Historical Perspective

Do you believe in God?
No, my mother told me, and my nine-
year-old world shifted. I had learned the
word infinity somewhere, and had looked up
to the night sky from the sand dunes above my childhood
home, having climbed out my bedroom window with
a couple of blankets after she had told me goodnight.
It had been a shaping moment, that no.

It took some years to
understand her east coast Canadian
fear of the French Catholics and my father’s
sin that led the Episcopal Church to excommunicate
her, and her trajectory away from faith. At the time, my
big sister was already a holy roller and an internal schism
quietly churned in me. My mother was my protector, my
sweet guardian full of sustaining humanity.

By Jack Kennedy’s run for
the Presidency and the Republican not-so-
subtle anti-Catholic campaign suggesting the
Pope could influence the White House, I was well formed.
My mother was an American by then and though I don’t
know how she voted, she liked his Bostonian accent
and thought of him as rather princely, rather English
like. Her religion was well forgotten by then.

Religion was pale for much
of the following years until George The Second
stumped for his next run. He surfed on the shoulders
of the Christian Right. The pulpits were ablaze with his praise
and the morally righteous acceptance of his holy war,
and the paling of American goodness. Separation
of church and state took a back seat, and morality
got entwined with sexual preference.

And now arrived at the forming
of his second cabinet and shifting further right
with promises of fixing his warring squandering of our
wealth by reshaping America in the likeness of his passion
for business, I sit wondering about a shift to my mother’s
native land where compassion gets stronger play and few
own guns. It is winter in America as our President’s
war goes poorly.

Charles Slater at the end of 2004