not falling down

AND WE DO TOO COUNT

There are certain words I never expected to see my mother use in print, and “pimped” is one of them. Just one reason why I’m happy to see her blogging again.

If you read Mo-Jo, you’re already aware that after years of mounting mismanagement, condescension and outright lies from the diocesan administration, my mother’s willingness to stand up for her school and her students finally got her fired. She has another job now, but (no offense to any booksellers present) she deserves a better one; if you happen to be aware of teaching or library-related jobs in central Kentucky for someone with an MAEd (but not an MLS), please let me know and I’ll pass the news to her.

For Lent I am giving up my headphones. In addition, I have two places where I can catch a bus home: right out in front of my work building, or a twenty-minute walk away on Bardstown. The buses on Bardstown are faster and more frequent, and I actually enjoy the walk a lot, but I am lazy. I am giving up not making the walk every day. Without my headphones!

The general approach most Catholics I know have toward these forty-day abstentions is a mix of self-denial and self-improvement–I gave up soda several years running, because I like soda, but avoiding it is good for me. This year I’m doing one thing for denial and another for the benefit. It’s object-oriented Lent.

“By the energy of the alcohol

the virgin Mary was made man.”

The Nicene Creed, babeljacked. Man, I don’t know whether it’s funny or a million stories waiting to happen. Or maybe just a stupid Dan Brown book.

Also, “babel-” totally needs to be a prefix in the Futurologian Congress. PS Dear Leonard: can the Eater of Meaning maybe do this someday?

Right, Lent. I’m giving up french fries. Starting tomorrow because I didn’t know I was doing it when I got lunch.

The Post has a fairly deep and interesting article about the assembly of a His Dark Materials movie.

HDM and Philip Pullman are a source of great conflict for me. The Golden Compass is a stunningly, impossibly good book, and The Subtle Knife was excellent too. But reading The Amber Spyglass was like a punch in the stomach, or maybe a stab in the back.

I read the books as soon as they came out, so it’s been a few years. Maybe if I started Compass now I’d see it coming, but I didn’t then. It’s one thing to set up an oppressive, evil church in an alternate universe and make your point through metaphor; it’s very much another to have one of your most sympathetic characters, ostensibly from our world, say “the real Catholic Church is a bad thing and here’s why.”

It’s not like I burned the book after that, or even put it down. I finished it, and I was still affected by the story and moved by its ending. I have a difficult time even expressing what I disliked about it.

I guess what it comes down to is that my mom read Compass to the kids in her middle school class, at a Catholic school, on my recommendation. They loved it. I have no doubt that many of them went on to finish the series themselves. And it doesn’t feel right to know that they got to the end of Spyglass to find a brilliant, trustworthy author turning a shared story into a political statement against something in which they probably believed. Against a church that, in my experience, is nothing like the way he portrays it.

I have no problem with the call to question your beliefs–that’s a call it’s been my job to make, and one that I welcome for myself. And of course the reflexive response is that it’s his world, he has the right to do with it what he wants.

That’s not true. But that’s also a subject for another time.

Philip Pullman and Tom Stoppard–I’ll definitely see the HDM movies, when they finally get made. I hope they live up to the books. But it’s going to make me sick to know that there will very likely be people from my church protesting and condemning the third movie, and that there will be other people hating them for it. What does that solve? Who learns anything from that? Why such a waste of a potentially perfect story?

On Saturday, Father Joseph Pilger was found beaten to death in his home in Lexington. That the article mentions his criminal history is a pretty clear indication that the AP has already decided on the motive; it barely mentions the fact that oh yes, he’d been living with an unnamed younger man for a month, and also his car is missing.

Father Pilger wasn’t someone I knew, but he could very well have been. It’s frightening. Lexington’s not a great town, but it’s not a hot spot for priest-murder, either.

There won’t be a Chicago travelogue, although I did keep a private journal; most of what happened there was too intense and too personal to blithely post online. I will post this, from that Monday night, because I wrote it thinking that I would need to relate something from the trip to NFD.

Things you may need to know: the trip was a polydenominational youth group-led thing, involving a variety of service projects. The primary one of these is babysitting preteen-or-younger kids at a Catholic single mothers’ shelter, which a) gives the moms a rare few hours alone and b) provides a happy, positive example for kids who haven’t had many of those. We also served lunch at a homeless shelter, packed food at a charity food depository and played a great deal of frisbee. Emily R is a four-year veteran of the trip, and she’s the one who got me to go.

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Day 4 before evening Omega, not after, because I want to write now, not later.

• I broke the obligatory thing that the St. Thomas group has to break–the nonworking top bolt in the back door, which just popped out when I accidentally stuck my key in it. I feel like an initiate.

• Something learned in Brazil and forgotten until a few minutes ago: if the shower’s cold and a trickle and you let it run over your head, it will feel warm when it hits your body.
• Strangely, here I am a semi-valuable Ultimate player. At Centre I was the runt, but in a family of dragons…
• Reading Microserfs in the context of this trip is illuminating. We’re playing with the four children of single mothers at a four-month Catholic Worker shelter, and meanwhile Daniel and Co. are so broke they can only get each other ten Christmas presents. Angst! And relativity matters, I know, plus I admit to being influenced by Sumana’s semi-brushoff of the book. Still, it really is pretty fluffy, and I think mostly got popular through hipness and a neat title.
• Today we met the kids, obviously, and they and their mothers are irrepressibly beautiful. I have a feeling we could get very tired of their playground, but they won’t. I also hope we can come up with other games to play than Devolved Tag.
• I’m terribly glad I’m here, changing, hurting, learning. I’m glad Emily made me come. I have needed this for a long time without knowing it, and it is exactly like a cold sweet gasp of air.

