I got into it today with The Name I Gave My Nightmares about some dude named Matthew Kelly.

I’ll be honest, I love being Catholic and am unendingly thankful for the beauty and majesty of the Church.  But, I’m not super into Catholic-y-stuff.  I don’t read a lot of Catholic books or blogs.  I don’t know who the movers and shakers in Catholic intellectual or cultural circles are.  When Pope Francis was being elected I was asked if there was a particular Cardinal I was hoping would ascend to the seat of Peter, and I had to admit that I couldn’t even name a Cardinal.  (Oh wait, I can name one, but no one wants Cardinal Whurl to become Pope.)  Maybe this makes me a little spiritually underdeveloped, but I don’t think it means I don’t practice my faith.  It just means I also enjoy keeping up with this season of Arrow and baking cookies in my free time.

Now, today, The Name I Gave My Nightmares was expressing to me and two of our fellow teachers why she dislikes this dude.  I have never read a single word by this man.  Until she mentioned him today I had never heard of him.  But, I found myself in the position of sort of defending him.  Or not really defending him so much as pointing out the flaws in The Name I Gave My Nightmares’ argument.

What it came down to is this: Matthew Kelly seems to be a sort of introduction to Catholicism and she finds it insulting that other people keep giving her his books because she has a master’s degree in theology and therefore his ideas are too simplistic for her.

That took a whole lot of dissecting what she was actually saying (man, I’m never getting that half hour of my life back) and asking a series of pointed and bitchy questions.  The truth may set you free, but it will never make you popular.  No one likes to talk to the person who just relentlessly picks at your thought process until your motivations are laid bare.  And yet, some days, I just can’t help myself.  I feel a special need to dig into her because it all comes down to snobbery.

I used to be a snob.  I’m trying to get over it.

A great gift of AA is the realization that other people don’t need to be me.

Sitting in an AA meeting is experiencing a parallel universe; disparate ideas and appearances that have no apparent reason to intersect converge in both logic and love.  The story is always the same (I drank, I couldn’t stop, I hit rock-bottom, in my surrender God saved me) but the details are unique.  In those details, and in the way they are expressed, and in the countless ways each person is transformed, you get to see just how much God loves each and every single person exactly as who they are and who He created them to be.  When I started to see that I started to let go of my anger at other people for needing avenues to the truth that I didn’t need.

I began to make the distinction between “not what I like/need” and “wrong.”

In a quick perusal of his webpage I can say that Matthew Kelly looks pretty cheesy.  He is most likely not my cup of tea.  And I did not try to tell The Name I Gave My Nightmares that she needed to like him, or agree with him, or even finish the books of his that she had been gifted.  In fact, the solution that all three of her audience members posed to her was to re-gift the books she wasn’t going to read to someone who might need them.

The reason she didn’t want to agree to that is because she couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that someone would need such a book or such an author.  It made me sad to watch her struggle with not wanting to admit that she was having such a thought.  It made me sad to be reminded of just how easily I dismissed other people’s spiritual and intellectual needs, simply because my needs were different.

My soul is moved by the struggle of John Donne, the apocalyptic vision of Flannery O’Connor, the soothing reiteration of Julian of Norwich.  My mind finds identity in strife,  while at the same time my soul craves comfort and safety.  I love the way God speaks to me, the paths that he gives me to show me his will.  I don’t need to get all fired up for Jesus.  I will never want to sing praise and worship songs.  I will most likely go the rest of my life without reading a single word written by Matthew Kelly.

And God doesn’t (at this point, to my knowledge) need me to.  But just because God doesn’t need Matthew Kelly to speak to me, that doesn’t mean He doesn’t need Matthew Kelly to speak to someone.  Whomever that person is, their soul is just as precious as mine or anyone else’s.  If Matthew Kelly is your guy, then by all means, have at it.

But, maybe, consider a set of steak knives or a nice bathrobe when it’s time for gift-giving.

(3 Years, 2 Months, and 20 Days Sober)