The Reader Travels

Graham Greene actually worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone during World War II, so he had some real life experience to back up his stories of Africa and espionage.

In The Human Factor, Agent Castle spent some time in South Africa, but now he’s back home in London, working in an intelligence office deciphering intercepted messages. As I mentioned before, Graham Greene converted to Catholicism for his wife, and like Greene, Castle also makes certain sacrifices in his life for love. He’s bored in his office job, but that’s what he gets for marrying an African, right?

There’s a job opening up in Sierra Leone, but he won’t get it. He and his wife simply wouldn’t do to represent the British government in Africa. Besides, it’s just too dangerous. They’d be too hard to protect.

The black woman and the white man create a visual symbol of love that unites across diversity. So, Greene was a Protestant and his wife a Catholic. Love found more common ground, something deeper and more meaningful than those outward labels.

And yet, he dwells on the sacrifice. It certainly makes for interesting fiction, though.

When we’re talking about Africa, we can’t forget the European imperialists, spreading their white fingers across the dark continent. Graham Greene is one of my favorite writers, his works adventuring across many continents, including Africa.

Having been raised Catholic and turning away from the Church in my adulthood, I am intrigued by Greene as a man, because he followed the opposite path, converting to Catholicism when his childhood was behind him. He plays the role of the romantic, choosing his faith for the love of a woman. He accepts his choices but constantly doubts himself, wondering if he’ll ever truly be one of them.

You can see Graham Greene in many of his characters, like the wayward priest in The Power and the Glory, a good but flawed man, mired in self doubt, feeling so often like he’s faking it as he ministers to the people of Mexico. In The Heart of the Matter, the first character we see is a fellow named Wilson, and though he isn’t the main character, he does bear some of Greene’s traits. He’s a romantic like Greene, trying to fit in with the other imperialists since he has just recently arrived in West Africa.

One thing to notice from the beginning of the novel is Wilson’s ultra awareness of race. He stands on the balcony of his club on a Sunday, waiting for his drink to arrive and watching the people around him. He ponders “the young negresses,” “the black clerks,” “one bearded Indian in a turban,” “a black boy” who brought him his gin, his own “pallor,” all in the first two pages of the book.

He also ponders his secret love of poetry and his futile attempts to keep from standing out among the white crowd. It’s his eyes that give him away, “a brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.” When all he really wants to be is a white sheep.

In Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, Lissie is an old woman who tells stories of her past lives. Although she has lived in the southeastern United States all her life, many of her memories are from Africa.

She remembers living in the African trees in one of her earliest incarnations. She remembers living on the ground in a later life, and she remembers, “the chopping down of our hair,” as if their hair were a mighty tree. She remembers fellow Africans dealing in slaves. She remembers the priests, “Of course they were feared, if not respected, and of course the fear looked like respect, I guess.”

I played flute in my parents’ Catholic church after I graduated from college. Like many others I was disillusioned with the Church after early feelings of oppression and some bit of higher education. Anyway, I needed a musical outlet, and the Church provided that for me, so I was prepared to set my disillusionment aside.

But I remember the last mass I went to. A missionary priest had traveled to Texas to perform the sermon for us that day. He was there to ask for donations to support the Church’s missionary work in places like Cuba, the Dominican Republic and West Africa. He spoke of West Africa saying, “The Muslims aren’t there yet, and they’ll use force if necessary.” I was so disgusted with the hypocrisy that I never went back.

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit these beautiful countries myself, I want to know more about them.

Since my brother was in the US Air Force at the time, and his visit to Colombia was work-related, he went with the safety and structure of a well-planned government venture. Of course, being US military, he could easily be a target, but he was well prepared before he ever stepped onto the plane bound for South America.

This type of traveling reminds me of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, the story of a man who writes guides for business travelers. His whole philosophy is that if you surround yourself with order, structure and routine, then you can handle the uncertainty and chaos of life and world travel.

The one thing that stands out in my memory of my brother’s trip to Colombia are his photos of the stations of the cross along a hillside, leading to a cross at the top of the hill. With my Catholic upbringing, this is the one thing that connected me to Colombia, this image of a shared spiritual history, and the safety and structure of repeated ritual.

Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, created new worlds and new languages, and popularized the fantasy genre of fiction, but he was also proud to call himself a Catholic.

And if J.R.R. was alive today, he would probably be among those enraged by the chocolate Jesus. I wonder which would be more offensive to him - that the Messiah was edible, or that he was naked.

It’s Holy Thursday today, the day we celebrate the Last Supper where Jesus said, “Take my body and eat it.” Of course, according to the Holy Church, He tasted like flat, flavorless bread instead of sweet, sweet chocolate. But I believe that if Jesus had ever eaten chocolate, he would have approved. He might even have seen it as a very special gift from his father.

My man often asks me, “If you went to church every Sunday as a kid, how come I know more about The Bible than you do?” The answer is simple to me. It’s because I was raised Catholic. Here are the facts:

1) Church was meant to teach us self-control and obedience. The idea was to sit still for an hour and pretend we were listening… or else!

