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Fic Update: "Mortal Corruption"
May. 8th, 2010 10:34 am Attended a funeral yesterday for a great old man who was one of the founding pillars of the astronomy club of which my spouse and I are officers. Calling it a "club" doesn't do the organization justice; for us, it serves the purpose that a church or similar religious group serves for many people. But, while we serve the noble purpose of astronomy instead of going to church, many of our club-mates are into both, and so this funeral was a weird hybrid service; a tribute to the man's consuming passion for the skies mixed up with modern rent-a-priest Catholicism. The Catholic part of it was the mundane half of the service, and in my husband's view the priest was a disaster. My husband was part of a hardcore separatist Catholic community until they kicked him out for owning Simon and Garfunkel records, and his standards for priestly decorum and eloquence are beyond what the majority of post-Vatican II parishes have to offer.
[I am not a "recovering" Catholic; I think of myself as "ethnically Catholic" instead. Even as a very young child I never bought into the package deal offered me and rejected it with a clear conscience as soon as I had a rational motivation, instead of an emotional motivation, for doing so.]
We thought the priest did raise one excellent point because he actively confronted the audience on their conceptions of heaven, dismissing all the "sparkly clouds and rainbows" stuff (you may believe in it personally, but that is NOT the stance of the Catholic Church), and basically challenged them on the foundations of their grief. I think it's fair to say that, while most Americans proclaim their religious convictions, as a nation we don't live as though we believe anything good comes our way after death-- the vast amounts of money spent in the attempt to stay "young" and alive says otherwise. There's not a lot of serenity in the modern American approach to death, though this does seem to be changing slowly at a grass-roots level. (Our friend died at home under hospice care.)
Oh yes, fic. I started this one for the previous challenge at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fe_contest , and while it fits the theme of the Spirit challenge far better, I still want to finish "Century Eyes" and enter that one. It's L'Arachel-meets-reality. Ow.
ETA: "Mortal Corruption" is the most popular thing I've written in ages. It's attracted more readers in four days than my prior "most popular" story did in the MONTH it debuted ("The Time Remaining" back in June '09). It's short, it's FE8, and somebody dies, so I guess that reels in the readers.
[I am not a "recovering" Catholic; I think of myself as "ethnically Catholic" instead. Even as a very young child I never bought into the package deal offered me and rejected it with a clear conscience as soon as I had a rational motivation, instead of an emotional motivation, for doing so.]
We thought the priest did raise one excellent point because he actively confronted the audience on their conceptions of heaven, dismissing all the "sparkly clouds and rainbows" stuff (you may believe in it personally, but that is NOT the stance of the Catholic Church), and basically challenged them on the foundations of their grief. I think it's fair to say that, while most Americans proclaim their religious convictions, as a nation we don't live as though we believe anything good comes our way after death-- the vast amounts of money spent in the attempt to stay "young" and alive says otherwise. There's not a lot of serenity in the modern American approach to death, though this does seem to be changing slowly at a grass-roots level. (Our friend died at home under hospice care.)
Oh yes, fic. I started this one for the previous challenge at
fe_contest , and while it fits the theme of the Spirit challenge far better, I still want to finish "Century Eyes" and enter that one. It's L'Arachel-meets-reality. Ow.ETA: "Mortal Corruption" is the most popular thing I've written in ages. It's attracted more readers in four days than my prior "most popular" story did in the MONTH it debuted ("The Time Remaining" back in June '09). It's short, it's FE8, and somebody dies, so I guess that reels in the readers.
