Old-Time Religion: What the Baggers ain't got

Disclaimer: I am not a follower of any religion, although I count myself among those informed by the Episcopal rubric which depends―more than most, I think―on a common-sense approach to the valuable insights and teachings of a very important Jewish rabbi of antiquity, Joshua Ben Joseph of Nazareth. One of his mentors, Joseph of Arimathea, is thought by many to have taken Joshua to southwest England to study with druids, a reasonable thought considering the mysticism that permeates the teachings of Joshua Ben Joseph. And contrary to the beliefs of the uniformed, there was abundant trade between the southern Mediterranean and the British Isles back then.

St. Benedict of Nursia (Fra Angelico; Wiki Commons)

It is a shame that the religious right knows so little about religion. From their actions, it seems doubtful that most Tea Baggers have ever heard of The Rule of St. Benedict. It might surprise the Tea Baggers that both St. Benedict and the Gospels they claim to love encourage socialism. For example, Acts 4:35 notes that, “Distribution was made to everyone according as he had need.” Sounds socialist to me.

The early monasteries, particularly those in Ireland as chronicled by Thomas Cahill in his book How The Irish Saved Civilization, were the western founts of learning for hundreds of years. The monks, in all that time, must have figured out a thing or two. With or without the ‘god parts,’ the Rule of St. Benedict, venerating as it does a sober, sanctified, charitable, wisdom-bearing approach to daily life in a coherent community, might well be a road-map for a modern approach to otherwise almost insurmountable problems, the problems of lack of work, lack of health care, lack of food and clothing, lack of respect for others. In short, charity in all its guises. If only the “godly” right wing recognized the Rule, or any part of it.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (The New Testament, King James version, Matthew 22:37-40)

The best Benedict, whose Rule informs thoughtful lives today

St. Benedict (a far cry from the current Pope of that name) was a Roman Catholic monk of the sixth century who set forth the totality of ways monks were to behave and the manner in which the self-sufficient monasteries were to be run. In times of economic stress, it would seem his Rule might have much to say to modern populations. The thrust of the Rule was to care for others before self. There are at least half a dozen specific instructions which, if the right-wing pseudo-Christians knew their importance and attempted to follow them, might change the landscape of current political discourse in the US.

Those few important rules are:

• To relieve the poor
• To hate no one
• To visit the sick
• Not to be arrogant
• To guard one’s mouth against evil and vicious speech
• Not to abandon charity

Those are among about 75 rules in all, including the ten commandments as the very first ones. But perhaps the one I like best of all is the last of those six, as it covers all the rest.

Charity begins…one hopes

Abandoning charity is the very thing the pseudo-Christians who inhabit the right-wing of political America have done, and done very nearly completely. A rundown, rule by rule:

Relieve the poor

The right wing does not wish to relieve the poor, especially not if those poor come from afar (like Mexico, for example), rather than within their own state at best, or the nation if they must be that generous. If they must. Not by choice. Never.

Hate no one

Far from hating no one, they seem to hate just about everyone. They hate them so much that foolish men like Herman Cain can, with a straight face, tell people that if they don’t have a job, it’s their own fault. Inanely, he can tell them that in an economy that fails by a good ten percent or more in providing jobs for all workers.

Visit the sick

Even if one or two Baggers occasionally visit people in the hospital, they do not, for all intents and purposes, visit the sick.  These days, visiting the sick might be taken to mean providing for the care of the sick, since medicine is far to complex for most of us to do anything ourselves except provide ways for professionals to attend to the problems.  They seem to have taken a vow of ignorance regarding understanding the true horror of a large community lacking universal access to health care.

It is unthinkable that a monk or even those who worked as lay people in the monastery, or even travelers or visitors would be turned away by the monastery’s infirmarer. No abbot worth his salt would have tolerated such a state of affairs. 

Whether health care consists of the herbs and leeches of the middle ages, or the sophisticated diagnostic equipment and medications of today, it is intolerable that a cohesive community―the United States, for instance―should not provide care for its members.

It is unchristian, for one thing. For another, it is just plain stupid. A community with a number of sick members and no help for them is asking for contagion and plagues, a breakdown of work life, a diminishing of the community sooner rather than later. Sick people can worship neither God nor mammon; sick people cannot build  a community that serves all, and they  cannot expand that community and help others. Failing to care for the sick is, at any level since contagion may affect all equally, just plain stupid.

Do not be arrogant

The Tea Baggers are arrogant in the extreme.

Without any visible powers of discernment, without benefit of a belief in anything except their own short-term gain, without a frame of reference to the historical failures and successes of the universe in human terms, they nonetheless think their self-referential desires should determine how a community/nation runs. In their arrogance, they believe others to be less worthy than they. Among those they regard as less worthy, they include younger people, artists and craft workers, the marginally self-employed, the low-paid, those they see as lazy, the infirm, those of other beliefs, those of other colors and backgrounds ad infinitum. The Baggers are, indeed, the Philistines of our age, denigrating culture, art, and most of all, spirituality.