2) We are not supposed to read The Bible. We are supposed to listen to the priest telling us about The Bible.

3) If we do read The Bible, we have to read a pre-approved Catholic version of The Bible.

Did you know that the majority of the Vatican’s banned book list is made up of different versions of The Bible? This was one of the interesting facts I learned during my two years of study in library science. I happen to believe this particular fact.

I don’t, however, believe the “facts” my ex-boyfriend’s roommate told me about the Vatican being a center of occult worship because of all the occult books in its basement and how the Roman Catholic Church secretly sainted Adolph Hitler. Not that it couldn’t happen. It’s just that the guy pretended he had been incarcerated in a penitentiary so his friends would think he was cool, and I just have to consider my source.

I loved The Brothers McMullen. With its indie appeal, the acting is crap, but the dialogue is brilliant. Ed Burns beautifully captures the Catholic American dilemma, reconciling American culture with sin and guilt, using religion as a motivator, an excuse, and the basis for some really screwed up logic.

The youngest brother, Patrick, is so afraid of commitment, he tells his girlfriend he can’t move in with her because of his religion, yet he admits to himself, “If I obeyed every rule that said I should wait until I got married, I’d still be a virgin.”

At one point Patrick is so consumed with guilt, he utters the statement, “I’m a Catholic. My life is over. I’m going to Hell.” I could completely relate to this feeling. At one point in my life I was convinced that marrying my abusive, illiterate, broke-tooth, inbred boyfriend was the only way I would be able to redeem my soul for the mortal sin of having sex with him before I got married. Thank God my reason finally overcame me.

But of all the things Patrick McMullen says, my favorite was a phrase that sums up his whole character. He says, “I don’t need any new ideas. I’m confused enough already.”

I always watch Edward Burns movies because there’s just something about him I love. And the way he pokes fun at Catholic-flavored wrong-headedness is plain adorable to me. One of my favorite exchanges in She’s The One was near the end of the movie where Ed’s character says something like, “But you don’t even believe in God,” and his father answers, “That doesn’t mean I stopped being a good Catholic.”

I didn’t really enjoy Ash Wednesday, though. Well done, certainly, in its darkness, but it just didn’t make me feel good. Through the whole movie, all I wanted was for him to wash his face. My OCD was kicking in, and I kept rubbing my forehead, trying to get the ashes off.

So, today is Ash Wednesday, representing the beginning of Jesus’s 40 days in the desert. And in honor of those 40 days, we make a symbolic self-sacrifice, focusing on the fasting and harsh conditions he endured because maybe in this small way we can be like Jesus.

I gave up something for Lent once. In my freshman year in college, my roommate was like a real Catholic, so she gave up something every year, and she inspired me to try it out. I gave up naps. For a whole 40 days, I didn’t take a single nap.

But like every good Catholic, I used a certain amount of bargaining. It didn’t count as a nap if I woke up after spending the night at my boyfriend’s apartment, then drove back to the dorms and went back to sleep. That was just going back to sleep. And I certainly wasn’t giving up the sex.

Have you heard of this thing called “cringe therapy” wherein people dig up embarrassing things they wrote during adolescence and publish them in a book or read them in front of a crowd of drunks? Well, I’m not sure what’s therapeutic about it, but the idea is most intriguing.

So, I went looking through my old journals to see if there was anything truly cringe-worthy to be found. The journals from those terrible teens were actually lost, but I did find something from when I was thirteen, still mostly flat chested, but on the edge of puberty and rebellion.

It was a spiral notebook from something we did called “Family Dialogue.” My parents picked this up from a Marriage Encounter retreat they went on through their church. They would ask us questions to help us “get in touch with our feelings,” and everyone in the family was supposed to go into a quiet corner of the house and write their answer to the question.

Now, granted, I look back on these exercises as a really strong growth experience in my life. I can make fun of it, but I’m really glad they did it.

With that said, looking back on the things I wrote, I can only say, I was a little robot. Nearly everything I wrote was a regurgitation of a lecture my parents had given me before we wrote down the question of the day. They’d lecture about violence in TV and cartoons, about the evils of atheists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair trying to take Christ out of Christmas, about finding Jesus in pop music, because when Journey sang, “Here I am, with open arms,” it was like they were inviting the spirit into their hearts.

Even though I was already smoking and drinking by thirteen, I sure was a “good” girl. Thank God I’ve been Saved since then.

San Francisco was named after the most beloved of all Catholic saints - St. Francis of Assissi. Now, whenever I think of St. Francis, I think of Bambi and Thumper and all the cartoon birds and butterflies of the forest, because he’s known for his love of nature and all the living creatures of the earth.

A couple of years ago, I went to an art exhibit that featured some paintings from Caravaggio, and I got a new image of St. Francis, and strangely enough, this one matches my image of San Francisco. It’s called Saint Francis of Assissi in Ecstasy.

Don’t you love it?