Downhearted Days: A Hiatus from Blogging

Dear Readers, Dear Friends,

I'm sorry to be away from the blog for several days (though this may well be a relief to many readers).  I've been a bit under the weather this week, and since it's a birthday week for me, I also decided to give myself a bit of time to enjoy the exceptionally pretty spring weather we're having these days.

Roses are blooming, a time of year I love because it's so brief and precious, and the brutal heat of summer will all too soon be on us.  And because it reminds me of my grandmother and her beautiful rose garden.  And because the morning air is full of the scent of roses every day this week.

And so I've decided not to blog these days.  

I'll also admit to feeling downhearted--that evocative word the old African-American spiritual "Balm in Gilead" uses when it speaks of the sense that often overcomes folks, when we feel we've struggled along in vain, and our little efforts haven't made a lot of difference in the world.  And may actually have been harmful.

The heart feels pulled down, and everything in life appears ashen-colored when this happens.

Since I was already feeling this way as a marriage in my family definitively ended last week (causing heart-pain to a number of people, and who can lift that pain from any one of those hearts?), I find myself almost unable to cope with some of the latest news in the American political and religious arenas.

There's been the outpouring of vile, slimy speculation about the 17-year old boy, Trayvon Martin, shot in cold blood by a vigilante in Florida.  An outpouring going on for some days now, with an attempt to reframe the narrative to make him the aggressor and the man who shot him an innocent victim.

In my locale, the discussion of this story on community blog sites flows together with the defense-of-religious-freedom narrative, since the same white men now screaming that Trayvon Martin was a hooded, drug-using thug who wrestled Zimmerman to the ground and beat him in the head were screaming several weeks ago about how our precious religious liberty is under attack.  And how we stand with the Catholics in their opposition to contraception.  About how we're pro-life and we demand that women submit to our pro-life dictates or else.

These same defenders of life then went on to demand that we bomb Iran.  

Racism, militarism, religious-freedom-for-mine-not-thine male entitlement: the whole ugly brew of white male conservative politics in the U.S. right now.  It's deeply disheartening.  Because it just never quite goes away.

And then the revelations about the National Organization of Marriage, which weren't a surprise in the least.  Except that NOM has put into writing, explicitly, brazenly, its goal of driving a wedge between the African-American and Latino community and the gay community.  The NOM documents that came to light this week in Maine speak quite specifically of NOM's intent to elicit hostility between minority communities.

They also speak explicitly about NOM's special "close relationship" to the U.S. Catholic bishops.

And so how can one read these documents about a deliberate, well-funded strategy to set black and Latino people against gay ones--to elicit hostility--and not see the U.S. Catholic bishops right at the center of the strategy?  What does "close relationship" mean, if it doesn't mean that the Catholic bishops of the U.S. are right on board with a political strategy of eliciting social hostilities between minority groups, of pitting group against group?

Who's funding this draconian movement to tear apart rather than heal society?  And to do so in the name of Jesus?  Who puts the money in NOM's hands to behave this way?

And how can a group of men who tell the rest of us in the Catholic church that they are called to represent  Jesus the healer, Jesus the good shepherd, in a unique way actively work to divide?  To cause harm?  To tear down social solidarity?  To set minority community against minority community?

As I said several weeks ago when I wrote about my fateful decision to become Catholic in the 1960s at a point at which the Catholic church seemed all about healing social wounds and promoting human rights: if I had known then what I know now, I can't see myself having made such a decision.

To see the church I chose in the 1960s choose the path it has now chosen--a path of overtly attacking the human rights of minority communities and overtly eliciting and manipulating hostility between oppressed communities: this is cause for serious lament.

And for profound downheartedness.

Who and what the leaders of the Catholic church have chosen to become at this point in history makes me sick right now--sick to the very core of my soul.  As does the special pleading of liberal Catholics who continue to prop up this ugly, destructive behavior with one dishonest glozing argument after another.  And who can evidently sleep quite well at night knowing that they are colluding with religious leaders and political movements whose avowed objective is to create more misery for marginalized groups of human beings already deprived of rights and advantages.

And so I need a few days off to stroll in my garden now and smell the roses.

Thanks for understanding--and for the wonderful support so many of you have offered me (in particular, several friends who have given support of one kind or another to this blog, all very much appreciated, including a friend who has, once again, sent a gift that is wildly over-generous.)  In short, I'm very grateful for the encouragement and support of all the readers of this blog.

(A little later in the day): it suddenly occurs to me that because I've mentioned that this is a birthday week, and that I appreciate the support readers have given me, someone may think I'm hinting that readers offer a donation to this blog.  I'm not--indeed not.  If any readers have a bit to spare and want to give to a really worth cause right now, I'm recommending SNAP, which has suffered serious financial hardship due to the mean-spirited attack of the Catholic hierarchy on that invaluable group supporting survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse.  Needless to say, I adamantly don't recommend giving a penny to Catholic parishes right now, given how the institution uses donations to harm various groups.

The graphic is a detail from the tombstone of a great-great grandfather of mine, William Henry Snead.  At some point, someone has planted an actual rose bush between his grave and that of his wife Harriet Godwin Snead.  I've tried without success to root a cutting of that old rose.