It was supposed to have been my vacation and I spent far too much of it being infuriated by the Catholic Bishops.  And I’m not even Catholic.  But they remind me of the elders in my childhood churches and of Mitt Romney when in response to women wanting to be treated with respect in the Mormon Church was described as having the attitude, ‘Why do you have to stir things up? It has nothing to do with the church and women should be satisfied with what they have.”

Is that so?

The Bishops in the Catholic Church are trying to shut up the nuns because they “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

There’s been enough ironic comment about that last bold faced lie. If only in an effort to calm down, I’ve been trying to think about why women stay in the Catholic Church when their perspectives, concerns, opinions, and obvious moral authority is treated so shamefully.  Why do women put up with it?

I often hear people say “I love the Catholic Church,” sometimes in the past tense but even so.  I’ve never heard anyone say, “I love the Protestant Church.”  Even the smarmiest of the denominations don’t have “I HEART the Baptist Church” bumper stickers.  At least not in the Pacific Northwest.  Protestants tend to say “I love the Lord,” which given my own peculiar theology sounds both smarmy and suspect.

I did what everyone does nowadays when they need to ask a technical question.  I googled “why do people love the Catholic church.”

There was the expected: Mary, the saints, christening gowns, incense, candles, midnight mass, Easter vigil, feast days, St. Joseph’s altars and the sacraments, the “outward sign of an inward grace:” baptism, confirmation, holy Eucharist, extreme unction, penance, holy orders, matrimony.  (I know these because I went to Late Nite Catechism eight times.) In other words, the kinds of cultural richness that made me envy my childhood Catholic friends when I had to sit in plain brown church pews and listen to men in their business suits drone on about sin.

Here’s where I am troubled:   The sacraments don’t apply to women as Persons.  They apply to people acting the role of women according to men’s approximations.  I expect women who “love the Catholic Church” scrape what they can for themselves from the sacraments. There’s a lot of richness and meaning that has not yet been overtaken by any sense of how much they are being screwed.

That rides tandem with another troubling reason people said they love the Catholic Church: One doesn’t have the burden of trying to interpret the Bible on one’s own. In other words, one doesn’t have to think, or to actively participate in one’s own life.  One doesn’t feel the need to revolt when women are treated unequally and their wisdom is disregarded and disrespected, when divorce is considered a sin, when the church’s stand on abortion beggars reason, when an old out-of-touch man and his minions tell them how to live, when priests seem to be disproportionately represented by pedophiles and when so many people passively disregard what the old men at the top say anyway.  Where exactly is the substance of this great traditional church?

Here is the most poignant reason someone gave for why they loved the Catholic Church:  I love the fact that this is the church that Christ started, and it truly can be traced back to him.

No, it can’t.

Enough time has passed since my computer crashed that I am thinking it wasn’t so bad after all.  It’s like one of those awful vacations that ten years later is described as “that wonderful trip to Spain when our luggage got diverted to Iceland.”

It was a Thursday evening.  I had just installed Google Chrome when suddenly the screen went plaid, then black.  I wasn’t too worried because my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything was due home the next day after being out of town for a week.

But Gwen said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”  That was an awful moment.

She loaned me a little Think Pad so I could find out I didn’t know any of my passwords, but eventually I was able to access my incoming e-mail and keep on top of bill pay, library holds and Facebook notifications.  I spent the weekend feeling like half my body had been sliced away from the other half, and wishing it was 1995 before I even owned a computer.

On Monday morning I was the first customer in the door at Seattle Laptop Repair where Nick told me the motherboard had died.  He took out the hard drive, and showed me how to extract my files and install them on Gwen’s Think Pad.

There was a day of rest.

The next step was to buy a new computer.  Gwen was more excited than I was about this. She was researching computers on Consumer Reports days before I got the motherboard diagnosis.  She had one ready to order, but allowed that knowing me, I would need to see an actual computer.

We drove together to Best Buy.  Gwen reminisced about my last computer. “I was all ready for a day of computer shopping,” she said.  “And you took less time than you do to get a Christmas tree.”

I have no memory of buying that computer.  Apparently it went by so quickly, I wasn’t even there for it.

