If I marry, I prefer my husband to be alive. Makes going to bed with him a hell of a lot easier, for one thing.

That being said, there was one point in my teens where I daydreamed about becoming a nun. My eldest sister was becoming a Catholic and there were times when I felt in awe and a bit envious. The ceremony, the let us prays, the faith...that sort of thing. She gave me her CCD booklets to study, wherein I found a lot of stuff about the father, the son, and the holy ghost, and I determined that it was easy to understand the father/son thing, but the ghost made no sense, but that was okay, because I had watched a lot of Scooby-Doo.

I started praying to Jesus, one night, in my long white nightgown, kneeling beside my bed, and I tried to open my heart to him the way my sister's CCD booklet told me to, and then I turned off the lamp on my nightstand (wishing in my heart that I could blow out a candle, instead, because that just seemed so much more appropriate, somehow), and then I went to bed with an open heart and open mind.

The next morning, I awoke with my first ever migraine.

Now, I'm sure the two have nothing to do with each other, but....was the timing not divine, or what?

Anyway, I decided through the years that I'm just not religious. I'm not against the thought of God or Buddha or Allah or anyone else, I'm just not into it enough and, even if I was, I'll be damned if I try to pigeon-hole myself into one little religion. Literally. I'll most likely be damned. I'll decide to become a Catholic only to die and be told at the Gates, "Um, sorry.....Catholics aren't allowed. Go back down there and do ten Hail Mary's, and St. Peter might let you live again to become a Buddhist." Or I'll decide to go to my local Congregational or Unitarian Church only to discover it wasn't DEEP enough, or SERIOUS enough, to warrant God's attention, let alone a backstage pass to his daily concert.

My parents baptized me as a Protestant and I attended Sunday School as a kid, but when it came to my family actually practicing our faith, we pretty much sucked at it. My dad confided in me that the closest he could come to pinpointing himself on the religion map was at "Druid". Years earlier, he had watched Exodus and decided to become Jewish. This lasted all of a few days, because he realized that the only reason he wanted to become Jewish was so that he could be like Paul Newman. He then went through a similar phase after watching Lawrence of Arabia, but with different results. By the time he watched Last Tango In Paris, we were ready to lock him up in the attic. But, I digress. My Protestant mother considered becoming a Catholic once, simply because she found the Pieta so soothing, but once she started reading up on it, she decided being a Catholic was too much work. I tend to agree.

All that being said, I'm rather sad to learn, belatedly of course (these things always come to me belatedly, but without the migraines, thank gawd), that the Catholic Church is losing their religion. Um, their religious women, to be exact.

Seems more and more women want live husbands, and less and less women want humble (albeit pretty)  homes to live in while performing good deeds for little pay.

And this is rather sad.

Myself, I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the Catholic schoolgirl uniform, and less to do with the true calling.

But, call me agnostic.