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Incidentally, the shower I share with DC here in Louisville is my single favorite shower EVER. I find myself making excuses to wash multiple times in a day, even though I’m not exercising yet, just for the joy of having hot water pressure and a shower head that I don’t have to duck to get under.

Also, the real reason I added this footer: Ayana, 9, made one of these for each of us on that Monday. I’ve put it in my pocket notebook now, and I don’t think it’s ever coming out.

Regarding Easter: I’ve talked to her, and she doesn’t want to talk about it very much, but she’s okay. It’s too late to file a report now, and she wouldn’t do it even if it weren’t. She doesn’t think he came, so the consequences might not be as bad as they could have been. I wish there were something else to do. There really isn’t. As is almost always the case.

I know it’s not a choice anyone but the victim can make, but the guess is that maybe eighty-five percent of rapes are never reported, and the fact is that every time a woman says “it was my own fault,” she’s ensuring that it’s going to happen to someone else.

The anger I felt Sunday has been subsumed, of course, by the need to do whatever was necessary for her. All I can do is talk if she wants to, and be there, and try unobtrusively to know where she is–though that’s more for my benefit than hers.

Living in Rodes has been a year of realizing what a maternal person I am, and this week I understood what happens to mothers when someone hurts one of their adopted children. It’s not just the rage: it’s the futile panic, and the impotence, and the deep-down hollow sickness. It’s the stupid, pointless guilt. And it’s the refusal to indulge any of that, because you have to do what matters first.

(This next part is more personal than I usually get on NFD. You can stop reading if you don’t feel like rolling your eyes.)

I don’t believe that most Catholic mantras hold power, in and of themselves; I scoff at the Prayer of Jabez. But. There’s a poem that’s also a prayer, by John Donne: “Batter my heart.”It’s a hard and painful thing, and I pray it, sometimes, when I worry about my faith. I did two weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about what’s happened since then, and… I always try to reconcile my faith with my belief in a rational world. But right now part of me is irrationally, spiritually terrified that somehow it works.

(Preface: Apparently a lot of people are concerned that the last entry somehow is somehow related to Object A, which it’s not–at least not directly. It’s just a phenomenon I’ve notedfrom long and repeated exposure. It happens. Girls will be girls.

Anyway, I started writing this yesterday and it kind of just kept going. I tried to keep it from getting speechy, butwhen I get started on an essay there’s no stopping me! Enjoy, if you want, or tell me if you don’t.)

From today’s issue of Newsweek:

“The hallmark of a free and democratic society is freedom of the press. Take it away, and you would leavepoliticians, financial hawks and whoever else has things to hide free to hoodwink the public. The very thought of agagged press sends chills down my spine.”

That’s a reader response to Anna Quindlen’s column of Feb. 18, called “A Conspiracy of Notebooks” (I’d link you tothat, but–ironically, as it turns out–there’s a subscription fee to view back issues). It’s a very true statement,and I sympathize. First Amendment rights are up there with abortion and death penalty issues, for me, and they compriseone of the reasons I voted for Dave Barry. The free press is an important thing. I only wish we had one.

This isn’t going to turn into a rant about the “liberal media”–there is a bias to the left in most of the press, butit’s easy enough to filter out once you know where to look. I wish the same could be said for the sheer right-wingstupidity of, say, MallardFillmore, but that’s another rant all by itself. What I’m trying to get to is this: our news sources may be mostlyfree of political ties, but they’re still very much in the thrall of sales concerns. And that’s what produces thingslike the current Newsweek cover story, from the same issue as the quote above: “Sex,Shame and the Catholic Church.”

What happened to those people as children is a horrible, horrible thing. John Geoghan is a sick man beyond thethreshhold of therapeutic help. Cardinal Law made the same mistake too many times when dealing with him, and it’s longpast time for Geoghan to be separated from the rest of society. These three sentences are the meat of a good newsstory, ready to be fleshed out with statistics and related accounts.

The article has these. Unfortunately, it also has a great deal more. Judging by the pictures in the article, allCatholics are grim-faced, white-haired men; after they grow up, they become lapsed Catholics, and thus normal people.Judging by the lead-ins, sex is a concept entirely alien to Catholic thought (reproducing, as we do, by mitosis). Thearticle alleges an “epidemic” of abuse, then goes on to examine exactly one case, lightly touching on two more.Apparently, this leads to conclusions like “secrecy and silence have always characterized the Catholic Church.”

There is nothing about my church that is secretive or silent, and there hasn’t been in my lifetime, and I have towonder if authors Lisa Miller and David France have been inside a Catholic church since 1963. My church, to me, meanssinging and laughter during baptisms and yes, ritual–the power and communion inherent in call and response. I’ve nevereven said the words “church secret,” and I’ve never heard anyone else say them, and I doubt I ever will.

I freely admit I’m reacting to this because the article is offensive to me. It implies false and insulting things abouta group to which I belong, and that upsets me, and I’m reacting where I might not, were it about another group–this isa human thing. But I’m also trying to illustrate the principles at work here, and the central irony of the issue ofNewsweek sitting next to me now.

Miller and France wrote the article the way they did–and the magazine produced it the same way–because it’s going toget good (controversial) response, and sell well. This, too, is a human thing. And a commercially driven presscannot, by its very nature, be entirely free.

“The liberal media” is an overused and mostly false phrase, and one to which Anna Quindlen doesn’t respond very well.It’s a reputation based on little fact and perpetuated by shortsighted people, but the same goes for the thingsNewsweek said about my church this week. And the only way to end stereotypes about you is to stop indulging instereotyping yourself.