Happy whatever-you-call-it

I'm pretty sure any McGillian would like to know how a Quebecer, in the accomodement raisonnable period, celebrate the-end-of-December (try to find a religion-neutral way of depicting that time of the year... even holidays doesn't work: Holy Days).

Well as you've heard if you read/listen/watch the local news, Quebecers feel that religion is part of their culture (I'd use "heritage"). So I'll go to mass with my family. And since all the catholic-Church-anglo vocabulary is unknown to me, this post will be hectic. I go to mass, but je ne communie pas. That means, I don't "eat the body of Christ". This gesture might be insulting to some people, but I respect my own non-belief in any superior spiritual being (which doesn't make me agnostic). The best moment is Minuit Chrétien (Christian midnight...), when my father outsings the guy one floor above. And if you've never heard it, ask me, once drunk enough, to sing it out loud. When I was in elementary school, I used to sing in a religious choir, so I remember the lyrics.

And you're reading a Quebecker that knows religious lyrics but not Ô Canada in French... I've outgrown God during my teen rebelion. He just wouldn't send me a sign, so I ditched Him.

During a whole period, I was without any kind of spirituality, and really brainy. Once I converted to full-spin environmentalism, I felt longing for something to believe in. This might be stupid (and REALLY not secular), but replacing religion with politics made sense. It still is a system (like an organized religion) in which one believes, right?

Then I saw les dessous de la politique. And it wasn't really worthy anymore to have faith in it, but simply to work hard to use democracy in an efficient way, as a mean to an end that one think is best.
I'm now back to looking for a form of spirituality, but will writing this, I've changed my mind: I suspect I've always had it, at the same time as faith in the CathoGod. It's not exactly paganism, nor "Mother Earth worship". It's a kind of poetry, being moved by the wind gliding through branches of a tree, an orange moon, the sun shining through clouds in a certain way, the St. Lawrence that I long for so much.

So requiescat in pace whatever you believe in.