Ladders

More than once I have sat down to write an essay about religion, and usually end up aborting the piece.  Never have I false-started a blog entry as frequently as with this one, and indeed one of my gaps between entries was due in large part to how I could salvage the idea, or write it in a way that would be middle of the road, yet satisfying.  It’s one of those topics—well, so far the only one to present me such a quandary—that can offend people to the point they don’t want to continue reading my blog, and maybe not even stay in contact with me if I cross the line.  I’m not even sure where the line is half the time. 

I’ve written about religion before, sort of.  I have quite comfortably expressed my views concerning my own faith, where, when and why I turned away from church, and even how I feel religion has strayed from its original purpose.  As a result, I’ve seen my friend count drop by more than a few whenever I write something like that.  I’d like to say it doesn’t bother me, but it does, I guess.  There isn’t one friend of mine, whether online or not, that I don’t respect regardless of their own views—and many of them have views with which I am in complete disagreement.  That doesn’t mean they’re not good people; we just agree to disagree.

This weekend, the Catholic College of Cardinals will convene to vote for the successor to Benedict XVI.  I wonder if we can go back to calling him Cardinal Ratzinger now?  Indeed, a Pope hasn’t resigned in over six hundred years, so we have a lot of questions that need to be answered.  Regardless of who they elect to succeed him, whether it’s the Canadian candidate, that guy from Ghana who’s supporters have put up campaign billboards on his behalf, or some upstart from Latin America where almost half the Catholics of the world reside (in various degrees of poverty, one might point out), the winner will not only inherit the title and responsibilities of the head of the Catholic Church, they will also instantly become a head of state, since Vatican City is a sovereign nation.  Just think, a priest from Quebec could soon be the head of another country, while he’s still a Canadian citizen.  I’m sure they’ll let him keep dual citizenship, or diplomatic privilege at the very least.  Conrad Black, put your hand down.  After all, it’s the Pope.  You can’t insult him, can you? 

Sinead O’Connor did.  The brash, young singer, and devout Catholic herself once declared the Pope—at that time John Paul II, a long-serving and very popular Pope, no less—was the ‘real enemy’, and proceeded to tear up his picture on live television.  The Saturday Night Live audience was stunned, shocked to silence as the image lingered in the air while they cut to commercial, seamlessly as though the whole thing was planned by the network.  It wasn’t.  Sinead committed commercial suicide that night.  She has since had a respectably successful career, scoring a few hits and selling records, mostly to her core fan base, but the breakthrough she enjoyed as a result of her smash hit ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ evaporated.  Why?  Because she insulted the Pope.  How could someone rip up John Paul II’s picture?  He never hurt anyone.  For Christ’s sake, he was the head of the whole Church!  Millions of faithful followers kept his image in their homes.  My grandmother, a life-long Catholic, had several photos of him around her house, probably more than Jesus and Mary combined.  As a child, I briefly thought he was a great uncle of ours, or something.  And he always seemed to look so nice in his photographs.  How could this man ever be considered anything less than a saint?

The story goes that Sinead had read an article about—wait for it—altar boys being sexually abused by church officials, including priests.  She wrote to her diocese, and after receiving no satisfactory response, wrote to the Vatican.  When it became apparent that no one was going to step up and admit to wrong-doing in the church hierarchy, and when it appeared that none up the chain of command was prepared to accept culpability, she felt it was necessary to use her own celebrity to speak out on behalf of the victims.  She realized that she had maybe the biggest platform to shed some light on so grievous a scandal.  Where she erred is that her message, blunt and visceral as it was, fell on deaf ears.  All the world saw was an emotionally-charged singer rip up the Pope on TV.  No one got the message, and Sinead drastically underestimated the response, or lack thereof, of the audience.  They crucified her.

