There's Something About Jesus

Greetings all

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on TWL. If I’d thought that this has left anyone the poorer then I’d feel sorry, but I don’t so, you know, so fucking what. By the way, notice how my stupid views on Ramsey pre-date all the publicity, huh. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway much has occurred in the interim. An old Spirelli has departed, just with a whimper. A brand spanking new Spirelli has arrived, and there’s been an unfortunate development with a dim witted psychopath. All part of life’s rich, stained tapestry, as they say. They’ll all wind up as another dubious blog entry at some point. So, to current matters, here are my notes on things Catholic. By the way, whoever is leaving spam on my comments thing, can you please just fucking stop it. Yours, N. Spirelli

There Something About Jesus

Notionally I 'm Catholic. All the Spirellis are Catholic. I'd be surprised if there actually are any Italian Protestants, or Anglicans. Certainly no Italian Uniting Church, or Church of Englanders. There are bound some Rastafarians, despite the fact that all white boys with dreads always look like dickheads. And Jews. Just because there always are, you know, shuffling around, making bagels, trading diamonds, doing stand-up, humming tunes from Fiddler on the Roof. I was stuck in a transit lounge in Vienna, ingeniously called the 'Sky Lounge' presumably because it had windows and you could see the sky. El Al must have just docked on route to Tel Aviv because Israelis were in the lounge, Hassidim decked out in all the gear, rocking back and forth in prayer. What's that little black box that they strap to their forehead I asked my travelling companion, with all the interest I summons from sitting around for nine hours in hard plastic chairs in the world's most boring airport. She looked at me as if I was the most ignorant person she'd ever met. Well, obviously they use those black boxes for storing their car keys while they pray. I was so stupefied with boredom that I could barely smile at the joke. Some years before, again passing time in some god forsaken Indian shit hole I'd asked if she knew the forehead marking that the population was sporting that day. No, she replied suspiciously, I don't know what it means. Well, it’s really interesting. I replied. Obviously it’s a country of considerable hardship and poverty. Now, see that spot there, that red dot. Well if you scratch it, you can win a brand new car! No really, it’s a national scratchie system. There are all sorts of prizes. Even Selangor Pewter! From memory her response at the time as no different from mine in Vienna. I blame India (see stupid boring story below).

No really, that airport is the dullest I've ever had the misfortune to spend time in. Just a couple of very pedestrian cafes that I was instantly drawn to for the sole reason that I wanted to order a Footscray Coffee. Footscray coffee? You see, if you’ve ordered a Vienna Coffee in Barkley St, Footscray (that is if you’ve negotiated the junkies and avoided being stabbed in the neck with a piece of heavy gauge wire sharpened on the footpath), then logically, you’re obliged to order a Footscray Coffee in Vienna, until, of course, the Viennese barista tells you to fuck off, you ignorant Australian cunt. There are also a couple of tired duty free shops. Every place sold these Mozart themed lollies. Forget what they're called. Mozarttrufflekruggan or something like that. And there's a full-on dirty little porn shop, just there stuck in the middle of the walkway, by itself. Just what you really need to refresh yourself in transit. A stale pastry, a couple of weird, goopy Mozarttrufflekrugan and a copy of Adventures Und Fist. But that's Austria for you. Germany without the cool. Terminally bland, keen on dirty fingernail porn. A place where boredom is the natural state of affairs and pretty much characterises the national psyche.

Anyway, back to Italy. There'd also be a smattering of Buddhists and Evangelicals in Italy, simply because every population has their fair representation of demented try-hards (in the first instance) and brain affected, aspirational nerds with bad clothes (in the second). But, by and large, Italians are Catholic. Italy equates with Catholism like dried fruit goes with flatulence. It’s like they have some sort of proprietary rights over it. The head guy (II Papa) is more often then not Italian, despite the current one having once been part of the Hitler Youth and the one before that a rabid, alpine loving Pole who would have most probably been rejected from the Hitler Youth for being too right wing. The last one was a strange old thing - all bent over, smiling away, doling out sainthoods like shitty school fete prizes. Imagine if he was your uncle at Christmas when you were a little kid. Nino, go over and give Zio Karol a big kiss. Urgh.

