Culto. It seems like a relatively short word, but in reality, each one of its letters represents 60 minutes of in-your-face, soul-salvaging, devil-bashing sensationalism.
I grew up Catholic, went to Catholic elementary and high school. I spent a good part of 13 years going to mass, memorizing prayers, and wearing my WWJD bracelet. It is exactly because of all of this that I am not Catholic today. The boredom, the rules, the uniforms, the discovery of how awful bread can be when you skip the yeast, the uncomfortable feeling of kneeling on wood, sermons that brought me closer to God, but only in the way they made me beg for mercy, that the Father would finally say "The Lord be with you" so I could let out a hasty "And also with you", make my way home, put on some sweatpants and play Pokemon.
While not Catholic, a Catholic upbringing has done a lot to sculpt my views on morality. It left me with inner voice that quietly guides me to make the "right" choice. That voice is also known as an overwhelming and sickening sense of guilt. I feel that many times I do not do the right things simply because it's the right thing to do but rather out of pure guilt. Try as I might not to make eye-contact with the obese elderly woman who just stepped onto a packed bus, something inside of me makes me hate myself for sitting in my seat while this plump woman stands there jostling around. I don't eventually give her my seat because I'm a good person. No. I reluctantly and resentfully give her my seat because by stepping her fat ass on my bus she has completely robbed me of the opportunity to sit there, blissfully zone out, and enjoy my ride. The nerve of some people...
Besides guilt, Catholics posses another endearing quality: lethargy. In my time in this country, this quality has saved me my sanity. The community where I live is mostly Catholic, meaning, while some go to church on Sunday, and occasionally talk about God, the majority of people are completely unwilling or uninspired to live a religious life. Why worry about eternal damnation or original sin when wearing a crucifix necklace suffices? Exactly.
But not all of us are so lucky. I've heard absolute horror stories about my fellow volunteers being forced to go to Culto, or evangelical mass. One hour turns into three and then four, the pastor starts screaming, and then your neighbor starts speaking in tongues, and people surround you to lay their hands on you in an attempt to save your soul. This is multiple hours, multiple times a week. At least Catholics have the decency to pack all their praise into one hour, one time a week so that they can get home and begin committing the sins that they'll be absolved of come next Sunday. Nine months in and I thought I had dodged the bullet, that I wasn't going to ever have to put myself through such an ordeal. That is until I stupidly stepped onto a local bus. When I heard the screaming, I know I had made mistake.
Normally buses play bachata, ranchera, or 80's power-ballads, but on this particular day, the bus driver was in the need of some G-O-D, and decided to play a CD of an evangelic sermon, most likely recorded somewhere in hell. It seemed that as time went on the pastor on the recording was progressively losing more and more of his shit. His booming voice turned into a scream, his breaths into gasps, his words into unintelligible tongues. After diving into a medley of tongues, he would reemerge and wheeze something about purity and the need to cleanse his church.
As this man was seemingly having a mental breakdown at full, deafening volume, I looked around at my fellow passengers, hoping to find solace in the annoyed face of another passenger, but nothing. I knew that Salvadorans had an uncanny ability to block out any and all annoying sounds but this was impressive. I was alone in this torture.
The minutes progressed and I felt that I would lose my sanity along with the pastor's. Yell, gasp, tongues. Scream, gasp, tongues. Yell, gasp, wheeeeeeeeze. Imagine the screams of a toddler whose balloon you just popped, but amplified to the volume of a freight train.
If I had any respect for Evangelicalism before, I lost it right there on that bus. I couldn't help but find it absolutely absurd that a full-grown man would resort to a nervous breakdown to prove a spiritual point. To me, Jesus wasn't some guy wailing in the middle of a street, clowning, trying to literally shake some sense into people. Moreover, religion and spirituality should be a calming, introspective journey into the depths of ourselves, not a god damn public spectacle.
It got me thinking about how Evangelicals must see the world. It must be like a WWE cage match, Jesus and the Devil going head to head, grappling eachother. Jesus stuns the Devil with two sucker punches, climbs the ropes, and launches himself off the corner post into a backflip and lands a punishing elbow to the Devil's groin. It's the job of all of us to scream as loud as we can, fervently holding up our "THE DEVIL SUCKS" posters, and wait while Jesus tries to eternally pin the devil in a monster chokehold.
It's probably something like that.
The bus ride eventually did end when I got back to my community, where such cosmic battles aren't felt or seen. It's people just like me, trying to do the best they can with the day that they're given. It sounds a whole lot more relaxing and reasonable, doesn't it?
