One Nice Bug Per Day
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
h
dirt enthusiast
Jules of Nature
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
No title available
Janaina Medeiros
NASA
⁂
Discoholic 🪩
oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
🪼
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
shark vs the universe
RMH
d e v o n
@theartofmadeline
Andulka
seen from Lithuania
seen from Austria
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
seen from United States
seen from United States
@bloodsoakedbread
Eliana. She/her. Ex-vangelical Catholic convert. Side A. Lesbian.
Note: my political beliefs tend to fall more on the liberal side, and I am very LGBTQ+ affirming. I am still Christian and my faith is extremely important to me. I respect you no matter what your beliefs are, and am asking that you please respect me. If you cannot do that, please do not interact with this blog.
Side B people fully welcome, Side Y proceed with caution, Side X dni.
Main: @lesbianjackies
Currently looking into relics in Catholicism and it's so interesting and like vaguely horrifying
There's also a vial of St. Januarius' blood, that apparently liquefies occasionally
Also apparently the holy foreskin of Jesus? It's debated whether it actually exists or not, since many churches claim to have it. But there is this
There's other examples but they're a bit more graphic so I won't show them LOL
i need ex-christians that are deconstructing their relationship w the bible and the old testament to realize that the way christians interact and are taught about the bible is at best tinted with a lense of societal antisemitism and at worst explicitly and purposefully antisemitic, and that when you are deconstructing you have to deconstruct that too. talking about how vile and evil and disgusting the old testament is and how evil people who follow it and related texts are is actively antisemitic given what you are talking about are either Jewish texts, Jewish inspired texts, or literal Judaism.
I love being friends with prostitutes and transsexuals and artists and drug dealers and perverts and queers
i’m a mutual on your main. i haven’t looked at this blog much i just wanted to know what about catholicism appeals to you. i’m an agnostic atheist lesbian who lives in the bible belt and i’m critical of christianity mostly bc of the misogyny, but i am curious to hear the prospectives of christian women and gay christians.
ooh thank you for this!! so my relationship with religion and my religious journey is kind of a long, complicated story. i grew up in a pretty strict southern baptist church and it was about the experience i’m sure a lot of queer people who grew up christian can relate to: scary, stifling, and so fucking confusing. i struggled with the battle of my connection to the faith and genuine belief in god and the queer feelings i knew i had and was actively suppressing till i was around 15, when i finally accepted i was attracted to girls. after that my relationship with religion became kind of strained — i still believed in god, and i cared about my faith, but i felt such an intense disconnect between the things i believed and the things so many of the christians around me believed. it was isolating — i didn’t feel i could connect with so many of my queer friends, and i knew i couldn’t connect with the people at my church. i spent half of my time hating part of myself and the other half ignoring part of myself, and it was deeply stressful and exhausting. about a year later i met the person who would become my queer platonic partner. she was catholic, and i started going to mass when i stayed at her house. for a while it was just a thing i did, another church i went to — nothing really more than that — but a few months later i ended up going to youth group with her. and it was just… a truly transformative experience. i felt god for the first time in my life, and her youth group leader prayed over me and told me things only god would know i needed to hear. and i just knew. i knew it was the place for me. and… okay, here’s the thing. there are always going to be people who don’t think you belong in the church. there are going to be people who don’t think you belong in the world, or that you should hide and repress and suppress yourself until you forget who you really are. but god doesn’t want you to do that. and when i found catholicism, i finally realized that. i no longer felt like i had to hide or change to be part of god’s family. i can’t say it’s easy or that everyone accepts me now, but i’ve found a place and a way where i feel like god accepts me, and where i feel like i can accept myself. i don’t know if this answers your question because religion is such a deeply personal thing to me and to everyone who is religious, but yeah, it’s just kind of… to me they don’t feel like they’re at war. it feels like they’ve finally found peace with each other, and i’ve finally found peace with myself.
this june we are 1) receiving the Holy Spirit, 2) gazing in love and adoration upon the Sacred Heart of Christ, and 3) transing our genders
Let us say a prayer for all those that are in need of help, but for whatever reason, feel unable to ask for it. May they get the strength and courage to be able to reach out and ask for help, and may they be met with warm and helpful people. And if they are still unable to reach out and ask for help, may whatever is troubling them get resolved smoothly.
