pat loughery

Today, while walking to burn off some guacamole, I listened to the May 1 episode of the always-excellent This American Life radio show/podcast.

This American Life is a national treasure. For those that haven’t yet experienced it: each week, the show chooses a particular theme, then presents stories around that theme. This particular episode looks at what it means to return to the scene of a crime.

All three stories presented in this episode are excellent as usual, but it was the last story that captured me.

The final act in this set of stories comes from Dan Savage. Dan’s a Seattle-based relationship and sex advice columnist, an editor for the alternative paper The Stranger, a several-times-published book author, and a gay man who aggressively battles both religious conservatives and what he calls “the gay establishment”. Agree or disagree with Dan Savage, you always understand his perspective and admire his strength as a communicator. Readers of this blog may recall that Dan had a heated series of exchanges with local pastor Eugene Cho about their perspecives on homosexuality and Christianity. (That single blog entry should be required reading on the subject, but it won’t give you a nice, easy answer no matter your opinion on the subject).

Anyway, back to the podcast.

The show’s webpage describes the Dan Savage story as this:

Dan Savage points a finger at the Catholic Church for being the kind of criminal organization that drives him to atheism—despite the fact that he still wants to believe he’ll see his mom in heaven someday

Frankly, that’s one of the poorest summaries of a story that I’ve ever read. Yeah, it’s about the Catholic church, and his mom, and atheism, but it’s about much more than that.

The story is about faith and doubt; power and weakness; life, death and grief; power and frailty. In it, Dan describes his relationship to the Catholicism of his youth, his difficulty with some of its teachings, and the powerful draw that faith and sacred places have on him, even though he doesn’t believe, wants to, but can’t.

Be careful listening to this; you may find yourself weeping along with Dan as he describes his mom, her love-in-action for him, and her recent death. I certainly did, at more moments than I can count on one hand.

The podcast is an hour long and well worth listening to, but at least make sure you listen to the third act, which is in the final 15 minutes or so.