Our thoughts and prayers are with you.  I’ll keep you in my prayers.  May God have mercy upon…platitudes that are dropped any time something bad happens in our worlds.  Whether personal or global loss the words are the same.  And then when the anger sets in, we ask why God would let something like this happen.  Why would God let such evil exist?  I stopped asking that question many years ago.

I used to be a true believer.  Never waivered in my faith and belief in a higher power.  Don’t confuse that with organized religion.  I gave up the church when I was sixteen years old.  Disillusionment makes it easy to walk away from a lifetime of training.  When I was a kid, we were very active in the church.  My brother was an acolyte, a lay reader and sang in the choir.  My mom, sister and I would help with the Altar Guild and delivering flowers after service to the shut ins.  We all attended Sunday school and participated in the youth group.  I knew how to setup the altar and which robes to prep for the minister for all the religious holidays.  Participation at all of the church functions was a given.  I attended Sunday service every week, midnight mass at Christmas and sunrise service at Easter.  The church was a big piece of my daily life.

And then my parents got divorced.  Mom loaded up her school schedule in order to finish her degree.  We missed a few weeks of church.  Then we received a visit from the ladies of the church.  And one would have thought that the reason for the visit was to see if the family was okay or if any support was need during a difficult time.  A reasonable person might have thought that.  But the reality is that they wanted to know if they were going to be able to continue to count on the monthly donation that was normally made when we attended service.  As a family, we were struggling to find our new normal and all the church was concerned about was the money.   That was the end of my relationship with organized religion.  I have other issues with organized religion, but that’s a topic for another day.  I can count on one hand the number of times I have been to a church in the last 30+ years.

I should point out that I was not and never have been Catholic, so that set of scandals had no impact on my divorce with organized religion.  As great as my disillusionment with the church was, it did not impact my feelings regarding my faith.  That came much later after a string of personal losses and the loss of faith in humanity.  It’s normal to question your faith in God when dealing with personal tragedy and being let down by those close to you.  Pile on school shootings, natural disasters, bullying and all the other ways man acts badly toward their fellow man and environment and then you start to question your faith in a higher power.

There were several years where I thought of myself as a sort of agnostic – neither a believer nor a non-believer, but I wasn’t waiting for proof or evidence.  I needed time to sort out my thoughts and feelings on the subject.  I spent a lot of time listening to others talk about their faith or lack thereof.  From evangelicals to atheists, there were plenty of people talking about the subject and I listened to most of them.  None of it helped me get off the fence.  But then I was re-watching one of my favorite sci-fi series and one of the main characters was questioning where God was amongst all the craziness.  The partner looked over and said that God wasn’t paying attention, so deal with it.  And that’s when I remembered that I believed in man’s free will.

The problem with faith is that it’s not something that can be proven or explained.  Faith is believing in the absence of those very things.  And as I’ve learned blind faith in anyone or anything leads to disaster and heartache.  However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have faith in God.  There are just some things that science can’t explain and I choose to believe that a higher power was the catalyst for these things.  I also believe that when God created man and gave them the choice of eating the forbidden fruit, that was the point where the path diverged.  By taking the bite, God’s involvement with man and his actions ended.  In that moment, it became about free will and man alone is responsible for the world we live in.

Before anyone throws a Bible at my head, I should say that I have actually read the book.  Every page.  No, I don’t take it verbatim and believe that everything that was written about happened exactly as stated.  My issue with the Bible is that it was still written by man.  And it’s been cherry picked by the major churches as to what books were included.  That’s too much human intervention for me to take it as a literal recitation of events of the time.  But that doesn’t devalue the lessons to be learned or the guidelines by which we live our lives.

So I no longer pray.  And I no longer offer my prayers to those that are going through hard times.  If going to church and praying help you, then I support that.  But those practices don’t work for me.  If I have a problem or don’t like my life then it’s up to me to fix it or make changes.  On the larger issues, man has created these problems and it’s up to man to solve them.  And if we fail, then maybe it’s just the end of our time.  And if that bothers, then maybe it is a good idea that we don’t fail.

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I finally went to go see Captain Marvel this past weekend.  It was…okay.  It was a good story but the pacing was slow and the CGI was overdone.  The script went for too many laughs and got carried away with the fact that this was part of the Marvel Universe.  I’m not sure they fully realized that they were making another installment of Guardians of the Galaxy.  The music was great.  I loved the 90’s vibe and it fit the character and story.  I especially liked the tribute to Stan Lee at the start of the film.  Perfectly done and a lovely tribute to the man that began it all.