Susan Boyle and "Church Ladies"

The linking of Susan Boyle, the amateur middle aged Scottish singing contestant, with the more pious among the churchgoing will become clear. I hope.

You may recall from the digital piece that has made its viral way through the net that when Ms. Boyle came out on the stage, the audience and one of the judges immediately snickered. The woman wasn't young. She wasn't stylish. She was arguably overweight, at least by television standards that add the proverbial 10 pounds. Her eyebrows presented in their pristine wildness. She was to the glitzy panel and the knowing audience, an obvious oddity. What could SHE possibly have to offer to the sophisticated world? As we now know, what she always had and gifted the scoffers who judged her visually peculiar, was a mystical voice. No longer could they justify the question of their first amused cognitive dissonance, "Surely this is a joke, for why would such a woman as she, be here?" She was there, because she could actually sing and because she honored her mother.

Things will happen for her now. What she will be in her new milieu, already post Larry King and the establishment of blogs in her honor, remains to be seen. But she put me in mind of other people who are dismissed out of hand, but don't have anything tangible to offer to provide them an entree into credibility in a world that fears the simple, or the pure. I count myself among those who try, but often fail to give them credibility. All they have to offer is their persistent and visible faith. And that offering makes the rest of us profoundly uncomfortable. With Ms. Boyle, there is the "Oh, isn't that wonderful, she can SING!" With those who praise God by say, going to the Monastery of the Angels after a Mass for a service in honor of Divine Mercy Sunday (brought to us by a young polish nun, Sr. Faustina, who had visions of Christ and wrote simply about her love of a Compassionate God), we are more inclined to think, "Isn't she just a little too pious?"

And, like myself today, off to Mirabelle to brunch, we go back to our secular world having had just enough spirituality, but not too much to make us stand out in any way, and have people look at us with a bemused smile of "She's just a religious nut." Someone I knew once said that anyone who made the sign of the Cross as he or she passed a Catholic Church was crazy. But, from her point of view, the signer was giving acknowledgment that inside that Church is our Holy of Holies, the Real Presence of Christ. Actually, this is my point of view too. I don't do what she does, not because I don't agree with her about Who is under that roof but mostly because I just never was trained to do it and never got into the habit. I do wonder though whether a little part of me fears being identified too much with my faith such that my own credibility as a college grad cum law degree and rational mind be endangered and it is more convenient to say I am not in the habit. Occasionally, I have been with priest friends who did grace before a meal in a restaurant and I was just a little bit nervous about being seen doing it, and making the sign of the Cross. I worry about looking, well, quaint. And I certainly don't do it when I go out with other friends. But like Susan Boyle willing to come out and be laughed at by the world, the Church ladies (and there are more and more young couples, male and female going in this direction) go out onto their small world stages and let the passersby or the customers or the thinkers, laugh uncomfortably.

I think the Church ladies may have the last laugh. And maybe it's time that I said grace when I had dinner with friends, out there, where everyone can see.