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striker

I USED TO begin every day reading the scriptures in the morning.

Sometimes, I’d work my way through stories in the Old Testament, and sometimes I’d read Psalms or Proverbs.

Sometimes, I’d read the teachings of Jesus, and I’d always be struck—every time —at what an inclusive person he was, how he was so, you know, good.

I don’t start again, not for months, after we’re safe and together.

It’s not because I don’t still believe in the bible, or because I don’t want to take comfort in scripture. It’s because I’m worried that I’ll start getting ideas for homilies.

And if I do, there’s nothing to do with those ideas, right?

I’m not a priest anymore, and I can never be a priest, even if the Catholic church decided to get real cool, real fast, with a whole bunch of things that are part of my reality right now.

Some Catholics are okay with homosexuality, and I fuck men now and they fuck me.

But polyamorous relationships? Not so much.

And we’re not married. Basically, no Catholic is cool with people being in a relationship and fucking and not being married.

And anyway, it doesn’t matter what’s okay for laypeople, I can’t, not as a priest. I’m supposed to be celibate.

So.

I don’t.

I just don’t open a bible for months.

Then, I do, once in a while, and I think I’m safe. I don’t get any ideas, I don’t feel inspired, and there’s no breath of God’s divine word coming through me.

Until one day, it starts.

At this point, to add insult to injury, Arrow is all, “I’m really bored,” and I try to talk him out of it, because I don’t want to be the guy who can’t be satisfied with my life.

I say a lot of good stuff, about how we can focus on gratitude and how we can be thankful for what we have and how we can stop craving things we don’t have and…

I can never be a Catholic priest.

Which is kind of fine, though, right, because I was never the strictest of Catholics to begin with.

But I liked that about Catholicism, the fact that you had that sort of freedom, freedom of interpretation, a freedom that never seemed present in Protestant traditions, all of whom seemed to split off over super trivial things, like whether or not baptism should be immersion or sprinkling or if God could manage to turn grape juice into his blood or if it had to be wine or—

Just.

None of that is important, in my opinion. It’s all details, and God is too big to be confined by details.

So, I slowly start coming to terms with the fact that being Catholic is a detail.

God’s bigger than the church. The church is an institution that’s been around for thousands of years, and I will always respect the church because of that.

There’s something stately about being Catholic.

There’s something about the weight of those centuries of tradition. There’s something powerful about it.

But God is bigger than that.

And the essence of God?

Can he use a lapsed priest who’s found he’s an alpha and who’s in a polyamorous bisexual relationship? Of course he can. What? Do I think there are limits to God?

I start to get ideas.

Okay, I can’t have a parish. I can’t have a congregation.

But these homilies, the ones that God is giving to me, I can still preach them.

I can write them down and post them on the internet.

I can do it on a blog or social media. I can video them and put them on YouTube or even TikTok.

I have the capacity to get out this message, the one that feels as if it’s being put on my heart by God himself.

And I feel like maybe the world needs to hear about alphas and omegas.

Maybe betas need to hear it. And maybe alphas and omegas need some path to spirituality.

I know going public like that is something Coltrain won’t like, so I don’t want to spring it on him.

Instead, I make an appointment and go to his office and tell him I’m exploring options, but that this is something I really want to do.

He flips out and forbids it. He yells at me, like he can tell me what to do, like he has control over me.

I don’t take it well. I don’t yell back, but I get angry. I stalk out of his office feeling furious.

Calix comes and finds me, because of course Coltrain sends Calix to keep me in line.

I want my mate, this man who I love, to support me.

Calix, on the other hand, I feel through the bond, has been traumatized by religion.

His Goddess is the same thing as God, in my opinion.

God is bigger than gender. God is neither female nor male, but both.

God is big enough to encompass the Goddess, to encompass the Polloi religion.

I have always believed God is big enough for all religions.

If I see God as Allah or as Shiva or even as not really God, just the teachings of Buddha…

it’s all just seeing God from a different perspective. God is just God.