Just to give you a point of reference, here’s me buying a Christmas tree:

I go to the lot that’s three blocks away.  After seasonal felicitations with the boy scouts, I say, “I need one that’s about five feet tall.”

“Well, here’s one.”

“I’ll take it.”

At Best Buy, Gwen and I found our way to the Samsung computers where five or six guys were engrossed in the various demos.  Gwen briefly scoped out the display models and found a modest one that wasn’t getting any attention.

“This is the one you want,” she said.

“Why is this better than these others?”

“This one is enough for you because you don’t do anything on the computer.”

Six guy heads snapped up, all of them grinning.”

“What do you mean?  I do things. I wrote a book on a computer.”

“No, I mean you don’t play games.”

“I play games.  I play Scrabble.”

The guys guffawed.

“You don’t play computer games that need a lot of RAM,” Gwen said kindly. “You don’t get into hunting and killing zombies and dragons.”

More yuk yuk sounds from the guys.  I think one of them spit.  One was definitely playing air guitar.

“Could you not talk so loud?”

There followed a brief negotiation with a salesperson followed by a period when I went to look at autoharps and Gwen walked around looking like a secret service agent while she checked CR for the exact computer we were considering. Eventually we left without the extended warranty.

OK, now I’ve reached a dead spot in my memory.   Let’s see if I can work around events that are still tied up in anxiety.  I got the computer all hooked up and got my files moved off the old hard drive.  Then I couldn’t get the Internet.  The little diddly at the bottom of the screen told me my network was available but I couldn’t access it.

Gwen came over.  I think if I had left her alone all would have been well, but I had to participate, the end result being that by the end of the day, neither my new computer or Gwen’s Think Pad could access the Internet.  Gwen insisted that paying the network tech geeks for a support package was a waste of money.  I’ve never seen her so adamant about something that would have relieved her of work.  But she seemed to think it would have compounded the problem and she is usually reliable about these things.  On the other hand her back was hurting and she couldn’t get comfortable and I think that was making her stubborn.

“I know what they are going to say, and I’ve already done it twice.  We’ve typed in your Wep twice and gotten you a WPA2 and an AES and changed your router password twice because,” she looked at me pointedly, “you wrote it down wrong the first time.”

Then, because Gwen is from Wisconsin and that pointed look counted as the grossest sort of rudeness, she generously invited me to use my new computer at her house on her network until she –not we– figured out what to do.  By the next morning, Gwen was over at my house again.  She had grown a halo and stigmata were appearing on her hands and feets.  She had a CAT-5 cable.

“We’re going to wire you so we can get some things done.  Then someday when you’re out of the house for a long time, I’ll come over and figure out your wireless situation.”

So that’s where we’ve left things for now.  I know that Gwen knows all my passwords better than I do but after this last episode, I think she made note of all the security codes, weps, webs, jpgs, and category fives.  Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s hacked my system and is remotely backing it up once a week. I’d do it for her if she were this much trouble.

Here’s a celebrated quote from Rick Santorum:  “The dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. .  .  It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

When I read this I pictured an eight year old with his hands on his hips blustering away at a room full of adults. Children sometimes do lecture adults and we indulge them because we don’t want to humiliate them.  And adults lecture children.  But adults do not lecture other adults unless one of the parties has abdicated her own mind or the other party assumes she has and doesn’t realize she is picturing him wearing a dunce cap.

It occurred to me that, sexuality and spirituality being so intertwined, this quotation could also be reflective of the Great Fundamentalist Fear: that somewhere out there someone is doing something in the spiritual realm that’s counter to how things are supposed to be.  How fast can you say Fundamentalism Infantilizes its Followers?

When we’re babies, we need parents to be there or we won’t survive. As we get older, we need to think our parents are always right even as we get used to the idea that they’re not.   At some point we understand that our survival doesn’t depend on parents, and we assess ourselves without reference to what was good or bad in the values they bequeathed.  We make choices without resorting to either compliance or rebellion.

Or am I being too idealistic?  Because sometimes when people start in about religion, I wonder.

