man of god

i describe the US to people all the time and take pains to say how open and enlightened it is. it doesn’t seem like the US of my youth, where it was considered wrong to have friends from another religion. my grandmother told me of her youth when it was forbidden to go to a protestant friends house, thankfully those times were gone.

i was in the US and was taking my son to ccd, this is what i have termed “catholic school”. living in a secular country with separation of church as state the children are only exposed to their religious heritage if you get up early on saturday morning and take them to the small school building attached to the parish. when we discussed sending him to this, i had a minor reservation remembering back to the time our daughter came home from catholic school in tears.

our daughter was upset because of the message of that morning’s teaching. they had been told that rich people were going to hell, because they became rich by focusing more on themselves and work, rather than giving themselves completely to god and living a life focused on enriching their souls rather than their pocket book. she was in tears because she felt singled out, among her friends she was clearly one of those with the most, with a big house, vacations and parents who ran a company and worked for the things they had.

our daughter was sent home feeling as though her parents were bad people who would be punished for their sins. i held her shaking in my arms while i calmed her down and explained that this message was not one that our church should be sending. i told her about our acts of charity that were only possible because of our work. i also told her that our work was focused to give her a rounded education which would let her see the world openly and fairly, give her the tools to help the world and make friends no matter where life took her.

as i drove our son to “catholic school” i asked him if he liked going. he said he did. i reminded him that although we were teaching him to see himself as a catholic, he had to remember that this did not mean that catholics were right and people with other religious beliefs were wrong. this sense of correctness and exclusion are the issues which i feel keep the world from finding peace, and i did not want him to slip into this in any way. i reminded him that we had friends who were christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist, agnostic and atheist. he simply looked at me and said, “i know dad”.

happy believing that he did know, that he understood how important it is to respect others and allow himself to see them as people and friends first, and not see anyone as a caricature built by the media or society, we got out of the car and walked to the school building that for the next 90 minutes he would be taught to be a good catholic. as we walked in the rain to the door, i noticed the parish priest, father stephen. stephen is a nice man, is good with children and is the priest whose close minded sermon from the pulpit drove me to stop attending mass. he asserted that the church had no homosexual priests, had never allowed a pedophile to stay within the priesthood and was being targeted by the media in an unfair attempt to hurt the church. i found it objectionable that he would use his position to say such things, which were known by almost all catholics to be completely false. i discussed this with my wife and we agreed that i should not go back until this blew over, because if he did it again i was going to stand up and tell him how wrong he was.

as we walked in he said, “hello father”, he had never learned my name, and called most parents mother or father. he asked me if i had an umbrella, i told him that i did but that it was in malaysia. i would think he might have noticed that i had been absent for years and that another male parishioner (one whose name he did know) was now sitting next to my wife at mass. he asked why i was in malaysia, i told him i lived there. he looked shocked and asked how it was. i used my practiced answer, i like it the weather, food and people are wonderful. it’s a nice life and a good change of pace from the US.

the next words out of his mouth stopped me in my tracks. “you must be careful. the muslims are a vicious people.” i took a beat, looked at him, and said, “father, that is not true, i have very good friends who are muslim, their faith is one of peace and they are wonderful people who i love to be near.” he replied with, “no, their book tells them to use violence.” i was simply shocked. i had almost no idea what to say. i explained that was not true. the wahhabist teachings do teach jihad as a seemingly sixth pillar of islam, but that i view as an alteration of the pure teachings. he said, he was not sure, clearly not educated on this subject at all, he reminded me that “other priests have told me so.” at that moment the bell rang and i thankfully moved away from him to send my son to be educated in our religion based on love.

as my day went on, and as days have passed, i continue to think about this exchange. these are the first openly hostile comments anyone has made to me about the muslim world in the two years i have lived here. it is also a shock to me that a “man of god”, the man we entrust both our children’s religious education and our souls to, could be so ignorant and closed minded. years before coming to malaysia, i had spent a week long vacation reading on the history of judism, christianity and islam in an effort to understand the world better. clearly my priest had never taken the time to do the same.

our son is still going to “catholic school” each week. i am not going to pull him away from his education and his heritage as i allowed myself to be driven away. but i am also going to continue to remind him that we have close friends around the world who come from many religious traditions. i think the core element of these friends is ability to accept us for who we are, and to understand that we are not our church. i am very glad that i am not my church. as far as i can tell my church is one of closed minded ignorance that is more focused on self protection and narrow-minded self congratulation than on deepening its understanding of the world.

we will continue to educate our children to be citizens of the world. we will continue to travel and to enjoy getting to know people from all around the world. we will help them to be more open minded and loving than anyone around them that is focused on separating the world by color, religion, sexual preference or any other belief that some people my use as a wedge to separate one group from another. i just hope in the next generation hard work and loving people who are different than ourselves will be ideas embraced not only by our children, but buy their church and the society they live within. whatever that church and society are.