True Believers

 Annamaria used to be one!

My 4th grade class, Our Lady of Lourdes School

"I went to Catholic school."  In meetings I sometimes say this - to comic effect - to explain why I am compulsively following a rule.  Sometimes, after a pause, I add the line, "For seventeen years."  I have gotten a lot of laughs with these lines.  People who have a similar education history laugh loudest and nod in camaraderie.

In the wake of this week's US Supreme Court decision, I confess that today I am not playing that line for laughs.  Fair warning: I am beside myself angry.

It is a fact that from ages 5 to 22, most of the major influencers in my intellectual life were nuns.  Contrary to the popular stereotype, at least 80% of them were kind, supportive, and great at their jobs.  There were a few harsh ones, but I would imagine that would be true in any kind of school in those long-ago days.  When I finished college, I left that milieu a well-educated and deeply devout Catholic.

Same kids, same steps, 4 years later

Then, however, by the time I was thirty-one, I had given up the faith.  For a while I called myself an agnostic.  Now I am an atheist.

St. John's High School, some of the same kids

But I remember vividly a great deal of what the nuns taught me.  Today I want focus on what they taught about the separation of church and state. When I was in the fourth grade, back in the time of the Peloponnesian Wars, there were still many European countries that had state religions.  Most notably for us kids, Italy and Ireland -birthplaces of most of our grandparents - were Catholic countries.  "Is that better than what we have here - separation of church and state?" Sister asked.  "No" was the right answer.  Why?  Because if the government could dictate a religion, and if it chose a different one from ours, we might end up being required to practice a religion dictated by the government.  We were much better off living in a country that granted everyone the right to worship (or not) as they choose. This was the very essence of freedom.

Freshman class, College of St. Elizabeth

Convent, New Jersey

The good sense of this was made abundantly clear when we studied, in history class in college, what went on in Great Britain at the end of the Sixteenth and the beginning of the Seventeenth centuries.  When heads, quite literally, rolled: Protestant heads chopped off by Catholics and Catholic heads chopped off by Protestants.    

I never belittle or dismiss what people believe and how zealous they feel about the tenets of their faith.  After all I, my educated self believed in the virgin birth until I was thirty.  If people's religion teaches them that an abortion anytime after conception is a form of murder, I absolutely believe they should be free never to have or to perform an abortion.  If the government tried to take control of their right to have children, I would lay down my life to preserve their freedom to be left alone to do so, regardless of the circumstances.

All those people rejoicing over the death of Roe v Wade in the streets today...  Does it never occur to them that if their beliefs can force today's women - even a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped by her father - to give birth to a child, that one day, when the tables turn, it could force them to abort a child for whatever excuse the government trumped up.

It kills me that many of these same "Right to Life" people will defend an eighteen year old's right to own weapons of war and body armor, even though we know that some of them will murder children in school or deliver the death penalty to people guilty of grocery shopping while black.  The right-to-life crowd do not want those young people stripped of their rights to tote AK47s.

FIVE PEOPLE DECIDED!

This past week, 51% if the citizen's of half the states in the U.S. had a right and a freedom ripped from them. By five people.  One. Two.Three. Four. Five.

A minority of the citizenry demanded the decision.  Five powerful people with nothing to lose agreed with them.  And the rest of us are forced to live with it.

Works of Mercy 101

Annamaria on Monday

A sermon:

My parents were good people according to just about any definition of "good."  Especially in how they treated, thought about, and talked about others.

And I went to Catholic school for seventeen years.  My parents were practicing Catholics, but not hyper demonstrative about their faith.  We went to church on Sunday, but they were what I would all calm and reflective, rather than evangelical.  They sent their kids to Catholic school as much for the quality of the education we would receive as for instruction in the tenets our religion.

The nuns who who were my teachers from kindergarten through college - Domincans and Sisters of Charity - taught me a kind and tolerant version of what I was supposed to believe.  Though I no longer practice any religion or believe in the kind of supreme being I was taught as a child to worship, the values I learned when young are still with me.