Rome is also the Catholic headquarters. Technically at least the Vatican is an independent state with its military, bank, postal service, diplomats and Olympic team. Well, no, there isn’t a Vatican Olympic Team. Not surprising since your average deacon or curate spends their lives frocked up in a full length dress. But if there was a Vatican Olympic Team, I'd vote for Father Damien Karras for captain, you know, the priest from The Exorcist,. He ran laps of the oval and looked pretty fit to me, a decent light welter-weight. And Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He's be starter. He would've been a handy middle distance runner in his day, though not strictly speaking a Catholic. He could use those freaky voodoo eyes of this to wig out the competition on the starting line. The HQ hasn't always been in Rome. There have been other locations in the past. Apparently there were once two HQs, one in Rome and another in Istanbul. It was also in France I think at one point.

Ah, Rome. The Eternal City. Founded by the half witted twins, Romulus and Remus. Unfortunately also scene of my second worst ever traveller’s toilet experience. The food in Italy is, of course, extremely good. A lot of Australians like to think we’ve come a long way in the food stakes but we cook like demented simpletons. We chuck in just about everything within reach, mix it up with a bit more of this and that, and pile the lot up into a tower of impossible height, adding even more stuff, just for good measure, and declare it to be innovative, a fusion of flavours. In fact, like lots of affluent, young industrialised countries, we have no real food culture, and in its absence we rely on ego. We learn the clichés and think we’re alchemists. Italians cook ideas that are often hundreds of years old and with extreme simplicity and it always, always works.

Anyway, I’d been busy scoffing food the whole time and might have been a bit ‘backed up’ but barely noticed. I was out early one day, intent on covering a good number of usual tourist sites. It started with a small abdominal pang which then became an ache and I was soon in urgent need of a toilet. Now Italy doesn’t have public toilets. They just don’t believe in them - a fact I was cursing as I scurried about in increasing desperation trying to locate one. I’d finally spotted an early opening café, and by the time I fronted the dozy barista, I was almost doubled up by cramps. I know I was sweating. Wanting to do the right thing I ordered un café grazie… e subito, in a clipped, clenched teeth sort of squeak. My face was probably purple. The minute or so it took him to make my coffee seemed like an eternity. By eyes were about to pop when I slammed down the short black and bolted for the men’s. I’d lifted the lifted and saw it was blocked with paper and god knows what else, solid. There was nothing for it. It had to be done. It was only after a full five minutes that I began started to feel some relief. And it went on and on and on. Just when I thought it was all over another pang urged me to stay put and continue ‘unloading.’

Finally, somewhat recomposed, I stood up, turned around and reeled back in horror at what I had done. I’d completely filled the damn thing. To the very top. Not only that, but I’d also just pushed the flush. It was just one of those automatic things you do. Press the button. Now it had a system where the water came in via two small pipes with jets, and these were literally submerged by kilos of whatever I’d eaten in the last two days. The pressure must have been good in that part of Rome because the damn thing was determined to do perform its thing and the whole pile started to quiver. I sort of cleaned up, hurriedly leaving the paper on top like some sort of horrific flag and bolted out of the café, ashamed and completely disgusted about what I’d done. There was nothing else for it. It’s not as if I could’ve gone up to the barista and said, look mate, here the thing. I’ve just filled you toilet with shit. No really, I’m not joking. It’s full. It was blocked anyway, so it’s not really my fault. I’m sorry and very embarrassed about it. Just thought you should know. And by the way, it’s probably all over the floor by now, probably the lot, so you might want to send someone in there rather than deal with it yourself, if you know what I mean. Someone had a very bad start to their shift that day.

