Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Dear Army Guys,

I am now a religious fanatic. Actually, I am more like a fake religious fanatic. I’m a fraud, an imposter, a poseur. But it’s not my fault- the blame belongs, righteously enough, to my meddling Roman Catholic mother. She shanghaied me into joining her Bible Study group.

My mother, a supposedly saintly and peaceable soul, blindsided me with a deviously cunning maneuver I’d have thought only the devil himself could have devised. It was entrapment, plain and simple, and it worked. I should have seen it coming. In retrospect the red flags were all over the place, but I was oblivious.

Here’s what happened.

Two weeks ago my mother, the Sneaky Catholic Saint, called to ask what Rudy might want for his birthday. Rudy’s birthday is one week before mine, so the fact that my mother did not also ask what I wanted was Red Flag Numero Uno. Instead, she went off on the tangent of her Bible Study group and how intellectually challenging it is.

Weaving her web of exaggeration and outright deceit, she deliberately intrigued me with the counter-intuitive notion that Bible Study groups are peopled with great minds and deep thinkers. She made it sound like a weekly academic discussion of philosophical theology conducted by the Roman Catholic chapter of Mensa.

She was all soft-sell, she made no obvious plea for me to join. She got me to say something like, “Well, that sounds really interesting, Mom!” (I say that about virtually anything she raves to me on the phone about, and she bloody well knows it.) Then, knowing full well the consequences of her actions, my mother said four fateful words: “You’d probably enjoy it.”
I, being the heedless dunderhead we all know me to be, foolishly responded that I probably would.

Guess what my loving and devoted mother got me for my birthday?

No, I did not get a nice bottle of Opium cologne or a useful carton of cigarettes. Instead, I got my sinful and sorrowful ass enrolled in my mother’s Bible Study group. My birthday present was the Bible Study enrollment fee, an expensive study bible, a baby-blue zippered cover for said study bible, a scary-looking three-ringed binder containing the Bible Study curriculum and homework assignment sheets, and a gigantic Land’s End tote bag with my name embroidered on it. The only thing I didn’t get was a magnetic Jesus fish to stick on the back of my car.

My mother had clearly spent a small fortune on all this and she was so excited about it there was nothing I could do but say, “Gosh, thanks, I can hardly wait.”

This is how I’ve come to be trapped in the world of Bible Study every Tuesday night until May of 2006. I’ve decided to think of it as a deployment. I’m trying to be stoic and good-natured about it, but I can’t help wonder why a just and loving God would allow such a grossly unfair thing to happen to me. I can only conclude that God must be on HER side and that God has an obnoxious sense of humor.

I am now the alumnus of two Bible Study sessions. Trust me; there are no Mensa candidates at Bible Study. Wait, I take that back. I did encounter one brilliant mind at work during this week’s Bible Study. Monsignor Powell gave a stunningly eloquent and intelligent lecture this week. Unfortunately, he doesn’t participate in the small group discussion format that makes up the bulk of Bible Study night.

Here’s how Bible Study works: We arrive at 6:30 PM and everyone sits together in one room for the opening prayer. I like this part because the opening prayer is actually a Psalm which we all read aloud in cadence, one side of the room alternating with the other side. Then we break up into our small groups and go off to your own rooms to discuss the reading and homework we’ve done.

During the discussion phase my mother, who happens to be our small group leader, reads through the questions we answered for homework. Her reading of the questions is invariably followed by a dead and uncomfortable silence from the group. Since I find this sort of non-participation intolerable, I answer most of the questions first. Then some of the others speak up and say the sorts of things one might expect to hear in a Special Education Bible Study.

Everyone else in Bible Study is even dumber than me, and that’s saying something when you consider it takes me two hours to do the reading and homework, and that I accidentally did the wrong homework last week. Despite having done the wrong homework, I was still way ahead of some of my Bible Study compatriots. I hate to sound like a Bible Study snob, but some of these people should be sent back to Bible Nursery School, where their bizarre ideations will not conflict with reality to such a noticeable degree.

During the first discussion group we spent a good ten minutes “discussing” Genesis and whether or not men actually have one fewer rib than women. I hated to be a spoil-sport, but it was patently ridiculous. My mother, a professional nurse mind you, allowed these people to go on thinking there might be a disparate number of ribs apportioned to the two sexes. I suppose it made them happy to think so, but I didn’t care. Truth is truth. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around pretending not to notice when a blatant fallacy such as the rib issue is given credence. Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted, ribs and all.

We also “discussed” how embarrassing it must have been for Noah to build that ark. What were the neighbors saying about him behind his back? The group concluded that people were probably making fun of him. Nobody questioned how a pair of every animal species on Earth could have fit (and shit) in the ark for forty days, a ludicrous notion at best, yet they took the building the ark part as literal fact. This not ten minutes after Monsignor Powell’s exhortation not to get caught up in the “minutia of myth” and miss the meaning expressed in the symbolic nature of these ancient stories.

What we did not discuss is the profoundly boring nature of the Bible. I mean, let us not be untruthful here: the Bible is dull. Even the most scandalous stuff is expressed in a monotonous drone as if the Holy Word was written by Ernest Hemmingway’s pot-head grad assistant after having spent a weekend in a sensory deprivation chamber.
All-time bestseller or not, this book can hardly be called a “page-turner.”

Nonetheless, my paramount goal is to make it through my Bible Study deployment without being sent to the Bible Study principal’s office or being stoned to death by my fellow students. If I can accomplish this I believe God will have no choice but to look with favor upon me and I will qualify for a really good MOS in the afterlife. Maybe I will be assigned to write Bible Cliff’s Notes. That might be fun.

Much Love,
--An Army Mom