There’s always a tell when people talk about their parents.  I know guilt is leering at them when they say, “But you know, I really love my parents,” or “But you know, they did the best they could.”  That’s the point that the feeling of guilt over leaving home has trumped the necessity for it.

There’s a tell when people start to feel–what was Santorum’s word?– “libertine” about their religious beliefs.  Anxiety gets slurped into this sentence: “I do believe in God.”  People make that statement as though it’s a talisman against any sacrilegious thoughts they might be entertaining about the meaning of life.  Or they are setting a baseline when questions about life get too confusing.

This is such a sad state of affairs.  Once when I was in my twenties and doing battle against a bunch of evangelicals –I’ve always been feisty about religion– a seminary student said to me, “You know, you can believe anything you want to believe for whatever reason you want to.”  I don’t know how long he lasted in seminary, but what a refreshing thing to say.

I think people get scared because the major religions have been around for thousands of years so they must be Right.  However traditions are not immaculately conceived.  When traditions are used as bludgeons, they kill off the people they’re meant to serve.

We’re all traditionalists is some ways.  You always know what season it is in my house from the holiday altars and tableaux.  On the other hand there are things I do things because my parents went through The Depression, like re-use dental floss.  Both traditions, one is based on choice, the other on an anxiety that was never mine in the first place.

The Spiritual Realm is like the Internet.  No one ever says “Mine is the one true Internet.”  The Internet just is.  We all have our favorite browsers and e-mail programs and web sites and things we like to do on the Internet.

And when your computer crashes and you get a new one and can’t access your wireless network and the tech people at Linksys won’t help you until you’ve bought one of their support packages,  I hope you have someone in your life like my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything.  Someone who can come over and say, “Oh please, the experts can’t always fix the problem, and you won’t get a refund if they don’t.  There are dozens of ways to do things on the Internet.  Move over, what’s your password?”

Now that’s love.  The experts might say it’s counter to the way things are supposed to be.

It’s the Christian holy week and I’ve been musing over my changing beliefs about Jesus, the point man for Christianity, the one whose mind so many people profess to know.  Actually we don’t understand what’s in our own minds, let alone anyone else’s.   But since I am one of two people who know the password to my blog’s dashboard, here’s what I think:

I think that what has developed right from the beginning as Christianity is not what Jesus had in mind.  I believe there was a historical Jesus and that he died and that’s where I part ways with traditional Christianity.  I believe the good news is that we are all divine in the same way Jesus was divine.  That was the radical message.  It was only after he died that someone cooked up a story to fit the mindset of a culture and mythos that existed 2000 years ago on the other side of the globe.

I think there is a much simpler interpretation and one that doesn’t beggar belief.

Jesus had an idea that we are all part of an energy and a power that brought the world into being and sustains it.  Maybe we could call it Love, but let’s leave God out of it.  To many of us, God is forever going to be remote, oppressive, male, and dressed in pajamas.  Jesus made new sense of what it meant to be born, to be a person and to grow into the glory of one’s own life.  The point is not to copy his life but to be our own piece of divinity that’s connected to the whole.

Death and transformation were familiar to an agrarian society.  People understood that seeds at the end of flowering  were buried and sprouted into new life.   So it was a useful image until Jesus physically died and someone who didn’t understand the mysticism involved had to cook up something more concrete.   I imagine the reasoning then was much the same as today: we have to get our story straight and everyone has to believe the same thing.  We can’t let people just go off and access their own spirituality, find their own paths, have their own numinous experiences and come to their own conclusions.  What if they get it wrong? What if it gets out of control?

The death and resurrection story had to be linked to the ancient culture’s traditions of sacrifice.  I still occasionally choke when I hear someone ranting about being saved from his sins.  I was raised by a mother who chased me around the house with a fireplace poker screaming that God was going to punish me so I have a jaundiced view of that particular theological point.  It’s been an achievement for me to no longer think in terms of sin.  It makes no sense that this beautiful world was created in love but its pièce de résistance was early in its tenure declared bad.   (Please don’t try to explain it to me. I understand the logic.  It’s no longer in my paradigm.)