I proudly own several Sinead O’Connor albums.  It moves me to tears to watch footage of people burning her albums in the street, because that is what actually happened.  Radio stations sponsored mass-burnings, and one even brought in a steamroller to crush her albums, tapes, and CDs.  This wasn’t Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  This was the United States in the early 1990s.  Suddenly, her talent was irrelevant.  The sexual abuse was ignored, as it had been all along.  People were more concerned that this freakish Irish singer, who willingly shaved her head to thumb her nose at the stereotyping of what a female singer/songwriter should look like, was an agent of evil, negatively influencing the youth of the nation.  Just like all those nasty heavy metal stars of the 80s—you know, the ones that put Satanic messages on their albums.  Surely those metal singers were worse.  What self-respecting man would grow his hair and wear make-up?  Boy George, put your hand down.  Funny, no one had a problem with him.  Nor should they have.

Sinead’s problems didn’t end there.  At a concert a few years later, the venue at which she was about to perform insisted on playing the Star Spangled Banner before her set.  She asked them not to do so, because she didn’t feel it was appropriate to play any country’s national anthem before a rock concert.  She also pointed out that national anthems promote nationalism, and in many cases hostility between countries rather than unity.  Fair comment, considering the fact that I have attended dozens of concerts, and not once have I heard a national anthem played.  She got lambasted for that opinion as well.  How un-American, to spurn the national anthem, and on US soil no less.  I never understood the furor over that.  Who sings the anthem before a concert?  It just seems unnecessary.  A hockey game?  Sure, but a rock show…?   The fact is people were just looking for reasons to cast her in as negative light as possible.  In the 90s, she couldn’t pour a glass of water without someone criticizing her.  All the while, children continued to be abused.  The collection plates were still full to the brim every Sunday, and the Vatican continued to stuff its coffers.  It still does.

Now, it is important to remember that children are abused all over the world, in every race, religion, creed, and culture.  There are bad people everywhere.  More and more abusers, within or without the church are exposed every year.  As the world slowly wakes up to these and other horrible crimes that have persistently been ignored, avoided, or denied, we are slowly coming to realize what one person had the balls to address almost twenty years ago.  In the last twenty years, the Catholic Church has seen its numbers begin to shrink.  The next Pope will have to think really hard about how it will continue to serve its congregation, in the face of severe poverty, climate change, exploitation, abuse, and controversial rock signers.  I wonder how many of the over one billion faithful know exactly how much money the Vatican keeps in its central bank/vault?  Do they ever wonder if the Pope, who could have been anyone depending on how popular he was behind the secret, closed doors of St. Peter’s Basilica this week, ever lays awake at night trying to decide what his divine message, which will be accepted quite literally as gospel, will be?  If he wanted to, he could stand at the balcony and declare that Twinkies are infused with the Body of Christ, and everyone would have to accept it.  He could say “You know what, we’ve been wrong for almost two thousand years.  Women could make decent priests after all.”  Maybe he’ll totally mess around with us and say “Sinead, you were right.  There are an awful lot of perverts touching young boys inappropriately.  My predecessors did squat to help them.  Maybe we should try to stop it now.”  I’m not holding my breath.

The fact is, the vast majority of Catholics go to church for the right reasons.  They are good people who wish to be part of a community where people smile when they greet each other, worship together in a place where they feel at home, and help others in need, both at home and abroad.  Most of them probably wish priests could marry, that women could have equal rights, and that people wouldn’t have to feel guilty enough every day to have to spill their guts behind a flimsy screen in a makeshift broom closet.  Most don’t want to see children abused, and find child exploitation abhorrent.  Most wish the Vatican could take even half its national wealth and spread it around to people in need—like, half their adherents.  Today, Sinead O’Connor is still a practicing Catholic, but she has chosen to follow a splinter group which allows women equal rights.  As a matter of fact, she is an ordained priest.  This branch of Catholicism has been disavowed by the Vatican.  There isn’t a person alive or dead who can convince me that her motives are anything less than sincere.

I would never hold someone’s faith against them, so long as what they follow is sincere, and followed for the right reasons.  And it isn’t up to me to decide what is right for someone, especially in matters of belief.  I have a friend who is a psychic, and she makes a living providing spiritual guidance to people who seek it.  I see no difference between what she does and what religious leaders do.  Her message is one of love and empathy.  The difference is that her faith does not have two thousand years of bigotry, exploitation, misogyny, coercion, genocide, censorship, and forced conversion on its resume.  That’s a whole lot of crosses to bear.

