how the lost sheep returned

of course the matter with the cheese (see my last post) weighed heavily on my heart. after all i'm a good catholic girl. not that i felt compelled to go to confession. i mean it was just cheese and i've already destroyed the evidence. still, i felt it would suck big time if one day i realized that my reservation on a fuzzy cloud had been exchanged for a spot in a giant pot of boiling water. so i tried to prove my goodwill by attending a mess again last weekend.

it actually wasn't the first time that this idea had crossed my mind lately. about five month after moving to b-town, i received the monthly leaflet of "st. marien" in my mailbox. not only did this show me that god had ultimately blessed my move, but it also reminded me that it had been over eight years since i went to church the last time. and not that i've ever been there on a regular basis. of course i did the whole enchilada of baptism, first communion and confirmation. but in germany people tend to be rather fickle about religion and just try to get by with the big milestones of getting baptised, married and buried there. and of course they'll go to the interesting messes like christmas or easter.

my family is pretty typical of that. except maybe for my late grandma who went to mess every sunday. she even had a fluorescent "virgin mary" miniature on her nightstand. i think it was filled with holy water from a pilgrimage to lourdes. when i was little and stayed over at her house, i used to sleep in her bed. and like all grandmas, mine snored like crazy. so i would pull the blanket all over my head and try to fall asleep like that, clutching the "virgin mary" tightly against my chest. though as the cheese affair has proven, that didn't seem to have made me any more devout.

i've always been rather conflicted about religion anyway. when i was in 7th grade, my religion teacher asked us to draw god one day - just like we imagined him. and mine turned out to be rather traditional. an elderly bearded man in a robe and sandals, sitting on a cloud and holding the bible. i figured he should look a bit like jesus on those ancient paintings. after all, he was his dad and i had never heard that jesus came after mary look-wise. i drew the picture with crayons, but i didn't have a red one. so i used a red marker for his lips. and since man do have eyelashes, i also drew some nice long ones on god's face. but then in class we all had to present our pictures and the other people had to express what they saw in the picture. so when it was my turn, there was complete silence in the room before somebody shouted "he looks like a tranny" and people started to giggle. and as somebody else asked why my god was wearing lipstick, my teacher explained that what i wanted to tell people was that god could also be a woman. i actually didn't, but i nonetheless agreed with her. so i became the freak-girl who drew god as a bearded woman with flaming red lips.

anyway, i went to mess last sunday. and actually it went by pretty quickly and the priest even made a joke or two. the only thing that bugged me is that i couldn't find that one easter song i had always liked in the prayer book anymore. i guess it must haven fallen out of the christian church song charts.