So, yes, Rome, the very epicentre of the worldwide Catholic faith. It’s a bit unfair, I think. We should have a rotation system perhaps. Or a system where every now and then different countries would line up to bid for the right to be the administrative and political centre of modern day Catholicism. Like everything else, we've be in that. I'd nominate Albury-Wodonga as preferred option with Wycheproof and Manangatang as reserves. You can add any unlikely decrepit Australian country shit-hole to complete that particular joke. God knows there are plenty to choose from. Plenty. Even the ones that weren't quite shit-holes a while ago are now pretty much shit-holes. And the ones that started out being shit-holes are just shittier shit holes. How was your morning walk Môn senior Bruce? Fine, Father Bruce, but I do fear that I've stepped in kangaroo shit yet again and it seems to have become stuck to my new red sandals. Cue the theme music to 'Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo'. You can see it, right?

Incidentally, why Skippy, the bush kangaroo. Is it meant to differentiate that Skippy from Skippy, the Arid, Marginal Land Kangaroo, or Skippy the Regional Centre Kangaroo, or Skippy, the Urban Growth Corridor Kangaroo, or Skippy, the Ex-Pat Living in fucking Earls Court, with Fifteen other Deadshit Kangaroos Working as a Warehouse Labourer and Spending All Weekend Pissed off His Nut on Lager Kangaroo. Please feel free to add any other ridiculous kangaroo to the taxonomy if you like. Without wanting to harp on it, I always thought Sonny was a bit of a sad tosser. His only friend being a kangaroo and all. Moreover, Skip with his walnut sized brain, was clearly far cleverer than Sonny and his whole family, piloting hovercrafts to rescue farmers from raging torrents, single headedly repairing the helicopter to deliver life saving medicines, throwing cargo nets over pirates, resolving difficult mathematical theorems and so on. Hurray Skip, Local municipal elections have delivered greater influence to Right wing Phalangists in the Lebanon, altering the parliamentary balance of power…There's going to be trouble with Druze! Hurry! There’s no time to lose! And where's old Skip now I wonder. Probably perched on the end of the front bar at the Dimboola Hotel, pissed on port and Cokes, a roll you own ciggie hanging on his lip, babbling indecipherable shit with Ray fucking Schaeffer whose also probably also off his nut, reciting awful bush poetry to the broken jukebox (see even stupider and more boring story below).

Anyhow, the whole Catholic thing. I'm an ex-Catholic. Catholics call us, ‘fallen’ Catholics, or ‘lapsed’ Catholics. Some say there's really no such thing. Like almost all of us, we were never given a choice. Even as a kid it sort of freaked me out. It was the imagery mostly. My Italian grandmother had the whole collection of framed religious pictures, the Virgin Mary, Baby Jesus, the crucified Christ, the bleeding heart of Christ, Saint Gabriel, Padre Pio, Mussolini. No, obviously not II Duce. There's something apt in those images resurfacing decades later as high-camp kitsch in 1980s inner city cafes, the backdrop for left wing students, idle layabouts and shrill homosexuals. It was also the imagery of the crucified christ, hanging above a church door that sent me screaming at age five, despite Nonna Spirelli whispering to me that it was only my friend Jesus. He might have been my friend, but he scared the fuck out of me.

If the church is a house of god, then god needs to find a good designer since most of them are cold and ugly places, especially those built in the 1970s. They're empty, sparse places, and they echo, and there's always that strange smell, part candle wax, part cheap perfume, part old incense, part blue nylon slacks, part BO and old people. It’s a place where people often end up when there are no other options and they're desperate. It’s where they come with their terrible personal tragedies, their pent up guilt, and the inevitable personal pain and suffering of their bloody minded, ego driven, stupidity. And it’s where they dump their filthy, terrible sins year after godforsaken year. And it’s in this place, this stinking emotional toilet of anguish that Catholics, er, celebrate Mass, overseen by a mass produced plaster statute of a guy on a wall, with hippie hair, half butchered, hanging on a cross. Sound like a fun time to you then?

