Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Discursion: Faith (4)

Listen:

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they who hunger for thirst and righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

My mother had a different type of faith.

"Being a Christian is a fine thing," she did not say. "But acting like one is even better." She might have said that if she ever said things like this. She didn't need to: she simply ensured I would make this connection on my own, not while I was daydreaming during a Sunday service.

To my mother's way of thinking, church was perfectly acceptable in theory, and more than occasionally in practice. Her way of relating to the world, and the actual people who populated it, emphasized the spiritual over the Holy Spirit. Actions spoke louder than psalms, but prayers had their own special power and she believed something could hear her when she spoke without speaking.

She was brought up, like my father, by parents who endorsed the idea that their pope was God's human vessel and the concept of speaking infallibly was not farcical. As such, she had religion beaten into her, like most Catholic immigrants did. God was at once the author of existence yet above the often grim conditions he chaperoned. Boys, who get the bruises, got off easily; girls received the sort of scars that never heal because they occur on the inside.

She married a man who regarded religion less as an institution than an obligation: his perspective-like all successfully inculcated Catholics-could seem more obsessive than spiritual. He knew his scriptures, absorbed the Ecumenism, and most importantly never missed a Sunday mass. Ever. She did not, and could not, challenge the manner in which her children were brought into the church. In a way, this was easier; if mass was akin to death and taxes-if slightly more tolerable than either-it became another immutable part of the routine. In other words, she accepted that for many Catholics, church was like work: you needed to show up and put in the time if you hoped to get compensated.

She was a believer. She believed (wanted to believe? needed to believe?) that she would see her mother again, that all of us could one day hold hands in Heaven. Not literally, of course, but once one accepts that our affairs are entirely in God's figurative hands, metaphors are an adequate if obligatory indulgence.

The impulse that feeds faith is powerful, and when life seems cruel or senseless the impulse can become a compulsion. Practically everything we witness during our time in this world obliges us to seek solace in some sort of plan, a deference to that prime mover who, unmoved, aligns the stars that dictate our inscrutable destinies. This recompense, the relieving belief in a higher authority arbitrating our affairs, ameliorates some of the mendacity, injustice, and unfulfilled wishes that comprise the majority of our experience while we live.

It's difficult to say whether Christianity shaped my mother's sensibility or appealed to her intrinsic sense of fairness. The New Testament resonated, which is consistent with people who are interested in emulating and not merely obeying. Indeed, the types of so-called Christians who seek inspiration in the Old Testament are typically proselytizers or repressed opportunists looking to find ecclesiastical back-up for their very human prejudices and desires.

Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.

Jesus, ideal as an inspiration if not the revealed truth. How can you not get behind this example, this idea that is larger than faith? God is Love; Without Love I Am Nothing. This doesn't leave much room for interpretation, no matter how consistently the dominant themes of this man's teachings are neglected or appropriated for our unevolved times. This is where the scripture and the rule-following (and the rule-creating) men in charge of laws and wars miss the heart within the words they claim to worship.

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me...

This is the kind of decorum you can spend many Sundays (some folks spend their entire lives) trying to understand in a church. It sounds good when you hear it, and it may even be inspiring if the man on the altar conveys it with sufficient humility. But like so many aspects of organized religion, it's when the rhetoric matches reality in the streets that it affects the soul.