Xmas

It's Christmas time, and Christmas makes me think about presents, family , good food, and God. I had someone point out to me the exact moment that they lost their faith the other day, and that got me thinking about my whole religious experience. It was never a matter of losing faith to me, because for some reason, faith was never instilled in me to begin with. I have a christian family, my mother's side is english protestant, and my father's side is french catholic. I went to a catholic school as a girl, and there I learnt about the Bible, and the saints, and went to confession. You think it would have made some sort of impression. But the whole thing was like a big game to me.

Because I was never baptised, I never got to take part in 1st communion. I remember begging my mother to let me get baptised while I was still young, so I could take part too, but she wouldn't let me. She wanted me to be older, she said, before I made that choice. So I missed out on communion, which wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't been a month's worth of communion preparation during school hours, before the actual event. I was really bitter, when we went to mass once a week and everyone in my class filed out to take communion from then on.

It was the next year that I found out that nobody remembered that I hadn't taken first communion, they all took it for granted that we had, because back in those days, people who weren't catholic were not allowed to attend catholic schools. (My siblings and I got through the system because our father was french catholic, and it was a french catholic school.) In any case, one day at mass I nonchalantly joined the line of communers, while the only other non-baptised kid in the class (and probably in the entire school) sat there and looked miserable. The eucharist (did I even spell that correctly?) tasted awful.

The point to this story being, that I never took religion seriously. I didn't go and eat some round stale cracker because I felt that I was receiving the Body of Christ, I did it because I wanted to fit in. I was succumbing to the worst form of peer-pressure: the kind you inflict on yourself. I never bought into the idea that there was some magnanimous, sometimes vengeful, omnipotent being sitting around and playing with the human race as if we were a Playschool Playhouse, although I did think that whoever had written the story did a pretty good job.

Maybe all religion is like that. The sheep syndrome, you know? But maybe I'm missing something completely. Either way, I can still enjoy Christmas, and I definitely intend to this year.


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