There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Pope Francis is going to die and it hurts my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! But first, here’s a ♥️ for you, for it is truly a greater gift to give than to receive 🤪)

Let me first confess that I am embarrassingly ignorant when it comes to religion. Like many milquetoast white people, I was raised culturally Christian, but as a kid, we didn’t observe much beyond a few Christmas Eve masses, and we only went to those because old churches are pretty and choral singing makes my mom cry in a good way. A century ago, there’d been a clash between the Swedish Lutherans in our family and our Irish Catholics. After purportedly needless infighting and turmoil, future generations agreed that religious distinctions were petty and only gave meddlesome old relatives more reasons to ride your ass. By the time I entered the chat, my dad claimed to be raising my siblings and me on the classics, which really just meant he read us Greek myths instead of the Bible. Left to my own devices, I was incurious about any and all Testaments, a folly of youth that has made me a much stupider adult. I know David is the little one, Goliath is the big one, and while I can sing all the words to every song in Jesus Christ Superstar, it’s simply not enough to fill in the gaps. For years, I’ve been planning to buckle down and give myself a proper biblical education, because it’s embarrassing to care about reading and writing while the references to a text that informs practically all of western literature go right over my head, but I also keep saying I’m going to stretch every day and learn to knit, so…. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And yet, religious ignorance be damned, I love Pope Francis. I’ve loved him ever since the buzz about his possible papacy began. First of all, he’s from Argentina. I love everything about Argentina, expect that brutal military dictatorship stuff and the fact that they just mix together mayonnaise and tomatoes and call it salad. I love Argentina for superficial reasons, i.e. I love a word with a healthy portion of vowels, and deeper reasons, i.e. I lived there for two critical years of my adolescence. And sure, during those years I was merely an affluent American studying abroad, then an affluent American not studying, still abroad. But those years were part of making me who I am, and it’s the only person I have been and can ever be, so get off my fucking back, okay????

Stars! They’re just like us!

In 2013, Argentina really needed a win. The economy had been in the tank for over a decade. The Peronistas were back in power. Despite his best efforts, a very young, very small Lionel Messi (though bigger than he would have been without the HGH) couldn’t nab a World Cup or Copa America title. The country was still reeling from the tragic loss of Rodrigo, El Potro Cordobés. And don’t get me started on that giant Borges-shaped hole in the nation’s soul…. Not only had the icon died 27 years prior, but in 2013, the man STILL had the nerve to be dead! The point being, how could you not root for Pope Francis at such a low moment for Argentina? And good on you if you did, because the man has proved to be nothing short of cool as hell.

Pope Francis openly rejected many of the lamest parts of Catholicism, the parts that make unlearned people like myself reluctant to un-unlearn. For instance, it always seemed weird to see Pope Benedict shuffling around in Prada slippers, when off-label flip flops were good enough for Jesus, and that dude spent three years wandering the desert! Pope Francis thought it was weird too! His clothes are humbler! He might not be shopping at Old Navy, but I don’t see him hitting up a Banana Republic either. He’s our “The Gap” Pope. His digs are modest too. Unlike previous “representatives of God on Earth” before him, Francis rejected the grand papel penthouse in favor of a tiny one-bedroom with a twin bed (probably not even extra long). He thinks we should take care of the environment! He called for a universal basic income and higher taxes on the rich, denounced the criminalization of homosexuality, defended the rights of immigrants and refugees, fostered comity with Islam, Buddhism, vocally condemned anti-semitism. In short, he seems like a nice person, who has used his enormous power and influence to not just promote love, service and generosity, but to model it. That kind of public figure shouldn’t be such a rare phenomenon, but right now, it is.

There is so much bad news to sort through right now, maybe it hasn’t made much of an impression that Pope Francis has been in the hospital for weeks with double pneumonia. It hurts my feelings that he appears to be dying, even though he is 88 and has certainly made good use of those years. But it’s bad timing, isn’t it? When so many of the world’s rich, powerful people seem hellbent on amassing more wealth and more power for no other reason than to have the most. Power doesn’t appear to be a tool in service of a greater goal, like I used to think it was. Now, more than ever in my lifetime, it seems to be its own empty commodity. In my sadness about the state of the world, I find myself more and more drawn to the targeted ads I stumble upon in my Instagram feed. Cute pairs of overalls and Hoka slides that I don’t need and can’t afford keep appearing at my doorstep. New things make me feel better for a second, then I forget about them. Then I yell at my kids for asking me to buy them stuff when the house is already full of their toys. They look to me to learn to be better. But with the truly good among the powerful dwindling, who will I look to?

Seven years ago, a television show I was running got canceled. When my husband — a Roman Catholic apostate with whom I have been factchecking much of this newsletter — couldn’t console me, he told me to read Ecclesiastes. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.” I’m not some Jesus freak y’all, but I guess quite possibly we’ve been here before and forgotten, which also means we haven’t always been, and won’t always be.