Unexpected

I got an email today from Writing.com informing me that my poem “Northland Religion” had received a comment.  I had completely forgotten that Writing.com existed, that I had a profile, and the existence of the three items I had posted to that profile.  I recognized the tiny, six line poem when I read it:

Make it ten-thousand and one / for that little lake of tears / that baptized me / with reflections of the forest / and of the sun / and of the cloudless dome.

Simple, shabby, tangled in the language of my struggle to deal with loss of faith, and utterly forgotten, this poem had still reached someone who “really liked” it, a fellow Minnesotan who thanked me for its creation.

Although I’ve never completely given up on poetry, I know very well by now that creative fiction isn’t my realm.  Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying my old dreams; I was going to be a novelist and change the world with my ideas and my sparkling prose.  Sometimes it feels like settling to devote myself to the study of other people’s genius–“those that can’t do, teach” and all.  Yet I lack not only the aptitude but the patience and interest for writing prose, and I am passionate about academic English.  And now I find, when the ghost of ambition rattles her chains, that I can quiet her with silvers of approbation like today’s unexpected comment and go on, quite happily, in the less glorious path I am pleased to have chosen.

Why being an English major makes me behave inappropriately in church

I love my family for many reasons, one of which is that they get my sense of humor.  I had more hearty belly-laughs with them in five days out-of-town for Christmas than I have for probably the entire fall semester (no offense, dear friends…you do make me laugh!).  However, it doesn’t take much at all for my family to set me off.  There’s really no point in sharing most of the anecdotes, though; you had to be there.  However, there was one instance that fellow English nerds might possibly sort-of appreciate.

After declaring myself willing to go to church as long as they “sang lots of songs and didn’t talk too much about Jesus,” I went to mass twice in one weekend.  Now, I’m pretty good at maintaining an appropriately contemplative demeanor at church, but as midnight mass commenced with the “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” I lost it.  I’m not proud of it–it was completely disrespectful how hard I was laughing–but picture this:

An elderly woman in a maroon choir robe stood at the lectern.  She was built like a brick, a big, square brick with a marble perched on top, connected with four or five wobbling chins in lieu of any apparent neck.  It was Christmas and after all the poor woman couldn’t help her appearance; I would have cut her some slack.  Her voice was an extreme iteration of the old-lady quaver…she could have out-warbled Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz.  Christmas or not, I probably would have rolled my eyes at my dad and made some sort of snide comment on the walk home.  But it was what she was quavering out of the large mouth in her gray-curled marble of a head that did it:

Proclamation of the Birth of Christ

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December,
unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth
and then formed man and woman in his own image,
several thousand years after the flood,
when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant,
twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah,
thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt,
eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges,
one thousand years from the anointing of David as king;
in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome,
the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
being conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months having passed since his conception,
was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary.
Today is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

I was shaking silently by “Ruth and the Judges” and at the word “Olympiad” I turned my audible snort into a cough and buried my fingernails in my wrist as an attempt to master my ill-timed hilarity.  Unfortunately, the proclamation was only half done.  At “nine months having passed since his conception,” with deep red welts in my wrist, I gave up, hid my face behind my hymnal, and laughed long, hard, and (thank goodness) silently.

It was over.  I took some deep breaths, composed my face, and bowed my head meekly.  And then I started to think, like I do, about diagramming sentences, specifically, the 180 word sentence of the proclamation (which, as you no doubt noticed, contains only two sentences).  The core of the sentence, which took approximately three minutes for the venerable chorister to warble, is “Jesus Christ was born” (which is essentially covered in the title…).  Having so recently exercised my laughing muscles, the thought of this sentence diagram was enough to send my face back into my hymnal during the entirely un-comical first reading.  Oops.

Had the wrathful arm of God chosen to smite me for my sacrilegious amusement, I might have re-considered my non-thesim (although, come to think of it, it would probably have been too late).  As it was, I hope the brick-and-marble nightingale didn’t notice anything amiss and that I didn’t seriously compromise the spiritual experience of those around me.  As for me, I had more fun at church than I have since…ever, probably.

