The Wild Reed: Quote of the Day

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Quote of the Day

. . . On Christmas Eve, my devoutly Catholic sister attended mass with her husband and three children. They literally bowed to something bigger than they. They heard again the ancient story of the baby, the undocumented foreigner, conceived out of wedlock, child to two dads, born in a filthy shed and laid in an unclean trough, a fugitive from the law from his very first breath. They were told that this baby is God, that there's something in this world greater and more important than wealth, or political power, or the laws of birth, or even the "laws" of nature, and they found it worthy of praise. In this act, as much as church leaders would often try to deny it, lie the seeds of revolution.

To wit, Pope Benedict XVI used his annual Christmas message to denounce gay marriage, calling it a "manipulation of nature" that destroys the "essence" of human life. But the pope, like my devout sister, worships a Trinitarian God who is father to himself, conceived by a union of feminine spirit with mortal woman to become mortal flesh that was still somehow fully divine. Talk about manipulation of nature!

This religion is preternaturally odd. It's fundamentally queer. It's revolutionary at its very core. It began as the religion of women and slaves, the poor and the sick, the oppressed and the outlawed. Its message that the sick deserved healing, that the poor deserved to eat, that the suffering weren't inferior, spread across Roman civilization with such revolutionary speed that Rome feared it, until they learned to control it. Even now, this bizarre story resists (eventually) any effort to harness it to worldly power. Maybe that's why, despite the pope's rhetorical efforts, 59 percent of U.S. Catholics, like my sister, still support same-gender marriage. . . .