The Sunday Morning Hangover Part 1: Dealing with the Space Religion Left Behind

Welcome to Episode 2 part 1!

In the first installment of The Sunday Morning Hangover, we discuss how to navigate the "what now" phase of religious deconstruction. I'll provide definitions, examples, scripture references and laughs, as we leave our standard issued maps behind and take our first curious steps away from the alter, together!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Once again, I'm your host Nick. And welcome to part one of what now. Today we ask what now. We're going to start with tradition, breaking away. When we break away from tradition, be that family tradition, church tradition, capital C, or lowercase c, we're left with the well, what now? Today we're going to be talking about the specific ache of breaking away from religious tradition. Not just the big theological shifts, but the small things, er quoting small things, clearly not small, the holidays, the rituals, the expectations that keep us tied to the version of ourselves that we're most likely outgrowing. And I think it's important to start with tradition, right? Name the topic. So according to Webster's dictionary, and I'll be honest with you, I'm using Webster's as opposed to the Oxford because the Oxford one requires a subscription. So we'll start with the Webster's definition. Tradition. A belief or story, or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical, though not verifiable. I'm going to emphasize those last two words. Not verifiable. I think we'll start with just kind of an exercise. Think of a tradition. Think of a tradition that is not related to religion. My family, my wife, daughters, and I, uh, we had a tradition for quite a few years that we kept until the girls got too old and too cool to continue doing it. But every Christmas Eve for a good handful of years, we went to a downhill ski resort nearby and we went snow tubing. Um, it was fun. It was usually pretty quiet because it was Christmas Eve. Um doing that tradition is something that I'm gonna come back to when we talk later in this episode about determining what's left after breaking a tradition. It's gonna be a neat tie-in, but it's a different topic, kind of. So think of a tradition, something that you, your family, or you and your friend group have observed for any length of time. Now think of a tradition as it relates to faith, our upbringing, the what I will call indoctrination that so many of us are are breaking from. I know that one tradition that my family had for many years was to drive nearly an hour to the private school that I attended. Yes, that school was nearly an hour from my home. Uh, we're not even going to get into the impracticality of that. Either way, we would during Holy Week, which, if you're not familiar with uh the Catholic faith, is celebrating and remembering Jesus' last week. Uh, and if you do take it for fact, um my guy had a hell of a last week. But you've got Ash Wednesday, and then Holy Thursday, and then Good Friday, and then your Easter vigil, and then Easter. Very quick math. Let's count together. We've got Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday evening, and Sunday, five consecutive days, all five days with Latin, all five days with a minimum 90-minute mass, and one of those days, three monks got into the sacristy and chanted like Gregorian chant the entire passion in Latin, standing the entire time, the congregation standing the entire time, with enough incense to smoke out, you name it, somehow we're expected not to pass out. In retrospect, it's no surprise that that approach to tradition helped lead to a burnt-out young man. So that's a that's a uh a religious tradition, and there are a lot of them. You you could call any sacrament a tradition, right? We have a baby, we baptize the baby, we commit the baby to a life of honoring Jesus, and we commit them to a childhood of indoctrination. I'm sorry, that wasn't fair. We commit them to a childhood of us as parents, steering them in the right direction as we are called to do by Jesus. One really common thread, if if you were to challenge a tradition, ask the parent, ask the priest, ask the minister, why do we do this? Oftentimes, if if you're if you're in tune enough, you'll gather that their response is just total bullshit. They they they don't know, they'll throw some of the classic buzzwords out, but in the back of your mind you're thinking, hell is this dude saying? Basically, what all boils down to is and you guys have all heard this, this is how we've always done it. An extremely frustrating thing for for me and many people to hear, be it as it relates to religion or hell, anything. This is how we've always done it. Now that's status quo, that's not challenging, and that's not curious. That's not asking the question, why? Right? The great question that we are never allowed to ask why. So just some some secular examples of people who said, no, I don't care if this is how we've always done it. You need to convince me that this is the right way to do it. Richard Trevithic, I don't expect that many people know who this gentleman was. A fun and boring fact about me, I'm a boiler operator and I have been for quite a few years. I nerd out over steam. And feel free to laugh. We we've all got our thing, right? Just the power of steam from um from getting the wrinkles out of your damn shirt to being an integral part of nuclear fusion. Steam. Super neat. Anyway, Richard in 1804 built the first steam-powered locomotive. Up until that point, they'd used horses or walked. Richard decided one day, well, I don't care if this is how we've always done it. This is too much work, it's inefficient. This is literally gonna save lives. We no longer leave with a caravan of a hundred people to cross the country and land with 15. We're gonna get everybody there. So he said no, uh enough. There has to be a better way. Now, when he said that, he didn't set out with the better way in mind, but he asked, he asked the question, why? And well, hell, this isn't the best way. I wonder what the best way is. Another one, super obvious, super quick and easy. Everybody's heard of them. The Wright brothers. They've built the damn airplane. Granted, history embellishes everything and oftentimes rewrites things to fit the narrative. