I Guess I May Never Understand

I was just going along on my merry digital way when I came across this from CBSNews.com:

“The Vatican insisted Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by excluding females from the priesthood. And it issued a new warning that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated.” (Link)

Now maybe I just don’t understand. I just have a hard time figuring out why women would want anything to do with organized Catholic/Christian religions to begin with. A belief system that uses allegory to help people along the way of finding a divine sense within themselves and opening themselves up to understanding that the world is about more than just one person, I can buy that. I totally support it. But a religion organized to strip away the spirituality behind the stories, and that puts immense effort (and takes great delight) in making a hierarchy among human beings to ensure the dominance of only one part of the living spectrum, I don’t see any use in that. As a woman, I have absolutely no desire to have anything to do with a group of men bound and determined to eliminate the female side of the spiritual whole and to subjugate women perpetually.

I feel bad if a woman wants to be a priest and honestly believes it’s a calling because I’m sure it hurts to be told they’re not good enough all the time. But maybe this is a chance to break away from the iron grip of literalistic self-serving dogma (self-serving of course to the ones who get all the power out of it) and re-find the path to balance. For balance there has to be male-female, dark-light, good-bad. And finding that sense of balance, of understanding the inner meaning behind starting out unknowing and abused, dying to the idea that self is all there is, and resurrecting to the possibility that we’re more than just what our bodies are carrying around is really the entire point anyway. Nobody needed to tell me that. And whether you call that inner/greater divinity God, Christ, Buddha, or Bob The Baker, the journey and what you make of it is what matters. Not what some guy on a power trip, and would really like your money, says you have to believe.