Reading Too Much Into It

Your humble host is, despite all odds, a practicing Catholic.

When I’m confronted with my crass hypocrisy by either my progressive/feminist friends or my Catholic friends, I generally have two answers:

1)  Hypocrisy (especially the sexual variety) is the birthright of all Irish Catholics.

2)  Less flippantly, I quote Graham Greene. “Continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.”

Part of me thinks the joke is the better answer; we must all learn to live with certain inconsistencies in our lives.  Less broadly, we must all learn to live with contradictions and imperfections in our inner lives.  We’re all sinners, after all, and abiding inner turmoil for the sake of preserving the status quo is a good personal definition of sin.  Quite Catholic of me, I know, in both my willingness to blame the individual and in my obtuseness.  

My personal confusion aside, I read things like this (especially coming on the heels of the California gay marriage decision), and I want to down a shot of Bushmills, put on an orange scarf, and skip down to the nearest Episcopalian church whistling “We Sail The Ocean Blue.”