magdalene//nymph

Rain, New Year's Eve

intercessions—god, you're cruel, cute, clingy; ℟ thank you, thank you, thank you

Seeing how positive the reaction to Father Jud in Wake Up Dead Man has been confirms my belief that most people—even dyed in the wool atheists—desperately, desperately want Christians to live up to the ideals they profess.

“The stars, the mountains, the sea, and all the things that speak to us of time, convey God’s supplication to us. By waiting humbly we are made similar to God. God is the only good. That is why he is waiting there in silence. Anyone who comes forward and speaks is using a little force. The good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting. Beggars who are modest are images of Him.”

I'm reading the bible for the first time and the song of songs has me baffled, why is it part of the bible?

We have entered a millennium in which we must give spiritual, cultural, legal, political and economic expression to the civilization of love. May the enormity of the suffering we witness help us grasp the radical nature of this call.

God is relation, full stop. He is like reality in this regard. Consider an electron, the fundamental unit of all matter. No one has ever seen one. They really don't "exist" until we turn our attention to them. The physicist Marcelo Gleiser says that "exist" may be too strong a word to use for an electron. I take God's existence to be much the same, though for God "exist" is too weak a word. We don't know what the existence of God is. We have no idea what the word "exist" even means in the context of God. What we do know—or what I know, I should say—is that God doesn't exist until I turn my attention to him. Relation brings him into being, or, more accurately, enables his being to be perceived, experienced, shared. My attention—and the precise quality of that attention—is absolutely involved. I realize this is unorthodox at best, heretical at worst. But it is my experience of being in the world and of being with God. "The feeling remains," as Teresa of Avila says, "that God is on the journey, too."

saw a post recently that said (paraphrasing) the catholic church doesn't allow for divorce when domestic abuse is involved. and while technically true, that's only because catholics don't have religious divorce.

"Stop hating on my religion! Our actual position is closer to the correct atheist position than you realized! Also not all priests or practitioners will tell you this correctly so in practice this isn't always true, but you HAVE to argue with the steelman rather than the version of the doctrine that's actually enforced on people in reality much of the time! You aren't even allowed to notice the disparity!"

Hi, that is not actually what I said, but I appreciate that religion holds a lot of trauma and emotional harm for many people, and sometimes it can feel like someone disagreeing with you is being patronising or attacking etc, even when they aren’t. I have no interest in telling anyone their position is wrong? I was simply trying to clarify (mostly to other catholics who may not know) that divorces and separations are always an option. The lack of catholic religious divorce is not a value judgement on leaving a harmful marriage, it is a simple reflection on the catholic belief around the ontological reality of sacraments.

Ok but I won’t lie the fact that you can’t just get a divorce if your partner is genuinely shitty is insane though

I suppose it depends what you mean by genuinely shitty. canon law says grave mental or physical danger, which can apply to a lot of things, all of which i'd consider genuinely shitty. it also depends what you mean by just get a divorce. because you can just get a divorce! you can get a legal/secular divorce and leave your spouse whenever you want.

Are those marriage preparation courses an actual common thing? Or are they just something that happens in very few areas, because I know of people growing up who had parents have shot gun weddings (weddings done suddenly / sans preparation) all because the woman got pregnant. And also being ethnically Filipino I know very well that at least in the Philippines (where LEGALLY you CANNOT get a divorce unless you’re like, Muslim, and the only other option is “separation” and annulment, which is insanely hard to get), there’s a LOT of sudden/unprepared marriages.