We're All Bad Catholics Now (...I Wish)

If you've never read Bad Catholic, you should; if you're an occasional reader (like me), you should start checking in more often (as I have this past week.) Of all the enjoyable stuff I've seen there, I don't think anything has given me the pleasure of a simple picture he posted three days ago. After pointing out that, "Your plan backfired, Barry: Instead of painting the Church as ridiculously oppressive, you managed to usher America into an incredible zeitgest, in which NPR dislikes you and Mike Huckabee can declare “We are all Catholic now,” without being damned to hell thrice over.", he offers this picture:

with the legend, "When any creature that normally takes half a century to form a complete statement starts a united effort to destroy your plans, think twice about your own brilliance."

Good advice to Saruman, good advice to all the proponents of this horrible HHS mandate.

How horrible is it? When this came down, I--the queen of mean-spirited pettiness--could not direct even a millisecond of "told you so" schadenfreude toward the bishops who had supported the passage of Obamacare.


So, inspired by the above and some of Bad Catholic's other recent pics, here's my less-good picture contribution:

An Easy Resolution For Us

Okay, so it's January 3rd and pretty much everybody who was going to make a New Year's resolution has already made one or given up on the idea or both. But in the unlikely idea there's anyone still looking for an idea, might I suggest something: praying before meals (aka saying grace, asking the blessing), even if you're in public.

I live in the Bible Belt, a part of the country whose religiosity is apparently so intense as to offend people on the East and West Coasts, and I have hardly ever seen prayer in restaurants, cafeterias, and such. As a child I, like most of my classmates, was taught to pray before meals at home; it's often the first prayer people teach their children. But for the most part we didn't pray before meals in public areas. (Church gatherings would be an exception here.)

People who I knew were church-goers and who I'm pretty sure prayed before meals in their homes never seemed to do so in public. It's almost as if it were taboo to pray in public, but most of the people I grew up with were proponents of prayer in the public schools, so there goes that theory.

I figure skipping the before-meal prayer in public is either habit or they're too embarrassed to actually do it.

What's to be embarrassed about? I can only call recall a couple of instances where I definitely saw someone who was alone pray before a meal in a public area and both times I thought better of them, although I was not a practicing Christian myself. Once was when I was a teenager in a MacDonalds and a man who was obviously a drifter of some sort sat down with his meal and began to address his Heavenly Father so loudly that pretty much everyone turned to look. I don't recommend this, but I thought no worse of him for it.

The other was when I saw an older woman at my workplace sitting with her lunch in the employee lounge bow her head and move her lips in silent prayer before she began eating, and I thought, "Good for her". She was a nice lady and as far as I could tell she always prayed like that, whether she was eating alone or with others. I loved that she didn't compromise her beliefs just because she happened to be in public.

Gratitude is the fundamental religious instinct. Even people with no religious training--or who have rejected what they received--feel the need to give thanks at times. It's an instinct worth nurturing. "Ungrateful" is an insult in every part of society. That's the reason a before-meal prayer is often the first prayer people teach their toddlers, right along with the "please" and "thank you" they're teaching them to say to humans. Those expressions are not empty ones.

An article in a pagan magazine I saw a long time ago said that "please" and "thank you" are actually manifestations of a profound truth: noone owes you anything. Noone owes you, so when you ask for something, you acknowledge that by asking nicely. Noone owes you, so when they give you something, you express gratitude; they didn't have to give it to you, but they did.

If we say thank you to the stranger who tells us what time it is or a friend who passes us a cup of coffee, how much more should we say it to God, the one who gave us everything? If he gave you the intelligence to get yourself to the restaurant and earn the money to pay for the meal and the good fortune to live in a country where there's abundant food to buy, why not a little thank you, even if there are people around who might see and suspect what you're doing. If you're Catholic, cross yourself afterward and let 'em see. It might remind them to think about the things they're grateful for.

Happy Pentecost

Happy Pentecost to any and all Christians reading this. To any Jewish people reading this, I hope you had a happy Shavuot. And to anyone reading this who doesn't know what Pentecost is, you can try here and here for some more information, but the short answer is that it commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit as described in the second chapter of the biblical book of Acts.

