Like most people I have four grandparents. Two of them spoke English, one sort of did, and one didn’t. The one that didn’t went to church, but he’d also curse the saints, so I don’t know how he really felt, if I’m being honest. The one that sort of spoke English, my grandmother, was rarely seen without a bible and my final memory of her was a tearful and moving and world-shifting sight of her being prayed over by a kind black man she had a crush on. 

The two grandparents that definitely spoke English were deeply religious, passionately so, it defined them. At least it did in my eyes. 

These are four people to whom I owe everything. Humble people with good hearts they treated their children well and we loved them until they died. Nobody’s perfect but they were good.

They weren’t fools.

We admire their cooking and their language and their clothes, their kindness and their discipline, their adventure and their foritude, but we treat their faith as the quirk of a bygone age.

If the way they ate was wisdom, and the way they carried themselves was with honor and poise, why is it we think the way they organized their minds and their hearts was an ill-concieved and fear-mongered self-deception?

It’s disrespectful and it robs us of more of the tradition we so sorely lack.

In the same way I wish I could have learned tile setting from Nicola, car maintainance from Ron, Pasta making from Speranza and poetry from Janet, I’d now have liked to discuss theology and that feeling that’s hard to describe with each of them. I’d probably still be too abashed to do it properly, but it’d be worth a try.