Visit Home (II of III): Nuns.

When I was visiting my great aunt the nun, she was saying that the previous night she had had a dream that me and my mom were coming to visit her, and then here we are.

At one point her old friend (another nun) stopped by to say hello -- we've known her forever, she used to drive up my great aunt and her own sister who was also a nun, and when we would borrow our neighbor's big yellow pontoon boat to go around the lake, she used to pilot it in full habit -- and we talked a little bit, so since she was dwelling too much on her bad health, I decided to change the subject and tell her some happy news, so I told her about how Obama had wished me a Merry Christmas the other day.

"That's lovely, he seems like such an intelligent young man," she was like, appreciatively, but then she saddened and was like, "but I do hope he changes his mind about the babies."

After this, she talked a bit about how in her family there were seven sisters, and that in one year five of them died, and she was in church praying, "Jesu, will I be next?", and the child in the stained glass window smiled at her and she knew her time had not yet come.

Later, a third nun popped who who was a real talker, and after I said I study the history of Christianity, although she hadn't been a part of our previous conversation, she almost right away started up on this good-natured mini-rant about politics.

"Oh," she was like, "People are so afraid to say God anymore, especially the political candidates, unlike the way it used to be. All the Founding Fathers believed in a God who made us."

"That's right," I was like, "But most of them didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. They were all deists, the most they thought was that Jesus was a supremely moral man who we should all imitate,but no more than that, and that a bunch of superstitious miracle stories had accreted around his life. That's a lot different then Obama and McCain, who are both professing Christians."

She seemed flummoxed, and I added, "Though, McCain's pastor called the Catholic church the Whore of Babylon."

"Really?", she was like, and my great aunt's friend chimed in, "But McCain, or his pastor?"

"His pastor did say that," I was like, "but McCain sat through that for twenty years, and somehow no one made an issue of that in the election. The whole thing is odd."

Somehow, the third nun then got off on a sidetrack and was saying how when she was in college she had a Latin course, and one day before the exam she was looking for a book and was next to the Latin section, and she just felt the urge to pick up some Bonaventure, so she just flipped open the book and read a bit, and the next day, it turned out that the very same paragraph she had read was on the test.

She also began to say farewell (she was a talker) and was like, "May God lead you!", and then that got her saying how she had lived and worked like an hour away from where my parents live, and how after her novitiate ended and she was waiting to be assigned, her mom said to her, "May God lead you," like she always would do, but then was like, "But not too far!"

Somehow, she then said that part of her family had the name that's the maiden name of Obama's mother, and then she began to say that she is hoping he'll change his position on the babies, and since the nun had already outstayed her welcome a bit, my mom was like, "Of course, sister, you'll just have to continue praying for it," and with that a a few other comments nudged her out of the room.

After our visit, before we stopped through a Tim Hortons for coffee, my mom was saying that she always got the impression of a hatchet from John Paul II, and that it was always his way or the highway.

"And," she was like, "it's not like I keep up with any of this, but what does the church have to show for such a long popehood, or papacy, or whatever you call it? I'm not saying that everyone has to be a great leader or that I could be, but you think that with what everyone says about him that he would have been doing something great, but I don't just see what it was with him, except that he was Polish and every other pope before him had been Italian. He didn't even seem that smart."