During the years that I was trying my damnedest–and I use the word pointedly– to be a good Christian, I remember when the teaching came down from on high via InterVarsity Press that sin really meant separation from God.  I think that’s the meaning of the word in the Greek.  Fair enough.  But I think Jesus was suggesting that separation from God was separation from oneself, from the divinity within ourselves.  Separated from our little piece of divinity, we can’t be ourselves.   A true modern, I call that anxiety, not sin.  And it’s deadening.

We experience our divinity in a balance of attending to the still small voice inside and allowing ourselves to be influenced by the love of others.  Love.  Not indoctrination, not coercion, not guilt, not obligation, not sentimentality.

Christianity without mysticism is not significantly different from a fraternity, a rotary club or the junior league.  They can all host potlucks –or keggers– and do volunteer work.  Christianity without mysticism doesn’t have enough to do.  It makes us police each other.  At the lowest level we bludgeon each other with anything that sounds like a law or a rule.  A little higher up the enlightenment ladder we get smarmy with our concepts of grace, usually allowing more of it for our own “sins” than we do anyone else’s.  We get self-righteous about social justice.

It’s uncontrollable, the divine spirit.  A holy spirit is implicated in what is sometimes called intuition.  Disparagingly if it’s female intuition.  I believe the holy spirit operates intuitively: you can’t prove its existence, you can’t control it, it doesn’t explain itself, it works creatively like an artist.  If ever the feminine is elevated along side the male in our society, we may find the holy spirit to be much more generally accessible and Christianity might seem less like boot camp.   There might be much less suspicion that someone out there was doing their spirituality “wrong.”  I would love to see everyone cut loose from religions and religious terminologies, free to find our own ways and experience the integration of spirit among us.

My computer crashed last week.  The mother just hopped its board.  It was an awful week enlivened at times by hysteria.  I was going to write about it but it’s still too close.  Here’s a more cheerful topic: abortion.  This is an extension of my last post about the birth control and abortion laws that are eliciting such funny comments on Facebook.  It’s mostly just an old man in Rome who truly has a(mis-guided) problem with birth control. But for some unfathomable reason, the instigators of what is being called the war on women, are trying to undermine both legal abortion and a way to circumvent the need for abortions, that is, birth control.  It suggests how mindless the whole business is.

The birth control/ abortion controversy does not belong anywhere near politics but since it’s there, here’s the way it is being used: One contingency has decided to use their arbitrary stance on abortion to gain votes from people who actually care about the process of pregnancy and birth.  While the so called pro-life movement has become a tool of the political right, it could just as easily have been a tool of the left because it’s consistent with left-ish views on capital punishment and wars.  The pro-choice stance could have easily fit into the political right’s notions of individual freedoms and rights.  But it went the other way and is used quite cynically on both sides.  People who care about the dilemma are being used by people who care about themselves.

The current permutation in the war is a disagreement about when Life actually begins. We used to think life began when we were born. Then it was in the 3rd trimester of a pregnancy.  More recently the case is trying to be made that life begins at conception.  But that’s already passé.  In Delaware a city council passed a resolution to urge Congress to pass laws that grant personhood to eggs and sperms.  Or egg-persons and sperm- persons.  So now life begins at ovulation and ejaculation.  I swear this is not a bit from Saturday Night Live.

Since 1972 abortions have been legal in this country.  Pro-Choice has stood for “A Woman’s Right to Choose!”  Pro-Life has been squirming to come up with new and better ways to make abortion be accepted as murder.  We are given only two choices just like we are given two choices in the Monkey trials: evolution or creation, vote for one.  And like a bunch of monkeys we make a choice about something that is too complex to be reduced to a fundamental choice.  Our minds need to be permeated with the complexity of the dilemma.  That’s not going to happen as long as politicians are running the war.

The officers in the abortion wars really don’t care what happens one way or another.  They are after something else. Power. Attention. The reassurance they have the Truth and therefore aren’t going to hell or they aren’t going to catch it when their father gets home.  Something like that.  Whatever will ease their terror.

Reflective people –and to be fair, there are those in Congress who are—grapple with the complexity of questions about life, birth, birth control, abortions, women as Persons, men as responsible fathers, over-population.  The public fight is too simplistic to be anything but problematic.  It’s followed the route of addiction.  First there was the dependence on one’s chosen belief.  Then the fight between the polar opposites became the problem itself.  This country needs a conversation that goes places the public fight has never gotten close to.