God and Angel

Angel certainly took a turn for the interesting at the end of season 4.  The force that has been controlling Cordelia gives birth to a physical manifestation of itself, a beautiful goddess-made-flesh named Jasmine.  Jasmine’s rhetoric–“my love is all around you,” “love one another,” etc–screams New Testament, and the divinely-influenced conception along with worship of Cordelia as  the holy mother add weight to the argument for interpreting these end-of-the-season episodes as commentary on religion.

The part I find particularly interesting is that Jasmine herself seems neither good nor evil.  She genuinely wants people to be happy, yet does so by stripping them of their free will (and eating some of them…but that’s beside the point).  It is the horrible things done in her name and the intolerance of free-thought and alternative opinion that make her a villain.  Those who come to understand that the happiness Jasmine makes them feel comes at the price of their free-will are not only ostracized, but hunted down like animals, even by their closest friends.  In the same way, there’s nothing inherently wrong with religion–especially a religion that preaches love–but there is something very wrong when that love turns to intolerance, hatred, and violence against those with differing points of view.

After discovering Jasmine’s true nature, Angel and company struggle with feelings of loss and loneliness.  While under Jasmine’s thrall, they felt at peace, safe, and part of something bigger than themselves, but all that is gone when they find themselves in control of their own minds once again.  The question is, does the warmth make it worthwhile to live a lie?  It’s a question I’ve struggled with myself.  Religion is comforting, and has always been a part of my life.  The ritual of mass, the songs, the safety, the sense that you don’t have to be in control and that God can wipe away your mistakes was liberating.  I always assumed that I’d be married in a church, baptize my children, and send my daughter to receive her First Communion in a frilly white satin dress (with a veil…man, was I bitter about not having a veil!).  But I thought too much, and reading, learning, thinking, and talking led me to the conclusion that it was one big, warm, fuzzy lie.  And, worse, a lie that more often than not leads to hatred rather than love.  And I couldn’t live like I hadn’t noticed, so now when I go back to church with my family on holidays I feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, standing among the faithful and seeing with open eyes.  I would never tell them that they’re blind, or misguided, or what have you, because I envy them the comfort of faith.  Logic is real, but it’s cold.

I’ve already thought too much for comfort, so I like a show that makes me think.

 

Capital R

Lately I’ve encountered a lot of capitalization distinctions–realist and Realist, deaf and Deaf, romantic and Romantic.  Generally it seems that such variation is intended to distinguish between simple description and self-consciousness.  So, for instance, deaf is a physical condition and Deaf is a cultural movement.  If this is the case, then it seems to me that a distinction between reading and Reading might be appropriate.  The act of interpreting collections of written words, reading with a lower-case r, involves road signs and menus, dull essays and romance novels.  Anything can be read, and all literate people read.  On the other hand, I suppose some people can go their whole lives without Reading.  Reading, at least in my estimation, involves a conscious settling of oneself with a book and a focusing of the whole attention on the song of its language and pulse of its narrative.  It’s about the way the volume smells and feels in your hands–the reason I am so picky about the physical characteristics of my books.  The same novel that I might read in the noisy breakroom at work I would Read later that same night with a blanket and a glass of wine in a quiet room.  It’s as close to a religious sort of experience as I get these days.

I began to think of all this an hour ago when I went to brush my teeth because I could not settle down to Read with hints of cheesecake lingering in my mouth.  I realized that when I’m angry at myself for something–when I’ve been lazy or self-indulgent or childish–I never feel like Reading.  While Reading helps to cope with a lot of external things, like stress or loneliness or disappointment, I don’t turn to books when I’m disappointed in myself.  It’s almost like I have to be pure to be worthy of the experience.  It’s all a bit ridiculous, but then, religious-type things usually are.  Anyway, I’m glad I learned to Read when I learned to read, and I’m glad that unlike the child-arts of makebelieve and self-confidence, Reading is a skill for which I haven’t lost my edge.

The Jesus Channel–comedy, horror, and the strangest looking woman on TV

Comedy Central usually isn’t that entertaining, so tonight, looking for some easy laughs, I flipped to what is affectionately known (by me) as the Jesus Channel.  I caught the tail end of a show that used “science” to disprove evolution–complete with PhDs and scientists willing to stab Darwin (not to mention Rationality) in the back to get their 2 seconds of fame on cable TV.  For instance, one fellow made a rather absurd reductio ad absurdum argument, claiming that the observation that DNA from chimps and humans is X% similar and thus might point to a link in the past is like saying that clouds and jellyfish originated from a common ancestor, since both clouds and jellyfish are 98% water.  What this “scientist” failed to acknowledge is that a molecule such as H2O is not the same deal as a DNA sequence–if we are talking molecules, we can go on to say that humans and a whole gaggle of living things are X% carbon, as are diamonds, so oooh, we must have a common ancestor with diamonds.  Not how it works, buddy.