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? We'll call that religion. Again, the way we'd always done it was boots on the ground, two feet on the damn ground. Maybe even, because this was ninety-nine years later after the first steam-powered locomotive was built. That was a pretty efficient and quick way to do it, but there has to be more. We're not going to get ahead of ourselves here. 1903 is when the first airplane left the ground and successfully flew. Now think to yourself how many years later it was that we landed on the moon, if you believe we landed on the moon. That is likely a different podcast altogether, uh, and likely one that I'm not going to do. Uh conspiracy theories, yeah, sure, that it's neither here nor there. But what these guys all have in common, and there are countless other examples, is this is the way we've always done it, just didn't hold water. They were curious. And I'll tell you, if you're listening to this podcast, you're curious. Be it about what deconstruction looks like, or just a curiosity is what this idiot who started a podcast possibly has to say about it. Either way, curiosity landed you here, and I'm damn happy that you guys are curious. I know I am. So, tradition. I'd be remiss if I didn't try somehow tying this into the Bible. I will tell you, admittedly, that the brand of Catholicism that I was raised with, we didn't lean heavily on the Bible. In fact, our only exposure was typically during the readings at Mass, and it's always been something that that I've wondered. Before I deconstructed uh being Catholic, I did the unthinkable, and I remember being kind of yelled at by my parents and being told that I was a disappointment a theme. Certainly wasn't the first, nor was it the last time I heard that. I did about four months of Bible study with the Jehovah's Witness. He was a really nice dude. Like ultimately, that's what got him in the door. He was just a really nice guy, uh, which was refreshing for me because typically the Christians that I dealt with were not really nice guys. They were very, this is the way we've always done it. So anyway, I bring I bring this gentleman in and we and we did Bible study for quite a while. And I remember thinking to myself, man, this guy knows his Bible. That's something to aspire to. How much easier would it be to follow Christ and to follow this religion if I understood the word? And why wasn't I exposed to that? It seems so obvious. This is the Word of God. This was his how-to manual, how to get to heaven, and it was written down for us, and we didn't lean on it. Well, I'll tell you, now that I'm deconstructing, I've read more passages out of the Bible in the last probably three months than I have in the entire previous 41 and a half years of my life. Granted, I'm looking through a slightly different lens because of my curiosity, that curiosity being that maybe this isn't right, but holy shit, it is it is easy to reconcile with the fact that this is BS, the more you read it. So maybe the Catholics who don't lean heavily on the Bible have got it right because they're protecting their beliefs, their tradition, their cult, if you will, by keeping us away from the Bible. So we'll throw in a couple Bible verses on tradition. I'd ask myself, well, what was Jesus' stance on tradition? I'm assuming not out of self-denial or self-deprecation, key word, we'll get to that one later as well, uh, and throughout this entire entire podcast. I am sure that many, if not everybody listening to this podcast knows the Bible better than I do. I will say that I welcome any and all comments about my understanding or perhaps lack of understanding of the Bible. I will tell you that while I allow you to do it, I'm not insanely interested in apologetics or prophesizing because if my time with the Bible has taught me anything, it is so open to interpretation. And one thing that you cannot, in my mind, browbeat somebody over is an opinion because everybody's entitled to theirs and everybody has one. So an example of Jesus supporting the breaking of traditions, we'll go to Mark. Mark 7, uh, that which defiles. I'm not going to read the entire thing. You guys, I'm assuming, are literate, um, or at least quasi-literate. And if you're not, you could do what I should probably do and get the children's Bible, because I wouldn't be so reliant upon Webster's dictionary and the damn thesaurus, perhaps if I had a children's Bible. Uh in fact, I'd thought about doing that, but that's really gonna be a difficult lens to look through because of the indoctrination, the child indoctrination. Let's make it cute, let's make it pastel colors, we'll make it fun and safe. