It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 60: Liza Johnson

Elizabeth 'Liza' Johnson was having a good night, and by her recollection, decades later, she had had no prophetic dreams of fate to beckon her, but rather, had quite put the lanky man from the hospital out of her mind.

Leonard, 'Leo' to his friends, pronounced with an 'ay' instead of an 'ee', was being his usual pompous self, and that was annoying, but Liza would put up with it, because it was good to see the rest of her friends back in the city. Here stood Lotti, a sturdy woman with sturdy opinions, who thought she knew the secrets of the world, but only knew as much as her missionary parents had thought to teach her; Katherine, full of a puckish spirit that burst high and fell far with the peaks and valleys of her mood; Leo, of course, a buffoon of a man, who, admirably, didn't hide from his wealth, which made his well-meaning, but often mean-spirited barbs and comments somehow bearable; Carly, who thought herself independent, but who, to Liza's constant displeasure, hung wanting on Leo's every world; and Amelia, neediest, kindest, and youngest of the group, a rational romantic, who gave and kept counsel with easy wisdom, yet never seemed to abide by the same counsel for herself.

There wasn't a great deal that these comrades had in common, save for their collegiate education and general politics and notions of how the world should be run, and if she was honest with herself, Liza wasn't convinced that they'd be companions for all that much longer. Already the familiarity that had come in their university days was weighing on her. They, these friends around, were all still in school, and she, just a year older and graduated, felt distance.

But maybe it was all in her head?

After all, here they were, celebrating her achievements. The LSATS, which Liza had taken the month before, had come through, and her grades had been a remarkable success. Her friends, when she had told them, hadn't been all that shocked by her prodigious scores, but Liza still felt surprise. She was an infuriatingly uncertain person when it came to her own intellect. To an observer, it would seem that things came naturally, but Liza only attributed success to the amount of hours she spent in studious solitude. A frustrating quality, to be sure. The time exhausted in analyzing and reviewing was needless. Liza Johnson could have allotted only half the hours, and she still would have been the smartest person in any given room. Her greatest problem, always, was doubt. Liza never lacked support from those closest to her, family, friends, and yet somehow persisted in the belief that she was deficient in everything that she endeavored to do.

'I was never smart enough,' she would tell the Author. 'Never pretty enough. I was driven, but what does that account for when you're young?'

University did little in the ways of bolstering her confidence, and when it seemed, as it always seems at the end of a successful tenure in higher education, that she would finally ascend the mountain of self-belief, she was unceremoniously graduated into the cold and slanderous world.

Hic sunt dracones.

It comes in many forms, and it comes for all peoples of the earth. 

Doubt. 

Yet for Liza Johnson this abrupt landing in reality was, she believed, specifically designed to antagonize her. She had always dreamed of changing the world, or at least of making the world more in the image of a place she would like to live; but upon tasting the damnable place first hand, she was confronted by the truth that she had very little ability to affect a difference in anything, least of all herself. 

In college, in any schools high or low, the problems of humanity are solvable. There are right answers and wrong answers, and though you are often challenged, there is always the safety in the idea that a moral solution is close at hand. There are heroes and villains of varying degrees, but those heroes, with their virtuous stances, always triumph in the end.

Yet, oh yet, the reality of the world is that any solution to a problem, all theoretical in education, are more often than not ugly, cruel, and dangerously maligned to the point that they themselves become the problem in need of fixing. 

Someone is always hurt. 

Someone is always put out. 

Someone's future is always at risk. 

There is no universal solution, just mounting problems and eternal unhappiness—

But no, she had to keep reminding herself, the solutions aren't the problem. No...People are!

'People,' she chuckled at the Author, 'are always the issue. What should be in the best interest of us as a whole is so often rejected by us. We are contradictory and fickle things, always on the look out for our individual benefits, but never with a thought for the greater good.'

In simpler terms, Elizabeth 'Liza' Johnson was raised, and still to this day remains, a firm Catholic. Not one of those chest beaters crying 'why me?' with no thought to help herself. Not a good and proper Catholic, dainty and sanitized, only living for ritual and suspicious of acts, but a Catholic in the truest sense of the word. A follower of the lowest and most unlikely of revolutionaries. Truthfully, she had little time for the more mystical aspects of her denomination. The smells and bells and transubstantiations of real into Divine meant less to her than the politics of the religion. That is not to say she did not believe in the mystery of the Divine, nor did she rejected it—far from it!—but what she was interested in, what she had always been compelled by and called to, was the man behind the anointed curtain. The man who spoke of a higher equality. Not one rendered by Caesar, but born of a person. If sin is to be considered primal to the conception of people, then the right to be considered a person is just as inbred and can only be stripped by the Almighty, not through proxy, but by Them alone. A person cannot be afforded the rights of life, for life's sake, then, by designation of race, class, gender, or religious affiliation, be subsequently stripped of those rights, one by one, until all that remains is the basic, physical characteristics of personhood.

A person is a person, whole, without fractions!

In Liza Johnson's world, to be a true Catholic meant to believe in the unified, equal whole under one God. There could be nothing that separated people. No economic division, nor cultural or ethnological too great to be overcome. Christ had said as much, and what Christ failed to make clear, then certainly St. Paul, her most revered of religious authors, had strived to elucidate:

All are welcome!

All are equal!

Blacks, whites, the poor, the rich, the beggarmen, and the thieves, and all in between. It does not matter if you are a Jew or Samaritan, a black girl or white. All are, not allowed, but entitled, to the same opportunities. 

'Walk like Christ walked,' her beloved grandmother, that night in Evelyn's some six weeks gone from this Earth, liked to preach to her grandchild.

But how would Christ walk in this modern world? the granddaughter often wondered. Surely arm and arm with the lowest common denominator, not with fists clenched and swords swinging on hips in glorious pursuit of a righteous war, but with words and actions and extended and eternal offerings of ecumenical and ubiquitous egalitarianism. 

Yes, you might die, most certainly you would be cursed and spit upon and ridiculed, but you could, you would, through constant will for perseverance, effect change. Through your efforts, surely, the world would be put right with the actions of your convictions.

And higher education had only strengthened this liberal, theological faith, and she saw in her peers, all of varying backgrounds and affiliations, as marching together as a whole towards this beckoning utopia. They would be, she was sure then, the generation to right the wrongs and failures of the past!

But then Liza Johnson had graduated, and very soon, she began to understand why it was so difficult to rely on merely actionable words and beliefs.

For every solution...a new problem!

For every solution...a new hurt!

For every inch gained...another bit of territory to be lost!