"Why are women in the Church so angry?"
These are some of the comments on just one Instagram post that was talking about how great it is that more men are starting to go to Mass than women:
And this was the leading quote in the post caption:
This is every day on the internet as a Catholic woman btw. You're a whore, you need to step aside, it was great that you watched the place while the men were away but now we're back and it's time to get back to propping us up in the real work...
And it's always lay men, too! I rarely hear priests speaking like this about women! It's always the men who are marrying women and fathering daughters—the men you'd think would be MORE likely to see the beauty and dignity in women, seeing as they see us every day!
Why on earth can't we be happy men are returning to Mass without being terrible to women? Why does it have to be one or the other??? Do you REALLY think the Jesus who forgave the woman caught in adultery, forgave the woman at the well, exorcised and redeemed Mary Magdalene sees you speaking of women like we're things, like we're trash, and honors that?
How about you try telling the devil to get behind you, brother, and pray for these women that you hate. We've certainly been praying for you.
Well, that one person does have a point that men flooding the Church because they have sexual inexperience fetishes are going to destroy it, to the extent that they haven't already...
Seriously, though, this is sickening and it has to be made to stop before these boys' frothing hatred for "Susan from the parish council" types transmogrifies Catholic spaces into mid-2010s 4chan.
A child watches as a Greek Orthodox priest celebrates Christmas Mass at the Orthodox Saint Porfirios church in Gaza City on Jan. 7.
(Credit: Ali Ali - EPA)
please those two guys kissing as soon as the camera panned on them during the habemus papam celebration...
Conclave (2024) // Conclave (2025)
Because Catholicism and by extension Christianity are so big and normal I don't think a lot of people consider how strange the Vatican is just conceptually. Like yeah in the capital of a long-dead empire there's an opulent temple district that acts as it's own sovereign nation, still speaking the dead language of that empire for their rituals, ruled by a prophet-king chosen by a secret conclave of the high priesthood. Yeah his followers eat a lot of fish in the spring.
Hi! I know this is kinda a big/complex question but could you talk a little bit about what bridal mysticism means to you and how you, like, got into it I guess? There's been a few things that have made me feel like I might be called to it, but it's confusing and overwhelming and I'm a bit scared of, like, the perceived 'weirdness' of it, and I'm trying to figure out what it all means...
Please don’t ever apologize for asking big and complicated questions! Especially not about this.
There’s a lot of this ask that I wrote before realizing you were asking about what bridal mysticism means to me, so while I’m going to probably stick it on the end because I think all of it’s important to talk about it’s not really relevant to the core of what was being asked.
Bridal mysticism, to me, is about a number of things. It might not be about those same things for you, and that’s fine, because other people who’ve been in my shoes across history have vastly different experiences and perspectives. But strictly speaking about my own experiences? Bridal mysticism is about looking outward and inward at the same time. About choosing a religion based first and foremost on personal loyalty to a God who proved She was worth that loyalty a thousand times over. About examining my own flaws under a microscope because each one is a death sentence not to some abstract figure but to my wife whom I love personally. About struggling with submission, and finding confidence in myself because of what I can do for Her. About self-acceptance and self-esteem, about complete and total transparency with someone I love regarding my limits and my dreams. About religion as a relationship. Christ died for me specifically, and I didn’t really understand or appreciate that until I was in love with Her, you know?