Having said that, I understand why it’s useful to have a legal definition of when life begins.  I believe that governments are structures to address the physical needs of human beings currently walking around on the earth and government needs to give individual consciences room to breathe.  Congress trampling all over the mystery of life with its big clown feet would be comical if it weren’t so frightening.

Life itself is a question that philosophers, poets, theologians, and mystics have been musing over for centuries. Pardon me for pointing this out, but I don’t believe your average politician has the smarts or the humility to join this company.  Reason enough for keeping the question of when life begins out of their jurisdiction.

I recently spent a wonderful afternoon with the lovely, the beautiful, the brilliant Anna Ellermeier, president of the student body of Western Washington University, soon to graduate with a degree in Spanish, and Law, Diversity and Social Justice; and formerly a voice and piano student of mine.  She made an apple tart with Granny Smiths and honey and served it with English breakfast tea, just the way I like it.

I asked her if women on the Bellingham campus were upset about some of the birth control and abortion laws that are trying to get themselves passed in statehouses all over the country.  Her eyes widened, “Oh yes!” she said. “Because we’ve always had those rights, we haven’t understood that we had to work to keep them.”

Talking to Anna and other former students—who I have instructed to stop introducing me as “my old piano teacher”—is my best antidote when I despair of the human race or of the earth herself.  Another reason, besides college students to feel hopeful about the future of women in the U.S, is men.  In the 60s, the women’s movement knocked a lot of men and women off their balance.  But in the intervening years, many of us have discovered what’s in it for us.  In recognizing women as Persons, we have gained so much.

Women and men have had to grow up—or not.  We’ve discovered parts of ourselves that we had perhaps hoped would be taken care of by someone of the opposite sex.  We’ve appreciated that we all have the full menu of what it means to be human, in differing proportions to other persons.  It isn’t necessary to always delineate male and female especially in unedifying ways: “Isn’t that just like a man.”  “You know how women are.”

When I was a girl, an outburst of Personhood was often quelled by the accusation, “That’s not ladylike.”  I had no defense for this.  My mind whited out at the condemnation in the tone, leaving me unable to question what the hell “ladylike” had to do with anything.  This wasn’t an unusual response in my generation.

If people didn’t know what to make of the women’s movement of the 60s, today’s Facebook generation has put a less refined point on it.  Senators and Governors who are backing bills to make birth control —birth control— and abortion difficult and who have Facebook pages, are finding out that today’s Persons can fight on any level that’s necessary.  The comments are showing up by the thousands. Some poor government flunkey can’t scrub them fast enough.

Here’s one of the tamer responses to the bill requiring a vaginal ultra-sound before a Person could get an abortion:

“Hello Senator, My daughter is still young but will one day be a woman and before I know it, she’ll be having her curse, if ya know what I mean.  What should she expect from a government that wants to probe her vagina?  How do I explain the whole good touch, bad touch thing when politicians think it’s acceptable to explore vaginas with plastic instruments?  Also, is this part of a plan to create jobs somehow?”

Here’s another:

“You know Senator, I’ve wished all my life that a man would know more about my own vaginal issues than I do, and now you’re here!”

A spokeswoman for one of the politicians being inundated with Facebook comments has, in a version of “That’s not ladylike,” said “There is no place for such inappropriate comments.”

Oh, I don’t know.  I find them entertaining. This is Facebook. If you can’t stand the comments, you can always change your status.  Politicians are the last people on earth to be lecturing the rest of us about appropriate public language.  I think it’s appropriate that the topic of women’s bodies and women’s rights has become as messy as childbirth itself.  It’s about time for something new to be born.

I got into several lengthy conversations as a result of my post The Mud Hole of Religion(https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/03/the-mud-hole-of-religion/). While not actually throwing mud, we were pitching terms and labels (non-evangelical, anti-intellectual, liberal) apparently assuming that we knew what we meant and everyone understood the words in the same way. After it all fizzled away, I gave myself an exercise of creating some definitions without consulting Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia.  Here’s what I came up with:

Thoughts are words, images and ideas that flit continually through our minds.

