SOL20: Talking Religion

            Today has been such a patchwork that it’s hard to know what to pick out as my slice. But it’s what I’m in the midst of right now that I will report on.

            Last spring, I met a young woman who had come to New York City as part of a Focus on the Family antiabortion event. A few hundred people filled a couple of blocks of Times Square. I had come as part of a counterprotest, since I support women’s right to making their own reproductive decisions without legislation telling them what to do. I always want to talk to people who are so vociferously against abortion about my own abortion experience, because it is one that rarely is talked about. (I was 48 when I had my only abortion, and don’t even get counted in the statistics, which usually report on women ages 15 to 45.)

            I got into conversation with this woman who had come from the Midwest with her family, which included her young teenage daughter who she had had at 18. She had had a hard time when her daughter’s father left her, but becoming “born again” had helped her get her life together. Her life was very different from mine, but we were interested in each other. We exchanged e-mail addresses, and have since exchanged e-mails.

            Today she sent me an e-mail, partly inspired by the coronavirus, because it prompted her to want to evangelize me. She worries about offending me, and I worry about offending her with my response. Because I have spent a couple of hours this evening writing to her about my feelings about religion and why I will never believe as she does, but still respect her right to her beliefs. And I hope she can respect my right to my beliefs even if that means, for her, that we will not meet after death.

            So that’s my slice for today—and I am still in the middle of it.

            Be healthy, everyone.

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I’m participating in the 13th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 20 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

FiftyYearsAgoToday: Norman Vincent Peale in My Life

A temp agency sent me to work one day a week at the Marble Collegiate Church, at 29th Street and Fifth Avenue. (This was my deal with Jack when I quit my job at Bantam Books and went back to school full-time, that I would work part-time so I would never have to ask him for cigarette money.) Marble Collegiate Church was the home of Norman Vincent Peale, who for those of you too young to remember, became famous for writing a self-help book, “The Power of Positive Thinking” (a forerunner of “The Secret”?), which was widely criticized by mental health practitioners and theologians.

            I worked for an assistant minister—I think it was Arthur Caliandro, who followed Peale as minister, but can’t be sure—who liked to have long conversations with me after I made it clear that I was an atheist. I think ihe was first interested in my being Jewish, wondered whether that would be a problem for me working at the church, and when I said no, I wasn’t religious in any way, he was even more intrigued. I think he wanted to persuade me to become religious, and I didn’t mind these conversations because it was more interesting than the secretarial work I was being paid for.

            There was no smoking in the office, so if I wanted a cigarette, I had to go to the ladies’ room and smoke in a stall. Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to do that either, but I don’t remember being chided for it. I worked there for several months, but by the following spring, I was temping elsewhere.

            You may remember during last year’s campaign mention of Trump’s attendence at Marble Collegiate Church. The current minister says he was never an active member, but he did marry his first two wives there. Here’s a Washington Post article from almost two years ago about Trump and Peale.

            Side note on Norman Vincent Peale: My senior year in high school, I took a class called Social Problems. The teacher, Mr. Wilcox, was primarily the football coach. One of our assignments was to read Peale’s column in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer every week and discuss it in class. He was also against alcohol and maintained that when the Bible referred to “wine,” it really meant “grape juice.” (My yearbook tells me that he graduated from Swarthmore College, which surprises me, and the Internet informs me that he was president of his freshman class in 1923-1924.) #52essays2017