Be Merciful to Me, a Sinner

I have written often about labels and categorizing, and my attention is warranted. Labeling is essential to our existence, but, as with nearly everything, it can be both benefit and bane. We lessen the impact of unmapped territory, defusing its power to terrify, by naming it: applying a label and filing it away in the SAFE category. The problem is that this categorizing also gets used to dismiss a whole host of things: information, creative works, points of view, and even people themselves. I am as guilty of it as the rest, so I need the reminders to stop doing it. Maybe that’s what my frequent focus is all about.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers to whom I’ve never paid much attention. If I give myself a second, I can recall that he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, and I think that I knew he was an atheist, which had him (at least, nebulously) filed away in the “Don’t read; he’s an atheist” category. Shame on me.

This morning, I learned more about Vonnegut (and myself), thanks to a piece in an old issue of Image Journal that I’ve had on my shelf for seven years. In “Kurt Vonnegut, Christ-Loving Atheist,” Dan Wakefield shares warm memories of his friend, and it turns out that they are acting on me as a figurative shaking by the shoulders. When will I learn? It’s easy to say things like, Credentials don’t matter; just give me the information and let me decide for myself. It’s quite another to open that mind, shut out the prejudices whispering like an ill wind, and just read/listen/watch—in other words, to, perhaps, be more like an atheist such as Kurt Vonnegut. Wakefield writes:

The Sermon on the Mount became a kind of keystone in Vonnegut’s talks, and pops up in novels and essays as well. In his sermon at Saint Clements he told the congregation, “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.”

In his book of essays The Man without a Country, Vonnegut wrote that “For some reason the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But often, with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

I don’t know, perhaps I am more attuned to the withholding of mercy that I usually am, because a close friend (a Catholic who I have known and treasured for nearly two decades), despite my repeated apologies for thoughts poorly communicated, has been withholding her mercy (and forgiveness). So here I am, left to feel disappointed that, once again, a friend who calls herself a Christian is unable to do even once what Jesus told us we need to do seventy times seven.   

I want to continue working to ignore the labels, but still, I am feeling more and more like it’s time to start actively searching out the works of those who think of themselves as atheists. Perhaps I’ll feel more welcome in their worlds.