My Favorite Parson[1]

I was very fortunate to grow up around reverent and sensitive portrayals of religious people and ideas. This was a daily influence and not confined to weddings, funerals, baptisms, Easter, or Christmas.[2]

We were of course instructed in rights and wrongs and who was more right than others, and Baptists of course were at one end of that scale and non-Baptists at the other, but the Baptists I grew up with were tolerant and loving, and by their silence on one thing or another, often allowed non-Baptists some unspoken but genuine connection to Jesus that we didn't understand and preferred not to analyze.

My earliest lasting encounter with a Catholic priest was Fr Mulcahy on M*A*S*H, probably the single most influential and sensitive portrayal of a cleric (of any faith) in popular media.[3]

I could just as easily have been exposed to an unkind portrayal, heard angry words at home, or had my palms relentlessly smacked by a cruel nun, but that never happened. I knew many Catholic boys, mostly good boys, but the closest I came to a priest was Fr Mulcahy.

Like wet cement, that character mixed with the bells of St Luke's by Grandma and Grandpa Cairns's house and created a matrix in which other things have become fixed. (Read more here>)

I wonder at those who have the opposite experience, and religious things are presented as ignorant, stupid, or painful. Are they accountable for their bad opinion?

I don't think so. You can't blame a child for how they're wired. That's our fault.

(Is my good opinion any more valid than a bad one if opinions are only the result of stuff that gets stuck in our matrix? I struggle with that.)

c0

Every Sunday our family drove past Our Lady of Peace on W 38th Street on our way to Bethel Baptist Church, which was just a little further down the road. A black traffic cop was always out front directing traffic at that time, and we began to wave to him, and he began to wave back. He had no association with Our Lady of Peace, of course; he was probably just making some extra money by taking Sunday morning duty there.

This is a nice memory that's not directly related to this topic, but it was one of those many religious things that became fixed in the matrix.

c0

[1]
If you don't get the reference in the subject of this post, it's to an old TV show, My Favorite Martian>

[2]
Baptists don't go to church on Christmas Day (unless it falls on Sunday), they don't use the word "Advent," and they don't refer to Jesus, Mary and Joseph as "the holy family"; but they do celebrate Christmas in many wonderful ways, and Jesus is the reason, the focus, the center of it all.
It is about the only time, BTW, that you see Mary in a Baptist church, and she looks very much I imagine like Mary in a Catholic church. She appears in Sunday school lessons, on the cover of the bulletin (a weekly handout with the order of service), and in the persons of little girls in Christmas pageants.

[3]
Is there a difference between a TV minister and a real minister? Yes, as much as between history and a history book.

c0

Started: 2012-09-27