Mea Culpa

Having studied at Oxbridge and attended grammar school 'back in the day', my dad is very fond of Latin, famous dead white men and all that gross classical European art (is it renaissance or something? I don't know and I work in a bloody art gallery, silly me. You know, the ugly paintings of kings and queens and aristocrats?) My dad came from a working class background and was one of three kids of post war Polish migrants, and was the only one of his siblings to attend university, but as a teenager I just saw this very posh guy, completely out of touch with the modern world, correcting my grammar, going on about how x, y and z were 'from the Latin' and the only three books of any real importance were the Bible, ancient Greek and Roman stuff and something else in a similar vein. I can't remember what. Oh yeah, probably Shakespeare. This all just sounds like I'm ratting on my dad, he has his good points too, we're all flawed. I remember once overhearing him exasperatedly ranting to my mum in the kitchen, 'she can't even spell 'medieval''...'Why get it wrong when you can get it right?' was his motto whenever I shrugged my shoulders and grunted that some slight inaccuracy in my grammar didn't matter.
I'm sure there might well be something interesting about learning Latin to some people, but I had no interest when my dad tried to lecture me and everything just went in one ear and out the other. I had an interest in learning Polish and as a teenager my dad agreed to teach me. He would sit me down and start giving me long lectures about verb structures and make me repeat different conjugations of verbs. He hardly spoke a word of Polish the whole time. I mean, he was trying to help, but the way I learn was incompatible with the way he teaches...

Anyways, I'd heard the Latin expression Mea Culpa before. I know it used to be a common expression but I don't think while I've been alive, and certainly not in circles I moved in, or even my folks moved in. It means 'My Fault' and it is also the title of a prayer I used to have to recite each week at church, which Catholics will know...

I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have sinned greatly in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and in what I have failed to do,
through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
Therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints, and you my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God

The bit that still sticks in my head is the 'in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do'. I still get it in my head these days sometimes, and whilst I can't solely blame Catholicism for making me neurotic I don't think it helped. It's this idea that thinking can be a sin! As if you can control your thoughts. It's like that X song that goes, 'I must not think bad thoughts, I must not think bad thoughts'.

I realized as a teenager that I was not immune to prejudice, that I'd think fucked up things about people sometimes. This worried me because thinking 'bad' thoughts was unacceptable, and I didn't realise it was something everyone did. I didn't give a shit about Christianity and I never had done, but I had my own moral code of right and wrong and if I broke that even in my head for a moment it would send me into disarray. I'd occasionally get a racist or transphobic thought in my head, even if it wasn't something I rationally believed, and I'd think 'oh my god the BNP must be slipping some sort of drug into my water supply', because I didn't realize that other people's psyche's worked like that too. I then worried very regularly that people would think I was thinking something bigoted, even if I wasn't, but of course I couldn't tell anyone I was worrying about people THINKING that I might be thinking something bad or that I might inadvertently do something bad because that would point to the true evil that lay within. Why else would I be worried about it? I thought that if you had a 'bad' thought then that must be that. That must be you. You were that fucked up, hateful, bigoted, racist, transphobic, etc, etc, person through and through. It took me years to admit I ever worried about this stuff. By this time I had spent ten years of thinking the insides of my head were totally unacceptable and there was something wrong with my brain.

The reality of the situation is that I am white and I live in a fucked up, white supremacist culture and therefore I have absorbed some of the shit that comes with that. That doesn't mean I am blameless or shouldn't question what goes on inside my head when it's fucked up. I think it's important to be aware of that stuff so you can question your assumptions, listen and accept when you are called out and think about your behaviour, how much space you're taking up, etc. But whilst I still do feel guilty at times, guilt can be a very unhelpful emotion (if it is an emotion, not just a signifier of something more sinister) and a terrible motivator for political action because it becomes all about appeasing the 'guilty' person's feelings rather than a genuine commitment to ending oppression. Becoming obsessively worried about being oppressive is essentially just being self-obsessed.

Back to Catholicism, a religion which is founded on the idea that you are essentially bad and must confess and make amends for your sins, hence all the guilt and penance and self-flagellation and the idea that even in your thoughts, God sees. I think this is one of the most damaging things you can say to anyone. If you accept you have 'bad' thoughts then they can pass and leave you and they don't need to signify what you're like at the core as a person. But if you can't and if you try to suppress the fact that you ever have 'bad' thoughts, you'll probably go crazy.