JAMES
MARY GREW UP IN A METHODIST CHURCH. But in fundamental ways, she was born to be a Catholic. It’s tailor-made for her. She loves the traditions, the rituals, the beauty and the ornateness of the churches.
Since we moved to New Orleans, she has taken to Catholicism with the fervor of a convert. She doesn’t just go on Sundays. She goes during the week. And down here, people take their religion seriously. Everybody either knows the name of the archbishop or knows him personally. Mary’s definitely in the latter crowd
I’m a cradle Catholic, born and raised. But these days I think of myself as more of a cafeteria Catholic. I pick and choose what to believe, and what not to believe.
I obviously don’t buy the “no birth control” argument. Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. In terms of abortion, I’m not sure if you’d really want to be part of a church that was actually pro-abortion. I’m sympathetic to difficult choices people have to make in life. I obviously believe abortion should remain legal. But I don’t find the Church’s opposition to it particularly surprising or troubling. It’s understandable. What other position are they supposed to take?
On the topic of gays and gay marriage, I can kind of understand the prohibition on getting married in the Catholic Church. Okay, fine. But the Church’s whole vehement opposition to gays in general, it’s just ludicrous. It makes the Church look out of touch and unrealistic. It’s a battle they’re going to lose, if they haven’t lost already.
In Louisiana, like in so many other places, it’s staggering the number of people who have little or no health care, who are suffering from mental illnesses, who are underfed or underemployed. The world has enough crises. And Church leaders are spending all this time and energy fighting gay people? It’s more than a waste of time. It’s a colossal misrepresentation of what they should be doing.
The truth of it is, I’m not going to change the Church. The Church isn’t going to change me. We just sort of live with each other.
MARY
THE MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED question I get about faith comes from non-Catholics, who always want to know what epiphany triggered my conversion to Catholicism. Whether convert, revert or a cradle Catholic, most of the community of faith will tell you the gift of faith is an ongoing journey, not a slap-across-the-face revelation. There are certainly blessed moments of clarity and joy and humility, occurring through deep prayer or sometimes just out of nowhere.
My religious journey started way before faith and is based on reasoning. The beauty and order of the world is too great to be the result of a random collision of particles. And the truth of love and evil is too undeniable to occur by happenstance. I am a faith and reason gal, of the JP2 variety: Fides et Ratio.
I wish—I pray—I could convey what the gift of grace is and means to me, but its one of those things: if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it. And if you do get it, you know it is inexpressible, though some great minds through history have given expression to it, which sparkle and delight and stop you in your tracks. Thomas Aquinas, C. S. Lewis, Archbishop Sheen, Dietrich von Hildebrand, G. K. Chesterton. Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and our new Pope Francis have the voice of angels. And George Weigel can explain everything and open your mind to the inexplicable issues.
If there was one catalyst it was the timely presence of a very learned and dedicated man of faith, Monsignor Christopher Nalty, who returned from the Vatican to New Orleans about the same time we did. It’s a daunting path to get on and a harder one to stay on, but he is a born shepherd.
Something beautiful and true occurs almost daily to validate my “nothing is random” belief. But Monsignor Nalty is a walking-talking-spot-on consistent validation of God’s will on earth. Try to imagine this scene last winter at the conclave in crowded St. Peter’s Square. There he was crushed in the hordes, being bustled about in the rain, responding to the barrage of believers’ questions, explaining in depth the meaning and possibilities of every airborne whiff of smoke emanating from the Vatican fluently in four different languages (which didn’t include English or Latin, which he is also a whiz at). How could that be random?
So if you are wondering about the Catholic faith, do some reading and find another miracle like Monsignor Nalty.
In the meantime, I offer these thoughts.
• • •
This summer, on the day I decided to write some thoughts about my Catholic faith for this book, I went first to a little chapel in Cortona, Italy, a beautiful city on a Tuscan hilltop, where I was staying for part of the summer. In the dark quiet space, I searched for words to describe how such an unworthy one as I have been blessed with such a gift. Faith: what greater gift is there to be given in middle age—or any age? I got down on my knees on the cool marble and prayed and prayed and prayed.
All that came to my mind were the words of the great Christian, Saint Augustine, also a late-in-life convert, whose gratitude for grace comes down to us through the centuries as immediate and pure, and full of feeling, as the day he first wrote his confessions:
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.