And since the word Pentecost makes many of us think of Pentecostalism, here's as good a place as any to mention one of the many things becoming Catholic has done for me: it got rid of my culturally-absorbed prejudice against Pentecostals. I grew up among fairly mainstream Baptists and Methodists in the American South and there was a bit of a prejudice against Pentecostals (though of course, it being the South, everyone was too polite to be rude about it to anyone's face). Pentecostals and Holiness people were often called by the derogatory term "holy rollers" and were considered to have unseemly and overemotional, even tacky, religious services. People shook their heads at what they'd heard those Pentecostals got up to, with their fervent preaching and shouting and falling out on the floor and talking in tongues and--especially hard for Baptists to take--dancing. Some mainstream women might also shake their heads at the grooming restrictions many Holiness women adhered to, with their lack of makeup and their long hair.

I absorbed some of this prejudice myself, although I'm not sure if I ever realized it before I had to read The Grapes of Wrath for a class and found the Pentecostal Joads irritating to read about.

The ugly truth is that class snobbery was what was behind a lot of the head shaking, not doctrinal problems. Kathleen Norris has written about this a bit in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. Pentecostals in the past often came from the poorer, less educated parts of society, and I think that still holds true, although I've heard that in the last twenty to thirty years the average wealth and education level has gone up. I think for some people a bit of that lower class tinge remains in their perception of Pentecostals.

For me, becoming Catholic got rid of my mild prejudice. For one thing I came into the Church on the Pentecost Vigil. That kind of makes you think about the Holy Spirit, even if you don't think that deeply. I believe in the Holy Spirit; I publicly affirm it along with my fellow Catholics every time I go to mass and privately every time I pray the rosary or the Divine Mercy chaplet. I believe in the Pentecost account in Acts. I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit, even if my understanding is not good. So why should I or anyone who believes these things be bothered by people seeking the Holy Spirit?

For another, I was baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church teaches that everyone who is baptized thusly is part of the Body of Christ, even if they are not in full communion with Rome, and thus all other Christians are my brothers and sisters in Christ. (Yes, I know some Pentecostals baptize in the name of Jesus only, but I figure they are at least trying, so I tend to think of them as siblings in Christ too.)

For another, I was made aware of Charismatic Catholics--Catholics who pay a lot of attention to the Holy Spirit and enjoy more emotionalized or "spirit-filled" devotions outside of mass; some of them even "pray in a spirit language" (i.e. "speak in tongues".) This is not attractive to me, but the Church is both worldwide and ancient, creating room for a multiplicity of personal devotional practices, no one of which will appeal to everyone--and that is fantastic.

For another, even before I came into the Church I was very attracted to the line in Galatians about there being neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female in Christ Jesus. That seems to me a clear indication that we are to leave our worldy considerations, such as class consciousness or wondering if other people's cultural-acquired preferences are "tacky" or not, outside the Church door. I also did a fair amount of thinking around the idea that God's standards are not our standards. Remember that Flannery O'Conner story in which the smugly self-content Southern farm lady has a vision of all kinds of poor people and freaks going up to heaven before her, shouting and clapping and dancing on their way? It's like that. With God, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. You only have to hear "blessed are the meek" to know you are not in worldy territory; this is not how we think, but how God thinks.

For another, as a Catholic I'm now part of a religion that a lot of people look down on and consider full of tacky things. Pilgrims going in bare feet or on their knees up the steps to a shrine--how gauche. Crucifixes with blood dripping from them--a little too real to be in good taste. The Sacred Heart--what's that about? The Way of the Cross? Probably something "ethnic" people do.

And for yet another thing, Catholics receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit at confirmation. No doubt that helped.

So why am I going on at such length about my having shed what was only ever a mild prejudice? Well, for starters I'm glad it's gone; I'm glad I'm no longer bigoted against Christians in general, no longer inclined to demean myself by sneering at "fundies", and no longer prejudiced against "holy rollers". For another, in a time when any stick will do to beat the Church, I think it's good to tell some of the good we find there, even something as minor as this. American society has for forty-plus years held up prejudice as the greatest of secular sins. Well, the Catholic Church helped rid me of one subset of prejudice. That is a good thing, right? She deserves props for it, right?