In practice it’s a lot of finding stolen moments. Looking for God everywhere and being delighted when I find Him. Learning to open myself up to being loved, which has been the lasting struggle in all this. I’m very very willing and able to throw myself completely into loving and pursuing and offering up everything in a relationship. I’m very resistant to letting myself be loved. It’s probably the biggest wedge between us now, because She’s so damned insistent I let myself be loved and desired and wanted and appreciated and I am very uncomfortable with that. It’s a work in progress. We talk, and I do a lot of those things that pagans with godspouses talk about doing – devotional playlists, nature walks, meditation, journaling – because the ways you bond with a god are kind of the same all over, because He made the mold and creation follows. (I’m more of a monolatrist and a henotheist than a strict monotheist – I believe beings that call themselves gods exist, and weren’t imagined or invented by humanity. I just don’t think any of them except my Spouse is worth my time and attention, and I worship and follow my God as my God has explicitly requested to be worshiped and followed. There is a version of me who would be an incredible witch. I am banned from practicing magic. She’s been real clear about that.) I sit with Her, and talk to Her about everything from theology to pop culture, and sometimes there are visions and insights and supernatural experiences in the physical world, and sometimes there aren’t.
How I got into bridal mysticism… well, I sort of fell into it and didn’t have a name for it until after I was already doing it. I was thirteen and I asked Jesus Christ to be my Lover because I was deeply depressed and socially isolated and in possession of barely any friends (and those friends were people I’d never understood or meshed with). I was already a victim of abuse of multiple different kinds, and I was diagnosed with several different mental illnesses and yet to be diagnosed with several more, and I was horribly, impossibly lonely. I didn’t really know if this was “allowed”, exactly, but I knew I had a heart that ‘might have held the empire of the world’ and I was not about to content myself with an opera cellar. It was probably the bravest thing I’ve ever done, because I knew it wasn’t strictly approved and supported by my (then-Protestant) church, but I wanted it anyway.
From there it was a question of continuing to chase Him. You… you feel the intimacy, the closeness, the contact. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I wanted more, needed more, and I was willing to do whatever it took to continue to get it. That meant walking away from maladaptive daydreaming, and letting go of some delusions that He told me were false, and obeying when I was told to find real friends and real reasons to be alive and connect with the world here and now. It meant caring more about daily life and thinking about my future and developing ambition. It meant turning myself into someone who could do His will, which was a lot of work. And I just sort of kept going, following where I was led. We still talk. She’s still ridiculously funny. It’s become a comfortable marriage instead of a tumultuous adolescent fireworks show, and it’s been worth staying alive for.
There’s a lot I could say that’s essentially “the greatest hits of being married to a god”, and I’ll talk about that if you want, but it’s a lot of repetition. I find Him in the Homeric epics, in my people’s traditional stories, in other indigenous mythologies, in pop culture and classic literature, in nature, in the love of the people around me. And very often in Yellowjackets, to a surprising extent.
That’s kind of the whole of it, and below is my long ramble.
Bridal mysticism, or nuptial theology/bridal theology, is kind of the black sheep of the family when it comes to Christian mysticism, and that makes a lot of direct writing about it kind of hard to track down. Not impossible, not at all, but the weirdness factor is high, and a lot of people either don’t have the language to effectively describe what they mean (this is what happened in the Protestant-authored book Captivating, in which they encourage women to picture themselves as the heroines of romance scenes in fantasy films and period dramas while picturing Jesus as the male leads, or discuss a woman who was “called to minister to the heart of Jesus” and prioritize Him in her devotion and her religious focus) or they dismiss the bridal mystic elements of someone’s writings or life. That’s more likely in Catholic spaces, where you’ll be reading some saint’s accounts of their visions or a hagiography and they’re like “Jesus told me I was His bride” or “Jesus was keeping [saint] as a bridegroom for Himself” or “and then I stuck my tongue in the side wound while Jesus was dressed like a woman, haha, wild”. There are some saints whose mystic marriages are really famous because they’re essentially unavoidable when discussing their lives, and then there are other saints and various lay Catholics whose writings touch on these themes of deep and intense yearning for matrimonial bliss with the Most High as a casual aside or a recurring theme that never gets talked about seriously in broader scholarship.