Now, your Eucharist is your holist of the sacraments. There’s Baptism (you’re forced into the Catholic club by your smiling, imbecilic parents high on post war consumerist prosperity); Reconciliation (you confess your real and imagined sins in a small dark room the size of a shoe box to some old, dandruff ridden poof who’s nodding off to sleep or has his hand down his pants – priests, has there ever been a wackier bunch of perverts?), Confirmation (when you re-join the same club as a fully formed adult around the age of 12, and if you’re a little girl, you dress like a bride as if you’re going to 'marry' Jesus - think of it, thirty, forty little twelve year old girls, all dressed up in white with gloves and veils, all there, about to offer it up to Jesus – now tell me there’s nothing wrong with that then), Marriage (hard to think of marriage as a sacrament rather than just a big fucking act of lunacy - it allows Catholics to have sex, and its not available to gays or priests, so its just as well then that neither gays nor priests have sex), Holy Orders (where you too can sign up to become a doddering, dandruff ridden old poof, or a nun - nuns are basically the domestic servants of priests, and subject of that old joke about convent rules - lights out at 10. Candles out at 11.00) and finally, Annoying the Sick, which is actually Anointing the Sick (ie you're going to die and the old dandruff poof takes his hand out of his dirty, stained pants long enough to smear some oil on your head and says, no worries, mate, you're going to heaven. I would have preferred annoying the sick, personally.

Catholics believe that the Eucharist is where god turns little wafers (meant to be bread but tastes like a flavourless home brand rice cracker) into the body of christ. Interesting metaphor? No, not really. You see Catholics, mainstream Catholics, not even the nutty, psycho kind like Opus Dei, believe that those nasty, tasteless white wafers literally become the flesh of christ. Cannibalism. There you are, a little kid, with a bit of the god’s actual body stuck on the roof of your mouth, not knowing what to do. You’re walking back to your seat, thinking, what part of jesus is actually stuck to the roof of my mouth and what the fuck am I going to do about it? You can't actually chew it. And according to Catholics the wine become christ's blood. Vampirism. No wonder Catholicism has been a hit in places like Haiti and across the third world. You line up, hands crossed, and get to have a chow down on christ’s body and drink his blood. Is this the religion of sane people?

Most of the other bits of the Mass are just dull. There’s the Nicean Creed. It’s the part of the mass where Catholics make a verbal declaration all together. It's pretty basic stuff. They all stand there and say it in unison, like robots. We believe in one true god. We believe in heaven and hell. We believe that Jesus is the son of god. We believe that the Church is great. We believe that we're the one true religion. We believe that all other religions are deluded. We believe that we're the best. We can't believe how stupid all other religions are. Muslims are just idiots. They're all going to burn in hell. Serves them right. What's for dinner tonight? If you loved me you'd let me do you without a condom. Those last bits aren't really part of the Nicean Creed. Anyway, making these declarations in parrot like fashion is mean to build one's faith.

Then there's the 'Prayers of the Faithful' always one of my favourites. It’s a little ritual or ceremony where parishioners make short prayerful petitions. There are usually four of five of them in a row and they follow a pretty standard format. They go a bit like this. Petitioner walks up to the lectern: Holy Father, we pray for Cambodian refugees. May you ease the suffering of these filthy, ungrateful, heathen bastards. Congregation (all in that same robot voice): Lord hear our prayer. Petitioner: Holy Father, we pray for the swift recovery of your son Bruce Magillacutty who slipped while having a wank in the bath and has broken his hip. Lord hear us. Congregation (in robot voice): Lord hear our prayer. Lord, we ask your blessing for the Manangatang under 12s in their game this afternoon. May we truly kick some protestant arse. Lord Hear Our Prayer. You get the basic idea.

There’s also the 'sign of peace' which is the part of the mass where, at the priest's signal, you have to turn around and shake as many people's hand, saying, peace be with you. As a boy I liked to substitute it with a playful, Arthur Fonzerelli like peace finger salute, and say, heeeeey peace man and when I got slightly older, I'd assume a very grave look, look intensely in the eye of the parishioner and shake hands firmly, declaring peas be with you, trying not to laugh. I always wanted to quickly slip a white rubber glove on to my right hand just before the Sign of the Peace but never had the guts. Spirellis are always been smart-arses from a young age.