But as is the case, great writing like Saint Augustine’s can inhibit rather than inspire. How could I ever come within a million miles of saying it better? Or even just something vaguely original? I have learned that God has multiple ways of communicating and works on his own schedule, which, of course, is totally cool with me.
So I opened my daily prayer book that I use at home, which contains the Magnificat (The Song of Mary), and was so-not-surprised to find the meditation of the day that followed the Gospel of Matthew 13:18–23. Again, the words are not my own, but they say exactly what I feel—and certainly much better than I ever could. And believe me, I’ve tried. Thank you, Walker Percy, the Catholic convert, novelist, essayist and medical doctor who wrote this exchange below.
THE CERTAINTY OF THE HUNDREDFOLD
Q: What kind of Catholic are you . . . a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean . . .
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Q: Grabbed aholt?
> A: A Louisiana expression . . .
Q: How do you account for your belief?
A: I can only account for it as a gift from God.
Q: Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellowman?
A: I don’t know. God does strange things . . .
Q: But shouldn’t one’s faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?
A: Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.
Q: You believe that?
A: Of course.
• • •
The other question I am asked: did my conversion change my views on abortion?
Abortion. What an issue. In a league of its own. Thinking of abortion as an “issue” is like thinking of life and death as just another day at the office.
When you are a young woman, even in this age of prolific birth control options and sonograms and so many couples having problems making a family, abortion is about you, not babies. The moral compass is your rights, your life, not a baby’s and certainly not anything to do with the morality of the culture.
Young women today—not all, certainly fewer it seems than when I was young—think of abortion as I did before I thought about it. When you don’t think about what abortion really is, it’s easy to put it in the basket of “I am woman, I am strong” stuff; to think of it as your personal province: your body, your decision.
And I really do get the desire and need for women to be able to control their professional and personal destinies. And yes, at some level it seems unfair that our window of time to create life often conflicts with our peak career and earning years. And, of course, there can be no greater or more horrific dilemma than the one an unwanted pregnancy presents to a woman.
But the sound of a heartbeat beating separately from your own, long before there is anything in your body that looks remotely like a baby, completely and thoroughly washes away those concerns. Or at least it did for me. And if that heartbeat stops, the world stops, or at least it did for me.
I remember how I felt when I discovered Maxene Fernstrom, my first campaign boss, a woman I looked up to more than anyone, was pro-life. She was a close friend and supporter of Henry Hyde, the pro-life champion of his day. In those days, I did not know one woman that was pro-life. Not that any of us “I can bring home the bacon” babes thought about abortion as having anything to do with a life other than our own. We were “doing our own thing” and on a fast track to glass ceiling crashing.
I know my girls at their young ages have a deeper understanding of the “issue” than I did, due to their Catholic instruction and modern technology and their mother’s haranguing, but still theirs is the age when the “issue” is just not all that real, in the sense that wanting a family is in the far distance. I get that. I do not get grown women not having a deeper conversation about abortion.
Even when I was pro-choice, I did not like the state butting their big all-knowing selves on either side of this most personal business, but even then, I understood a culture that doesn’t revere life and the dignity of individuals was on unsteady ground.
I am pro-life for many reasons and support many pro-life causes; it is literally inconceivable to me that anyone of any party or philosophy or gender or age could support partial-birth abortion. And I hate the politics of abortion, that it is treated like any other political football, as though it were ANWR or taxes.
Americans do revere life, and America was built on both the sanctity and dignity of every individual. And we are uniquely moral. Yet we talk past each other of the most life-affirming and moral issues of all time.
Monsignor Nalty prayed every Saturday for years outside an abortion clinic in New Orleans. And the clinic closed. No telling how many lives he saved, mothers and babies. Many have thanked him for making them stop and think about what they were doing, and for their decision to not do it, but I suspect there are many more families out there he saved and will never know about.
In life, and especially in this country, there is a do-over opportunity for almost everything. Except abortion. That is one bell that can’t be unrung.
JAMES
WASHINGTON IS A DIFFERENT WORLD from New Orleans. Even the stories in Louisiana have a richness and a depth that you just don’t find in Washington. Everything is related to everything else, probably because everyone is sort of related to everyone else. There are voodoo priests and jazz legends, Cajun swashbucklers and Mardi Gras marauders, and any number of wild-ass heroes and scoundrels.
