Tossing out the paddle ...

Ever felt you were in shit creek and you threw away the paddle?

This was many years ago, at the time when the Professor-Cardinal Ratzinger was in the Conclave for the Papal election. Yokelin was away visiting her sister in KL and I had UNSW and NICTA commitments. The playwright Williamson had written and produced "Democracy" about the intrigues suffered by Chancellor Brandt during the time of German reunification.

Our elder son Kerwwyn and his wife Mandy felt sorry for me that I was missing Yokelin and offered to take me to see "Democracy" with Mandy's parents Harry and Tanya Stephens. Harry is a devout, intelligent, reflective and scholarly Catholic. More on that later.

Harry drove us all in his Tarago. After the play, which was very good indeed, Tanya asked me, "Did you like it Norman?" I answered, "Yes! Williamson is very insightful. In fact he should write a play on the Papal Conclave happening now!" Tanya laughed, and innocently asked, "Why?" I began paddling in shit creek without knowing I had entered it, answering chirpily, "Oh to be in that nest of vipers would be a gift for Wiilamson!"

Harry exploded! "That's my Church you are maligning there!". Mandy and Tanya tried to sooth Harry, saying things like, "Norman's only joking! You know he is mischievous!"

Hmmm ... But I then threw away the paddle, adding in an attempt to recover, "Harry I am sorry, yes it was a bad joke! Actually I didn't mean ALL of them, only Cardinal Ratzinger - the first phoneme of his name tells you what he is. Harry nearly went apoplectic and replied, "He is a good man!"

Well, there was no recovery from this double faux pas, and I had to abjectly apologize.

To cut a long story short, in the intervening years Harry and I became good friends. He knows I am a secular humanist. We align on most issues concerning morality and ethics. The test for was my affection for Harry was when he answered with no hesitation, "Yes of course" to my query, "Could one reach the truth, peace and love of God by different faiths?" Harry passed with the highest distinction. I believe that it is possible even for a skeptic like me to share fundamental values of decency and goodness with a deeply religious man like Harry. What one makes of such equivalence, weak though it may appear to some, is your liberty. To me it suggests that it is possible to have morality independent of religion.

In Yiddish, two fathers-in-law like Harry and me are makhatunim. Here we are in 2010.