A Strongly Worded Letter About Jesus and Stuff.

This is a letter to the editor that I wrote tonight, regarding a column that The New Hampshire ran this week. I don't know if I'm allowed to really write letters to the editor since I'm actually on the editorial staff, but anyway. I'm pissed. That's 80% of why I have a blog.

In his Oct. 19 column, Nick Mignanelli writes “I think it’s kind of charming how liberals are so quick to drag religious institutions that they inherently despise into the death penalty debate.” (emphasis mine.) I am a liberal and a Catholic, and Mignanelli does not speak for me.

Christians are to be imitators of Christ. That means working for tolerance, love, charity and peace--and those interests are best served by liberals. Jesus said love the poor. Jesus said “sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:17:21-25). Sounds practically—gasp!—socialist.

If Jesus were here today, he’d be pro-welfare, pro-healthcare, and most certainly anti-execution. (Mignanelli seems to have forgotten that Jesus was a victim of the death penalty.) And if he were around today, Jesus would not be hanging out with Pat Robertson and crowing about how public schools aren’t allowed to display the Ten Commandments—he’d be in the roughest part of the projects, serving lunch at a soup kitchen. That’s why I’m a Christian. And although Mignanelli doubtless considers me a “cafeteria Catholic,” he should not make sweeping assertions like “liberals inherently despise religion.” That’s a remarkably ignorant statement, plain and simple.

Mignanelli says “In addition to their nominal stance against the death penalty, doesn’t the magesterium of the Catholic Church also have some strong feelings about abortion, family planning, and stem cell research? It’s interesting how liberals would never cite the Catholic Church’s expertise on those issues.” This is true—because the Catholic Church’s “expertise” on those issues is null. Here’s a secret—most Catholics don’t listen to the Church for family planning advice, either. The Catholic Church is run by celibate men. Men who have neither sex nor families cannot dispense sound advice on family planning. The Church still insists you’re going to hell if you use condoms, take hormonal birth control or use any other form of artificial contraception—even within marriage. A few diehards in Rome and elsewhere would still tell you that if a thirteen-year-old girl with Down syndrome gets raped and becomes pregnant, she’s going to hell if she gets an abortion. Is that the “expertise” Mignanelli is referring to?

I care deeply about my faith, and I’m a liberal--but people like Mignanelli are the reason I don't always tell my sane, liberal friends that I'm a Catholic right away. I'm conflicted about it enough without wannabe teenage pundits like this giving the church of Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day a bad name. If you are going to be a conservative---marginalizing the poor, giving advantages to the rich, oppressing immigrants and gays and promoting the death penalty--don’t do it in the name of Christ. And stop calling me and the thousands like me “cafeteria Catholics.” I’m a soup kitchen Catholic.

Some of the pissier stuff got left out of the letter, because I'm classy like that. Now watch this, because it's awesome:

I'm totally going to hell, guys.

These Allegories Are Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

Norah: There's this part of Judaism I like. Tikun Olam. It said that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together.
Nick: Maybe we don't have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces.
-Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

I've avoided writing about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque so far, firstly because Tim King dealt with it elegantly over on his blog, and secondly because it makes me so spewing mad that I wasn't sure I could write anything coherent about it. (My opinion, just so we're clear: Awesome idea? No. Is it right for the United States government to sanction religious intolerance? Absolutely not.) I'm not going to write about it now, either, because while I am pissed about this, what's worse is that every time I calm down from being angry at somebody (BP, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the woman with a sticker that said "Guts, Guns and God Made America Free" on the back of her truck) the despair in my gut gapes a little wider. And despair is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

Despair is worse than fear. Fear gets people moving, fear accomplishes things--for good or bad. If you still have the energy to be afraid for your country (or planet, for that matter) it means you haven't given up on it. Fear yells in your ear; but Despair comes creeping in quietly, a little bit at a time--hand in hand with its old pal Apathy--and whispers "It's out of your hands. You think what you do matters? Lie down. Forget it. Watch The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Just go to the mall. Forget about all this mess." Despair is one sneaky son of a bitch.

I hate most of these mainstream flavor of the month metaphysical bullshit artists that are popular with the Oprah's book club set lately, and I probably sound like one of them now, but the best thing you can do to fight despair is make your own small corner of the world a little bit more okay. (That doesn't quite fit on a bumper sticker, but I'm working on it.) Personally I like feeding people--whether it's cooking a big meal for my friends, a weeknight dinner for my family, or pancakes for my boyfriend, it makes me feel just a tiny bit better about pretty much everything. I can't fix the oil spill. I can't stop homophobes or racists from yapping their hateful nonsense all over cable news. I can't feed everybody in the world (I warned you this was going to get a little Oprah) but sometimes, I feed this one handful of people that are most important to me and for a little while everything doesn't suck.

There are still things in the world that are just plain old beautiful. For instance, yesterday I was standing on a beach on the Cape thinking about corn. Ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, the corn lobby, the Midwest vote. How these things that are bad for us are going to continually going to get passed into law if Congress is just concerned with getting votes. How government subsidized high fructose corn syrup is one of the major contributors to the obesity epidemic, which the government says it's trying to combat, but if that were true wouldn't they stop paying farmers to grow more of the thing that's making us sick? Then a baby smiled at me and I smiled back and for a minute things just weren't so bad. I remembered I was on a beach, and that there was a baby over there who was just learning to walk, and I told Despair to go get eaten by a Great White.

