The Ninth of July

It's July already, and soon will be August.  Time does not wait for my wishes and desires. Like this one: I wish I could sit down and get out more blogs. 

The fact is I write as many as I really want to write; to do otherwise would be simply to flood the world with drivel--and we have enough of that.  Just tune into the many offerings of  cable TV!

Where was I?  Celebrating this weekend past with the families of my spouse's siblings as they celebrated the marriage of their son/nephew/cousin to a wonderful woman from Costa Rica.

I am not versed enough in anthropology or ethnology to comment on the marriage of those two cultures, and what it holds for the future.  But I would like to say a few words on what I observed in that celebration and in the discussions the next day, which my wife and I spent visiting some of my siblings.

This is not the world I grew up in!  It is the world we, all of us, are now fashioning. 

I mean this primarily in terms of the religion into which we were born, practiced, and now leave for our descendants.

I come from a family of ten children, my wife from a family of eight.  In my family, of those of us who married (8), seven married in the Roman Catholic church.  In my wife's, about half--I don't remember.  Some were "mixed marriages," some were conversions.

In the very next generation, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of "praticising" Roman Catholics--and that number does not include our two very own children.

But here's what I find important: we don't just treat each other civilly, we love each other!  We don't just get along, we love each other.  We are not perfect, but we care for each other.

And so, for me, it's still the same old world. I remember growing up in a family, not of Roman Catholics as our main identity, but as brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. It's still the same world in that regard.  And I can live with that.

What I have spent a lifetime learning, but what the younger generation has apparently picked up more quickly, is that when religion gets in the way of that, it can simply be left behind.

How about you?