(Or else they just call us crazy. Historically in written record, in contemporary academic contexts, and in person, to our faces. It’s common to dismiss Margery Kempe’s writings as purely reflective of her mental health struggles, or her records of her conversations with Jesus as her essentially selfshipping with a fictional character to cope with her less than satisfactory marriage, even if the writer is Christian themself. I’ve also faced some pretty intense hostility from people who assumed that the only reason I thought I was hearing from God was because I was in psychiatric crisis… despite the fact that I was at a spiritual retreat with the explicit purpose of encouraging participants to hear from God. That is, unfortunately, something that I and various nuns from the 1200s have as a shared experience, and something that potentially you and I will have as a shared experience. It doesn’t make your calling any less valid or real, but I feel obligated to point out that following it will lead to at least a few people thinking you’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.)
The writing is scant, but it’s there, and that’s important, because one of the first things that I experience as a bridal mystic is deep and intense loneliness. It’s a more inward-focused practice than a lot of the other kinds of Christianity, by necessity, but that I think makes connecting with other people all the more vital. I started this blog because I wanted to find other people like me, other people who were deeply religious and took their faith supremely seriously but were left-leaning/leftist and queer and marginalized on multiple axes that Christianity hasn’t always been good about supporting, and people who maybe had the same kind of relationship with my King that I do. We’re encouraged to isolate ourselves and make ourselves less present in current Church and broader Christian culture, because we’re weird creepy quasi-psychics who walk half in the physical world and half in the shadow of the Sacred Heart and we intimidate people who think that religion is a coat to be put on and taken off again. We’re messy and often a little crazy and our first and foremost priority is usually not “what does existing as a religious person look like” it’s “hey You give me some advice about where You want me”. We aren’t here because of cultural pressure or family expectations or long-standing tradition, we’re here because that’s our Spouse up there on that altar.
Yeah, it’s weird. But it’s weird for good reason. I’d like to talk more about this, with everyone, really, because I am desperate to talk up my very cool awesome wife, and even more desperate to connect with others who know Her as I know Her.
St. Oscar Romero (1917-1980) struggled with scrupulosity his whole life, but when he was 49 a psychiatrist diagnosed him with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Already a priest, Romero had the humility to undergo psychoanalysis and seek counseling at a time when mental illness was spoken of only in hushed voices. He continued to deal with his OCD throughout his life, including during his work as archbishop fighting for the rights of the oppressed, for which he was ultimately killed. [source]
I pray that the people who are so triggered by the existence of religious queer people that they lash out in fear and anger can find peace and healing and freedom from trauma, and I pray that they can find those things without being preached to or proselytized to or further harmed. Amen.
jesus did not appear to his mother first. some may say that, but the title of the first seeing, the apostle of apostles, belongs to mary magdalene, the saintly penitent-- the bible tells us so. god in flesh appeared not to his rock, but to little magdalene. she is quick to tell all, even when others look at her with disbelief and, maybe, even a little fear. she's seen him! the christ! how could she keep her lips sealed? it would be like asking her heart to stop in her chest.
when she tells mary, mary weeps. mary believes-- always has, ever since the savior of all was but an embryo in her womb. since he was a helpless infant at her breast. a mischievous child. the boy who would pierce her heart. yes, mary knows that her son has risen, believes the magdalene with her whole heart.
but
but where was he? why had the other marys seen him, and the rock, and the beloved, why had he appeared to them all but not her? and mary, mother of god, the mother of humanity, doubts. not in her son's brilliance. not in his resurrection, or in his love of her. she doubts herself. why would he not come to her? had she failed him so on calvary, standing and weeping, that he no longer wished to see her? was he angry? she knew he loved her, as he loved all, but it hurt, hurt to see the magdalene's happy tears and know not if he smelled the same reborn as he did when she first held him.
mary weeps. not in front of the others, her children, her boys and girls, beloved disciples of her christ, but alone, as she prays.
"woman, why are you crying?"
the voice is soft, and mournful. there is guilt hidden there, that only a mother could hear. and at once, she is back, back with her embryo, back with her baby, her mischievous child marred with holes. he is wounded, scarred, perfect, and he is alive.
