When I flip through other people's blogs (as I sometimes do) I notice that many of them revolve around two main themes: (1) religion, and (2) families. It seems like pretty much every single blog has to do with one of these two things. Although I love family photos in matching Ralph Lauren polos and two golden retrievers as much as the next person and am waiting with baited breath to hear about the family trip to pick this year's Christmas tree, I am not in the family way. I am also not going to turn my writings into a Bible study of sorts. If you are into either of these things, this blog is not for you. If you click "next blog," you will quickly and effortlessly be transported (most likely) to another blog full of religion and family outings. If, however, as I suspect, there is a market for the non-religious, non-familial blog post, please, read on. I do apologize, though. Although this blog (fortunately, in my opinion) is neither of these two things although, for a few moments, I will discuss a little a bit of Southern theology, courtesy of my enlightened grandfather (who, it must be said, graduated in the top ten of his high school class--which would be a remarkable feat if there had not been only nine people in the class to begin with).
On Thanksgiving, after a family dinner, which is always full of various stresses anyway, my sister's new husband, Kyle, stood up and cleared her plate as well as his own. This irritated my grandfather, who accused her, among other things, of being a bad wife and a bad Christian. He would get her a Bible and she would see. When she replied that she already had a Bible and that she was perfectly capable of reading and interpreting it on her own, he insisted that the Catholic Bible is different (read: inferior) to the Bible that Baptists read. Unfortunately, this always launches him into a tirade about a specific verse in the Book of Matthew where we are told that we should call no one father except the Father in heaven. He even went so far as to call the priest in his neighborhood Catholic church to ask him about the verse and to tell him that how very wrong he was. My grandfather was surprised to know that the priest had read this verse and that he did not find it particularly troublesome and that, when parishioners called him father, he did not lose any sleep at night over it. My granddad thinks that, because Catholics call their priests "father" that they are all heretics and will die a fiery death. Okay, he didn't go that far--but he did say that we don't know how to read our Bibles. If we did, we could see that, as everyone else knows, that it was written down thousands of years ago in the Good Book that a wife must always pick up after her husband. On this point he was most adamant. The Bible says so. Even though my grandmother (a very sensible but somewhat cold woman) told him that she had read the Bible, too and that she had seen nowhere that a wife was required to clean up after her husband. Of course, I know that my grandfather is wise and all-knowing and that, somewhere in the Bible, there must be a passage that reads that "Thy wife shalt clean up thy husband's dinner dishes." Moses probably chiseled it onto the back of the stone tablet where he wrote the other ten commandments. Either that, or God spoke it out of the burning bush, or wrote it in the sky when he parted the sea. It seems to be an important enough point that any or all of these things are equally likely. Thank goodness my granddad told me.
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