April Please

The month my weird upbringing brought me to tears ♡

Who is the nervous spirit of this world / that must go over and over / what it already knows
- Jorie Graham

When the Pope died tears started leaking from my eyes. It wasn’t exactly crying, it was something else, like the water of fellow feeling that fell from my eyes at the marathon, at the end of a previous April. Thanks to an Irish grandfather I grew up Catholic in Protestant Scotland. There was no such thing as a secular education back in the late 90s. During the week my public primary school assemblies were punctuated by sermons from the Church of Scotland minister, and after-school care came with compulsory Calvinist sing-a-longs (Amazing Grace, you know the rest). On the weekend I traded in the plain-speaking predestination of protestantism for a high-camp Catholicism that promised forgiveness on tap, only say the word.

Mass was spooky, and I kind of liked it. The smell of incence; a choreography of lit and extinguished candles; all the daily ungainly transformed into Sunday supplicants, with all the right moves. Latin chants. Ornate painted stations of the cross (all-too-human torture and gore). Prayers of the faithful with room for every socially forsaken group. The involvement of lay people, shy women turned full-throated by the dignity of the reading roster. A cappella singing from a swishy-robed priest directed at a host that we were promised was now the body of Christ. Not just a symbol, but the real thing! Transubstantiation, baby!

And then the welcome come-down of the cup of tea afterwards, where the hard-pewed formalities turned to limber chatter, children’s freshly freed laughs peeling louder than the bells. The priests I encountered seemed so fulfilled, spry and alive with a kinetic kind of joy. One Father Jim was over-flowing with such energy, and poured it into fundraising for parishes near and far. One time he did a sponsored parachute jump (“High Hopes” read his flyer). Another time he lay for an extended period on a bed of nails. Said bed of nails was displayed next to the tea station in the run-up to his fundraiser. Cool. An early adopter of transition lenses, he turned into an off-duty rock star on the steps of the church as he stepped out into the sunlight to farewell the flock. This was a positive adult in my life, a model for how to blend charisma with sincerity, how to pay genuine attention to people, and how to be more than okay being a bit of a freak.

I was a teenager before I learned about the widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic church. I was almost too enveloped in my adolescent cape of false confidence to feel the heartbreak of it this betrayal. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. To be able to categorise something was to feel impervious to loss of trust. Couldn’t be disappointed if we could name the phenomenon so clearly. Abuse of power comes as no surprise. I also couldn’t be disappointed if I rejected it all - who had ever asked me if I wanted to be a Catholic, anyway? I hadn’t come at it from first principles but from a childhood inheritance and an environment of vestigial sectarianism. Well I could put away my childish things, couldn’t I? Besides, my peers and I were getting tired of the doctrinal contortions. We didn’t understand the hang-ups on sexuality.

At Catholic high school in New Zealand the progressive teachers tried to win us back from our anger by saying that God loved every human, and that being queer was a way of being human, so God loves queer people too, phew. I liked their interpretation of Catholicism, but during Pope John Paul II’s reign the Church deemed homosexuality to be a “tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil”. Then Pope Benedict XVI doubled down and lobbied against gay marriage. The teachers seemed to be bending over backwards for something that didn’t love them back. Some days their interpretations were consoling and even thrilling (faith is what you make it! Question everything! Queer the catechism!), but on other days, to our teenage ears, it was plain sad: their loyalty secured with a compulsory dose of cognitive dissonance. Was all their hermeneutic labour worth it?

By the time Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected and took up the name Pope Francis in 2013, my Catholic upbringing and secondary schooling were over. I was far away from the religion and barely noticed the new pope at first. I still visited chapels and cathedrals for the wonder of it all. But for the religion I held a weariness. Both the outright moral bankruptcy and the well-meaning back-bending had left me tired. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it wasn’t tiredness but a shift in curiosity, away from the rituals that I had found so strange and interesting in childhood, and toward the spry aliveness of the positive role models — aliveness that could live in anyone. How living and alive could a person be? I started to encounter Pope Francis by osmosis — he was a great one for working the media (all those pressers on the papal plane!), cracking his impish smile, and spreading the word. No-nonsense soundbites made it out of encyclical letters: “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”.

