People of the cloth...

Been thinking about folks who, literally, wear their faith on their sleeves--on their backs and on their heads... In one of my courses, for the next three novels, we're talking about women who take the veil in Islam. A dialogue turns to an interior monologue today:

for faith is a foreign language I do not speak.

I see holymen-in-training almost everyday. Well, I do not witness their training proper, only those who are in training. Makes me think of training wheels, trykes...Yesterday, I saw the same two gents as they arrived as Yeshiva and as they departed it. Where do they all go from here? Not just home, but as holy men. Do they all become rabbis? Do they spend their days reading and debating the Torah? Do they yell at their children, their wives? Do holymen think they are of that other world, or are they of this mortal coil? Do they say "thank you" and "please"?

I work with sisters, as in nuns. I often wonder how they made their choices to serve God, to be the bride of Jesus---sometimes, when I'm in the mood, I poll the occasional soeur. Sometimes it was for His divine love, sometimes it was an opportunity... I wonder how fiercely independent, yet community-minded women reconcile themselves to bit parts in the Popes' successful scheme. (Ah, the patriarchy!) They cannot be priests, or perform a proper mass. Perhaps not all share Sor Juana's sentiments--her "antipathy for marriage" and her desire to study. But, ...while those who chose the Church, in principle, chose (latent or manifest choices) to keep men out of their beds, they still opted to 'marry' into a male trinity. Sounds almost polygamous, from the woman's position, and polygynous, from the Godhead's point of view. Maybe that's the spiritual community's way of meshing, belonging to each other--a simulacrum of intermarrying? Although these sisters seem charitable and committed to social justice---thus potentially sound Marxists in practice, they surrender their rights of property and wealth to the Top Dog, rendering them totally dependent on the two Hims--- the Benevolent Father or Rome's papa. And they're all educated...

Perhaps faith is the caulking of what one knows to be true and what one wants for the world...