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands? And Jesus said, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written, quote, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. He is encouraging the breaking of a tradition of man. However, Matthew 15, three, Jesus replied, And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? God said, Honor your mother and father, and anyone who curses their mother and father is to be put to death. I feel like he got a little carried away there. And we went a little further down the rabbit hole than we wanted. What I was trying to showcase was that in the Gospels too, we hear Jesus saying, break the damn traditions. You don't have to blindly follow it. The quote, this is how we've always done it. Doesn't even hold water for him. Matthew, he then turns around and says, You can break the traditions of man, but you absolutely will not break the traditions of God. And then he doesn't. The determining who I am and what traditions I follow was one of the first and most stark realizations I had. It's important to keep in mind that not all tradition is bad. The goal of deconstruction for me wasn't necessarily total destruction, but discernment. So how how do we tell the difference between a healthy behavior that we should continue or the toxicity that we ought to draw? Healthy tradition behavior. It connects you to the community, your community, the community that you have picked because they're your people. Judgment-free, shame-free, guilt-free. They accept you as you are. It feels like a choice that you make with joy. It's not getting to bed at four in the morning and going, Great. Now we get to go sit in the car in the pitch black for an hour so that we can go listen to some monks chat Gregory and why the hell do you even find these people? I haven't tried it. I encourage one of you guys or gals to do it. Google it. Go to the yellow pages. I dated myself there. Get back to me with how somebody finds three monks that'll show up to any event and start chanting in Latin because, truth be told, that'd be hilarious. Another healthy tradition behaviors that can adapt and grow as you change. But this is how we've done it. Isn't enough. Your tradition can adapt and grow as you change. Or let's change another word there. It can adapt and grow as you grow. Toxic tradition. That's kind of the converse side of it for me. That was many of my childhood traditions, be them family traditions or church traditions, because they are all relatively tied together. Toxic tradition. It is used to shame or control your behavior. And that could be as simple as, oh, what's that, eight-year-old Nick? You don't want to go listen to monks' chats. Well, you should be ashamed of yourself. Or, oh, I don't want to hear about how tired you are. You're going to go. That's control. Another trait. It feels like a performance to avoid conflict. This is a really important one, and I alluded to it in my last episode, and will touch it likely in every episode to come. We are molded, we are raised with fear. The good Catholics and Christians hide behind a Bible verse saying that it is important to have a healthy fear of the Lord. I used to jokingly say the fear of my father was greater than the fear of the Lord. And my dad would laugh at that. Almost like uh, well, I guess I'm doing my job right then. Another really telltale sign of a toxic tradition, rigidity. Here we go again. Because we've always done it this way. It says rigidity. I called it rigidity. You could call it ignorance. You could call it a lack of curiosity. You could call it robotic behavior. You could call it fear. Consider that maybe the reason my parents, our parents, our church elders, were so adamant that you follow the tradition they did because maybe they were terrified of telling their parents, and so it just gets passed on. If you're feeling the itch to break away, and curiosity being as important as it is, as vital to this process as it is, ask yourself Does this ritual actually point me towards improvement? Or am I just afraid of the silence that happens if I stop doing it? That silence that could be a severed relationship with your parents. That could be them making it very clear to you how disappointed they are. In my case, a priest in a confessional shaming me and giving me a punishment, I'm sorry, a penance, a punishment because I should feel bad about it, because I am now less than because I asked why. Once we've kind of determined who I am and what traditions am I gonna follow, and I'll tell you this is I've been talking about this for maybe fifteen minutes. The fifteen minutes of my journey that I covered was a couple of years. I will use the word grace because in a non-liturgical sense, that word is incredible. And that is a characteristic that is so absent to a large extent in everything, from work to marriages to parents' relationships with their children to politics to global issues. I'm hesitant because they latch on to that word so much in the Bible, and not just grace, but I we're talking about the grace of God, and so it's kind of still a foul taste in my mouth just saying the word, but it is so important. Offer yourselves grace. And I'm not talking the heavenly grace, clouds parting, sunbeams landing down on us. Give yourself grace. It's okay to not know. It's okay to be scared, it's okay to still feel like, oh my god, I'm doing something wrong. That makes perfect sense because there's that child in you that is still completely terrified of what happens if