Beliefs are the thoughts that re-occur often enough that we choose to believe they have taken up residence and can’t flit.

Spirituality has to do with our private, personal, idiosyncratic thoughts and senses about who we are, how we got here, and what happens to us when we die; and what we believe, if anything, about forces that seem larger than our own minds.

Religions are structures that attempt to codify behavior and beliefs for a group of people, using the culture’s or sub-culture’s ideas about spirituality.

Fundamentalism is a belief that certain ideals are  inviolate truths which apply to all people, all times and all places.

Evangelicalism is an attitude that attempts to persuade others to believe something on the basis that it’s better than what they currently believe.

Government is a structure that addresses the immediate physical concerns of people currently alive.

If this was one of those exams where they ask “which does not belong?” we could safely dispense with government. Government does not belong with religion. Full stop.

The most problematic concepts left on the list are, for me, fundamentalism and evangelicalism. We all have some of both.  We all get excited about things and make statements like “You’ll love this book,” the subtext being “because I did.” That’s a rather benign evangelicalism.  We all have our own fundamentals, our non-negotiables, our deal-breakers, the logic of our own integrity.  For some of us, these can change over the course of a life-time as we change and as our circumstances change.  This is a different paradigm than one which ascribes all authority to someone or something outside herself: a scripture, a deity, a pope, a party platform, parents, a tradition, a man. So far, so good because we all do that some of the time, too.

Fundamental thinking gets ugly when the logic of someone else’s integrity is smeared all over the rest of us. There’s an organization called “Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented” which says: “What you believe is not the problem. What you believe I should believe is the problem.” http://christianstiredofbeingmisrepresented.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html .

In music, a note is sometimes called the fundamental.  You sing the pitch or strike the note on the piano and when the sound is alive, you hear overtones, little shoots of other fundamentals. You hear/feel the sound resonating in different places other than right there in the vocal cords or on the piano keyboard.  If the sound is dead, you hear the clunk of the note, but no ringing, no whistling, and you feel no vibrations, nothing to suggest music of the heavenly spheres.

Singers experience a fundamental as a range, not a discrete point of sound.  Singers can push a note to its edges and enter a quarter-tone. In the western scale, we don’t have a special name for a pitch that’s a quarter-tone sharp.  We still call it the fundamental.

To me, the most fascinating part of the tone is its core.  Once I enter what seems like the core, it moves.  I move with it.  I follow the core of the tone all around what we are still calling the fundamental.  If I decide the center is a discrete place to concentrate my breath, the tone goes dead.  It’s the movement that keeps the sound alive.  But when the note is entered with grace and when its acoustics are arranged with care, it can resonate with life.

Life is like this.  There is no center. The core moves.  No one owns it, no one gets it all to herself. When I enter it, that’s grace.  When I lose track of it but I know it’s still somewhere, that’s faith.

My college roommate, Putzer, the attorney was with me for a few days this past weekend.  When I referred to the current political primaries as “March Madness,” she told me that phrase actually referred to basketball.  You could have fooled me. I’ve been following the political clown show via computer and inevitably I travel down the roads to religion.  The scent of sanctimony from the candidates, the bloggers and the commenters causes my computer to crash and I have to take time to re-boot and make a cup of tea.  While I’ve waited for the tea to brew, I’ve thought about religion, and specifically, Christianity because that is the religion I know the most about.

Spirituality is a rabbit warren of meaning with “ten thousand several doors” for us to make our entrances and exits.  When we’re young and fearful (or immature and terrified), there’s a waiting room where we can believe someone has all the answers.  Depending on where we are in life, we can curl up in one room or the other until we get curious about what else is there.  We can wander out of the Christian rooms and see what they’re doing in The Wiccan.  We can make macaroni necklaces with the Muslims, finger paint with the Buddhists, and star-gaze with the astrologers.

We can wander into hidden places that have no address.  We can find ley lines and vortexes.  We can be transported by mystery.  We can gather what has meaning for us, make our own rooms, and put in skylights.