Guard against evil and vicious speech

They do not guard their mouths against evil and vicious speech. Indeed, the celebrate and heap honors upon those who might be chosen as role models for how NOT to live a thoughtful, Christian (or Jewish or Hindu, etc.) life. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, to take two sterling examples, trade on their own arrogance in consigning to perdition any person who disagrees with them in the least trifle. Vicious hardly begins to describe Coulter’s speech; evil is inherent in almost every opinion Limbaugh utters. And yet, they both think they are good Christians. I doubt they’d want to debate that with St. Benedict. Although I’d love to watch them try.

Charity: The idea that giving…in every way…is better for everyone than taking

The religious right in America has abandoned charity, in the particulars above and many more. Charity is far more than giving your old clothes to the Purple Heart. It is far more than putting a dollar in the collection plate during the one day a year you go to church, hedging your bets against the possible actual existence of god. It is more than refraining from commenting on your friend’s horrible new hairdo. It is more than passing by a Mercedes with a man slumped over the wheel and doing nothing because, “Hell, he’s rich; he can just dial for an ambulance on his own cell phone.”

Charity is the practice of finding out what help you can render, and doing that. Period. The Jews call it a mitzvah, a good deed. Not a deed done for your own good. It must be selfless, and doing it anonymously is a plus. It includes donating to causes you believe in; it also includes praising others for donating to causes they believe in even if those causes are not yours. Baggers have bashed me for supporting animal rescue organizations before human-oriented ones, forgetting that by giving us dominion over the animals, as their god said, we are also given responsibility for them. They fail to understand that by donating to any helping organization―whether it is people or animals being helped―one is increasing the net supply of kindness in the world, decreasing the net experience of suffering, and actually attending to their god’s business.

Baggers just plain fail to understand, because they fail to empathize. They fail to embrace charity at its most basic. How do the supporters of draconian anti-immigration laws know what an illegal immigrant might have faced at home? They don’t. Worse, they don’t care to know. They insulate themselves from the suffering of immigrants, as well as the jobless and those who need medical care they cannot get. Their arrogant is clear in the ways in which they wrap studious ignorance around themselves like an impenetrable cloak.

No illusions

I have no illusions that one Tea Bagger will recognize himself or herself in any of this; I have no illusions that a Tea Bagger will read it. So I am preaching to the choir. 

If I were a Christian, I might chide myself for saying it is not likely the godless religious fundamentalists will take any of this to heart. So it’s a good thing I’m not a Christian, though I don’t imagine I can say that with impunity. I expect, actually, to be pilloried from both the right and the left on this, no matter how many times I insist that I am actually an existentialist informed via an Episcopalian background, and leavened by a soupçon of intense exposure to the ideas and community of classical Judaism.

27 Dresses. Not.

Well, it COULD be a thrift shop purchase, although it looks more like a nightgown with mosquito netting. (Wiki Commons)

Could you put in some pew de soy?

What?

During journalism grad school, I got a job copy editing the local morning rag. Glen, one of the typesetters, who had been an English teacher before the unruly kids almost destroyed his gentle soul, was getting married and had handed me the wedding announcement.

"Oh," said I. "Peau de soie? Well, does her gown entail any peau de soie? Probably; most do. Why don't you ask Esther and find out."

He did. It did have pew de soy and some Allan's son's (Alencon) lace as well. Still, I sent him to the Community Editor with the announcement, as it was her job to marshall all the laces and silks and satins into regimented rows, always ending in, "The couple will honeymoon in Myrtle Beach." Everyone who lived in Athens, GA, honeymooned in Myrtle Beach. I suspect they thought a passport would be required if they ventured farther afield.

I missed that wedding. I even missed the one wedding for which I was supposed to be a member of the wedding party. Lord, how I did not want to do that. I managed to get a strep throat a few days before that wedding, which was to be the day before my college graduation, and two days before my husband, who was getting his doctorate, and I moved to Denver from Binghamton, NY. So I bombed out. Whew.

I think I am phobic about weddings. It might have something to do with the wedding in the movie 16 Candles. Or maybe the 1978 movie, A Wedding, directed by Robert Altman and casting funnywoman Carol Burnett in an unaccountably bleak role. A wedding, it always seemed to me, was a prescription for one kind of disaster or another. So I avoided them. Even my own...and I've had three, or four if you count the last one.


Interfaith marriage? Problem solved
The first one was fraught with peril because the groom was Jewish and I was nominally Roman Catholic, although I had, by age 20, long since abandoned that nonsense. We could find no clergyman to marry us. After much dialing, I finally found a New York State Supreme Court Justice who agreed to do the deed as long as it could be on a Wednesday morning in March. OK.

