A Quote by Joan Hackett
I don't know about being a Catholic anymore, though I had a great romance with the Church. But its male hierarchy causes me pain and distress. So I can't really pay too much attention. When that encyclical from the Pope - the one about contraception - began 'Dear Sons and Brothers' I figured it must be private mail and had nothing to do with me. So I didn't read it.
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I don't really read a lot of newspapers. I don't pay attention to what is being said or written about me. I've had lots of experiences in the past when I got too much into it. That sort of diverts your focus.
I don't really like to pay attention too much to what is being said about me, only because the people closest to me - my parents, family, and friends - know me best. So I feel like their opinions mean more to me than anyone else's.
When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
I grew up in a family in which no male upstream from me had ever finished high school, much less gone to college. But I was taught that even though there was nothing I could do about what was behind me, I could change everything about what was in front of me. My working poor parents told me that I could do better.
Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.
Nothing's really changed for me over the years. I like telling stories about people with problems. I can't really put it much simpler than that. Relationships are interesting to me. Not just between men and women but fathers and sons, brothers and sisters and friends.
Now Pope Francis on his overnight flight back to Italy explains how contraception can be justified. This is the pope, the Vicar of Christ, the Catholic Church explaining how contraception could be justified. And then he rips into capitalism and the American immigration policies while at the Mexican border before getting on his plane to go back to Italy.
The Roman Catholic Church early on simply adapted the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire and confused the whole thing. Vertical attention and hierarchy were so entangled, that when the French killed the king during the Revolution, they lost much of their vertical attention too.
I have the best fans. I know every artist says that but I really do. I love my fans for how much they know about me, how much they learn about me, and how much they really pay attention.
I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.
I'm an ex-Catholic priest. I have such a complex relationship to Catholicism. On the one hand, if I called myself a Catholic it would have to be a very unorthodox one, as I just don't believe all of the teachings of the Church. But on the other hand, I'm an educated man because the Catholic Church educated me. It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can't talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?
My favorite story about O'Connor - one of them - is I was in Toronto at a pro-life conference.I had a session before he was to come on,I thought very moderately - that not have unwanted abortions was to have much more research on contraception. Two true-faith people came out of the audience, wrested the microphone out of my hand and said, `That is im - inappropriate, improper. Pro-lifers do not believe in contraception.' [John] O'Connor's watching this said,`I want to tell you I'm delighted that Nat is not a member of the Catholic Church. We have enough trouble as it is.'
Ninety-eight percent of women in childbearing age who are Catholic use contraception. Ok, so in practice the church has not enforced this and now they want the federal government and private insurance to enforce it. It just isn't consistent to me.
When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening, I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.
For me, in general, it's always about the material. Obviously, it's about the material and hoping that someone wants to hire me for a job, too, but I've certainly seen films like 'Orphan' and movies like that where I know that if I had had the opportunity to read that script or had an opportunity to do it, I would have wanted to do it.
I know absolutely nothing about where I'm going. I'm fine with that. I'm happy about it. Before, I had nothing. I had no life, no friends, and no family really, and I didn't really care. I had nothing, and nothing to lose, and then I knew loss. What I cared about was gone; it was all lost. Now I have everything to gain; everything is a clean slate. It's all blank pages waiting to be written on. It's all about going forward. It's all about uncertainty and possibilities.
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