Christianity, in this country, has become one big holding zone where the lowest common denominators are grubbing around in the muck, throwing sewage at each other, and imagining they are the warren.  The word Christian is now a political statement not a descriptor of one’s orientation to the mystery of life.  It’s a statement that one belongs to a fraternity with a really cool leader who makes him feel safe, important, and entitled to pretty much anything he wants, including the right to infiltrate the minds and bodies of other people.

When Jesus was alive there was no such thing as Christians.  Christians created their club after the really cool leader was gone and no longer had immediate jurisdiction.  Any future difficulties were neatly covered by the concept of the Holy Spirit who is endowed with qualities which conveniently give backup to whoever holds power.  Boy, was this ever a case of a parent who left a convoluted trust, secure in the belief his guileless heirs would sort it out fairly.  Two thousand years later, the heirs are still fighting over who is executor.

I cover vast territory when I say that one of the most condescending phrases to crop up in the past decade is “people of faith.”  I don’t know who coined it, but ironically, it’s been co-opted by the muddy folks in the holding zone. When a “person of faith” has conquered his way to the top of the pit, he needs all those muddy people below to hold him up.  Whatever once passed for faith is supplanted by fear that they won’t.  Meantime, everyone is still covered with mud.

When we stake our lives on the belief we are right, and that we have the Truth, and when we sit complacently in our own self-righteousness, we don’t need faith.   A more accurate descriptor in this case would be “people of doubt” because instead of our faith supporting us, we need everyone in the world to prop us up.

We are all people of faith.  We all have faith in something.  But there is something in life– a power, a mystery, the wind, a lump in the throat–that can’t be seen directly and which evades definition.   Everything else is language.  Language evolves.  When politicians get a hold of language, it dies.  But then it’s reborn at another address.

Meaning resides in those hidden places that have no address.  How we make meaning within ourselves makes all the difference in the world.

Doing a blog is like keeping a dream journal.  When you know you want to write, you tend to notice and remember images, anecdotes and embryonic ideas.  I have found that every week something rises to the surface and declares: “Write about me.”  Something funny happens, or a seed sprouts in a plot of ground I care about.   Both things happened this week as I wallowed in the Downfall of Rush Limbaugh. So many writers have parsed the actual story so well that I don’t have anything more articulate to add. And Comedy Central has done itself proud in the humor department.

So I have been reflecting on the concept of “sorry.”  In spite of the headlines that said differently, Limbaugh made no apology.  And no one expected one.  Saying sorry is not the same as crying uncle.  It’s not something you finally croak out when you realize your backers are deserting you.  It’s not something you scramble to say when you realize that in the attempt to save your face and cover your ass at the same time, you have done neither.

Genuine apologies are between two people. They are too intimate to be part of public conversation. When public figures engage in pseudo-remorse, and when contrition is an Olympic sport where anyone can hold up a rating, it’s degrading to everyone.  We’d do better to skip the pretense and stick to the equation of the First Amendment plus slander laws.  There was a time when X equaled shame, but we’re past that.

“Sorry” is an umbrella term, covering a wide circumference.  When we climb over all the subscribers in our row to get to the ladies’ room in the middle of Hamlet’s soliloquy, we say “sorry” a half dozen times.  When we can’t hear the salesclerk say, “That’s $29.57,” we say, “sorry?” When we say “sorry” for getting our face in front of Dick Cheney’s rifle then you know the word no longer has any discernible meaning.

I didn’t understand what an apology was until I was in my late forties because I was raised in a fundamentalist household where forgiveness was a bit of a racket. The winner had to be Right and the loser had to be Wrong.  Whoever lost the moral sweepstakes got to be disgraced and whoever won got to be smug and quote Bible verses.  What is non-ironically referred to as “our public discourse” is as familiar to me as childhood.

Here’s what a genuine apology looks like:

Part One: “I behaved badly and hurt you. I’m sorry. ”

Part Two: Shut your mouth. Stop talking.

The minute you add something like, “Against my better judgment I stooped to your level and fought with your tactics,” you have negated the apology.

Then you stand there in all your flawed humanity and tolerate whatever feelings made the apology so hard in the first place.  If you are fortunate, the person you’ve hurt, your fellow flawed human being, will say, “I appreciate that” or “Apology accepted.”

