'Twasn't Customary
In some places it still isn't. I start with memoir musings here.
When my parents were growing into their values, worship outside their tradition simply wasn’t done. The Edwardian, barely post-Victorian, values of the macro-culture wouldn’t permit it. The Roman Catholic church of my parents, as-was then, wouldn’t permit it either.
In the 1930s a radio personality named Father Coughlin (see my post, August 14) was touting his deep, if aberrant, conviction that “only Roman Catholics go to Heaven”. A joke circulating around, but definitely not in, Mom and Dad’s social circle at the time took on Father Coughlin’s attitude:
A Protestant had passed away and was receiving a guided tour of the wonders on the other side of The Pearly Gates. At one point his guide led him past a high stone wall. “What is that for?” the newcomer asked. “Shhhh…,” he was admonished. “Don’t disturb the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones up here.”
Whoever made up that joke was right about Coughlin, the last century’s prejudices and the sincere and misinformed among its Catholics. But if each of us is part and parcel of life on a world the Creator of the Universe founded in Love and is said to have declared very good, I ask myself WWLD: What would Love do?
One of my cousins, then nine years old, was in the kitchen with his family on September 11, 2001, when someone asked, “Where was Jesus when that happened?”
The child responded, “He was in the buildings with the people.” Sure sounds to me like that child knew what Love would do.
In the buildings with the people then, but what about today?
Same infinite compassion. And I suspect that today Love walks the long dusty road of life and hopes that someone, somewhere will take compassion on a stranger, kneel down and wash those cracked, sore, filthy feet.