Worried about having to go to Church

(Raises hand)
I am! I am sick of the Catholic church. I am forced to go to church every week and I have to go here in a few hours. (we don't do midnight)
They know I don't want to go, but since I live under their roof I have to go. Can't really go anywhere anyway if I wanted to. It's offensive and when they say something about marriage and then I hear something about how wrong being gay or even different at all is I come out feeling terrible and sad because of what messages of hate people generally believe in around where I live. It just pushes me farther away from coming out to my family and it pushed me to be Atheist.

Isn't Church grand?

 

Take an ipod?

Really, you're not giving them any material aid just by being there so i think your conscience is safe, you just have your own boredom to contend with.

 

I wasn't catholic, but I hated going to the Christmas Eve services at my church. I'm banned from going there now.. so I don't have to worry about going.

I would just try to keep yourself occupied. I would sit in the balcony and play around on my phone. It also helped me ignore the service.

 

They banned you from going? What did you do?

 

ooh, I wnat to know XD

 

Don't go. You simply abstaining from attending a small part of the holiday doesn't ruin your family's christmas. Them reacting badly ruins their christmas. Tell them that (politely).

Oh, and I'd suggest sleeping at midnight, or at least doing what you normally do at that time.

 

They banned me shortly after I came out as being a member of the LGBT community. They told me that I was "not welcome there". So, I'm pretty sure that it was because of my sexuality and how I dress.

 

burn the church down :icon_twis

 

It's things like that that make me feel confident in my decision to not be part of such a hypocritical, hateful, exclusive group. They claim that everyone is welcome and will be loved...and yet this happened to you. They claim they will protect others from harm, and yet when one of their own inflicts harm on someone, it is the victim who is blamed and the guilty who is shielded and protected. I just can't be part of that.

I'm sorry this happened to you. They suck, frankly...

 

I'll be going to church (a Catholic one) next weekend due to my grandmother's anxiety towards any family member who doesn't. I sit there and listen to the music (the organ's a Casavant, the choir's okay), admire the architecture (it's a beautiful Neo-Gothic church), listen to the sermon (that's to say critique and ridicule it in my head) and lament that if the Mass were still in Latin it would be much more endurable (*sigh*). What I don't do is kneel, pray or eat any unleavened bread.

 

My step-father is the pastor of an anti-gay church and I somehow manage to get through every service that I am forced to go to when visiting home. To be honest, I just sit there and think that I am an intruder in a cult meeting.:dry: I use that time to find everything I think is wrong with the church and justify why progress is needed instead of the regression it seems to want.:eusa_doh:

 

A reminder of the good things the Catholic Church has done

It's easy to focus on the evil of a few and ignore the good done by the many.

I am going to midnight mass as well, but not because I have an overly religious family. However, I would go even if I didn't want to, or if my family practiced a religion I didn't believe in.

Go to spend time with your family, doing something that's important to them. Not everything we do has to fall in line with our own personal beliefs. I've gone to Temple with Jewish and Hindu friends in the past.

I don't know your church, but it's very unlikely that they will mention anything about homosexuality Christmas Mass. Plus, it's only an hour. If they start shouting obscenities about gays, then yeah, get the hell out of there.

Hope this helped!

 

wow! not cool.

if you come to Washington state, you are welcome to sit with me at mine. is Baptist. I went in all mens clothing and binder.

---------- Post added 25th Dec 2012 at 02:18 AM ----------

is that hateful too?

 

Ugh, totally feel your pain.... For the first time in years I'm not going. But its only because my dad's working overseas (to my great delight, tbh- as he is a strict roman catholic and a bigot) and not because I'd rather not sit through such a length of time listening to some homophobe preach hate and lies. Fml.

 

That's crazy. I managed to not get asked by family to go to midnight mass last night. Mass generally seems way way too scripted, anyway. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for knowing EXACTLY what the priest was going to say for all of Sunday mass. At the time we went every week.

 

The Christmas Eve service was the same every year at my old church. It was funny... I started to play with the candles that they gave us for the candle light singing of "silent night". I almost accidentally caught the place on fire one time... I learned that day that fire is not a toy..lol.

As for the banning, what is done is done. Honestly, it's probably a good thing that I was banned because it saved me a ton of fighting with the members of that church. They hated that I was gender non-conforming and they also hated it when I came out to them.

J Snow, I hope that you made it through midnight mass.. I've never been to one, but I have heard that they are really, really long.

 

They are longer than your typical Sunday Mass, but they vary from church to church. At the church we went to when I was a kid, you could count on Sunday Mass being a good hour to hour and a half. Every little thing had a huge ceremony surrounding it. A different church about 3 miles away, Sunday Mass lasts 30-45 minutes. The same things are covered, but lots of the ceremony is taken out. Midnight Mass at the first church would last 2-3 hours. At the second church, about 1:10, but that's mostly because of the huge crowd to get thru the communion line. Both are Roman Catholic churches.

 

At my church (again, roman catholic) both the midnight mass and Sunday morning services are about an hour long. However, for midnight mass (which obviously, starts at midnight), there's an optional 11.15pm start to go and sing Christmas carols. If you counted that, midnight mass would then be 1 hour 45 mins. My family went to a 9.30am service (Christmas day) and that was an hour as well. Wouldve gone to midnight, but had to go to the one my dad wanted or he wouldn't go (cos he's Anglican or something), but he still went cos its a family thing for us.

And personally, I have no problems going to church, even though its rather homophobic and stuff I have attended a baptist youthgroup the past few years, and they were cool with who I was. Although I'm strongly considering just being non-denominational. Which I think works ^.^