Any Given Sunday

I used to date a real jock type guy. He was insanely into football. American style football with the pigskin and the tackling and whatnot. Anyway, every Sunday, you could find him parked on the couch, watching any football available. He’d watch college football when the pros were done. He’d watch the Army/Navy games. He was in a fantasy league. Football was his life.

I am not the athletic type. To me, watching football is about as exciting as cutting my toenails.

Unfortunately, these jock types all have one common theme. All they think about is sports. They expect the women in their lives to sit on the couch next to them, staring off into space, and getting them beers as they hog the TV to watch game after fucking game.

One Sunday, I told Mr. Jock I was through. I hated sports, the sex wasn’t that good and I was tired of watching football. Apparently, Mr. Jock kind of liked me, because he begged for a second chance. Knowing how obsessed with movies I am, he offered to trade off his Sunday football for a movie night. Against my better judgment, I caved.

That Sunday, he showed up with two DVDs; ‘Any Given Sunday’ and ‘Rudy’.  I promptly dumped his ass and traded up to a Brazilian who thought football was soccer.

Here’s the thing. Several years after I dumped Mr. Jock, I decided to watch ‘Any Given Sunday’. I watched it, and I loved it. A few years before, I’d shot it down because it was a football movie. I hated football, so I was sure I would hate it. The fact that the guy I was dating rented it was a slap in the face. I don’t regret dumping the douchebag, but I do regret dumping on the movie, without having seen it.

And it suddenly occurred to me that this is the way I have been treating religion. I have let fanatics color my view of something that could actually be, well…good. I didn’t watch ‘Any Given Sunday’ with Mr. Jock, because I was sure it would just be more of his football obsessed hyperbole. I’ve stayed away from organized religion because I didn’t want to become like the fanatics who follow it without thought.

But if I can give a simple movie a chance, I am sure I can give an organized religion a chance.

I come to this epiphany because I recently received a very small, but very important miracle. It’s not something that I’m going to share on here. If you can believe it, coming from the girl who once wrote an entire post about her pubic hair, who described her suicide attempt in detail, and who openly admits to wanting to have a 5 way with One Direction, my miracle is a bit too personal to talk about. Maybe I’ll write about it in a year. Maybe I’ll write about it in a week. But for now, it’s just going to be my own miracle.

Regardless, I think I’ve made it clear before; I am not an atheist. I think atheists are just as arrogant as the religious types who pretend they know it all. I’m not even a true agnostic, because true agnostics don’t believe in a benevolent god. What I believe in is universal energy. What I believe in is that there is some true form of structure to the universe. Like Einstein, I believe there is an afterlife, because matter can never truly cease to exist.

And I want to believe that there is some kind of benevolent creator that set this all in motion. I want to believe there is a purpose.

But I will not be blindly led by rhetoric.

I was brought up Catholic because of tradition. Everyone around me was Catholic. All the kids went to catechism classes and had their first baptisms and communions when they were too young to make a decision. Religious brainwashing is easy for an unmolded mind. A mind that doesn’t understand that people can have ulterior motives and that not everything is as it seems.

It’s a hell of a lot harder to influence a 33 year old cynic, with a base understanding of physics, and knowledge that evolution is a fact, not a theory.

So I’m doing my own ‘Any Given Sunday’ retake. For the next ten Sundays (or day of devotion based on domination) I will attend 10 different religious services. I will follow their customs. I will go with an open mind. I will find out if there is some group out there, in the thousands of years that we’ve all been on this planet, that can somehow offer me a way to find a deeper connection to the universe.

Here’s what I won’t do during these services. I will not change my existing moral beliefs. I will not deny scientific evidence I know to be true. I won’t limit myself to one set of beliefs. Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Wicca and anything in between. All are welcome.

I will arrive. I will listen. I will participate. And then I will post my findings here.

Any given Sunday, for the next ten weeks, you will find Essa’s review of the religious service she attended that week. I won’t be cynical for cynicisms sake, but I won’t hold anything back either. God might had said ‘don’t take my name in vain’ in the Bible, but God didn’t say shit about ‘cunt, shit, fuck, assholes, motherfuckers, cocksuckers’ or ‘douchebags.”

My goal in this exercise is simple. I want to find the root of my miracle. I want to find it and I want to thank it. Consider this my fucked up version of Cinderella.

So for the next ten weeks, any given Sunday, you will find me here, either expanding my horizons or ranting angrily. If you have a religion in the Central Florida area you want me to try out, feel free to contact me on the contact page.

Mega-churches need not apply. Trust me; I’ve seen what you all do on “60 Minutes”.