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// Church of the Gesu //

I was born and raised Catholic, like most Filipinos. Yet, growing up, I quickly became disillusioned with many corrupt priests and uncharitable nuns who lived their faith in the lap of comfort, power and a dogmatic adherence to the trappings of organised religion which I felt were disconnected and irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people.

Whew, what a mouthful. Ran out of breath there for a sec. But I'm not done yet.

Nuns from my university relished showing off their new shoes; traveling from Tuguegarao to Manila on airplanes because buses are simply unbearable, dahling; and building ostentatious altars of faith - at the expense of students, who else, whose families must bear dizzyingly exorbitant tuition fee hikes every school year, all in the name of a good Catholic education. Did they even fucking understand what they were doing? Or were they happily acting on blind faith because, after all, it has given them status in the community?

Of course there was the small matter of me being gay. "Hate the sin, not the sinner," said the priest - by which he meant it's OK for me to be a homosexual but so not OK for me to engage in homosexual acts. WTF? If I'm a homosexual (which I am), then isn't everything I do (including breathing) a homosexual action? Funnily enough, this same priest forgot to make a distinction between hating a heterosexual sin and a heterosexual sinner - so how are we, Father, supposed to know? And while we're at it, please enlighten us, Father, about your own sexuality. Are you homosexual, heterosexual or asexual?

I simply couldn't imagine our lord Jesus telling his heteroxual (or homosexual, or asexual) disciples which private acts of pleasure, between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, etc. are considered sinful or not. In fact, I'd imagine that Jesus would have thunk this whole sex business a bit too tawdry and complicated, in the first place, and so let's forget about it all together, please, because the only way to stay pure and be one with the divine is to be... gasp! Could it really be? Celibate.   

And yet, here I am, trying to claw my way out of the deepest, darkest, desperate-est hole I've ever been in, and I need some sort of context. I need something, someone, someday. 

I tried chocolate and coffee and sugar. I've binged on Hollywood, hanging out with people from the Bourne movie, thinking perhaps that I'd gain back some magic in my life through osmosis. I'm willingly buried in an avalanche of tennis balls. Still, I cry myself to sleep. 

The neighbours' dogs bark at me, the cats topple my flower pots, and even the drivers of the village's shuttle buses give me face when I ask them - nicely and with a smile - to please take me where I want to go. 

I feel unwelcome from life, in general.

I used to contain my laughter when my friend, Roy, would talk about God or when Marah would talk about yoga. I couldn't bloody well openly laugh in their faces, although I might as well have had done so because I didn't take them seriously.

But now, I'm deeply envious of them; they seem to have found something that works. They know something I do not.

They have a spiritual context. For anything. Everything. For all of life's extreme circumstances. Extreme joy. Pain. Pleasure. Uncertainty.

So what now?