I Palindrome I

I was raised Catholic but got out of practice in high school. I was dogged by skepticism that wouldn't allow me to believe bread and wine really turned into flesh and blood. I could pretend that happened. I could also believe that while we pretended it happened we were remembering or contemplating something more significant, but I was told that would not do. I had to believe that bread and wine turned into flesh and blood. After all, people had been waterboarded for less. We were living in the twentieth century and no one was likely to torture me over issues of Catholic dogma. Still, I couldn't be Catholic and not confess the reality of transubstantiation.

But I had been an alter boy, I saw first hand where the bread and wine came from. They were just bread and wine. I saw that bread and wine stayed bread and wine no matter how many spells were cast on them. I tasted bread and I tasted wine. I tasted flesh (in small quantities); I tasted blood. All different. I never in all the Masses I attended saw anyone ever grimace or react as if surprised because they tasted flesh or blood. I can say as plain as anything, I never knew- have never known- bread and wine to change into flesh and blood- in any circumstance. Perhaps if this were to happen to me today I could have a more sophisticated understanding of "believe," but as it was "two roads diverged" and all that.

So as much as it's possible, I was no longer Catholic.

Providentially, at that time there were pretty girls at the Friends church that were not too proud to date some schlub clearly beneath them. So that's where I was, but my recent encounter with the lies that undergird religious truth and the deep suspicion of Protestants my in some ways proper Catholic upbringing inspired suggested I should look into these people called Quakers. That's what I did, and I liked what I found. I first read Barclay's Apology and then George Fox's Journal. I looked over Quaker histories. I dated demonstratively affectionate girls. I found answers to questions I couldn't quite articulate and a hope for what something called "the church" could be. This was what Christianity was supposed to be. Things made sense to me. (And what's religion if not some system that simply affirms our sensibilities and fits well with our temperament?) Not the kind of sense that Intelligent Designers or Talbotesque Apologetics want religion to make- it made a kind of spiritual sense. It didn't put the known and unknown universe into some coherent order. I didn't suddenly believe things I couldn't believe. It seemed to just fit with how I had known God and myself. For what that's worth.

Time would show me there is always a gap between what a people could be at their best and what is- a gap between where we are and what is actually possible given desire and imagination. But for the most part I liked what I lived and I liked the potential.

So... this is to say: I am decidedly Quaker. What that means has grown but remains the source material for how I understand me and "its" relation to a community. Perhaps that puts me into some circle where my understanding of what is Quaker feeds my sense of who I am that depends on what it means to be Quaker to know who and how I am, but it's a circle that something I call Quaker is uniquely able to understand and it's not necessarily the proverbially vicious circle. This being Quaker is important and true, so I am concerned with our Annual Conference, erstwhile Yearly Meeting, and its desperate search for something that resembles life. Of course a desperate search for life can be a good thing, but in our case, perhaps for the sake of some type of growth- so we could build forty churches in five years- because big equals true- because bigger is more real- it seems we are building and embracing some dummy Christ- some generic Christianity stuffed with straw and rags. Perhaps it's because of something else, but it seems like window dressing all the same- a mannequin rather than a living body.

Maybe it is real. Maybe there's a life in it that I can't see. But I can't lie and say I see a life where I don't.

It certainly was easier when I could simply taste what wasn't real.