Reconciliations

I am not sure how to describe Anna’s approach to religion. Reverence is perhaps the right term. She thinks there is no greater moral code than the Christian; that the Catholic Church has saved Greek and Roman civilization from the barbarians; and Poland from communism; that God is a kind of personification of all goodness; that priests are somehow wise because of all the books they have read.

(I can’t resist an footnote about priests’ books. In Iwaszkiewicz’s “Mother Joanna of the Angels” the tsadik says to the priest, who had come to ask about demons: “Would you have me give you in fifteen minutes everything it has taken me a lifetime to learn?” In his voice is derision, but it is also quite bitter, for he means (but neither says nor perhaps realizes): “I have spent a lifetime poring over these books and still understand nothing”. In other words, “I have wasted my life”).

Anna goes to church every Sunday with the man with whom she lives in sin. He is not the father of her children and is otherwise married with two of his own. How she reconciles her religiosity and her life with her admiration, indeed, submission to, the teachings of the greatest and most moral force on the planet is totally beyond me. Just as was beyond me Peggy’s readiness to have an affair with me, even as she argued, in between bouts of love making, in favor of the existence and goodness of the Almighty Christian God. The very same god which condemned expressly what she was doing so well: adultery and the desiring of another woman’s man.

(Peggy in the end married a Jew. Is it surprising? Would I be more surprised if she married a Buddhist? Is it really different from Kazik, an accomplished pianist and a part-time classical musician, who married a girl with a strong and exclusive taste for Lionel Richie and such? Am I single because I do not see sufficient value in sex to put up with Lionel Richie as the other man in the bedroom?)

How do these people do it? How do they manage to go to church and pray and praise the superior moral code with their lips and then – turn around and not comply? I haven’t asked them because I always assumed they would be put on the spot, hurt, and perhaps offended. But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps there is an answer, perhaps they have found it.