As the saying goes: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man."  In my case the quote - variously attributed to Aristotle, Ignatius Loyola, and Francis Xavier - would have to say "she" and "woman."   The lessons from my parents and my schooling are so deeply imbedded in me that I have no sense within me of where I leave off and they begin.  They are part of the definition of me.

One example  comes from how I was taught, in Philosophy 101, to think about the differences one finds between people, like race, color, national origin.  The nun who was my professor gave a lecture about the difference between "essence" and "accidents" in the philosophical sense.  Essence is the most basic statement one can make about a person or thing.  A chair's essence is chair.  A person's essence is person.  Everything else you can say about them are accidents.  For the chair, for example, what it is made of, what color it is, what size it is, are all accidents.  Regardless of all that, it's still a chair.  So: For a person, his or her essence is not changed by whether he is a he or she is a she, or brown skinned or blue-eyed or old or young, etc..

And so my philosophy professor taught me that being a descendant of a Mayflower passenger or an arrival on yesterday's boat of refugees does not change the nature of personhood. Or the respect due to the individual.  Nor does skin color, nor bank balance, nor anything.  Powerful stuff that has guided me throughout my life, which reinforced and gave philosophical underpinnings to my father's strong lessons of tolerance.

  

When I speak of religion here I have to talk about the one I know best, Christianity.  The brand of it that I see around me in the world today seems to have forgotten what it is supposed to be about.  A code of beliefs begun on the basis of radical love.  John 13:35: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

My classmates and I were made to memorize two lists called "Works of Mercy."  These were actions that we should take on a regular basis.  Being human, we were not expected to be saintly all the time.  But we could improve our chances of eternal salvation if we performed works of mercy.  There are two sorts.

Corporal:

To feed the hungry;

To give drink to the thirsty;

To clothe the naked;

To harbor the harborless;

To visit the sick;

To ransom the captive;

To bury the dead.

Spiritual:

To instruct the ignorant;

To counsel the doubtful;

To admonish sinners;

To bear wrongs patiently;

To forgive offences willingly;

To comfort the afflicted;

To pray for the living and the dead.

In the face of all these lessons from my past, I have to ask: Who are these people who fill the air around them and the broadcast airwaves with hate, harsh judgment of others, despicable epithets, and too often bullets and bombs?  Do they call themselves Christians?  Or devout members of any true faith?

Imagine the world they could build if they spent their spare time performing works of mercy instead of attending rallies in favor of building walls to keep out the harborless  or in support of an administration that puts children in cages, or cuts funding for medical care for the indigent.

Works of Mercy.

Acts of Kindness.

For all persons regardless of the accidents of their birth.

You don't have to have been raised a Christian to see what an improvement this would be in the society we all have to live in.  We could try it.  It might not earn us eternal salvation, but it could salve a lot of the pain too many people are feeling.

Ya think?

Bouchercon Hiatus #5: My Life in Six T-Shirts

During Bouchercon week, It is the custom here on MIE to repost an oldie but goodie while almost all of us are off enjoying one another's company in person and meeting mystery fans.  Since I am such a new kid in this "town," none of my previous posts seem old enough to rerun at this point.  So I am placing here a blog entry from my parallel life on The Crime Writer's Chronicle.  Stan Trollip had advised me that the best blogs were personal.  Here is one about my life.

Annamaria - Monday

There used to be shop on Third Street in Greenwich Village where you could buy a cotton t-shirt and have the store clerks write anything you wanted on it.  I bought several during the years when making a statement that way was considered cool, even in the Village, the World Headquarters of Cool.  With the sale of our country house, a few of those shirts that I hadn't seen in years emerged from my unjustly extensive collection of memorabilia.  Somehow, the six shirts shown here wound up in one pile on my closet shelf.  They tell my story, not the whole tale of my life, but some of the significant bits.  The first two were on sale, as is, from the store.  The others show personal messages.  Here is what they say about me:

I went to Catholic school for 17 years, all of my formal schooling.  That experience was largely a blessing for a poor, working class girl like me.  The quality of my education was for the most part excellent, if rule bound.  On that score, a passage in The Once and Future King really spoke to me.  In that book, to teach the young Arthur about life and leadership, Merlin turns him into various animals.  When the future king is transformed into an ant and approaching the ant colony for the first time, over the entrance he reads, "Everything that is not compulsory is forbidden."  I could relate to that!  On the other hand, I went to a women's college on scholarship.  There I met brilliant nuns dedicated to educating the minds of women. I revere them.  They gave me my college degree as a gift.  And showed me that women could be gifted.  And take charge.

