Minutiae

As I write this, my granddaughter Aurora, the one who wanted violin lessons and so gave me the gift of learning to play a new instrument, is writing an essay arguing against glowing cats. This too, it turns out, is a thing in this weird world.

Her third reason (“thirdly,” she says) why glowing cats are wrong, after “we should use less important animals than cats, like rats or mice” and something about how we should get over worrying about tripping on our cats in the dark, has to do with the fact that the cats have to eat jellyfish to make them glow. I didn’t get to read enough of her essay to figure out whether she is concerned about the jellyfish, or, more likely for this cat-loving vegetarian, she thinks we are making the cats do something gross.


Many years ago I found myself saying something positive about the church I go to when I said to a friend, “Oh, you don’t have to believe in God to go there.” I’ve wondered what I meant by that for years.


“Twist me and turn me and show me the elf. I looked in the mirror and saw—[wait for it while you twirl]—myself.” I remember these ritual words from  the ceremony in which I moved from being a Brownie to being a Girl Scout, which tells me I was probably in second grade at St. Louise de Marillac. This is the year I learned to write in cursive and spent my days with Sr. Ernestine in the classroom across from the lockers. I think it was also the year when we watched, in preparation for making our First Holy Communion, a movie where we saw evil souls being damned to a fiery hell.

The rhyme appeared in my head sometime Tuesday evening before the election results were in, when it was still possible to imagine seeing something other than ourselves in the mirror.


T3 (if we’re counting these post-mirror days) it’s Veterans Day, and I show up for a professional development day at my school fresh off an evening in the emergency room.

I won’t describe the whole, healing day, but here’s how lunch went: a physics teacher I play mandolin with some Sunday afternoons sang Irish songs. Then our service learning director showed us how to bang our arms on our tables “to make our silverware dance” while she sang (in Latvian) a Latvian table song. Then a Latin teacher got up with his guitar and said “I think we should sing Hallelujah,” so we did. Then a chemistry teacher and an English teacher rocked out to bring the mood back up, before we closed with our Director of Diversity singing (in Hebrew) from the Song of Solomon.

A little bit later we lay on quilts in the grass reading “Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education” from the Southern Poverty Law Center.


I can say with great certainty all the things I don’t believe about believing in God. Not Santa Claus. Not involved in the Cubs breaking the streak. Not interested in my traffic problems. No big front porch with rocking chairs in the sky. I don’t go to church because I believe in God, I finally realized. I go to church because I believe in people.

I remembered that moment this morning when my priest, who looked a little ragged on T5 after spending his week immersed in organizations that work with immigrants, said that this isn’t a time for talking about what we believe. Instead of reciting the creed we spoke the beatitudes. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” we said out loud together. “For they shall be satisfied.”


I’ve cleared up some of the glowing-cat confusion. Something from the jellyfish is inserted into the eggs of the cat. (She’s a seventh grader, so that’s the gross part.) And it turns out she really would be just fine if they’d only use mice or rats or some other animal we don’t like as much.

That’s a connection I wasn’t planning to make here.


Some of the last words spoken in our faculty meeting came from the man who had chanted the psalm at lunch. He quoted Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, a Yemeni poet who said, “Even though there be no mercy in the world, the gates of heaven will never be barred.”

I don’t pretend to know what Rabbi Shabazi meant. He was speaking to people who had been driven into the desert from their homes, who were watching their families suffer and die around them. I want to think that there were warm, sad evenings in the desert, evenings when tired, hurting people gathered around a campfire and someone started to sing. I want to think Rabbi Shabazi meant, “Even though there be no mercy in the world, there will be mercy in the world.”


The first thing we did on our professional development day was write one sentence in big letters on black paper about why we teach. Then we were photographed with our signs.

The last thing we did on professional development day was watch a video showing everyone who works at our school holding up their sign set to another Leonard Cohen song. “I teach,” mine said, “because I believe love wins.”

It’s not a creed, I realized as we spoke the beatitudes this morning. It’s a call to action.

 

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