My grandfather was one of those angry Baptists. You probably know the type. The kind whose dogmas were concocted long ago in a cauldron of accumulated rage, secreted by a people bitterly resentful over the fact that they lost the war and can no longer legally own Black people as slaves. A brain seemingly composed of Chick Tract papier-mâché. With the characteristic (and obligatory) personal shitlist longer than the King James Bible, and a Jesus of unsullied Germanic European descent who spoke with rural Tennessee drawl and carried a Glock in one hand and a Chick-fil-A sandwich in the other.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I learned that his former home and property on Vancouver Island had recently been purchased by some Catholic religious order, to be repurposed as a monastery. Catholics were not número uno on Grandpa’s shitlist (it doesn’t take much imagination to correctly guess who was), but they were definitely in the top ten somewhere. I found something instantly gratifying about the fact that a demographic he denounced as the Spawn of Satan are soon going to living at his old house and praying there. Serves him right for his lifetime of shameless over-the-top bigotry. The only thing that would top that was if the building was going to be converted to a Turkish bathhouse, or if the Catholic order that purchased it was this one…
Five and ¾ Senses 