Lost Boys

So December found me wrong about love, what other things have I been wrong about over the years. I started thinking on it hard after that last post ( and hard it was since I know just about everything) but then work took off, projects came in a torrent along with Christmas and New Years, time flew by as it is want to do, and I sort of forgot about the possibility that I might be wrong about things. Me wrong? Ha! The next thing you'll be telling me is Payton Manning would lose a football playoff game by playing weeny football, or that the NRA wouldn't quietly go away after the Newtown CT shootings, or that Christmas wouldn't be as emotionally and financially satisfying as it usually is. Me wrong? Then why would fate involve me in  a huge project relocating the good Fathers of our local Jesuit collage into temporary digs while their cozy residence hall is being renovated? Damned fate, I've been avoiding the catholic church for thirty-five years, nay all religions, because they're evil. Maybe there are occasional anomalies in our multi-verse where true love can thrive but religion? Bah!

Just a comfy little crash pad paid for with gold extorted from the poor. Each brick washed with alter boy tears.

So me, still not wrong. I'm sure you have managed to glean from my previous posts that I have a strong aversion to organized anything and the Catholic Church sure seems organized. Organized enough to hush up their pedophile scandal for more than 30 years, organized enough to turn a profit off of orphans in the Montreal dioceses, organized enough for the Magadelene laundries in Ireland. So maybe a few good eggs managed to surface in Latin America in the 60's, ( you know; feed the poor and comfort the suffering) just don't tell Bill O'Rielly and American Catholics about it. I still consider it a good policy when you meet a priest, or minister for that matter, to consider them guilty until proven innocent and I was about to meet 41 priests, Jesuits at that. Why just search the internet for a few moments and my righteous anger is nothing compared to the heaping piles of Jesuit conspiracies about to engulf us. I was wrong once, but me and the internet? Come on!

My preconceptions about the clergy weren't disappointed when the project started in September. I was introduced to a steady stream of imploded vaguely Irish looking little dudes in their 60's and 70's, minus 2 young guys from Africa and 1 from India, who didn't so much inhabit that cottage in the picture above as seem imprisoned there. It was as if the Lost Boys were living in a Neverland built by Charles Addams. They were lost Boys too. Somehow their insular lives and bonding to the church had rendered them strangely adolescent in their demeanor. Giggly, occasionally petulant, peckish with the disruption and a little helpless outside of their safe places. These Lost Boys were not waiting for Peter and Wendy... no they were a little different...

Not that different!

Sorry about that. Wrong lost boys. My preconceived notions must be getting the best of me.

Just like this, but lots older, and no Wendy.

I was tasked with relocating their offices, an activity made harder because each office required a photo shoot so they could be packed up, relocated, and restore to exactly the same state the good Fathers left them. In addition I was told that the offices contained many objects that were "irreplaceable" which is a transportation code word for expensive. ( not hard to believe, I once moved a whole room of 17th century and earlier manuscripts at one of the BC libraries because the leaky roof was dumping water on the open shelves ).The Fathers all felt the need to quiz me directly as to how I would proceed so they would feel comfortable that the disruption of their lives would be manageable. They especially were concerned that the photo shoot would interfere with their daily routines, a fear I relieved them of by assuring each one that he didn't even have to be present for the cameras since he wasn't nearly as important as his stuff. (Word it the right way and say it with the right inflection you can insult people and they can't do a thing about it.)

Turned out that every single one of them showed up for the photo shoot of his office because all their stuff really was irreplaceable. There were all kinds of things there that once destroyed would be gone forever. There were computers that still had floppy drives, lectures recorded on beta-max tapes, music on LP's, 8 Tracks, and cassettes. One father's phone was a rotary dialer! Are you kidding me? They must have been spending the big money on... no the furnishings were old, but not antique old, more like 40's military old. Stout wooden desks that would become antiques someday unless they were burned for firewood first, green pleather chairs with only four wheels at the bottom instead of the OSHA mandated 5, there were typewriters...typewriters! all files where vertical. There was no pressboard only items waiting to be made into pressboard. It would have been hard to replace the stuff if it was destroyed, it would be harder to find somebody that would want to.

Those church bastards were just living it up! Word.

By the time I was on my forth photo shoot I had to ask "They spent hugh money on this building, they're spending tons more on this renovation, the chapel, the dinning hall, the foyer, everything is immaculate couldn't you guys get better furniture? Father F didn't even have to think about it, "The building is for the glory of God, the furniture in here is what we need to work. " He put it out there so fast that I wasn't sure I was buying it, but he seemed so sincere it would have been bad form to continue  my inquisition ( ha, pun! the office of the inquisition, yes that inquisition, still exists at the current vatican). Haters hate, it's what we do.

I was a little flummoxed though. On first visit and especially when they were in a group they definitely seemed to conform to my expectations which is to say, "a bit off", but they were getting around my anti-religion, anti-priest defenses by being friendly, by feeding me every day at their dinning hall, by openly drinking scotch and other adult beverages, by checking out cleavage (got you Father A!) , and by generally just being regular people in a very WTF situation. Don't judge you say? How else would you categorize a man that gave up cleavage even though he was still giving it the hungry side look 40 years later. That's straight up tragedy.

...and did I say regular people? That would be true until you got to the irreplaceable flotsam that they had saved to brighten their offices. There were none of the high are crucifixes that adorned the public areas, but there were dozens made from old metal, bits of rubber and wood, hand painted pieces of furniture, pretty much anything that could be used for crafts, or house building, can be used to fashion crucifixes. Crucifixes that each had a unique story. Crucifixes that came from every ripped-off beat-down third world hell hole on this planet. Crucifixes that weren't the spoils of colonialism or conquest, but gifts to the only men that brought food, medicine, and education to places where hope was a commodity that no-one had enough money to buy.

... and it didn't stop there. Each of them had little pottery things or carved wood items crafted just for them. Crafted by people that had nothing else to give. People that filled the pictures that covered the walls. Pictures of baptisms in jungle ponds, pictures of half built schools on rugged mountainsides, pictures of trucks full of food surrounded by people patiently waiting their turn, pictures of festivals, parties, and feasts that reminded me of nothing my own catholic childhood could remember. These guys were not regular people.

I gave up on organized religion over 30 years ago. Church is where thinking goes to die. That doesn't mean I get to pass blanket judgment on millions of people just because they are part of something that has gone off the rails over and over again... but I did. The Fathers at St Mary's made me feel small about it though. Who have I helped? Is the world a better place because I live my reasonably moral but safe life while churning out a snarky blog, or because someone in the grip of what I consider a delusion builds an infirmary in the Sudan?

There's all kinds of lost boys.

If good people belong to a bad organization does that make them not good? Can an organization even have a moral component? Can we do good things if we do them for bad reasons? Can we judge and not be judged? I wasn't wrong about the church but I was dead wrong about the Fathers... or maybe just lost?