Today is kind of a weird day for me in my corner of the web. I read and responded to an individual’s web log with a link here in regard to the foot washing tradition on Easter Thursday. In turn, he returned the favor and quoted me and responded to me. Hey, turnabout is fair play.
However, I’ve been taken aback by the increase in the readership here and the personal comments about me that accompany his post. (I’m not linking back to him again for this entry, because I really can’t see the discourse progressing beyond tit for tat.)
So, I entitled this entry “having my cake…” because I truly enjoy the freedom of writing here and of expressing myself on stage. It’s a pretty cool thing when something I say or write resonates with someone else and makes them laugh. And, I truly want to have my cake and eat it too.
The comeuppance, of course, is putting yourself out in public means you will also engender negative emotions. When things go well, and you get mostly positive feedback, you forget that there are people out there who don’t share your values. If you write from your heart and your truth, it’s inevitable that at best someone will disagree and at worst they will hate you.
The beauty of it all is the complete ironic construct of my own actions (commenting on the church I left without regret many, many, many years ago) coming back on me. Yeah, the ultimate comeuppance, judging yourself and then being judged.
People I don’t know have guessed in self-congratulatory furvor my apparent age, politics, intellectual capacity and the state of my soul from reading this weblog. {Is it necessary to point out they have guessed these things incorrectly?} They have dubbed me a “barbarian” and then debated if that was fair or whether simply “misguided” would be more compassionate. My gender and apparent feminism was taken out for a flogging. And, words that I thought were pretty clearly a joke have demonstrated my moral turpitude.
In short, with a few brief lines in this virtual plane, a few people who I likely will never meet have reconfirmed my own faith and made me happy that I am not in their church. There is currently a viciousness to fundamental beliefs that I cannot reconcile with any of my own reading and studying of history, philosophy, religion and the words of the New Testament.
Even though I don’t believe in God as a monotheistic construct and I likely will never be able to find comfort in organized religion, I do see and appreciate the beauty and power of the stories in the Bible. I worked with the parish priest to formally lay my mother to rest in a Catholic ceremony and read aloud Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18, and I was cool with providing her that sacrament as part of a faith that I believe was there, even though she struggled with the actions of the formal church here on earth and the weakness of the men who run it for as long as I can remember. Helping to participate in the mass helped focus me through my grieving, but at heart I am a secular humanist and I don’t have the faith for which the zealots seem inordinately proud of themselves.
At the end of the day, I count myself in good company historically and currently for not going along with these goodly, judgmental folks. Inside me I carry some of my mother’s anger at the closed-off narrowness of their lives that presumes so much about mine without knowing me.
A friend from comedy, DJ Hazard, best responded to what I think is the arrogant presumption of these strangers’ praying for me, “Unsolicited prayers are the same as The Kids In The Hall ‘crushing your head’.”
I dedicate this post to Ellen Goodman, Eileen McNamara, homosexuals who just want to find love and live in peace, anyone who looked for compassion and found only judgment and, most especially, any woman who has found herself making a difficult choice and then had to listen to people condemn her without having the first idea of what was in her head or heart.
So it goes to those who responded to your blog….
The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.
Cicero