I got TWO smiles out of Catherine today…not a bad deal at all; and well worth typing about, despite having six useful fingers and an immobile right wrist!

We also crossed the bottle barrier today…I kept the kid while Colleen taught Sunday school this morning, packing some defrosted pumped stuff, just in case. She slept through the newly-minted “adult education” program in the church hall, but took the bottle from me later, completely blowing her two-month old mind, once she realised Dad was providing nourishment.

As for the church program I blundered into, it was frustratingly simplified, given that it was supposedly designed for adults. The religious ed. director’s idea is to examine the nuts and bolts of Catholic doctrine, talking this week about early church councils, leading into the Vatican II changes. My attempts to inject the issues of class and political power consolidation by the church heierarchy into the discussion of keeping the mass entirely in Latin while for several hundred years, most churchgoers probably couldn’t read their everyday spoken language were totally dodged, dipped, dived, ducked and dodged.

This frustrated me. In my mind, colored as it is by a university degree in history, lots of reading, and a healthy bit of cynicism, there’s no way to divorce mortal politics from Christianity, once it stopped being a message and started being an organization, a process that started before the dust settled when they rolled the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. It’s part of the history (ugly, maybe, but it’s there…) that shaped a lot of doctrine, and shouldn’t be dismissed in a discussion at the level this program aspires to.

Or maybe I’m just a frustrated academic at heart, and have expectations that are way too high.

That’s probably it.