What does God care?

　
Religion is an ongoing investigation of the unfairness of life.

Religion looks at heroic humans who rescue strangers from floods and fires. It looks at others who murder, rape, steal and take pleasure in the pains of their victims. It looks at the brilliant and gifted, and at children born troubled. It sees the well-nourished and the starving and tries to understand why God’s standards sometimes seem to be lower than human standards

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Does God not care very much about the world and its inhabitants, or can religion discover purpose in the lapses and deficiencies of creation?

Christians celebrate centuries of sermons, liturgies, sacrifices and praise by eliminating poor boxes because they attract thieves, and spending sums of congressional dimensions to pay off victims of abuse in churches, orphanages and schools.

Those who believe that God is Love are certain that God is not Hate, even though love and hate are both evident in the world. Christians famously denounce each other for thinking outside catechisms and tenets. Christian homes are not always the cheerful centers of cooperation and forgiveness that faith might encourage. Churches have been known to explode in angry confrontations between people, lay and clerical, who despise each other in the name of God. What can be more chilling than that? It was people of religious faith who favored the death penalty for Jesus, crying out for deadly torture on the cross

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Scripture scholars, such as the late Father Raymond E. Brown, the brilliant Sulpician priest, have liberated venerable writings from some of the restraints imposed upon them by well-meaning guardians. They guarded the past, dragging their sandals as the past became the present. Customs changed, cultures developed, languages took on new meanings, but religion’s guardians kept it separate from life and froze it solid, right where it was many cultures ago. Although that attitude is described today as fundamentalist, it has little in common with fundamental, ongoing creation, symbolized as seven days by long-ago scribes, who did not lock up their scrolls after writing about the first day.

Some dispute the notion of God. Sometimes folks disbelieve in the same god, as in the gimme god of creedal capitalism, or the god who sanctions hatred, or the god whose followers have buried him in deserts past. I never figured out what God looks like, but I pray to the same Lord I've known for eight and a half decades, the Lord of all. I began those decades in a country that allowed legal discrimination against Jews, African Americans and others, discrimination which repudiated much that an earlier generation, including some of my ancestors, had fought for in a civil war. When I was young, some states prohibited interracial marriage, even as many now prohibit gay marriage. Only five years before I was born, and one year after my mother and father were married, the U.S. Constitution was amended to say: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of by any state on account of sex."

One blessing of advanced age is its gift of perspective, of eyes that have seen members of a majority race battle in war, in legislatures and in courts to assure equal rights for all races and all persons, without reference to the gender, to the sexuality given them at birth.

Prayers never seem to get answered all at once, especially all of the "whereas" motions of the person at prayer, but somebody seems to be listening.

　

If the church looks hopeless...

The Roman Catholic Church is the gold-and-myrrh standard by which all Christian churches are evaluated, to the considerable exasperation of those churches and to the confusion of the Romans, who have no idea where anemia comes from.

Today’s Catholic Church is not the church of your grandma, especially in the United States. Around 1960 your mom might throw out Friday’s dinner because she inadvertently dropped a forbidden meatball into the spaghetti. She may have worn herself out shopping around neighboring parishes to find a confessional with a laid-back priest who would grant absolution from the sin of birth control.

Mom sat with the kids at Sunday Mass. Dad mingled with other men just outside the church, smoking and keeping within the prescribed number of feet of the building required for technical attendance at Mass. The priest was reciting the words in Latin, with his back to the congregation, while some of the faithful were reciting the rosary and others were reading English translations in their missals.

Faith was not complicated. Folks attended Mass and avoided meat on Fridays, dropped coins into the poor box, supported the school kids who sold subscriptions to the Catholic paper. People followed the rules most of the time. Everybody knew that on the day of his ordination, Father became God’s agent, able to bring Jesus to the altar and to forgive sins, a super-person respected fervently whether anybody liked him or not. Catholics did not compliment him on his sermons because everyone knew it was presumptuous to do so, inasmuch as all sermons were worthy of praise and did not need any comment from laity. When I was a young police reporter in the 1940s I was told not to report the arrest of priests charged with something called crimes against nature. To do so would be unsuitable in a family newspaper. Just the other day a cardinal said in an interview that, after all, only a tiny percentage of clergy is convicted of crimes against children.

The Church is the world’s oldest continuous institution, older than any government, so it is surprising how quickly it changed. All of a sudden the Mass was celebrated in English and other languages familiar to worshipers. Polls revealed that Catholic reliance on birth control was about the same as the rest of the population. Priests were arrested for sex crimes against children, even in Ireland, along with bishops, archbishops, cardinals and nuns. Seminaries and convents drew fewer young men and women. It is said that the Catholic press has never had less influence. Commonweal, one of the most distinguished Catholic magazines in a country of 70 million Catholics, reported a circulation of less than 20,000.

There are still more than a billion Catholics, but after a couple of thousand years some wonder what difference a billion Catholics have made in the world. Are countries formed in the Catholic culture – Italy, Spain, Haiti, Argentina – evangelizing the world? Has Europe, like the salt Jesus mentions, lost its savor?

Why, given such questions, is the Church still the most tenacious of all institutions? Its priests are the most giving of men, surrendering themselves not to bomb people in crowded markets but to show them how to live. Some, gifted politically, become bishops, only their faces visible among yards of decorated ceremonial fabric, a so-there to gowned secular princes and Pharisees. No matter how hopeless circumstances may appear, hope is the nature of Church.

Wondering about the game

In 1929, when I was four years old, carpet golf was as popular as the new talking picture shows and Lucky Strikes sold in flat-fifty cigarette tins.

My mom and dad took me to an indoor golf course, where the idea was to play a series of holes until reaching the most intriguing one, the final hole, which called for a sharp eye and determined swing. It was more interesting to a four-year-old than all the others combined, and that’s where I wanted to start.

This agitated my parents. Once a player popped a ball into the last hole it disappeared into a box. Game over, nickel spent, no refund. How interesting. I wondered what happened to the ball when it vanished, and remained more focused than my parents. While they were distracted with hole number one I managed to steer my ball into the last hole, where I heard it thump into invisibility.

I did not understand the despair of my mom and dad, because I had gone straight for the science of the game, the mystery of the vanishing ball.

The gift of life goes on for everybody until the gift of death arrives. I scarcely thought about it in a personal way until something reminded me of that disappearing golf ball, and I wondered about the next game.

Where did all the helpers come from?

Yesterday my beautiful daughter drove me to the supermarket, as she does every week. We each do our shopping, then she drives me home, whisks my packages into my kitchen and then goes home with her own groceries. Marie always makes me feel that life begins at 84, and that a rather exclusive ailment called olivopontocerebellar atrophy is something to be lived and explored.

Yesterday I learned a couple of things about my supermarketing. Marie acknowledged that she sometimes drops me at the store after her own busy day at work, then goes home for a shower, returns to the store and finishes her shopping just ahead of me. I had not noticed how much time I was spending in those aisles, and I was glad there was no taxi meter running.

The other thing I noticed yesterday was that other customers, strangers, occasionally offered to help me find something on the shelves or to load something from shelf to shopping cart. Why were they doing this? What was I doing to draw their friendly attention? I still have a pretty good grip on the shopping cart, which is a first class substitute for a rollator, and the supermarket is where I do my weekly walking marathon.

I guess that most life changes are as subtle as that, one day unknowingly drawing the attention of generous strangers, and realizing that your daughter’s love includes a lot of patience.

–Ed