I hate the notion that we're powerless against the bad stuff in the world; because we're not. But most of us don't have a lot of control over the wider world, either. The best thing we can do is to do our damndest with whatever it is we do have control over. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have, as Teddy Roosevelt said. Take care of the people around you. Take care of yourself. Be the best at something. Grow the best tomatoes or make the most delicious pancakes ever, or be that one person who always remembers to send birthday cards, or the person who makes spectacular cocktails or can always entertain kids or gracefully diffuse an awkward situation. Lie in the sun. Eat a really good peach. Over-tip your waitress. Be nice to the checkout girl, especially if you're having a terrible no good very bad day. Because for now, all that stuff is still firmly in our hands. And that's the kind of thing that throws Despair to the sharks.

Important Thing of the Day

This Scottish PSA (down at the bottom because I'm terrible at formatting) showed up on Broadsheet today, and although I know I've got approximately 3 people who read this blog I wanted to share it because I think it's really pertinent for college students. Something that really, really bugs me-- and not the way American Apparel or even Sarah Palin bugs me--is the attitude that college students, male and female, have towards rape. Because the fact is that even girls have an insanely blase attitude about it. Sure, not about armed, violent, To Catch a Predator stuff--everybody knows that's wrong. But--and this is just my perception as a college-age woman--there's a disgustingly passive feeling about date rape.

I'm not going to lay into fraternities...we all know that they're not exactly the safest place in the world for a drunk girl. The group I want to address is my peers: the nice girls. We are nice. We come from nice families, nice neighborhoods, nice high schools. We have nice friends and maybe nice boyfriends. And some of us are the worst rape apologists since everyone who signed that bullshit Roman Polanski petition. It has to stop. Here's the way the thinking goes. Those girls who get raped get too wasted, dress too slutty, do stupid things, get themselves into bad situations and probably deserve it. If they let themselves get too drunk to say no, they probably deserve it. If they walk home alone, they probably deserve it. We are nice girls, so we're smart. We walk in groups, don't get too drunk, don't dress too slutty. So that could never happen to us.

Yeah, right.

It can happen to anyone, chickadees. Sure, don't be a moron. But don't go around saying that a woman who's gone through one of the most traumatic things the human psyche can experience was asking for it. Have a little goddamn empathy. I mean, whatever happened to sisterhood? The idea that anyone "deserves" or is "asking for" rape is so disgusting, so morally out-of-whack that I have a hard time even writing something coherent about it--and the notion that women are talking this way about other women is even worse. The idea that women have to dress a behave a certain way in order to avoid rape basically excuses all the dudes who are actually, uh, going around raping people. This nice girl is calling bullshit.

Heavy.

So my grandfather died this week. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but...well, no biggie. I didn’t know him, and he caused a lot of grief for the whole family that way too twisted to get into here. This post isn’t about him…although if we want to get super Freudian it probably is. Just being real with you.

My mom asked if I wanted to read at the funeral, and my knee-jerk reaction was to say no. My relationship with the Catholic Church is really only surpassed in fucked-uped-ness by my late grandfather’s relationship with his kids. I didn’t really want to get up in a Church that doesn’t want me, and give a reading at the funeral of a man who didn’t want to know me.

I went through all eight years of CCD and two years of Confirmation classes. I got baptized, first communioned, and confirmed. I know the prayers and the songs and the order of the Mass. But then I see the pope on TV pope-ing around Africa telling people that they’re sinners if they use condoms to, you know, prevent AIDS and I have to pause. Some radical pro-lifer blows up a Planned Parenthood clinic and kills two nurses, and I have to pause. I read the stories of women who truly feel called to the priesthood and are basically told that having ovaries makes you unfit to preach the word of God---and I have to pause again.

Now, some of you—who are obviously not veterans of the CCD program of St. Mark’s Parish—may be reading this and thinking, hey, screw it. Go find another church, or skip it altogether. Go join an ashram if that floats your boat. To which I say: it’s not that simple. They get you early—I mean, seriously, I gave these nutjobs my youth. The Catholic tradition is ingrained on me as deeply as looking both ways before you cross the street. I feel conflicted as hell about it, sure, but just try to keep me away from a Catholic church on Ash Wednesday. Can’t be done.

So I’m still figuring that one out. But if you’re not still figuring questions like that out, you’re either dead or I don’t want to know you. For now, the best sort of philosophy I can think of doesn’t come from Jesus or Buddha or Confucius, but from Kurt Vonnegut:

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

I thought about my mom’s request all day. Driving home from work, I decided I was going to do it after all. I don’t want to make it out as though the heavens opened up and I had some epiphany while the Hallelujah chorus swelled through the shitty speakers of my Subaru—but I did have a sort of moment of clarity. It was far, far more important to put aside all the hurt and mixed feelings I have towards the Church and my grandfather and just stand up there and read the passage from St. Paul than it was to hang onto all that shit.

So I did it--got up there in my funeral duds and blew that second letter to the Corinthians out of the water--and I think in doing it I let go of how angry I felt at my grandfather for making everyone so sad for so many years. It clogs you up, hanging on to all that pain--and I was hanging onto it, hard. He didn't hurt me, but he hurt a lot of people I love, and for that I was angry. But I'm making up my mind to let it go.

Because God damn it, babies, you've got to be kind.