Two Movies You May Not Have Heard Of

Ushpizin, available from Netflix for either DVD rental or instant viewing, is an interesting movie about a married couple trying to be religious and not always succeeding. It is the festival of Sukkot, and Moshe and his wife are so broke they barely have any food in the house, let alone supplies for celebrating the holiday. They begin to pray very hard and two things happen, they receive an unexpected sum of money and two guests from Moshe's not-so-religious past show up. They attempt to provide hospitality to the men, but things do not go smoothly.

I saw this small independent movie back in November, but I still remember it and would like to see it again; that's better than some big budget movies I've seen. I liked it not only because it gives a glimpse inside a world I will never be a part of, but because it shows religious people sincerely trying to follow God, failing to live up to their ideals, yet continuing to try. Religion is not shown as a contemptible thing, fit only for mockery. This makes Ushpizin an unusual movie by contemporary standards. It's also a good story.

Arranged (also available from Netflix) is another low-budget, seemingly small movie. It concerns Rochel and Nasira, two young schoolteachers in a NYC elementary school, who do not fit in with the other teachers. Both dress modestly and have expectations of an arranged marriage. Did I mention they don't fit in? They become friends through the shared bonds of looking for love in a now non-standard way and of enduring their principal's attempts to save them from oppression.

Ushpizin is the better film, but I like this movie too. How often do we get to see a young woman stand up in a movie and say that "traditional" isn't necessarily bad? Aren't all modern films supposed to be about young women defying authority and tradition? This is a different movie--refreshingly so.


As to family viewing, I don't think little kids would like these movies, but older girls might like Arranged and there's no acres of naked flesh, sex scenes, violence, or noticeable swearing in either movie. There's also no car chases and special effects, for family members who require them, and Ushpizin has subtitles, which I've learned is an issue for some people. (I'm sympathetic to illiteracy; I'm not sympathetic to whines of "I don't want to read" coming from literate people.)

A Representative of the Kingdom

I heard an anecdote from my mother a while back. A preacher she knows said he went out of his house in an especially good mood one morning, and while he was on the way wherever he was going, he got behind a car that had a bumpersticker that said "Honk If You Love Jesus!" Being in a good mood and, as a minister, loving Jesus, he honked. Whereupon everyone in the car--the woman driving and her small children--all turned around and flipped him off.


He said it flattened his mood so much he turned around and went home.

People, this isn't the way to represent the body of Christ. When you identify yourself in public as a Christian,you become a representative of Christianity and thus of Christ. Flipping people off is bad PR.


When you slap a Jesus bumpersticker on your car, wear a tee-shirt with Christian slogans or graphics, or hang a big cross around your neck, you are proclaiming yourself a Christian, just the same as if you loudly announced, "I am a Christian" to all and sundry. Some of the people who see or hear your proclamation may not be familiar with Christianity or with the particular subgroup of Christianity you are a part of (if your announcement was, say, an XYZ Church Annual Picnic tee-shirt). Other of the people who see your proclamation may have a prior inclination to think negatively of Christians. So here you come saying "Honk If You Love Jesus" or "Follow Me to Church" and you proceed to act like a jackass. Which gives people in the former category a negative impression of Christians (or Christians of XYZ branch) and gives people in the latter group confirmation of their tendency to think badly of all Christians. Was that really what you wanted to do when you bought the bumpersticker?



Here's why I think this is going to become even more important than it used to be.