they buck the system. This podcast is called The Man and the Boy, and I'm gonna get much more into the boy as episodes advance through a a type of therapy, but I've been able to go back. And what I ended up doing was I was I inadvertently found that there was a four-year-old-ish version of me that was basically sitting huddled in a corner crying, terrified, paralyzed with fear. I have the opportunity to reparent that. And this is legitimate, it sounds like science fiction. And I'll challenge you to consider that if it does, so does the Bible and religion. And we believed one so fervently up until we decided uh to ask why. One of the biggest and most discouraging aspects of deconstruction is the fallout. To break it down to its simplest form. Breaking tradition, it just pisses people off. One of the reasons it is. Met with so much opposition from people of authority to our parents. It pisses people off. They're upset by it. Because when you stop performing the rituals, you become a mirror. Your absence from the way we've always done it, or the old ways, forces the people staying to wonder why they're still doing it. That discomfort often looks like judgment, but it's usually just fear. That sibling of mine, that parent of mine, that friend of mine is terrified, but they're asking themselves, Well, damn it, what if Nick Leaving is actually for valid reasons? Traditions are important. They're very important. Very important. And I'm not saying that they're not. What traditions you pick to follow is we'll go back to remember the healthy tradition versus a toxic tradition. Healthy traditions are the ones that A connect you to the community. Uh your community, again, your people. B feels like a choice that you can make with joy. And C can adapt and grow as you grow. Let's build a new tradition. Let's build a new altar. Replace an old tradition with a new one, a secular one, or a reconstructed one. Typically, the religious, Sunday morning is your morning for church. How about instead of going to church on Sunday morning, you cook up a cup of coffee and you watch the sunrise? Oh, it sounded so romantic. How about you turn on the PS5 and you grind on your favorite game for an hour? It it doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that you are reserving some time, somewhat routinely. However, if the rigidity of a routine, every week at this time I'm here doing this, if that is difficult, then don't do that. Just cut yourself out some time. Maybe it's gonna be Sunday morning, maybe it'll be Wednesday night, maybe it'll be whenever you feel like it, but you're committing that it's gonna be one hour a week. Fit it into your schedule. That's fine. But make it something that enriches you. Make it something that you are benefiting from. Something that is a choice that you make with joy. What's so empowering about this is it doesn't need to be supervised by someone else. It doesn't need to be that confessor, it doesn't need to be that priest, it doesn't need to be the gossipy family three pews behind you that's gonna tell somebody during donuts downstairs after mass that they saw so-and-so nodding off or not paying attention. Find one that is non-supervised, that creates joy in you, and that can adapt and grow as you grow. We'll call that building new altars. Breaking away from tradition, as I've said, it feels like what now? And here's a really neat analogy. I've got some recreational land up in northern Wisconsin. Not surprising, you just heard the accent when I said Wisconsin, right? I will tell you, those of you that say Wisconsin, we're gonna we're gonna have to have some words. Just message me and say, hey, I thought it was Wisconsin, and then I guess we'll take the gloves off and go from there. One thing that I love doing, unfortunately I don't own enough land that I can go get lost on it, but enough land that it's probably a forty-five minute hike from one corner to the other. Once all of the leaves come in in the spring, it feels like you're in the damn rainforest, thick canopy, aspen trees, oak trees, maples, you name it, a nice smattering of deer stands throughout the woods. I get to navigate it. Breaking away from tradition, it was like the training wheels being taken off. One of the images that came to mind was walking through my woods. First time in those woods without a map. Funny side story, my youngest daughter got lost, got lost in the woods two weeks after we we purchased the land. Uh we look back on it and laugh now. Obviously, if I'm being honest with myself, that was legit traumatizing for her. But being lost in the woods without a map. Now consider that map a tradition. That map was handed down to you by mom, dad, father so and so, pastor so and so again doesn't matter. They're just people. Wipe away the title. They sin as much if not more than you. They are just as broken and terrified of life and the uncertainty as you. Their faith looks fervent because they are so desperate to have something, some hope, something other than well shit, I don't know what happens after this. That's not enough for me. I need something. These were just people. How many people do you know that converted faiths to marry somebody? I assure you you don't have to go far into your family tree. My parents did not. Neither of them had to convert. But my grandfather, he did. He came over from England, son of an episcopal minister, married a good Catholic girl. Her dad wouldn't let her marry him until he converted. So what did he do? He converted. What