The relationship can start to repair itself.   If it wants to.  Forgiving does not mean forgetting. What martyr put those two words together anyway?  We all hurt in different ways and we recover –or not–on our own internal schedules according to our own desires.

I like the expression, “It’s all good.”   Sometimes it’s good like flowers blooming and sometimes it’s like rotting compost.

Years ago, on my first visit to Whole Foods, I nearly passed out from the sheer number of choices.   I had much the same response when I first set foot inside Larry’s Market, the now defunct supermarket that was one of the first, back in the 80s, to stay open for 24 hours.   Even factoring for inflation, Whole Foods is far more overwhelming than Larry’s Market ever was.

What links them is the samples.  At Larry’s Market, there were always little bread samples in the bakery and almost always some kind of sweet thing for afters.  At the check-out, there was often a domed lid with chip samples under it. If you were lucky, someone might press a bite sized granola bar into your hand on the way out.

My orientation to grocery store sampling is that of a pudgy kid in the sixties.  When I was growing up it wasn’t unusual for a stranger to approach an overweight kid eating a cookie at a picnic and say, “That’s the reason you’re fat.”   In the way these things work, I was the one who ended up feeling ashamed, not the adult who felt so entitled to insult a child who took her comfort in the few places she could find it.

Enough of these experiences turned me into a secret sampler.  I could smell a sample in the parking lot.  I could suss out a whole store and find where they were handing out Tiger’s Milk samples in a futile attempt to popularize it.  Though not technically a sample, I could finger the edge of wedding cake frosting left on the serving plate before the cake cutter turned back around to sink her knife in for another piece.

I think about how I got started on this life of sampling subterfuge sometimes when I am in a place like Whole Foods.  There’s a way of lowering ones eyelids to half-mast in a disinterested survey, looking for a dome.  Then circling the area like a predator, faking surprise when you come upon the prey, in this case, the do-nut holes.

I mention do-nut holes, because that’s how I set limits for myself.  In a bakery, I only take a sample when there are do-nut holes.  The truth is that most bakery goods look better than they taste. After you’ve been disappointed enough times, they don’t even look good anymore.  But I like do-nut holes and they always taste the same, give or take a day’s staleness.

Do-nut holes were the de-fault sample at the old QFC on 15^th NW.  I understand that a whole family can lunch off the samples at the big warehouse stores.  The West Seattle Thriftway for months put out samples of obscure little banana flavored sugar cookies that made the staff re-route themselves just to get another one. At the old Art’s Family Center which some of us still call Art’s, but which now is another QFC, you could always get salmon spread on either a Triscuit or a Wheat Thin.  Or both if you were fast enough.  The place to go for not just a sample, but a whole hunk of bread with butter is Great Harvest Bread Company.

Speaking as a veteran sampler, I can say that Whole Foods does better than any store I have ever scavenged. On a good day, you can sample orange slices and grapes in the produce section, something smoked in the meat or fish section, chips and dip in aisle seven and washed down with coffee or tea one aisle over.  Double back for the green liquid by the protein drinks or the artisanal granola in the cereal aisle, then due north to try some kefir, Yobaby or Greek yogurt.  Any continental repast finishes with cheese of which there can easily be four different kinds to sample, and then if you are lucky enough to get to the domed lid in time, some tiramisu or fudge cake in the bakery.  Whole Foods doesn’t do anything so down-market as do-nut holes.

But I have never seen anything like the sampler’s paradise that is Mackinac Island. The townies call the tourists “fudgies” with good reason.  Every other store front on the main street is a candy kitchen and you can eat a pound of fudge in a day just from going in and out of them.  Not that I ever did.

This last item is off topic by content, but not by free association.  Jessie, my little fairy god-child from years past, could make my mother laugh outright at comments I could never have gotten past her.  Jessie was with me one fourth of July when I went to see my parents in Olympia.  We were putting together a hamburger supper and my mother was shaking the mustard bottle while she explained to Jessie that the first thing to come out the spout was usually water.

“Oh, I know all about that,” Jessie assured her. “That’s why I always get a mid-stream sample.”