When you go somewhere you and your kin or kind are not much known, you become a representative of your group, like it or not. People in minority groups know this. Natalie Goldberg once wrote of going into a rural, Midwestern classroom and telling the kids she was Jewish; none of them knew anyone Jewish, so she figured that now she represented Jewish people to them--she was eating an apple, therefore all Jews eat apples sort of thing. Christians in America and perhaps especially in the Bible Belt have had the luxury of being in the majority for a long time. Even now something like 89 percent or more Americans self-identify as being at least nominally Christian. But that's going to change and do so sooner and faster than we are going to find comfortable. I'm not referring to immigrants from historically non-Christian parts of the world changing the demographics of our country. Already a lot of citizens who tick Christian subgroup XYZ or ABC on forms that ask religion could be more accurate by checking "other" and writing in "secularist who sometimes uses XYZ facilities for weddings and funerals and may bring out a manger scene tree ornament at Christmas". Throw in a little mild persecution and a great many of those people will fall away. And some of the people who remain will be people committed to redefining Christianity as something historically unrecognizable.

This means that practicing Christians will more and more often run into people who have never met a practicing Christian and have formed their view of the faith based almost wholly on the mockery of contemporary comedians and the vilification of our enemies. What you, as a known practicing Christian, do and say before such a person will either reinforce the negative opinion they've taken from pop culture or will be a witness against the caricature. Given that we're supposed to evangelize, which is better?

My point here is not to point fingers, but to point out the responsibility we take on when we display symbols that identify us as Christians. I've never worn any of those smarmy Christian tee-shirts that some people wear because I don't like them, but if I ever found one I liked, I would be reluctant to wear it in public, because it would make me feel under a greater obligation to mind myself. I do frequently wear a modest-sized Marian medal and I would hate it if I ever spoke nastily to someone or hit my shin and let out a stream of profanity and then had the people who witnessed this notice my medal; their seeing my behavior and thinking I am a jerk is one thing, their seeing my behavior and thinking Christians are jerks is another thing. I know I would hate this scenario because I let something like it happen once. (So if there were a finger pointing, it would have to point at me as well.)

Some years back I noticed myself getting angry while driving more and more often and I didn't like it. So, although I've never liked things dangling from rearview mirrors, when I got a free plastic rosary in the mail, I decided to hang it from my rearview mirror as a reminder to remember Jesus and not get angry and mutter bad things about other drivers. And it worked pretty well for weeks. Then I lost my temper worse than I ever had while driving.

I had to go pick up some medicine or something at Wal-mart and, unfortunately this was on the day before a hurricane might or might not hit us, and it was afternoon. Leaving the store after having suffered through the crowd inside, I ended up in the most godawful snarl of parking lot traffic likely to be seen in a small town. After what seemed like ages of this and escape to a less congested area seemed nigh, I witnessed a bit of what I took to be insane driving and someone nearly hit me, and I flipped out and did something I'd never before done while driving: angrily thrust two upturned fingers toward my window, while shouting the air blue.

But there's Jesus. Before I had even calmed down, I was overcome with remorse: Suppose they saw the rosary dangling from my mirror and thought all Catholics act like this? I felt horrible about it. Now, maybe it would be a finer thing to say I thought only of the wrongness of the act itself or of how sin hurts Jesus, rather than how I might have created a negative impression of my group of Christians. But if I were pure of heart, I probably wouldn't have snapped like that in the first place, and the results were good: my little bout of road rage ended, I became a much calmer driver for years after, and I found myself glancing over at my little plastic depiction of Jesus quite often.

And that's the good part of displaying symbols of our faith on or about our person: they make us think of God more often. The "bad" part of course is that they require we take on a responsibility to act as representatives of our faith; it's harder to hide when we're wearing a sign. And maybe that's a good part too.

Some Things Great and Small

This article by Umberto Eco is from November, but I found the link still on my computer and was reminded it struck me back when I read it. I am in agreement with most of it, but less so with this:

"The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed
in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater."
Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions
just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing
depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The
so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only
promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty
secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes."

I don't think contemporary people seek out the occult, New Age thinking, or the World-According-to-the-Davinci-Code type conspiracies because they want something larger than Judaism and Christianity. I think it is because they want something smaller. Any religion that we create out of our own head--whether conciously and deliberately as eclectic neo-pagans do or simply by filling up the empty secret container of an existing system with our own fears and hopes as Eco talks about--is bound to be smaller than one that grew up over many generations and has cultural accretions and thoughts contributed by many places and people. We don't want a religion that requires anything out of us that we haven't already thought of on our own and are ready to give. We don't want to be challenged. But that is smallness, not largeness.

