I’ve finally given up on the Catholic Church. For years I insisted (although weakly, and only on rare occasions) to view our religion, my family’s religion, as dissenting inside the organization. The underlying idea I had was that all major religions revolve around the same undefinable unimaginable unarticulatable truths, instinctive to humanity and to the universe; and our version, our sense of it, was Catholicism. That’s what we were born into.
That, however, stopped working for me. I am no longer a loyal dissenter. I’d tolerated the wrong of opposing birth control and divorce for a couple of generations now, but at some point I woke up and saw the specifics of the Catholic Church preaching against condoms in Africa (among other places), against gays being treated equally, and when I add that to the harm done through all this time, I couldn’t take it. It’s not just neutral; it’s doing evil. For years I forgave the church leaders for their ignorance, granted them their good intentions, but enough is enough. They are doing harm to many with their preaching. It’s not just an opinion when it comes from the pulpit. With great power comes great responsibility.
I haven’t given up on God, or Christianity in its non-literal metaphorical and most valuable truth, or on believing that doing good or trying to do good (well, maybe that’s just not doing harm) matters. I still feel it all and believe it in my own way.
(Image: broken church, by Rob the Tog, via Flickr cc)
This 2006 TED talk is witty, smart, and significant, I think, although not surprising. Schools kill creativity. Unfortunately, that’s not a surprise. Sigh … but it makes for a fasciniating 19 minutes
My dad turns 90 today. He plays golf or tennis almost daily, he’s on the web a lot, follows the stock market as if it were a fulltime job, and he’s very sharp on politics and public policy. That’s him at right during World War II.
He is a role model and encouragement for me and other baby boomers as we pass 60 and continue aging.
And dad has something to tell us all about relationships too. After his wife (my mom) died when they were both in their 60s, he married again at age 69. He and his wife Liz had a 20th anniversary earlier this year. That’s them at right, taken a couple years ago. Both of them were then in their 80s.
Somewhere in my distant past there was a sermon about the wasted humanity of being right. The priest who was talking had just done a funeral. The dead guy’s sister regretted not having talked to him for the last five years of his life. He’d offended her. She cut him off. She was right.
She was right and she showed it by cutting him out of her life. Brother and sister, cut off. Who won? Who was right? Who lost?
“So much loss,” the priest said, “over nothing more than who’s right.”
I got an email over the weekend from a neighbor whose brother had helped her buy her house (or something like that) and is now kicking her out of that house (or something like that). She wrote that email to a group of people, including us. She doesn’t know us very well. She’s calling him names. He’s kicking her out of her house. Her daughter wants to divorce the rest of the family. Her mother is siding with her brother.
Family fight. Nobody wins. Time goes by, people lose each other, and for what?
I spent a spare moment on twitter Saturday afternoon. It had been a busy day, a long drive home in the morning, quiet time to myself in the car, then an explosion of small children, a beautiful summer day, a nice dinner in the garden.
I liked the intro. I’m not a church goer myself, at least not anymore, but the introduction, church or not, God or not, was pleasant enough and engaging.
I even like the list. There’s something in the tone that makes me like the author.
But parts of it bother me. Maybe at 61, almost 40 years married, I’m getting tired of the stereotypes. For example:
We are not mind readers, say what’s really on your mind.
That one made me smile. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My wife has never had any trouble speaking her mind. And then there was this one:
We need our time alone: guys night out, man cave…
Boy, no offense to guy friends, but no thanks. What with business to do, kids, family, trying to have a life … I never understood the guys night out. Never wanted it. Is that really just me?
So as I read on, I recognize the problems, but is any of this really man vs. woman?
We want to be the leader and the protector… let us lead.
That’s old. Protector maybe, in a physical way, male, but I don’t think marriage is about a leader and a follower. Let’s hope you have some of both, on both sides.
When we say nothing is wrong, “Nothing is wrong” nothing means nothing!
Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes. It’s a good thing only one gender has trouble with this .
We want to be respected and appreciated.
Weird. What’s that doing here? Who doesn’t? What does this have to do with men and women?
We don’t remember many dates, maybe even special dates.
What is this, the I Love Lucy show? Leave it to Beaver?
We don’t like chick flix.
I like good chick flix myself, and I also like good action flix, and so does my wife. Maybe it’s just me.
This stuff gets old. It’s endearing, I suppose, but it’s also out of date, and some of this — like respect and appreciation, or leadership, are gender specific — is not that good for anybody.
How are we different from apes? Apes also pass culture onto groups, apes can be violent, apes can be empathetic, but no other species has the power for the abstract.
And why does this matter? How does it affect our lives?
Robert Zapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and a favorite professor at Stanford, gave this talk last Saturday as part of Stanford graduation. He starts at 4:51.
If you can’t see the video here, you can click here for the source on youtube.
I’ve reached 61 years old now, and we’re six months away from a 40th wedding anniversary, and in all my life, the best definition of love I’ve ever run across is this one:
And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body.
No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.
That’s from the 1995 novel Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières. I heard it first as delivered by a father to his grown-up daughter in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a 2001 movie starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz.
One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:
For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.
What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough.
“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. For years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”
A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.
The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.
Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.
I liked this, from the same post:
Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”
So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.
I picked this up browsing Seth Godin’s recent post over the weekend. He had it here, as part of a riff on the new world of commercial advertising on youtube. Good post too, but I ended up thinking this Dove commercial on youtube deserves special attention.
(If you don’t see the video, click here for the Youtube source.)
I assume you’re aware of how much we distort the supposedly ideal beauty in women. I am. But we forget. This is a bad thing, it hurts people, both women and men, and we should remind ourselves frequently.
but at some point I woke up and saw the specifics of the Catholic Church preaching against condoms in Africa (among other places), against gays being treated equally, and when I add that to the harm done through all this time, I couldn’t take it. It’s not just neutral; it’s doing evil. For years I forgave the church leaders for their ignorance, granted them their good intentions, but enough is enough. They are doing harm to many with their preaching. It’s not just an opinion when it comes from the pulpit. With great power comes great responsibility.
My dad turns 90 today. He plays golf or tennis almost daily, he’s on the web a lot, follows the stock market as if it were a fulltime job, and he’s very sharp on politics and public policy. That’s him at right during World War II. 
And dad has something to tell us all about relationships too. After his wife (my mom) died when they were both in their 60s, he married again at age 69. He and his wife Liz had a 20th anniversary earlier this year. That’s them at right, taken a couple years ago. Both of them were then in their 80s. 