I can’t count how many Washington stories I’ve heard over the years about Congressman So-and-So who was a committee chairman, and how he passed this or that legislation. Or how they had to get an amendment to this certain bill, and so they got a certain congressman drunk, and it all worked out in the end.
That’s all fine, as far as it goes. But the stories down here tend to be a little spicier, a little more irreverent, a little rougher around the edges. Some are mystical. Others are just downright dirty.
I first began to discover this when I was about fifteen years old and my grandfather was on the board of a bank in Baton Rouge. They gave me a job delivering checks and files around town. I used to walk from downtown to the State Capitol during my rounds. They had this huge statue of Huey Long on the Capitol grounds.
This was the late 1950s, only a couple decades removed from when Long was still alive and a very powerful figure. So I’m standing there one day looking up at this statue and wishing I’d been around to see Huey Long in his prime, and along came this groundskeeper I used to stop and shoot the bull with.
I remember saying something like “Huey Long—that guy must have been the biggest thing to ever hit Baton Rouge.”
And the groundskeeper looked back all serious and said, “No, son, he ain’t the biggest.”
I said, “Well, who’s bigger?”
He said, “A woman named Big Red. She come from Port Arthur, Texas, to the inauguration in 1946. Brought the blow job to Baton Rouge. She’s a bigger legend here than Huey Long will ever be.”
I mean, he had her name, the date, even her hometown. I suppose we’ll never know the whole truth about Big Red. She’ll never get her own statue at the Capitol. But I began to understand that day that people down here know a good story when they see one.
MARY
WHEN YOU MAKE A dramatic move to a new planet, it is almost impossible not to compare all your experiences to the ones you had on the previous planet. This is just how human beings are. So along with the questions we asked ourselves—Right decision? Wrong decision?—we also couldn’t help but think of our old home a lot and try to put it in perspective.
Everything in New Orleans—and I mean everything—was different from Washington.
JAMES
HERE’S ANOTHER DIFFERENCE: beignets are an indication of an advanced culture. Doughnuts, they’re an indication of a culture in decline. You can’t even compare the two.
For starters, beignets have a shelf life of like three minutes. You can’t take them home. You don’t eat them as leftovers. They’re delicate, just like New Orleans itself.
The truth of the matter is they are a pain in the ass if you’re the shop owner. Because they only last a few minutes when they’re fresh, you’ve got to keep them coming. If you make too many, you have to throw them away.
Think about any other pastry. The chef comes in at five o’clock in the morning, and he bakes a bunch of croissants and you line them up and sell them all day.
In many ways, beignets are an art form. To make them well takes persistence and dedication. You have to have the oil temperature just right. You have to pace the entire operation throughout the day so you don’t make too few or too many. Many places don’t have the patience or the passion to turn a pastry into
art.
That’s the whole story in a nutshell. Washington is doughnuts. In New Orleans, you eat beignets.
MARY
THERE AREN’T CHURCH BELLS after dark in Washington.
It is considered a disturbance of the peace.
JAMES
IN WASHINGTON, IF YOU WANT, you can basically avoid the other side. You can work with people from your party, socialize with people from your party, expose yourself only to media that espouse the beliefs of your party. It’s possible never to leave the confines of your own tribe.
That’s not the way it works in Louisiana. I may not particularly like the Republicans in Baton Rouge. I may disagree with Bobby Jindal on a lot of his policies. In fact, I can’t stand that his idea of an education plan is to cut funding to state colleges and teach creationism in the schools. I find it offensive to every bone in my body that I’ve got to pay one nickel in taxes for that kind of crap, and I’ve said as much to people who work for him. So I don’t have to agree with Jindal, but I also don’t have the luxury of not getting along with him. I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite. It’s just the reality. If we’re working on the Super Bowl or trying to put together an improvement project in New Orleans, the road almost always passes through the governor’s office. I live in a Republican state, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. I have to deal with that and play nice whenever possible.
Mary faces the same predicament. She lives in a Democratic city. There’s not going to be a Republican mayor of New Orleans—not now, not ever. So unless she wants to completely withdraw from the community, she has to deal with it and put aside partisan politics and work with people on the other side. And she’s done exactly that. I think what we both discovered very quickly is that there are too many things that need to get done here, important things that matter profoundly, to worry too much about anyone’s party affiliation.
Love & War Page 30
