Universal

This weekend was a nice, calm one.
Hubby did the robot thing on Saturday and the dogs went to the groomers (they behaved! It’s a miracle!) and I managed to get the office in check.
Next weekend the plan is to stop off at IKEA and get the new furniture we need so it’s usable. We have all new electronics and file cabinets so this is the last step.
Sunday hubby went to church with me (another miracle!) and spent the whole hour making faces at the baby boy in front of us who was laughing and clapping at hubby’s antics. I guess I can’t complain, he went. Church, for him, is something you do Christmas eve.
If this becomes a regular thing, my parents will think it’s an answer to their prayers and will up their novenas to several a day. While I would be happy if he just went to his own church and practiced his own faith, my family prays for his conversion to Catholicism. Now he’s talking about going to church with me on a regular basis (every few weeks or at least monthly).
I think it’s the impending fatherhood and his concern about being a good role model. He, like me, believes that religious education is important for children. It gives discipline, instills morals, and if done right creates a highly tolerant and open mind. After all, it’s hard to know everything or think you’re the end-all when you believe in an omniscient, omnipresent, and all-powerful being who made so-and-so down the street different than you, but loves them just as much.
He does have problems with certain groups and individuals in the organized religions, including Catholicism, who feel that if you don’t do what they do and think what they think you are going to hell. Very rigid and exclusionary. The way I was brought up, everyone is God’s child and everyone has equal rights to Him.
End of story.
It’s why if we had decided on the full nuptial mass at our wedding, Hubby and everyone else would have been free to receive communion. Over half our wedding guests weren’t Catholic and a few weren’t even Christian. I’ve been to Catholic weddings before where they only gave communion to the select few of the wedding party they knew to be Catholics and then didn’t allow anyone else any. Whether or not we were.
I was denied one of the sacraments because of the exclusionary mindset. They couldn’t be sure I wasn one of “the right people”. I was and am a little bitter about that.
It’s wrong.
Catholic means “Universal”. It upsets me that we so often aren’t.