Failures to Love

            Today I met with two fellow writers from a recent poetry class for lunch and to read some recent work we’d all written. We give each other comments that perplex, misread, reveal our own prejudices, and still somehow help each other. I don’t know these other writers well yet. One wrote about how she wants those she loves to celebrate her life by using body after she dies. She is bothered that our bodies are just wasted when we die. The other woman used examples from nature to introduce her view that we should work for the collective good rather than our individual happiness. My poem was both more and less ambitious.

            Criticism rolls too easily off my tongue. I fight the tendency to do what the teachers I disliked in poetry workshops did when I was in graduate school. I don’t agree with every philosophy, metaphor, or concern, nor do I find all of them worth making the subject of a poem. Still, that is different than ascertaining what a writer is trying to say and whether or not she/he has done so—or said something else, or switched point of view or something similar—or, most common for many of us, tried to write two or three poems at once in one poem.

            I had a discussion with them about religion, prompted by my Mere Anglicanism t-shirt, which one of them asked me to explain. She asked me if I was liberal, which she assumed because there is a graphic of a griffin on the shirt. I forgot to ask her why she thought a griffin would equate one with liberal religious beliefs. The conversation turned too rapidly, as she explained to the other writer present that the Pope has just called someone, I quote, “a witch” who should be “burned at the stake” for writing a book called Just Love which advocated the acceptance of same-sex marriages.  

            Sometimes I don’t act in a way that is caring, don’t love enough to challenge error. No description of the communication between the Pope and Sr. Margaret Farley has included the word “witch” or suggested that she be burned anywhere. Really, at this point in the conversation I should have returned to the topic of why a griffin reminded her of liberal Christianity. Instead, I left the table in pursuit of a glass of water. I returned my dishes to the small café’s owner, whereupon she asked me what my shirt meant. After I explained it, she looked directly at me and said, “Religion is the opiate and the bullet of the people.”

            At this point I decided it would have been a better morning to stay home. I finished the workshop, commented on poems, and went home without challenging anyone.