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Just goofin' around so I feel less of a sad-sack
Bursar16 tons of #9 coleslawRegistered Userregular
I've hit something of a low point in my outlook at the moment, and one of my friends suggested that I ought to take up writing again. Sort of a small-scale NaNoWriMo among a few people, where the point of sitting down and putting words together isn't to necessarily make something that stands up on its own, but just to jumpstart that creative portion of my brain that's been going dormant from neglect. Call it "therapy through getting off my ass and doing something" if you will.
And, what the hell, I figure I'll toss it up here. If it's hated, it'll sink to the bottom of the forum and be forgotten, but at least I'll have written something.
Spoiler:
There's always something off-putting about holy places, locations of devotion, where one feels that better men than you have made sacrifices purely out of dedication to an ideal. These sacrifices aren't necessarily of the obsidian-knife-through-the-ribcage variety, though those certainly are among the more disheartening holy places, but they can be sacrifices of lives in a much more insidious but no less effective way: time. Hours spent polishing altars, months spent reciting catechisms, entire lifetimes spent genuflecting to higher powers in the firm belief that this time spent pleases the higher powers to which these efforts are directed.
This is not to say that this makes those who spend this time better or worse than those around them who do not; after all, free time is a luxury of society created by excess. Sixteen families, each working enough to produce at least enough resources for their own survival and one-sixteenth of one more person, can together support one more person who doesn't have to do anything at all. This position of leisure was once the domain of regents, who amassed the wealth of their fiefdoms to live extravagant lifestyles. It was also the domain of the clergy, who took the donations of their constituents to live lives dedicated to the gods in exchange for the continued preservation of their parishioners' souls. At times, the clergy and the regents were one and the same.
America has made a habit out of deposing its leaders (or at least claiming to), having gone so far as to codify a relatively bloodless way for its crown to pass from one head to the next every few years. However, religion is much more difficult to dislodge from a public's consciousness, even if it isn't a protected right. This is why there are always holy places found in both inauspicious and surprising places all around the world, from churches on street corners to forgotten cairns on a mountaintops. We came, we saw, and we remember you.
The church of Our Father of Perpetual Incessancy is not especially isolated, being less than two hours or so from Los Angeles (although half of that will be navigating small, winding roads through the mountains), but nothing about it seems particularly more off-putting than a more run-of-the-mill church.
16 tons of #9 coleslawRegistered User regular