do you have to do to convert face? You have to deconstruct the one you're currently in. You have to walk away from those traditions. You have to say, yeah, I mean, I guess at one time I was taught and believed that this religion is my only ticket to heaven, but God I really want to marry this woman, or boy, I really want to marry this guy, so whatever, you know, it's it's it's just religion. You have the right to do the exact same thing. You have a right to build a life that fits you. Maybe your deconstruction journey isn't leaving religion altogether. Maybe it's leaving, say, Catholicism and going to uh Lutheranism. Maybe it's going from one more rigid religion to one that's a little more accepting and open minded and welcoming. Or maybe it's what mine was and just yeah, you know, it's just it's not really for me. So my deconstruction is enough of this. You have the right to do the same thing. Again, we all have relatives that did it, and the most religious people in our life aren't going back and throwing stones at them. Most of the oppressors and indoctrinators, there's a really good chance that one of those two parents of yours converted to a different faith just for it. Tradition is essentially a script. I'd called it a map earlier script, doesn't matter. It's a pre written answer to the hardest question in life. How do I mourn? How do I celebrate? What makes a good person? Am I a good person? Not knowing isn't enough for many people. So they cling to anything bigger than themselves. Call it a campfire story that helps you sleep at night. There are many legends. One I encourage you to look up if you haven't. It's actually super super cool. I'm a big cryptid fan. I have a Mothman tattoo. Don't get me started on these things. However, Wisconsin has its own cryptid, and it's called the Hodag. H O D David A G hodag. Super super cool. But we've got the hodag and we've got Mothman and we've got the Chuka Cabra. And anybody who's not or not legitimately believing in these will tell you that boy maybe these were just creatures that were created to keep the damn kids in the tent. To keep to keep the kids in their bunk, right? You better not go out there. Frickin Hodag's gonna catch you. And that's ludicrous, right? This large scaled animal that slithers through the woods and steals children that are leaving their bed at night. Is that really any more ludicrous than a dude who walks on water? Mom was a virgin when she had him, knew where to find a bunch of dudes in the Middle East with white American names. None of that to me is any more ludicrous than the Chucacabra or Mothman in fact. I'm legit not kidding that I think Mothman is real. Anyway, again, different podcast. You have the right to ask that question. When you start deconstructing, we're not questioning the god. We're questioning that social framework that we are handed and fed with him, our self identity. This was issued to you. Hi, I'm Nick and I'm a Catholic. That's a statement, that's an identity, right? I'm Nick. That's the identity, I'm Nick. And I'm fill in the blink, compassionate, empathetic, a dickhead. It doesn't matter what it is. I'm Nick, comma, a Catholic. That's not enough. I'm Nick the Catholic. That's the identity I was given. I'm not Nick who decided to be a Catholic. There's no comma. There's no separating that because without Catholicism I'm not Nick. And without Nick, there's no Catholicism. Without Nick or what's your name? Amy, Joe, Tim. Doesn't matter. Without you, there's no religion. Because if the next generation doesn't get brow beaten into it, then it's going to go away. Ricky Gervais is a comedian, okay? Everybody knows him. Sometimes it's hard, and I remember when I was still believing, um, I would hear his um his atheism jokes and think, oh my god, this frickin' guy. Now now that I've broken through, now that I've learned how to walk through these woods without a damn map or a damn compass. Holy crap, was there some wisdom here? Ricky Gervaise had a a really good quote. He had many of them, but he had a good one. And if you list my last episode, I quoted Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I'm I'm going to do this going forward. I like to throw one or two in there. Ricky Gervais says I don't believe in about 2,700 gods. Because that's a pretty round number of how many officially declared religions there have been. I don't believe in about 2,700 gods. Christians don't believe in 2,699 of those gods. They are nearly as atheistic as me. To wrap up tradition, and I don't even put a button on it, these are all themes. None of these are checklist items where, oh hey, if you want to know about tradition, you better remember to go back to episode two. It's not like that. These are definitions, this is laying groundwork. We're building our vocabulary, our knowledge and our understanding, and this is all going to make the deconstruction process so much more robust. To end tradition. I realize that tradition because I do still have them. Not Catholic traditions, not religious traditions, but I still have them. Tradition is a tool, it's not a cage, they're not handcuffs. And if a tool isn't helping you build the life you want, a life of say love, integrity, compassion, empathy, grace, it's okay to set that tool down. Life sentences don't have to exist. They don't. So when we walk away, when we turn around, when we break through and get ourselves lost in the damn woods, it's okay to question, it's okay to be curious, and I am so damn proud of you.