicting parts are made whole. Made Holy. Nothing is ever destroyed and nothing is ever lost. All of it is wrapped up together and washed clean.

In the end, all is forgiven.

You’re a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Someone making all things new.

Amor Vincit Omnia.