Yes, Father!

There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady.
Or
Why Franny and Zooey changed my spiritual outlook

I first read Salinger's Franny and Zooey on a snowy afternoon in 2004. I was in the middle of one of my larger spiritual crisis. I had a theology professor who walked into class daily and told me that the Bible was entirely made up and that I couldn't put any trust in anything that it said. A month earlier I had seen poverty that I'll never be able to forget in Peru. I was stuck in an unjust world that wasn't going to get any better, and apparently, I couldn't put any trust in my fledgling faith. Life wasn't going to get any better. I stopped praying, stopped going to Church, stopped thinking about God, really. I couldn't understand what was going on--I was a freshly confirmed Catholic (not even a year, yet), a converted Christian, a crack theology student, a campus minister--I wasn't supposed to be going through this.

But there I was, going through it all the same. I recognize it now as the natural progression of faith, but at that particular moment, I was a train wreck.

Sitting on my bookshelf was an unassuming little white book. It was a gift from an English teacher who was more of a mentor than a teacher. It was my graduation gift and had a fantastic inscription in the front cover. I had always like The Catcher in the Rye, so I opened it and tried to lose myself in the story.

Lose myself I did. I was in love with Salinger's writing style and with Franny from the very first pages. I didn't realize that I would quickly be delving into the potentially mystical world.

Franny's conversation with Lane about the ridiculousness of the university hit home. After coming back from heart-breaking poverty, I wondered what I was thinking, spending piles and piles of money on an education. I was submitting poems to magazines and thought there was something horribly egotistical in submission. I was sick of the life I was living, sick of the people I knew, sick of everything.

Franny sets up the Jesus prayer extraordinarily well in the first chapter. I felt compelled to drop my life, find a knapsack, and wander through the world, reciting the prayer. One look outside, however, convinced me that the prayer could wait a little while longer while I finished the book.

Enter Zooey Glass, one of two fictional characters I have ever loved whole-heartedly and from the start. Whatever his original intention with Franny is, he illustrated some things that became incredibly important for me in my later spiritual/academic development.

1. The differences between religions are purely illusions. Different names for the same thing. What the Jesus prayer strives for--indeed, what all religions should or do strive for at their heart--is complete emptiness and submission to God, regardless of the name you call out. I can spend the rest of my life calling out Christ's name. You could spend the rest of your life calling out another name. In the end, we'll both get to the same place (Rahnerian concepts of redemption, anyone?). This thought became the catalyst for my interest in systematic theology and my love of Karl Rahner.

2. Apparently, somewhere during my theological training, I became constitutionally unable to understand a God who would dare trust his revelation to incompetent humans. Therein lied my struggle with the mighty theology professor who kept telling me that the Bible was a lie. (Which, by the bye, he doesn't actually believe. He just likes to force undergrads to think for themselves.) If God's message was so important, why the heck would he give it to a bunch of ignorant, early AD men? Why not wait a few thousand years and decide to redeem humanity then? While F&Z doesn't answer these questions, it made me pause to consider why I was struggling so much with my Bible. After I realized why, I could start thinking about how to address that problem and come to terms with it. I've started to resolve those questions for myself, but this is neither the time nor the place to address them. In short, I was pulling a Franny. I was reaching for something I wasn't ready to understand because I wasn't ready to understand God.

3. This might be the most important, but it builds on 1 & 2, particularly 1. There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddamn secret yet? This is so elementary I can't even being to describe how embarrassed I am that I never stopped during my ordinary day to think about it. If we're all Christ, we're all carrying the kingdom around inside of us. Think about it for a moment. Deep inside all of this other ridiculousness part of me is a direct little bit of God. Part of you is a little bit of God. So what are we doing every day? Are we helping one another let that little part of God back out? Are we helping it to grow and flourish until we're really becoming more and more a part of God? Can I look past the fact that you're an atheist, and this person is a Methodist, and this person is Muslim, and see that they're all the same? They're all Seymour's Fat Lady and they all need one another's help to get to where they're going.

After I read the last lines of the book, I closed it and watched the snow fall outside for awhile longer. Then I crawled into my bunk, pulled the covers over my head and fell asleep.