You can't forget the Readings. Probably the low point of the Mass. There are usually two of them. They go something like this. Someone rolls up to a lectern and says, the second reading is a reading from the Second letter of Saint Trevor to the Epileptics (short pause). And on the eight day Jesus and the disciples came upon a field and Jesus did seeth that the field was bountiful. And they cameth unto a small group of farmers who were resting from their labours under a shady tree. Jesus came upon them and did greet the group of farmers and did sayeth, 'The lord thy god has seen your green fields and he has witnessed all of your labours. Prayth what is thy crop?" To which the farmers did say, 'turnips my lord!, we are the turnip farmers of Antioch." And then the farmers then did hand Jesus some turnips which they had taken from their fields, and Jesus saw that they were good turnips. And Jesus smiled knowingly unto them, saying "blessed are you all, you the farmers of the turnips, and blessed be the turnips, whether they be baked, or whether they be steamed or whether they mashed." And so the farmers received the blessing of the lord and Jesus and the disciples continued their journey. The reading always concludes with the line...this is the word of god, to which you have to say in the robot voice, praise to you lord Jesus christ.

Then there are the songs, the hymns, those terrible, terrible hymns. There are probably three or four in every Mass. Lyrically and musically they're awful, mind numbing. Before computers and power-point they used to have a couple of kids up the front with a projector and a screen, and the words spelled out in texta pen on a transparent sheet, just so that everyone could join in. Invariably, they'd be a couple of ancient powdery old dears singing away in a bizarre, quivering super high falsetto, emitting sounds previously unknown to mankind. True. They’d start up and I’d swear, moments later you’d hear the sound of the neighbourhood dogs in the distance, either pleading for it to stop or tearing each other’s throats out. And they'd all be sung very very slowly. Some would take twenty minutes or so to get through. Yahweh is the god of my salvation. I come to him. And have no fear....Urgh. At boarding school in central Victoria we were forced to practice hymn singing for an hour every Saturday night. It was after dinner and before the weekly movie. It was so tedious that we’d think of ways to make it interesting, which usually meant trying to piss off the poor Christian Brother who happened to be in charge of us. Some times we’d only sing every second line, or we’d alternate between singing very quietly and very loudly. Other times we’d just try and ‘squirrel grip’ the kid in front.

It never sat right with me, the Catholic thing, even at an early age. It was mostly the doctrine, the teachings, the fundamentals like original sin that they drill into you and which to me just didn’t add up. You knew there was something fishy going on, but you did pretty what you were told and jumped through the hoops. Nearly two decades later I somehow found myself seated in a large lecture hall every Monday morning ploughing through 12 months of theology study. Fucked if I really know why, but there I was. In the interim I’d picked up some hard core critical analysis skills, pretty much just as a lark to fill in several years. I was determined to have another serious look, as an adult, probably thinking it was uncool enough to be cool. What struck me like a perverse reverse revelation was how crude Catholic doctrine was. I was expecting Darth Vader, and it was little more than one of the Three Stooges, pissed, and diseased, with a broken leg, singing Sea Shanties that sounded like the Birds Eye Fish Fingers tune. It wasn’t flawed, it was just ludicrously stupid. As an ideology, it was so unsophisticated. It was base and childish. It was the Dumb Club, and it made me realise that its power was outside its tenets and its teaching, and probably had to do with ritual, symbol and mysticism. Like that’s news to anyone. It closed the book on Catholicism for me, well, as much as it can for any former Catholic. But, strangely not for a number of my contemporaries, particularly when it came to marriage, or after the arrival of children. Many have sort of drifted back, explaining that it’s not really about the religion but more to do with community and values. I suspect they’re bullshitting me, after having bullshitted to themselves, and it’s really just a cover for a valid search for meaning. If that’s right, then good luck to them. I doubt they’ll find anything more than the same old testament fairytales and the empty, irrelevant braying of an organisation that speaks with no authority, knows very little, and insists on standing for even less.

Amen.

N. Spirelli