Our Enemies, Our Siblings

The United States is fighting a war against terrorism. I think we can all agree that terrorism is a bad, terrrible thing and should be fought against, no matter who the terrorists are. But, un-PC though it may be to notice it, let alone call attention to it, most acts of terrorism are committed by Muslims. I have come to think that we have to regard not terrorism but that form of Islam which fosters terrorism as our real enemy; whether we call it Islamism, militant Islam, radical Islam, Islamofascism, or fundamentalist Islam, it is the enemy of not just the US, but all of Western civilization. We nurture it to our own endangerment.

But part of Western civilization is the Christian precept of remembering the humanity of our enemies, reminding ourselves that they too are children of God, whether they believe it or not (which in fact Muslims do, though they would quarrel with Christians about the nature of God.) This facet of the West's great Judeo-Christian tradition is shown in a piece NRO has today by a US military chaplain. It is an emotional piece, but I was struck by this line:

"...isn’t this the kind of world we are fighting for — a world where an
Imam teaches a Rabbi words from the Holy Koran to comfort a young Muslim boy,
and that rabbi himself is comforted by a Christian, a Catholic priest."

Yes. I don't think we should downplay the dangers of radical Islam and as a Catholic I wish more people would come home to the Church, but yes, this is the kind of world I want to live in.

A New Magazine, Plus Thrifty Protestants Vs. Lazy Catholics

There's a fairly new magazine (it seems to be at its third issue) online called In Character . It bills itself as a magazine of "everyday virtues" and each issue is built around a theme--so far, creativity, thrift, and purpose, with loyalty up next. What I've sampled so far is pretty good, certainly better than the dreck in many women's magazines. Gregory Wolfe's article "In God's Image: Do Good People Make Good Art?" is very good and is of particular interest to Flannery O'Connor fans. (NRO reprinted it in a more accessible font size, so I recommend reading it there.) I also enjoyed Damien Cave's history of thrift stores and the reminiscing in "You Kill It, You Eat It and Other Lessons of My Thrifty Childhood".

That last article touches on thrift's relation to religion. Thrift is usually associated with Protestantism and "the Protestant work ethic". But today's evangelicals are usually just as consumeristic as their secular brethren; let's not even ask about "liberal" Protestants. The author says that, while we can no longer depend on religion to bring back the virtue of thrift, "It is within Catholic social teaching that one finds currently the strongest case being made on behalf of what is reasonably called thrift as a theologically grounded virtue." This, in spite, Catholicism's traditional reputation of encouraging slacking off by having all those holy days and religious festivals.

There's a thesis to be written on the subject of how Protestantism came to be associated with thrift and hard work. (Actual conversation at my house: Auntie Suzanne, exhorting Uncle Pookie to do something: Where's your Protestant work ethic? Uncle Pookie: I'm Catholic. And so are you.) I know Calvinism must come into and probably Puritanism, but there's also the question of why Protestants whose cry is "faith alone", would promote hard work as a sign of salvation. Also how much of this is the idea that if it's fun it can't be moral (aka general tight-assedness) or that if it's uncomfortable it must be virtuous? And why would the faith most associated with the Middle Ages not be associated with thrift--wasn't everyone thrifty by necessity, except for when building cathedrals or having the odd feast? (If you had to spend many man-hours spinning and weaving to get a small amount of cloth, imagine how careful you'd be in how you cut and sewed it and how you wore the subsequent garment. Now imagine all your goods represented a similar investment of time.) Many of the early Christians (Catholics, whether Jack Chick will admit it or not) were downright ascetic, and monastics have to work as well as pray. How do attitudes toward thrift relate to self-expression or church architecture? How does thriftiness affect the spirit? And if actual history and theology aren't enough to hang a thesis on, then there's the area of the great psychobable god of our age, self-esteem: Do any Catholics suffer low self-esteem because a great civil virtue is associated with Protestants? Probably not, since hardly anyone in our consumer-driven, materialistic culture cares about thrift, but that doesn't mean a college student couldn't BS about it for 20, 30, or a couple hundred pages.

