Well, today I’m not going to actually write about anything I learned in class about The Handmaid’s Tale. Or Oates or Atwood.

Today I’m going to write about church on Friday.

I’m Anglican, and you should never ask for an Anglican perspective on anything, because when Mass is over one third of the congregation will on a pro-life march, a second will attend a gay rights rally and the last third will do time between both. And we all read, so when I brought up the Handmaid’s Tale after Mass, at lunch, there were many statements about it that brought me to the heart of Atwood.

Father Paul stated, disapprovingly: "She doesn’t think much of Christianity."

I disagreed and corrected him, even though he’s in his mid-seventies and I’m in my mid-twenties. He modifed it to, "Well, she doesn’t have much to say about evangelical Christianity." He’s an evangelical Anglican. I agreed that she didn’t and said that I didn’t either. All the liberals were gone from lunch that day, and I had to hold the fort for right thinking leftists. Everyone who had read the book or seen the movie said that Atwood found fundamental Christianity a threat. I said pointed out that she never said it was Christianity, but that it might well have been. What was more, I saw fundamental Christianity as a threat. Like all fundamentalisms it’s so NOT fundamental. It is not basic. Fundamental Christianity should be, "love your neighbor as yourself," or the Sermon on the Mount. So would say a liberal. I recently watched the documentary "Fear and Trembling before G-D about the horrible treatment of gays in the Jewish Orthodox and Hasidic communities. But Rabbi Hi! llel, when asked what the heart of Judaism was gave the same response (and did this standing on one foot) as Jesus did about his message- which was also rabbinic. Fundamentalism is so good at picking and choosing what it likes, and what is of advantage to the mighty. It demonizes the other and makes a demon out of the oppressor. By now I’m sure I’ve stopped talking about the book, but isn’t that what a good book does, lead you discuss something beyond it? Something immediately in this world?

I am reading Oate’s The Faith of a Writer now, and going to the poems. Handmaid led me into a slight argument with a friend who is a Lutheran minister (he eats with us on Fridays and sometimes says Mass at our church). It was about the essence of faith. He is a good man, but his faith can be boiled down to three sentences he learned in seminary. There is nothing terribly strong or dynamic about it. I would that my faith was the faith of a writer: not easily set down, put out in poems and essays, changing, expressing itself in the world, whispered through ink on pages from my soul when it is quiet to the soul of another when he or she is all alone in her room reading.