Maybe it’s because we’re in the dark of the moon, when spirits are often depressed. I don’t know.What I do know is that I find myself mourning today, and at times like that, I hesitate to write much on this blog. I don’t want my low spirits to pull down the spirits of others.
Certainly there’s much to mourn about, as we look at the grim pictures and read the grim stories from Haiti. For a people already so impoverished, so susceptible to hardship caused by both natural and human factors, to undergo this cataclysmic event: it’s hard to understand. And to stomach.
Constantly, in the past two days, the faces of the Haitian students I’ve known and Haitian co-workers with whom I’ve worked scroll across my mind. I wonder about their families—and about them, since I haven’t been in touch with any of these wonderful folks in several years.
My mourning is also pointed, today, in another specifically religious direction (I say “another,” because the appalling, unmerited suffering of millions of desperately poor people raises profound questions about where God is in the world as people suffer). This is one of those periods when the statements and actions of some people of faith have so disgusted me that I find myself wanting distance from faith communities altogether.
I am outraged at Rev. Pat Robertson’s statement that the Haitian people brought this disaster on themselves by making a pact with the devil. What can one say in the face of such ugly misuse of religious and moral norms? And how can this man, with his history of constant ugly misuse of religious belief to attack one vulnerable group after another, continue to have a platform in our society?
What does it say about us, that people promoting such “religious” viewpoints not only have free rein to do so, but have significant influence on our political system—and a richly funded pulpit from which to spew their venom?
I’ve had it, frankly, with the hate. And with the lies. Lies that the decision of five Catholic members of the Supreme Court yesterday to squelch broadcasts of the prop 8 trial is designed to cover over, when it comes to gay people and gay lives.
What does it say about the role of the Catholic church in promoting discrimination and violence against gay people around the world, when these highly placed Catholics, whose judicial decisions affect the lives of millions of citizens, take such a stand against transparency in a significant public debate? And in our courtrooms?
And against free, open exchange of ideas and information in this national public debate? The stand taken by Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, and Thomas is yet another indicator of the intent of powerful right-wing interest groups in the American Catholic church (and well-represented in its hierarchy)to circumvent the democratic process and impose the religious and moral viewpoints of a single religious group on the whole nation.
If our moral positions are so reasonable, so obviously compelling, why do we not permit free, unfettered, well-informed debate about them? Why do we persistently do everything possible to work behind the scenes to assure that our positions are imposed on others in a process that does not permit public dialogue?
The New York Times gets it exactly right today, when its editorial on the SCOTUS decision says,
The trial that started on Monday in San Francisco over the constitutionality of California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage could have been a moment for the entire nation to witness a calm, deliberative debate on a vitally important issue in the era of instant communications. Instead, the United States Supreme Court made it a sad example of the quashing of public discourse by blocking the televising of the nonjury trial.
In this Supreme Court decision, we see the worst face of Catholicism in the U.S., the theocratic, wheeling-and-dealing, ethically compromised and sold-out-to-power face of American Catholicism. The face of a church from which people are fleeing in droves, because it does not show the face of Christ to the world, or to its own members.
More religious bigotry and stupidity are on display, too, in a video clip of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show now making the rounds of the internet. I’m particularly outdone by the statements of the last New Jersey resident interviewed in this clip, who argues without a tad of irony that, as an African-American woman, she values her rights . . . and so she has the right to deny rights to gay citizens of New Jersey! Because she believes those citizens ought not to have rights. And what she believes ought to dictate what the political process does. Because she believes it.
This is the same person whose deliriously happy response to the decision of the New Jersey legislature to turn down same-sex marriage was captured in this video clip, which shows her shouting hallelujah at the top of her lungs after the vote results were announced.
We have a lot of work to do in the U.S. to educate people about religion and politics, and the healthy intersection of the two. There are days, I freely admit, when I wonder if it’s possible to overcome the invincible ignorance that postures as religious belief everywhere in this nation with the soul of a church.
Meanwhile, I take crumbs of hope where I can find them. For me this week, one of those crumbs has come from reading about the courage of Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who died Monday, who took great risks to help hide Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
As I wrote on this blog repeatedly throughout December, it seems important to me that we keep looking for clear, unambiguous examples of heroic virtue to inspire us, as we work to build a more humane society. At its best, before the canonization process was politicized beyond recognition (and before the saint-making process depended on the ability of those promoting the cause of a saint to pay huge sums of money), this is what the Catholic notion of the communion of the saints was all about.
It was about finding a rich array of models of holiness in a richly diverse religious tradition, to provide role models for the many kinds of people bound together in the communion of the church. In my own life, I’ve long ago decided that my personal canon of the saints can and should include non-Catholics, non-Christians, non-believers.
For a number of years, I created an eccentric personal iconostasis with pictures of the saints to whom I looked for guidance and solace. The iconostasis had pictures of official Catholic holy figures like Our Lady of Guadalupe and Edith Stein.
But it also had pictures of other people who are unlikely ever to be canonized, but whose heroic virtue and compassion have touched my life in a redemptive way: several nuns I’ve had the privilege of knowing, whose lives were poured out in service to those to whom they ministered; a brilliant gay priest who fought to make his religious community more tolerant of its gay members, and who died far too young; my alcoholic brother, who died at the age of 39, and who gave his last dollar, a dollar he was saving to buy more liquor, to a woman begging door to door the night before he died.
Harvey Milk’s picture was on my iconostasis, as was Gandhi’s. So was my great-uncle’s picture, a saintly, humble, sweet old man who lived with his mother up to her death, never married, and earned the undying love of a passel of great-nieces and great-nephews by playing with us as if he were a child himself, on his annual visits from family to family.
I no longer have that iconostasis, but a version of it is still in my heart. Miep Gies’s picture will now adorn it. Pat Robertson’s won’t.
But I’ll pray for him, and if he ever happens to read this blog, I hope he’ll pray for me, too.
