Mailbag: A carnivore's translation of Genesis

Did we ever tell you that we wanted to be a Catholic priest when we grew up? When we were 9 or 10 we built a little altar on our dresser, with a pair of candles, a missal and a set of cruets for the water and oil. We must’ve had a chalice, but we don’t remember what we used for one. Probably a beer schooner.

We’d recite the entire liturgy in Latin, this being before they changed all that and started saying the Mass in the same language that people who live south of the Mason-Dumbass Line speak.

We called in all favors and threw in a nickel or two to get our sister to play altar boy, a task that she performed with a breathtaking lack of enthusiasm that we’re sure the Baby Jesus didn’t look kindly upon.

Later, in high school, at the humanist institution of Wilson High (following a longtime stint at parochial schools), we took a terribly interesting course in comparative religions. Rather, it was interesting until the teacher up and died, leaving us all to wonder toward which version of the afterlife she was headed. Since we had just wrapped up Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” we assumed there would be a river involved.

Since then, we’ve always enjoyed the opportunity to wax theological about matters, to the condescending amusement of our Willowy Editor who has a master’s degree in theology from the Jesuit powerhouse Loyola Marymount University. And who also is occasionally irked by how long it takes for us to get to the point in our column, the end of which we can see from here, so let’s get to the Mailbag, which randomly begins with this missive from reader Shearl Bailey, riffing on our recent column about Lent:

“Lent,” she writes, “offers a superb opportunity to honor Christ’s powerful message of compassion and love by adopting a meat-free diet for Lent and beyond.

“After all, it’s the diet mandated in Genesis 1:29 and observed in the Garden of Eden.”

We don’t know about mandate. Seems to us that God gave us fruits and trees (herbs in some translations) that would serve as food (“meat” replaces food in some translations).

Our verdict: We’ll allow meat. In fact, speaking strictly as an armchair theogist (within spitting range of a university-educated one), we have to wonder if life wouldn’t be better all around if Adam and Eve, when they went out to dier that one time (Genesis something:something), they had ordered the snake rather than the Fruit Surprise?

Also regarding Lent, our friendly nemesis Dimwit called and said he is plaing to buy us a Bombay Sapphire gin gift set to torment us through our gin-eschewing 40-day season of abstinence. We are holding our breath.

Tuing to politics, we received an off-the-record note from an identified source regarding our column about pals in politics, in which we mentioned a former 4th District councilman with whom we had a cordial relationship.

The note is, sadly, appropriate: “His name is Patrick O’Doell, not McDoell.”

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No wonder he doesn’t call much anymore. Neither does the former police chief Jim O’Doell.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.

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