The attitudes toward this happy event ranged from horrified to OK with it. Well, maybe a bit more. For example: 

• My father, the RC patriarch, was not happy. 
• My Episcopalian grandmother, my mother's mother, was happy. She liked Paul, my fiance. 
• My brother was 15. That is, he didn't really care. Sure, it was a day off from school--two because of the trip from Long Island to Binghamton. 
• My husband's favorite aunt--and mine too, as it would turn out--flew from NYC the night before and back the next afternoon. She was a grand lady, and also the able long-time cable desk chief at Time, Inc. She was happy. I think she was as happy a my grandmother. They were much alike.

There was also Paul's best friend as his witness and my best friend as mine. I think they were both on the negative side of the midline between ecstatic and horrified, but only just.

But if you value your belief that weddings are a priori happy occasions, do not look at that wedding picture. We all look like we've had the word from the stormtroopers and we're next. All of us.

Next time I got married, it was in Athens, GA. I was in grad school, had just divorced No. 1, and No. 2 seemed like a good bet. He was also a journalist, and, in fact, the marriage lasted 16 years, a lot better than the scant five for marriage number one. The wedding? Neither of us wanted clergy, so we trotted over, with our two best friends, to the offices of an elderly judge. At one point, we had to quietly snake the rings off each other's fingers because the old judge had forgotten we'd done that already. So we did it again. I think he got tired after that, or he might have gone round again.

The reception was a barbecue at a friend's house. We fell out of a hammock together after too many peach daiquiries.

Third time's the charm
Marriage number three (five years and counting) was supposed to be the first actual church wedding I'd ever had. I had become a nominal Episcopalian, mainly for the coffee hour as freelancing is lonely work, and my husband was Church of England, being a Brit. We even had the de rigeur conversation with the Rector who assured us it was very important to involve the church community, who would be there for us as marriage took its inevitable toll on us (he did't put it that way.) We nodded. Then Simon ran off to fly to Africa or someplace on business, and I went home to wonder how I could ever even get through buying some kind of frou-frou dress, never mind figuring out how to involve Simon's three grown daughters in the ceremony, as the Rector had suggested. A dilemma indeed as at least one of them hated me (and still does.) And this is supposed to be joyous?

Right after Christmas, a month or so after the confab with the Rector, I had a meeting about some business with a Religious Science minister friend. She was worried. I had given up my apartment and had put my work on hold. Simon's house needed a lot of work, and I like decorating. But she felt I was at risk without getting the third wedding done pronto. I could be out in the street with my little dog and no place to go. And no alimony, or even a whiff of any.

"Why don't you just go get the license today and I'll marry you Saturday night. It will be fun. I'll get champagne," she said.

I called Simon at work and he agreed to meet me at the county office where marriage licenses could be procured.

On Saturday, we cleaned out part of the basement, took the stuff to the landfill, and returned the borrowed truck to its owner. It began to snow. Hard. Our return trip, from the mountains around Camp David where his friend lived, among the constant coming and goings of the presidential copter and 24/7 fighter jets on patrol, was really slow. But I really wanted to paint my toenails.

I have no idea why it was so important to me to paint my toenails.  For this wedding, I was wearing a purple two-piece dress I had gotten from my cousin's thrift shop.

Well, it wasn't really a thrift shop. My cousin manages a big apartment building in Washington, DC, and when someone moves out, they often tell him to take what he wants. One woman left a ton of books, a ton of clothing, a ton of kitchen equipment. He took it all. When my friend Noeleen and I visited, while Simon was in Africa, we each chose what fit us from the selection in Dennis's spare room. She got mainly shoes; I got mainly clothing.

Anyway, between trying to fluff up my hair after the snow experience and painting my toenails for the open-toed shoes to go with the thrift shop dress, we were late. Quite late. The cell phone call to Jane, the minister, produced ice almost as bad as what was on the roads. "If you're not here in half an hour, I won't do it," she said. "Noeleen is already here."

We got there. And it was fine. Short and sweet. Then Jane, her husband, Noeleen and we newlyweds had champagne, and then we drove through the blizzard to our favorite Indian restaurant in Baltimore.

Three weeks later, we had the reception on the date of the original, non-starter church wedding, since it was already booked and paid for. I would have gone through with that wedding itself, I guess, but when I called to tell the Rector that we had already gotten married, so it would just have to be a blessing and not a full wedding, he said that was all right. Civil weddings could be blessed.

"What? You were married by a bona fide minister? Then I can't bless it," he said. "It has already been done."

He wasn't too fond of us after that. The community seemed OK with it, though, as those we had invited all came to the reception. I wore some old black silk pants I had, a silk chemise I had bought at Nordstrom Rack, and the thrift shop Asian coat thingie in embroidered yellow silk I had found the week before. No, really. This time it WAS from a thirft shop.

But I did, the morning of the reception, decide maybe I should go have my hair done.