Good Friday

I was recently telling a friend of mine that I don't like to work on Good Friday. It's not that I'm particularly religious, but I was raised as a Catholic, and even going to public school as a kid, we had the day off.

Well, tomorrow, I have a huge event for work. I've known about it for months, had it marked on my calendar, was instrumental in planning it - and yet never once actually realized it was Good Friday. Honestly, I almost forgot Sunday was Easter. It's not as though I have family out here to celebrate it, so it's really just another day for me.

This has been a pretty shitty Lent for me. I didn't go to confession before it started, and I skipped Mass on Ash Wednesday. I didn't give anything up, though I tried in the most half-hearted of ways to be a nicer person. (It didn't take.) And I took a good kick in the heart from someone I really loved just a few weeks ago, adding to my general malaise.

It's not just Lent. Truthfully, I haven't gone to church in a really long time, mostly because I've been a sort of mad at God. (As I told the Ex last year, "He knows exactly what He did.") It's hard to sit in church and be joyful unto the Lord while you're cursing His name.

I've made a lot of excuses for this. First it was the distance from where I lived to my former parish in Santa Monica. Then Romeo died, and that made it difficult to have any interest in the whole Advent/Christmas season. Then I moved again and I was ostensibly looking for a new church. Then I didn't go because I thought about how depressing and stark Mass can be during Lent.

Now, I don't really have an excuse. I think it's just that sometimes I sit inside a church and I feel like a fraud. I want to feel at peace. I want to feel communion with everyone else. I want to believe it when I recite, "I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the Word and I shall be healed." But I don't. At least I haven't for a while.

No matter how many times I confess, I still feel guilty and awful, like some sort of spiritual failure. Some people might say that's the whole point of religion, to make you feel like a bad person so you keep going back. I don't think that's true. I'm not interested in becoming a religious fanatic, but I sometimes wish I could have that sense of serenity that other people seem to get from faith.