People to Pray For

Kathryn Jean Lopez put this link in the Corner today:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-photo27apr27,0,4897151.story?coll=la-home-headlines
It is about people who work in the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit. This is not a job that most people would want to do, no matter how much they may hate child pornographers and molestors. Few people would want to look at the material these people have to look at daily, or hear the stories they have to hear, or interact with some of the perverts they must interact with. Few people want to think about this kind of evil, much less have to deal with it every day. One of the men called it "soul-destroying" work. Lopez, when she posted the link, suggested that some people who read it would want to pray for the protection of the souls of these investigators. She was right. I did.

Something From Yesterday's News

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050313/D88QC5200.html
There's so much to dislike in this news story--and I mean the events, not the way they are covered--but it was the final quote that got to me:

"I wanted to know where God was when this happened," Free [a man
whose niece was wounded in the shooting] told the Chicago Sun-Times. "He was
supposed to be everywhere. He could have at least been there."

That annoyed me, and I'm not quite sure why. I also know I'm not being all that charitable toward this guy. People say stupid things when they're upset. Reporters can fluster people. Questioning God's presence or concern are pretty common whenever we are experiencing tragic events. And I'm hardly immune to the "why me" syndrome myself. But it annoyed me. All I could think was, "Why wasn't God there at the shooting? Why not ask where God is when babies are ripped from their mother's wombs everyday? Where is God when people are torturing and starving their children? Where was God when Ed Gein was making his breast-complete vests of women's skin and dancing around in them? Where was God when Hitler slaughtered 6,000,000 Jews?" Assuming the church where the shooting occurred is some Protestant Christian group (I'm not familiar with them) and assuming Free is a member (the article doesn't say, but in the first flush of my annoyance I assumed he was), is his Christianity so fragile that the first time something bad happens to him, his faith breaks? Is he one of those people who think bad things only happen to bad people? Are the people in that church so socially isolated and historically cut off that they think bad things only happen to people who lack faith? What's the deal?

Today my annoyance has faded and I can pity the man. If he and others at that church (assuming he is a member) believe in a sort of health and wealth gospel in which bad things simply don't happen to people with enough faith and if they see no potential good in suffering, then they are in for some bad times--beyond the relatively uncomplicated stress of having a gunman open fire on you, I mean.

I don't understand the health and wealth gospelers, myself. Or even the more common "have faith and nothing bad will happen" type thinking. What Bible are they reading? Ever heard of Job? Or that bit about being persecuted for Jesus' sake? Having to carry the cross? And do they have any acquaintance with history? I don't recall ever hearing that individual Jews and Christians were always spared disease and disaster because they had faith in God. I don't recall ever hearing that Christian nations were spared trouble just because they were Christian (let's not even mention the Jews as a group--ai yi yi!) But the attitude is everywhere.

This kind of stuff made me angry even as a child. My younger sister came home from a slumber party once, telling how, when bad weather threatened, the host child had said she wasn't afraid because she knew Jesus wouldn't let anything happen to them because she believed in him. I was very angry about that. I already tended toward atheism even then (I was about 13), but my attitude was that, damn it, if you're going to believe, take it seriously. I knew about Job and I knew bad stuff--especially bad weather, for goodness' sake!--happens to everybody. Faith isn't some lucky charm. Jesus isn't a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card. That cross you're supposed to pick up and carry is a torture device, not a Ring of Protection +5. When I was yelled at for criticizing that girl's "thinking", I got off a parting salvo: "It will make people hate God!"

And I was right. It can. Case in point: A lovely older woman my husband and I used to know apparently lost her faith over this kind of thinking. As best my husband could piece together from what she said to him, she came from one of those Protestant groups that, whether it actually preached the idea officially or not, held that bad things won't happen to you if you have faith and act right. And she went along with that up through her early married life. Then one of her children died of SIDS. Explain that, health and wealth gospelers.