In the past couple of months, since I have started attending the Episcopal Church here, I have become acquainted with the writings of a Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. He is almost a contemporary of mine, born in 1943 in Kansas. Although I was born in 1952 and in Montreal, my sister was born in 1942 and the world he writes about growing up in, post-war, changing, is the world that I knew too, experiencing it first through the eyes of my sister and later through my own eyes. He writes in the Preface to The Naked Now, that although he grew up in a Catholic family, his Catholicism expanded in the 1960s with Vatican II, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the greater emphasis on "the psyche" that came to pervade so much of our life ever since.
This created in him "a fixation for trying to see almost all things as both/and--or a collision of opposites....I was always happily Catholic but curiously Protestant and Pentecostal." Gosh, yes, exactly. I grew up in a Catholic/Protestant home. My mom was Roman Catholic, my father was small "p" protestant, but by the time I came along in their marriage, he didn't attend any church. When I brought my catechism home from (Catholic) school, my mother quickly told me that the question/answer "Who goes to heaven? Only Catholics go to heaven." was one that should be left at school, it was offensive to my father and to the other non-Catholics we knew. I remember just accepting that, recognizing there was one way I was going to have to answer in school and church but that wasn't the total truth. My mother instilled in me a kind of "live and let live" for people who held different opinions Like Rohr, from an early age I saw almost all things as a collision of opposites. I wasn't left totally at sea though, because my mom said "In the long run, just do unto others as you would have them do unto you (a theme common to most world religions) and love your neighbor as yourself." Later, just before she died, she added in, "If you don't want to remain Catholic after I am gone, that's fine. But just remember the teachings of Jesus Christ." Her death when I was 16 began my long journey through various religions and practices. But that's another story.
What I am thinking about today, having listened to the start of Rohr's "The Naked Now" on my morning dog walk, is how much comfort I get from listening to audio recordings in the morning. My mind may be flying all over the place right now, with concerns about the upcoming trip and the state of the world and my responsibility toward it, but turning on my iPhone and putting my ear buds in, grabbing the leash and heading out into the golf course and along the quiet streets of my neighborhood, I can relax into the words of people who spend a good deal of their life contemplating, questioning, and sharing. What a great blessing it is, in my small corner of Arizona, where intellectual discussion is sparse, to have access to talks and presentations. I buy some of the recordings and transcriptions, in Audible and Kindle and "real book" form. But some of it is free on Youtube. There's a lot on Youtube besides videos of fuzzy animals doing funny tricks (although sometimes I like that as well.)
And the biggest blessing right now is that I will be able to access it all on my trip in September. I have a fear of flying, not looking forward to 11 hours flying from LA to London. And the in-flight entertainment just doesn't appeal to me anymore. But I can download my playlist on my iPhone and my iPad, music and audio, put my earphones on and close my eyes. Mask or not, I can still relax.
I think your mother and mine would have got along fine. I grew up in a religiously eclectic family, and there were two topics we did NOT discuss at holidays. The other was politics. We still loved one another, as family, regardless!
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