I emerged from college right into the transformative experience of the feminism of the 1960's. I have written elsewhere on this blog (Crime Writer's Chronicle) of my participation in what I call The Pink Collar Wars.  The nuns of my college primed my engine so that I might zoom right into the movement and have it broaden my horizons and multiply my possibilities.

When New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970's, the real estate market wobbled for a few months, making a small house on 12th Street, badly in need of renovation, affordable for me and David.  A beloved friend whom we greatly respected for his real estate acumen and financial prowess, begged us not to buy.  "Buy near us in New Jersey," he said, pointing out New York's state and city income taxes, the city's sink-hole-of-depravity reputation, and the leafy beauty of the swanky suburban town where he lived, where we could have bought a mansion for the same price.  We agonized.  We even did a financial analysis that told us that, in the long run, it might cost us $10-20K extra per year to live in New York.  But we were in love with our city, warts and all.  We decided to buy that house on Twelfth Street.  During its chaotic renovation, while staying in New Jersey with my father, we drove in and rummaged around the dusty construction site to find clothes suitable for a friend's wedding.  When, in duds relatively filth free, we boarded a taxi to go to the church, David said, "We are more like a track team than a married couple."  The next week, when our daughter was still commuting through the Lincoln Tunnel to the 4th grade, I moseyed over the Third Street to get us team shirts.  Staying in New York was the best decision we ever made, in many ways, especially financially.

This shirt has more to do with my daughter's education than mine.  Brilliant as she is, she qualified for the ultra-prestigious Hunter College High School, a public institution where the 200 most brilliant New York kids, by a rigorous testing process, attended.  Because of the heady milieu where she had been studying, by the time she was ready to apply to college, she considered herself average or a little below.  She fretted that she would never get into a decent institution of higher education.  No amount of reassurance on my part calmed her fears.  "You're just saying that because you are my mother," she said.  I went to Third Street to get shirts that spoke about where her parents attended college.  I chose sayings to communicate that one did not have to go to Harvard to have a good life.  Her parents both started out just this side of destitute, and we both had jobs we loved that we're quite financially rewarding.  We were, after all, living in our own Greenwich Village townhouse.  Mine is the shirt you see here.  David's said, "Unimpressive State University."   Even having parents wearing such billboards did not calm her down much.  She got into the top four small liberal arts colleges in the country.  She went to Swarthmore!

I wore this shirt to Luciano Pavarotti's first free concert in Central Park.  I learned to love the opera, literally at my grandfather’s knee. Music of all sorts of, including opera, brings me enhancement of my joys, solace in sorrow, companionship when I am lonely, help concentrating on any task at hand, and especially inspiration when I am writing.  I consider making music the highest calling for humans on this planet.  I can’t play a lick myself, but I am so very lucky to have been born into a family of people who can experience ecstasy when listening to music.

Most New Yorkers used to call that Pharaoh of old two-TANK-ah-men.  But when the first big exhibition of artifacts from King Tut’s famous tomb came to The Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s president, made sure we all learned how to pronounce the ancient name properly, with the accent on Tut (long o sound).  I got this shirt to wear to the show.  But I also keep it as another talisman of how lucky a person I am.  The photos of ancient Egyptian artifacts in my fourth grade text book were the first taste I got of the breath of history and the existence of exotic locales where one can see the art of the centuries. I have lived to see Karnak and Abu Simbel and to celebrate my 60th birthday at the Great Pyramids of Giza under a full moon. Not bad for a little girl from Our Lady of Lourdes School in Paterson, NJ.

I am keeping the shirts.  I don't ever want to forget any of this.