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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (32964)	3/21/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: Edwarda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Hi, dear! My experience was similar. In my elementary school, which was parochial, there was a sort of fervor to convert. It was never, ever, the kind of thing I was shocked by on highways in really Baptist communities in the South. It was more of a charitable (in the best sense of the word) desire to introduce other people to this really good thing, this source of strength and beauty and wonder. I have to add here that with so many interfaith marriages in my family, I may simply have dismissed out of hand bigotry that may have existed among the Roman Catholics around me. I'd have felt utterly sure that it was ridiculous, so bigotry may not have made an impression on me. What in my own life I did find unbelievable was all of the hysteria around Jack Kennedy's being a Roman Catholic. The carrying on that the Vatican would move into the White House! The high school that I attended was a private Catholic school. There were students who were not Catholics. That statement alone speaks for itself. When I went to college, I was stunned. There were many women who were Jewish who "locked out" women who were not Jewish. There were black women (this was the very early 70's) who assumed that they could have nothing in common with a blonde. I finally got through by snarling in exasperation, "I have more f*king soul in my little finger than you have in your whole body! I come from a people who came here to read in the wanted ads, "Anglo Saxon wanted; Irish need not apply." With the Jewish women the key was knowing more about keeping a Kosher home than they did and being persistently there without being pushy. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to add that I do remember hearing of the furor when my father, nominally Protestant and really an agnostic/atheist (I don't know if he was too clear), married my mother, a devout Roman Catholic. The furor was all on his* side of the family! My mother's family put a greater store on personal qualities and on the goodness of a person than on where one checked in on Sundays or on Saturdays (because so far no one has married a Moslem). The family is rife with marriages to people of the various Protestant faiths and people who are Jewish. My sister married a Jewish man; the most recent marriage of a cousin was a moving ceremony in which the priest and the rabbi rejoiced in the union of two souls who despite the enormous differences in their beliefs love deeply and can find such beauty and importance in each other's heritage. (BTW, has anyone seen "Admissions"? An off-, off-Broadway play in which a group of college students in the current time find themselves confronting their own prejudices. It's very good and running through the end of this month. It may be touring.)