Setting this absurdity aside (I was mostly laughing at this point, although I had a few moments of horror when I realized that if you weren’t really up on your high school biology or weren’t really listening critically, you might accept some of the arguments being proposed as plausibly factual…) we come to the terrifying mess of a “newscast”-esque show that followed.  Jack Van Impe Presents involves the elderly and violently enthusiastic Jack and his utterly horrifying, 80s-suit-clad, razor-blade-thin-faced wife Rexella (see picture…you can’t make this stuff up) engaging in a mockery of a dialogue about current events (sort of).  Rexella reads off a bunch of headlines pertaining to a topic–for instance, space exploration–and then turns to her hubby with wide eyes and a confused, sing-song, child-like voice and pleads, “Jack, do you think their are aliens in outer space?”

(As a point of curiosity, yes, Jack does think there are aliens in outer space.  After Lucifer disobeyed God and got a bunch of his fellow angels chucked out of heaven, he and the good ol’ demon boys packed up and settled down a few galaxies over.  Jack thinks scientists will discover them…soon.)

It wasn’t the religious rhetoric, the ridiculous claims, or even the gushing, over-the-top enthusiasm that these are apparently the end times (woohoo! life as we know it is about to end! bunch o’ my neighbors are gonna burn in hell! Sweet Jesus, come destroy this world you created!) that really bothered me about Jack and Rexella’s show.  Truly, it was the vapid, confused, subordinate, helpless female image presented by Rexella.  Her entire function on the show is to beg for answers from her all-knowing husband, who is always ready with a verse (or two!) from the Bible and a strong grasp on the “truth”.  She never gets to preach, she never gets to answer, she never gets to interpret the Bible or give her own point of view.  It’s my opinion that a common side-effect of religion is the degradation or complete lack of critical thought.  But if Rexella is the role-model for a good Christian wife, then things are worse than I thought–then of the two people in the couple, you get perhaps watered-down critical thought from the man, and no thought at all from the woman, who looks to her husband for all the answers.

I don’t dislike religious people.  Lots of them are lovely, and their faith gives them strength, direction, community, and compassion.  I do, however, dislike religion.  A lot.  When I look at what it is used to do sometimes, the ideas and attitudes it is used to spread, I can’t just say organized religion is fine but it’s not for me.  Organized religion often isn’t really fine, and I’m not for it.

The Parable of the Toads

I don’t believe in God, but if I did, this is the answer I would give to people who wonder why an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity would allow so much pain, suffering, evil, and death to occur in the world:

A woman went out with a weed whip to trim the fence line of a large athletic complex.  There were hundreds of yards of fence line that needed trimming on both sides; it was a big job indeed.  As the woman began to work, she noticed countless tiny toads hopping about in the long grass near the base of the fence.  They were slow-moving and often hopped in circles– if she had waited for them all to move out of the way before trimming, the task would never be completed.  She didn’t want to harm any of them, but they were so tiny and numerous and stupid and she had to get her work done.  She winced each time she saw a squishy little body eviscerated under her thrumming weed whip, but the work progressed smoothly and, ultimately, would be completed in good time.

So, (here’s the part where, if this were a New Testiment parable, Jesus would explain to the less-bright apostles what the hell he was talking about) in this story the woman is God and the toads are humanity.  The job is God’s Will and the weed whip is the instrument of God’s Will at work in the world.  God doesn’t want to harm anybody, but humans just get in the way of the divine plan, and if God were always stopping to wait for us to get out of the way the plan would never progress.  Of course, the obvious flaw is that this weed whipping woman is clearly not omnipotent, or she would just teleport all of the obnoxious amphibians out of the way of her work (believe me, it’s no fun getting the gooey pink insides of miniature toads splattered all over yourself).  Still, if the theists want to pull this one out when the skeptics come a-calling, they’re quite welcome to it

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