And what God is? Love, joy, peace, togetherness, justice, and every other good thing under the sun.

So, there’s room for the Goddess there, but Calix doesn’t have room to see religion as anything other than oppression.

“I can’t believe you still believe in those kinds of fairy tales,” he says to me.

“I don’t believe in fairy tales,” I say to him.

“They won’t take you back in the Catholic church,” he says to me. “And you still somehow want to believe in their God? That God does nothing except discriminate.”

“God is bigger than that,” I say. “I don’t judge God by the way humans interpret him. Humans get God wrong all the time. God’s bigger than our mistakes.”

“But you can’t deny science,” he says. “How can you believe that the world was created in seven days by someone speaking it into existence and—”

“I don’t,” I say.

He blinks at me.

“I don’t know how God did it,” I say. “But I don’t believe in a God who flies in the face of scientific fact. Evolution is real. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t real, too.”

He folds his arms over his chest, like he’s never heard anyone say something like that, but it’s not a crazy thing amongst educated Christians to hold stances like this. One does not have to give up God because of science. It’s possible to have both. In fact, I’m convinced we need both.

Even when I speak to dyed-in-the-wool atheists, I often feel as if there’s a spirituality to their beliefs.

They have the same awe as I do when we both look at the natural world—from the intricacy of a spider’s web to the vastness of the galaxies.

In my opinion, that awe is God. They don’t have to call it God for it to be God, you know? We both feel it.

And I think humans need God. We need that feeling of something bigger than us, something that connects us, something that is within all of us. If we try to live without it, I feel like we always feel empty.

In fact, this is one of my homilies, wherein I draw parallels to the peace and togetherness that I feel in the bond with my pack to the peace and togetherness we can find in spiritual tradition.

Calix just sputters. “It’s nothing but pain,” he says. “Why would you want to ally yourself with that?”

“It was pain for you,” I say. “I see that. I see that there were people in the Polloi who twisted your natural desire for God and used it badly. They used God to hurt you. But blame them, not God. God loves you, Calix. The Goddess loves you.”

He laughs, this long bitter laugh. And then he says that he can’t talk to me about this, because it’s like we’re speaking different languages.

Maybe so.

But I can’t help but feel as if I’m trying to speak his language as best I can, and that he won’t give me the courtesy of even trying to learn the one I’m trying to speak.

knight

IT’S SLOW, BUT I notice.

I said that I wasn’t giving up any of my mates without a fight, and it’s true. I’m not.

But the only fighting I’ve ever really known how to do was the physical kind, and I don’t think that kind of fighting applies here.

They say it’s not happening, that they’re not pulling apart, but they are.

First, Calix is spending nights away from our apartment. He says he’s just working late at the facility, trying to figure out how to save the omegas and alphas there, and I have to admit that no one’s doing that.

I would help, but I don’t know how.

But then, other things are happening. Lotus is talking about having babies, and… well, that scares the fuck out of me, and I might not be as supportive as I could be of that.

I don’t mean to make her cry when we have a big, pack discussion about it.

But I do.

And then, Striker wants to start a fucking religion.

He says that’s what he’s doing, but it kind of sounds like that to me, because it doesn’t sound like any Christian religion I’ve ever heard of.

It sounds like he’s just making shit up that sounds good to him, regardless of whether or not anyone else agrees with him.

So, if you’re going to start a YouTube channel preaching a bunch of spiritual stuff that doesn’t align with a traditional religious text, but just comes out of your own brain?

I mean, you’re starting a religion, aren’t you?

But he doesn’t really appreciate my take on that, I have to admit.

And then Arrow and Lotus decide they’re going back to the Polloi compound to try to talk more to Kyvelki, and I say I’ll come along, and neither of them seems to want me to, so I decide to not do that.

But when they come back, they’re even more convinced that we’re, like, the fulfillment of some Polloi prophecy, and that we should spearhead a revolution.

I can see it’s only a matter of time before the revolution and Striker’s religion converge on each other and join forces.

The problem with Kyvelki’s revolution is that it’s all about the Polloi.