[MD] until death do us part

[John Carl]

Greetz All,

I was toodling around yesterday, following a link Matt sent, (thanks Matt)
and came across a book review Pirsig did in 1975, about a man going through
divorce.

http://www.psybertron.org/stpaulnews.html#Review

It's also got some keen snippets on Texas Protestants, Mary!

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I once taught a college course where I asked the class, "Is there an
absolute external morality?" And I was astonished to discover that, without
exception, every Catholic student said yes, and every Protestant student
said no. There is a profound division here.

For the traditional Catholic layman, morality is external. The author
remembers vividly the terror he felt in parochial school when he saw what
happened to Cecelia after she defied Sister Anastasia. He still feels it.
For him the other-directed authoritarian system of his moral education has
become the pattern of his life, and we see in page after page his professed
love of, and obedience to, authority. He is a system player. That is how he
had to learn it. You love the system and the system loves you. Now the
system is failing and he is without a clue and in terror as to why this
should happen.

Protestants, including his own wife, tend to take more heed of their own
consciences when coming to moral decisions. This is more true among
Methodists than many other sects, more true of all, I think, among
Protestants residing in the state of Texas. In fact, if there's one thing
the traditional Texas Protestant knows how to do better than anything else,
it's how to make up his *own* ornery mind about what is right and what is
wrong, and *keeps* it made up, come hell or high water, or anything else you
might want to run in front of him. Texas girls see this in their fathers and
grow up unconsciously expecting to find it in every man. This, tragically,
in the one thing the author cannot supply. He must run to authorities for
every moral decision and every major idea in his head. And by Texas
Protestant standards this makes him a moral weakling and a failure, and
this, I think, is why his wife cannot love him. And there is nothing he can
do about it.

Nevertheless, I think this book will provide a happy ending for its author.
It is, among other things, a 278-page marital advertisement which should
produce dozens, if not hundreds, of matrimonial offers. I hope, for his own
sake, that his final choice is someone who really appreciates him for the
good man he is. Preferably, it should be an Eastern, Polish, Roman Catholic
woman, heavy-boned and big-breasted, domineering and authoritarian, from a
childhood of poverty like the one he got away from by marrying the little
ballet dancer from Texas. She should love him earthily, and also her
children and her church discipline and the suburban life, because she finds
in these things the meaning of life itself. He deserves it.

As for his divorced wife, I don't know what will happen. She has a hard life
coming.

But there's a feeling, rising up from deep inner sources, that in the end,
when it is all over for all of us, it will be she who goes to heaven long
before he does.