Dear the Members of the Church I Loyally Attend,

There is a poem, and I think you ought to read it. It's called Possible Answers to Prayer, and it's by Scott Cairns.

Your petitions—though they continue to bear   

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.   

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent   

entertainment value—nonetheless serve   

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath   

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more   

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,   

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes   

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly   

righteous indignation toward the many   

whose habits and sympathies offend you—         

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend   

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

I go to your church every Sunday, and I have to tell you: the culture there sucks. Where is your boldness? Where is your respect for those not like you? Where is your art?

But anyway. One of you said to me, the other day, "It's only fair that we get a chance to share the word in the schools, what with what the GSA is doing." And it caught me off guard. What the GSA did was hand out shirts that said, "gay? fine by me." No capitalization, no graphics, pretty simple and understated. And it's true, they do read a little bit like, "By the power invested in me as the judge of such matters, I hereby grant thee permission to by gay," but they also read like, "Hey-- your sexuality doesn't change my opinion of you, and I will still respect you." Quite frankly, church-goers, that's a message you'd do well to endorse.

My grudge against the church comes out the church culture, and the way they see an "us", perfect, saved people, and a "them", sinners, all those who disagree with us. And that's almost fine-- the Bible does describe an us of saved people and a them of those the us should try to show God to, but you're missing something. You're missing that you don't get to up and be condescending and feel awesome once you're a Christian. The gospel is built on love, and on valuing people simply because they're human, and imagining them the way you imagine yourself, and being kind, and caring for others, and I don't see it. That project where you're going to preach Christianity in the schools is called the Ethos project. I looked up the word Ethos. It means, basically, a culture's mindset, values, and assumptions. Your assumptions as they reveal themselves in your implications and actions suck.

Blogreaders, I'm sorry to whine so much about Christianity. I promise to whine about some other stuff soon.

Sincerely if the slightest bit regretfully,
Claire

Dear [Those Who Wage War on Dinosaurs, the Big Bang, and Evolution],

Mostly, science is science. We keep evolution around not because it's pretty but because it's useful, and it's useful because it allows us to understand and interact with the world effectively. 

But sometimes, science is a mythology, too. 

And that's okay. 

Sincerely, 

Claire 

Dear [The Name of the Kid Once Got Pulled Over By A Cop For Speeding By A Lot And Also Not Paying Attention With My Lifelong Best Friend In The Car And Then Swore Her To Secrecy With The Result That I Didn't Find Out About This Incident Until Several Weeks After the Fact],

The other day, we were talking over lunch. Everyone else had already left, and we didn't have much to say to one another, so as I always do, I mentioned the most interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. It was the version of the bible story that my mom had told me the night before. I wasn't entirely clear on what hat story was, and I'd like to let the world know, but it's a long story, so it'll have to wait.

What you said was this; "That's interesting, but I don't see what difference it makes, really."

It matters because metaphors do have power.

The reason the story catches my interest is that it's a better story. It shows a less arbitrary God, and a real enemy, and a God who isn't totally in love with making rules. Past all of that, though, it's a story. I mean a real, honest to god story, the kind worth telling generation to generation. My mom's story upgrades the thing from the kind of story that makes you feel like somebody, somewhere, is lying to you to the kind of story that you want to hear again. In the same way that rhythm is at the very core of music and line is at the very core of art, story is at the very core of literature.

I don't like a chaotic, arbitrary God, because I think in patterns, and that which you can't understand is scary. I don't like a God who pointlessly made a very nice garden that was also a death trap and was surprised when shit went wrong, but yet is all knowing and has preordained my future. I prefer a God who wrote all of the languages and speaks them all perfectly, and who wrote the strongest metaphors, the ones every culture clings to, and who made our minds to thrive on patterns and then made a patterned universe so we could understand it, but still made it complex enough that we could spend our entire collective existence figuring out. I like the God who invented calculus and quantum mechanics and is totally fluent in all of it. And also? I would really prefer a God who wrote a really, really beautiful book to help us understand him, and I'd love it if he were capable of writing a worthwhile story in the process. That is why it matters.

Sincerely,
Claire

Dear Groucho Marx,

You may remember that you once remarked, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." Well, Mr. Marx, I don't care to go to any college that will admit me as a student.

Colleges seem to sort themselves neatly in my mind into colleges that are boring (Morningside, I'm looking at you) and colleges I have no prayer of getting into (like for instance, University of Rochester). I'm sure there are colleges in between. I'm sure some boring colleges are more interesting than they would seem and some impossible colleges will, in fact, take me. But I'm gonna be honest, I hope it's the latter option that comes true.

Yeah, while we're here on the topic, I'm gonna take myself a minute to complain. Skip ahead if you like. The idea of college is like an anxiety attack in a bottle. I shouldn't have gotten that B in math class-- I should have studied those few hours more. I should have taken 4 years of German instead of that stupid journalism class. Better yet, I shouldn't have screwed around with choir, I should have taken Spanish, too. I should have left room for AP Chemistry, even though I don't expect to like regular chemistry. I should have joined more clubs as a freshman. I should join more clubs now. I shouldn't bother with art next year. I can't major in linguistics, I have to get a job. I probably won't have time to take all the classes I want to take, like music theory, and history, and linguistics, and psychology. I should read more books!

That last sentence was "I should read more books!" I'm down with reading more books.

The thing is, those petty awards like grades and major letters will eventually be meaningless. (I mean, the pins will hang out on some forgotten piece of felt in my mom's attic for years and she might pull it out someday to when my kids are over at Grandma's house, and we can all take about one minute to feel nostalgic, and that will be worth something. Maybe I better hold out for that one minute of supremely limited fame.) Even now, those letters and grades are pretty meaningless. Learning things is great, because it allows you to learn to think. Being able to think well is very useful for things like developing coherent ideas, and solving complex problems, and being fascinated with this complex and interesting world we live in. Getting golden starts does not promote fascination and curiosity.

Ideally, everything we learn in school would promote fascination and curiosity and develop the ability to think critically and elegantly, and ideally, grades would perfectly reflect what we had learned and therefore the results of that learning, and then they would be useful. As it is, they do a barely adequate job of it. Colleges must assume they have most of the value they ought to have, and for that reason, we must continue the menial quest for meaningless rewards.

Ho-hum.
Claire

P.S.  I got college propaganda from Beloit with the word ho-hum in it, and well used, too.