You may recall me saying that the chef at Hillel isn't Jewish (yay gentiles!). Well, one day I went into Hillel to work on some stuff and ordered lunch at the cafe. He called me back into the kitchen to chat while he made my food. He asked me once last year about conversion, but we've gotten a lot closer since then, so he asked again. I told him I am starting to think about it more seriously. He said, you know that's great if you do and what's great about Hillel is they'll welcome you if you convert and they'll welcome you if you don't. Whatever choices you make, people here are going to accept them and be cool with it. Then he asked me about my childhood and religious background. So predictable. I explained the very liberal, open, Catholic household in which I was raised - that my brother went to Catholic school for 7 years but he switched to public schools when I started. The chef was raised Catholic, too, and he told me his excellent story...
He went to Catholic school through the 8th grade. At some point before that, his parents got divorced. Now, if for some reason you are unfamiliar with the Catholic stance on divorce - either you live under a rock or are from Mars - let me explain in a very simple way: it's a BIG NO NO. The official rules say NO DIVORCE in big black letters, bolded and underlined, twice. The Church will still recognize you as married, and they say G-d does, too. A famous case of the Church not allowing divorce is Henry VIII of England. Google it. But I digress. So his parents are divorced. Few years later, his mom wants to get remarried. You may be thinking that the Church said no, absolutely not. False. They said no conditionally. If she were to make a very large donation to the Church, they would recognize her new marriage as valid.
If the word that comes to mind here is hypocrisy then you are spot on. To be perfectly honest, if I had to choose just one word to describe the Catholic Church, it would be hypocrisy. This is terribly ironic because I vividly remember learning this word for the first time in church. At some point in the New Testament, Jesus talks about hypocrites and how they suck and all that. I was about 5 when I heard this word in the second reading during mass. I tugged at my mother's sleeve and asked "Mom, what's hypocrite?" She said "It's someone who says not to do something but then does it anyways." Small child confused look. "Like if someone tells you not to smoke cigarettes then goes and smokes one. That's a hypocrite."It seems the Church will let you smoke all the cigarettes you want so long as you pay them lots of money. This apparently doesn't violate their moral code in anyway. While my family's experience with the hypocrisy of the Church isn't quite the same as his and maybe isn't as dramatic, it also has to do with their laws on marriage. Not only will the Church not recognize a new marriage after a divorce, they will not recognize any marriage performed outside of the Church, even if it is the first one for both people. Basically, if your marriage does not perfectly fulfill their requirements (save for any monetary bribes or payments) then you're not married to them. So, what I am trying to get at here is that my brother and I weren't supposed to be baptized.
My parents didn't get married in the Church, or in a church at all. They got married at justice of the peace. The Church makes you do a full year of marriage counseling before you can get married. It's to make sure you're compatible or some crap like that. My dad told the priest straight up, "I've been with her for five years. We're compatible. I don't need counseling." When the priest refused to give in, they said fine, we just won't get married here. They had things to do, children to have, lives to build. Well, they actually waited almost 5 more years before having a child but they probably didn't know that at the time. A week or two after my brother was born, my mom calls the church to arrange his baptism. They tell her no. They say she and my dad weren't married in the Church so their son isn't a legitimate child and cannot be baptized. They will need to be remarried in the Church and then he can be baptized. Oh damn, were my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents mad. Like my parents were really going to get re-married? They don't have time to be re-married, especially with all the hoops a Catholic marriage entails. My grandma and great-grandma went to the church and had a word with the priest. Then my brother was baptized.
What happened? I always got the impression my grandma and great-grandma pulled the money card. You threaten to take away that regular donation from a long-standing Catholic family, and you're gonna have issues. That's why the priest gave in. There were no problems when my baptism rolled around, although it was performed at a much later date than normal (3 months after I was born). I guess no one was concerned about the fate of my soul being stuck in limbo for all of eternity. Probably because that doesn't happen.
So the chef finished that year in his Catholic school so he could be confirmed, but his brother was taken out of school right after that episode. His mom sat them down and said you guys are old enough to decide for yourselves what you want to do, but I am not going to go to church there anymore. So they didn't go to a Catholic church anymore. Sometimes he and his family now go to a non-denominational church, but they're not very religious. He likes to talk about G-d without calling him any name, i.e. Jesus, and without drawing any pictures, i.e. of Jesus, which I think is pretty cool. It makes me feel better that I can see the options for my future in him and other people at Hillel. Though at this point I would rather do the work to convert to Judaism than have no religion at all, at least I know I have another good avenue to go on.
Three jobs -- wow! I don't blame you for not blogging much. I'm trying to keep a private journal of Jewish stuff that goes on in my life, and I can't keep up with it with only one job.
ReplyDeleteThat's great that you can talk to the Hillel chef. I didn't even know that non-Jews could have a job like that (I just assumed that one absolutely had to be Jewish to prepare kosher food), but I suppose being under supervision of a rabbi must be sufficient.
My parents were both previously married/divorced (no children, luckily) before marrying each other. They also got married by the justice of the peace. Five years later they got married in the Catholic Church after going through the annulment process, but it was after my older sister and I were both baptized. They were lucky to have a very accepting priest (who my dad says was the reason he didn't leave Catholicism). That's terrible that both your parents and the chef's had to go through those things, but still, it doesn't surprise me that they did. In elementary school (when I had to go to Mass every week with my class), I got to know a variety of priests over the years as they came and went, and some of them seemed more stringent/"THIS IS CATHOLIC DOCTRINE" while others seemed more accepting/lenient. We even had a pastor who brought this whole controversy in the parish for hiring some woman as "executive director" (not a position in the church previously) and paying her tons of money, as well as putting the parish in millions of dollars of debt by mismanaging the money.