mesotablar | Amatonormativity Made Vows Attractive (Reply)

Hello all! This is my entry for May 2019 Carnival of Aros! I was trying to fill the prompt How aromanticism influences your views on religion but I may have gone somewhere else with this...

Amatonormativity Made Vows Attractive

As a generalisation I would like to say that I grew up on a street with a church at each end, and my family ignored both.
My views on religions are inconsistent, vague or undefined.

But I always found something alluring about nuns.

I grew up with the usual pop culture influences of children born in the 90s. Barbie and Ken were still a big thing. There were few strong solo female role models, let alone ones not interested in romance (were there even any?). I bought into the whole idea of partnering up and getting married.

Because of my entire family’s ‘lapsed catholic’ status I never saw marriage as a religious thing, it was a life thing.

You are alive, so you breathe and eat, move and sneeze, blink and fart, sleep and get married.

Even if you didn’t ‘get married’ you sure had to get engaged for at least 5 years. Long engagements or a shotgun wedding are the only practices found in my family history. Remaining single is a privilege of those who die young.

So I figured I had to get engaged and/or married. As I grew I found the idea of marriage more and more distasteful. Then I found out about nuns. Women married to Christ. I had found an out. I could get married and fulfil that life expectation yet not be romantically linked to another human!

Luckily I grew up about a 10 minute walk from a convent (and a 5 minute drive from a monastery) so I could investigate and actually talk to Sisters. I met some great people and the idea of dedicating my life to love and helping others is very alluring.

Being a greysexual the vow of chastity would be no issue. Vows of poverty might have been more of a sacrifice because I was raised on stories of how much my family lost in WWII so from an early age I became obsessively protective of the few family heirlooms we have (incidentally most of them are religious in nature) and the vow of obedience is in itself not much of an obstacle. I happily live within defined boundaries, my willingness to live within a box is proving itself as I contemplate this form of consecrated life as a way to fulfil the expectation of life: born, marry, die.

But

I grew up outside the church. Jesus is just a name to me. God can be plural. My holy trinity is the Rainbow Serpent, Tiddalik and Tjirbruki. Maybe if there had been an indigenous Sister I would have been reconciled, but there wasn’t so I wasn’t.

I am more aware now that at that time I was trying to find a loophole to expectations, but now I am knowledgeable enough to just reject the expectations. I have the greatest respect for women who take the vows and I think I will also always have a tiny curious envy of their contemplative, helpful, spiritually love filled lives.