Hell to Pay

Hell to Pay
(November 23, 2015: for Mary Oliver)
I met a woman today who told me she was going to Hell.
Because she was gay.
Some bible-loving Christian told her so.
Into the fray.
Read your bible, find a good Christian man.
And also pray.
She would never see her beloved mother again.
Hell to pay.
Her sainted mother had died two years before.
Eternal Day.
No Heaven of course for her ungodly daughter.
Only clay.
I suspected she was already in hell.
Fearing to stay.
Salvation?: to be herself, holding to the truth of her heart.
And all crass ignorance at bay.
Lord,
have we not driven our sisters and brothers to the edge of mental illness and beyond by our un-Christian bible-thumping?

———————-
A friend reminded me of the wondrously beautiful and marvellously insightful poem Prayer, it doesn’t have to be a blue iris, by the American poet Mary Oliver of Provincetown, Massachusetts. In her collection Thirst (2006), she grieves for the death of Mary Malone Cook, love of her life and partner of more than 40 years until Mary’s death in 2005.

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Massimo Faggioli reports on the outcome of the synod in http://www.globalpulsemagazine.com/news/life-begins-at-50/2070

“Yet the final document, which received the quorum of the two thirds for all its paragraphs, is more cautious than the text of 2014.
It is also silent on some important issues, namely the attitude of the Church towards gay people (except a weak passage on families with gay members).”
“But in this sense the final relatio of 2015 is a document that gives us a picture of the Church – more accurately, of its bishops – that is closer to reality,”
“The Synod also showed that much of the Catholic debate today is the expression of a debate between American bishops. The fact that they disagreed in public … is in itself surprising. It is the symptom of the extremism and sectarianism of some … but also the sign of Francis’ breakthrough in the American Catholic hierarchy.”
“The Synod’s final document is important, but it says less about the future direction of the Church than Francis’ great speeches of October 17 (a new ecclesiological framework for a synodal Church) and October 24 (against the ideologues in the Church). This is why the Synod of 2015 will disappoint some liberals, but it is clearly a victory for Francis.”

With open hands

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Chris McDonnell, writing in the Catholic Times, pays tribute to Henri Nouwen and finds that one of his metaphors ‘with open hands’ to be ‘very pertinent to our present times. A few days back we saw pictures of Francis at Al Azhar mosque in Cairo where he embraced the mosque’s Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayeb, who urged the West not to hold an entire religion “accountable for the crimes of any small group of followers.” That image of greeting between a Christian and a Muslim runs counter to our populist press view of castigation of a whole people through the actions of a few.’

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