Inaugural Post

This template isn't working.

I like it. I really do. And I think it fits within the context of a blog about spirituality.

The lone tree, standing in a field of green, with a hill taking shape above it.

Still, I'm being all saucy with my title and URL. And this template is not saucy. And I'm not a web designer.

So my inaugural post on my new blog starts off not being about God at all. It's about trying to find a template that fits both my quest and my personality. Turns out that's challenging if you lack computer skills.

So what does the title mean, anyway?

I've always had a weird sort of attraction to the virgin martyrs, all of whom met gruesome deaths at very young ages after refusing to bow down to demands that they turn away from their faith. I first starting reading about them in my Grandmother's missal. We'd visit Grandma's house and I'd pick up that missal and start reading about St. Agnes or St. Cecilia or St. Lucy. I found it hard to fathom having that strong a faith at that young an age. (That their virginity is even important to their status as saints is odd, and despite my affinity for their stories, the feminist in me rebels at this classification.)

So my title is a play on that.

There also is the fact that I'm not a virgin. Haven't been one for some time now. I'm not a martyr, either. At least, not in the traditional sense of refusing to denounce God and instead worship the planets or whatever, and subsequently being tossed into an arena with wild beasts for my steadfastness.

But I am sometimes a martyr in that I feel bad for myself and do the woe is me crap and act like everyone is so totally working against me before I snap out of it and get on with things. It happens. I'm human. And a mother. We're good at that stuff!

And so yada yada, an experience led me to this place. I am a most imperfect Catholic. And for the most part, I am okay with that. I don't need perfection. I disagree with the Church on many an issue, and perhaps at some point I'll delve into that here. But there's a part of the Church that I love, and some of it is just my history, being born into it and eventually dying in it. But some of it is also that the Church stands for so many basic human rights issues. And that we have some damn good troublemakers who call this Church their home. Hopefully I'll write about them here, too.

And I believe in God. I believe that our charge here is to make the world a better place, somehow. I wanted to start this blog because I get so wrapped up in the minutiae of my own life that I frequently forget God. God becomes this faraway relative that leaves your mind until you look at the calendar and think, Oh shit, it's So-and-So's birthday! And so you scramble to the drugstore to get a card and send it, and it's not because you don't love them, or don't care about them. It's because you're busy and life is hectic and in all the hubbub, it's easy to forget what matters.

There is this song by The Innocence Mission that sums up the frustrating way I seem to approach faith, and in it, Karen Peris sings in her ethereal voice that God is like a ticket stub she finds inside a pocket, forgotten but not exactly discarded.

"I take the ticket half and put it on the table, saying, this is God and he's here through my comings and my goings. But I walk past the ticket half...just as I walk past the cross on my wall."

Seconds later, she sings, "Our self-indulgence grows so dazzling, we don't see you..."

Yeah. Pretty much.



But what I hope is that this blog helps change that. For me. I'm hoping you don't mind, and you come along for the ride.

I'm not a virgin. But I'm sometimes a martyr. And somehow, I'll get this place looking like I intend it to, however that may be.