He rode the subway. He took a vow of poverty. He emphasised mercy. He believed all faiths to be valid paths. He wished for Hell to be empty. He sounded a lot like my high school teachers (“if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?”). He called Gaza every day. He spoke to the whole world on his last full day of life. Someone so very alive, and alive to everyone’s aliveness, is no longer living. 40,000 people journeyed to his funeral and that’s where the tears came from — he did something for the aliveness of all those people. James Butler wrote on Pope Francis for the London Review of Books, and quoted from his his last meditations on Good Friday: “today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell.” Here’s to keeping on falling and being fully alive to ourselves and others.

---

Things I want to remember reading and watching this April:

• Bisan changed her greeting for the first time: “This is Bisan from Gaza, and unfortunately I am still alive”.
  

• “Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairments; over 15,600 children have been killed violently. Tens of thousands more of Gaza’s children are injured or missing, and many of those surviving are so traumatised that they openly express the wish to die.”
  - Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, counsel for Palestine at the Hague this week, in the shared claim that Israel’s ban on all cooperation with the UN’s Palestinian rights agency UNRWA is a breach of the UN charter, as reported in The Guardian.
  

• Louis Theroux, The Settlers (BBC). Louis lets his documentary subjects tell on themselves, as always. But this is the first time that he has been driven/moved to call someone — in this case one of the leaders of Israel's settlement movement — a sociopath.
  

• “Because our [autistic] children deserve a world that sees them, values them, and includes them. And until that world exists, we’ll build it — one day, one talanoa, one sensory-friendly trip to Pak’nSave at a time.”
  - Destiny Momoisea for The Coconet
  

• I just got hold of Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed, and am so enjoying the funny-tender style:
  ‘…Planning any children?' Coralie gasped.

  ‘I ask', Anne said, 'because if so, it's time to start on the folic acid. And Adam, forty isn't young, you know. Everyone knows about tick-tock, tick-tock for women. Sperm degrades too.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Adam said. ‘I'm not quite forty yet. And recovering quite well from my Ebola.’

  Who was Anne to snap on her latex gloves, slice and dig into Coralie's chest, yank out her most cherished private dreams, and examine them like an excised tumour? She wished she'd phoned her own mother when she'd had the chance. But that would have left her empty in a different way.
  

• Season 2 of The Rehearsal, by Nathan Fielder. A sincere guy, armed only with a latptop harness, is back to facilitate elaborate pre-enactments of tricky scenarios. This season’s aviation safety concept nicely Trojan-horses central themes around issues in communication and difficulties people have in expressing themselves. But coming from an aviation-obsessed family also makes this concept compelling at face value for me, lol.
  

• Peace is Every Step, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I was sceptical at first, but reading a little section every night is helpful. Purely obtained thanks to chance-reading a tweet about the impact of this book on Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
  
  This is deeply personal. I share it - while fighting to stop the GENOCIDE of the Palestinians - only because I trust it may help others.
  I came back from Germany hurt, traumatised. I realised it because an uncharacteristic "anger" suddenly transpired all over, from interviews to engagement with family and friends. So not me, I felt unwell.
  At the pick of it, this book literally fell over my head (a lady gifted it to me before my last SOAS lecture last November). Not the book I would normally read.
  I read it.
  It has been pure enlightenment. Calm is back. Anger has disappeared. I forgave the German authorities for bullying me. But I cannot forget how they - and other political systems - are bullying others. That is impossible.
  The struggle for human rights (against dominance and bullying in all their forms, from patriarchy, to settler-colonialism old and new, and imperialism old and new) will continue, in Palestine and beyond.
  And it will be as easy as BREATHING, cultivating peace at every step. If we understand it, we will make it.

Until next month, know that we will make it,
H x

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