Speaking of crosses, a few weeks ago, I took a picture of one adorning the gable end of a former church, now used as a community center.  I’m not sure if the building has been desanctified or not.  Beneath it was an aluminum ladder, with no one in sight, just propped up against the building as though someone was trying to climb up onto the cross. That, or climb off it.  I took a picture of it and posted it on my Facebook page (you may have seen it, and it’s still on my page if you want to go back and play along), jokingly asking people to post captions.  Mine was simply:  “Volunteers...?”  I can’t imagine being the guy that walks out onto the balcony after the white smoke over St. Peter’s starts to waft out of the world’s most famous smokestack.  That’s a ladder I wouldn’t want to climb.  Lately, The Artist Formerly Known As Benedict XVI has come to realize that ladders go two ways.  We all know that we climb ladders to reach for something; surely climbing down is for a reason as well.  There has been no shortage of suspicion as to why he changed his direction, and I’m not prepared to offer any speculation.  We all have ladders of our own, and perhaps he just got tired of hanging on the rungs.  Maybe it’s because he’s really old.  Maybe at the top he just didn’t find what he was looking for.

Coffee And A Paper

Often I have written about how much I long to spend more time in nature, and what that offers me in times of stress and trepidation.  Those who know me at all know that I am a very sociable person, but from time to time I shrink away from people.  I was once that small child who hid behind his mother’s legs, too shy to say even ‘hello’ to someone who may as well have been the friendliest person in the world, and I couldn’t tell you why.  Today, I have no trouble introducing myself to strangers, often flitting about in a crowded room, the proverbial social butterfly that I am.  I remember people, both faces and names in most cases, and I have been known to know somebody at every function I attend, be it a professional development course, wedding reception, birthday party, school reunion, or whatever event I happen to be attending.  Sure, I might not know these people as intimately as I would my family or close friends, but I have always tried to make it a point to remember people, and to smile and greet them if I meet them by chance someplace unawares.  We like it when people remember us.  I always feel better about myself if someone I recognize sees me and smiles.  At least I made a decent enough impression the last time we spoke.  You have to take things like this as small victories.

Still, I like being alone.  Solitude is something I crave, like coffee or Old Dutch chips.  I long for moments when I can just think by myself, without worrying about the complicated nuances of conversation handicapping my thought process.  It’s easiest to get your own points across when no one is there to rebut.  Maybe that’s why I took up blogging.  All the same, I enjoy listening to others, and look forward to engaging conversations.  But once in a while, it’s great to just be silent, think about what surrounds you, and reflect.

What better place to find solitude than in a big city?  It’s true, there are more people there than in a small town or in nature, but when you walk around in a city of any significant size, particularly one with a downtown core, people are more likely to ignore you, simply because you are just one of potentially tens of thousands who at first glance look all the same.  In a city, I have observed that people aren’t necessarily rude per se, but are so focused on where they need to be, there is simply not enough sensory time to take in their surroundings, and that includes other people.  What is often mistaken for apathy—for instance, if someone gets mugged while passers-by simply walk on, may well be a lack of sensory application.  Of course, some people are self-centered, but entire populations of people can’t be that ego-centric, can they?  What becomes the norm is most likely to be overlooked.

Nothing can better afford the aspiring writer a glimpse into human behavior like walking casually in an urban center.  If you have no place to go, you all of a sudden have lots of time to look at what’s going on around you.  Ever walk down a busy street only to discover a shop, restaurant, park, or attraction you had no idea existed?  I have lived in Fredericton—a small city to be sure—for almost twenty years, and I still discover little nooks and crannies I had no idea were ever there.  It makes me wonder how many great diners, coffee shops, or second-hand stores I have missed all this time, not to mention how much money I might have spent in places like these.  On a recent trip to Bangor, a friend and I discovered the second-hand music shop of our dreams, which the clerk informed us had been there for over fifteen years.  That great epiphany, that ‘where have you been all my life’ moment rang too true the day I first walked in the door of what may as well have been my own El Dorado.

Writers need a deep understanding of a great many things if they want to be successful.  I always felt that to be a good writer, I had to be good at research.  So I made it a point to read up on topics of which I knew relatively little, particularly if I had planned to use that knowledge in a story.  No one wants to read a story that doesn’t feel authentic.  It occurred to me recently that authenticity in my writing and internet research don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  At the end of the day, as an author, I have the right to manipulate my story as I please.  I’m not currently writing any historical fiction, so the sky’s the limit.  Where I have found my writing in need of research is in the resource of humanity itself.  If you pay attention to people, you can better create characters worth knowing.  That’s why it pays to pay attention to human behaviours and interactions.  What better place to witness that?  Like any sportsman would say, if you want to catch fish, you need to go where the fish are.

I would love nothing more than to have unlimited funds to just wander.  I would be thrilled to wake up, walk down a street, buy a coffee and a newspaper and just sit on a park bench.  I’d even buy a bag of seeds to feed pigeons if the local bylaws allow it.  Or, if it’s raining, I would be content to sit in a local greasy spoon, with the same coffee and paper, just watching life happen around me.  Urban centers are a part of nature too.  It just happens to be human nature, not birds, trees, and a starry sky at dusk.  People stop for lunch, run errands, and even interact with each other sometimes during a busy morning in the downtown core. Cabbies flow in and out in their personal carriages, some adorned with photos and trinkets, others not.  Delivery vans pulled over at the curb with flour-way flashers frustrate drivers looking for a place to park, while unseen people in offices and stores are waiting patiently (or not) for what the Purolator guy has to bring.  Beat cops totter between parking meters, raising the ire of everyone who swears they were only a minute late as they clasp the parking fine between their rigid fingers.  Homeless people slump beside alleyways, curbs, and mailboxes, each with their own method of soliciting sympathy to their cause, be it a few coins, a sandwich, or a bottle of Listerine.  Some of them pick up cans.  Some play the guitar or harmonica.  Some just hold their cap for a donation, resigned to defeat.  Sometimes people don’t ignore them; a few will even grant them their wish.  Some will make it a point to deliberately berate them.  A few callous folks might even steal from them.  For better or worse, it’s all human behavior, and every single person exerts their own character.  If you take little snippets from all of them, you can cobble together some very complex, entertaining characters, more or less fictitious, but like any legend worth retelling, always based around some matter of fact.

I was never interested in studying psychology.  I was not prepared to stand in line at 2am to register for a course, which in the early nineties was how it was done.  I took a sociology course, and hated it.  I have nothing against philosophy, and in fact I enjoy reading it for leisure once in a while, but learning about Karl Marx and Max Weber bored me to tears.  While these disciplines offer much in terms of understanding human behaviours, I have found that I needn’t have paid to take a course to learn about people.  In retrospect, I went to university for the first four years primarily to learn about myself.  How I interacted with other students, whether it was in residence, class, or socially after hours, shaped who I am today.  When surrounded by so many fascinating people, I was able to store away those little snippets of character traits to fill a lifetime of novels.  It’s just a matter of applying the right characters to the right characters, if you get my meaning.

If I had those unlimited funds, I would so much like to visit far away cities, like Ernest Hemmingway did in the twenties.  I am admittedly not a fan of Hemmingway’s novels (I find them flat and directionless, generally speaking), but what he did better than most was to define his characters as though they could climb right out of the pages and have a conversation with you.  I prefer his short fiction, because the whole point is to develop the character as a mini-portrait, and the whole point of the story is up for debate.  Good writers let the readers decide.  What I have surmised is that physical description and wordy prose don’t necessarily do the trick.  The real art is in letting the reader learn about the character through their personality, and you can’t fake that.  If you can’t feel for them, you just won’t care about them.  They become anonymous passers-by on the street.  When you put the book down, you want to smile when you meet them again (or hate them if they’re villains, of course).  You’ll want to converse with them, ask them what they were thinking in Chapter 10, or maybe even punch them in the face.  They become active participants in your imagination.  Just think, all this time, they were all around you.  As an author, I want most to be a good host, introducing my guests to new people, and hopefully forging a friendship or two that will last a lifetime.  A hot cup of coffee and a paper could do as well.