Why I'm Not Contributing to the Topsy and Tuptim Posts: the Instrumentum Laboris Has Driven Me Crazy

Going indigenous means no tan lines.

FYI - Mary Ann is Topsy and I'm Tuptim (T&T) and it used to be that I'd contribute a bit in writing the T&T posts. I had spoken to Mary Ann and we agreed that I'd also read the Pan-Amazon Synod Instrumentum Laboris and send her my remarks however it didn't turn out that way. As I finished Part I, Chapter 2, she was far ahead with Chapter 4 already posted. I just couldn't keep up with her. 

But another thing happened - a very weird thing where I couldn't control my mind. Instead of being upset at what the document was telling me, my mind kept showing me hilarious images of what was leaping from the page into it, preparing me to "go indigenous". Cast off all the shackles and "go native", free at last. Playalinda Beach here I come! 

That's the nude beach over at Canaveral Seashore Park where I can practice being indigenous, free to be me, naked and without shame, because in indigenous places there is no lust. It's all pure and natural. Just nature. I can wear nothing at all except a shrunken head necklace and the charm bracelet made from all the teeth saved from my three children as they grew up. 

So here's my apology to Mary Ann who has been very understanding of my shortcomings.

Hi Mary Ann,

So sorry that I have been no help at all to you on the T&T discussion of the Pan-Amazon Synod. The way that the Instrumentum Laboris is presented it's as if the cannibals in the Amazon are already so perfect that they do not need Christ - or that they are Christ Himself so we all have to be like they are. Besides, what's the Pope talking about? The Yanomami have been being baptized for years by the Salesians. Mention of "new paths" reeks of women priests - the age-old and well trodden path of pagans, protestants and witches. 

I glance at a few paragraphs because that's all my mind and heart can take, and think, When will Christ rid us of this man? When will bishops and cardinals stand up against this heretical concept? I received an email from an unknown person about the shrunken head post with a one word comment - "Yikes!" I referred him to all your T&T posts and said that "Yikes!" should apply to the synod itself and what PF is doing to the Church. 

Being ecological means making our
own adornments from useful things
lying around the house.

James Lynch (from the shrunken head post) is a leftist loon, currently living in Miami, who worked at Chase Bank in Brazil while he was exploring the Amazon, looking for the Lost City of Z of Percy Fawcett fame. Percy disappeared along with his son and the son's friend in 1925, all three probably eaten by cannibals. 

People at Chase Bank complained because James Lynch would go days without bathing, however I bet that the Yanomami in the Amazon bathe almost everyday in the streams and rivers. They look clean to me in all the pictures. What is it with white liberals that they think indigenous people don't bathe? Besides, the natives live in open spaces, not a bank building. I once had a boyfriend in college - the one who is now Professor Emeritus of Engineering at a well-known university in the South...a Presbyterian who is now head of Christian education at his church and who has Richard Rohr on his list of must-read authors for his classes. One day long ago when we were in college, on the way back from Florida to Raleigh I picked him up from his home near Lumberton, NC, and we rode the remainder of the way back to school together. Problem was....he had not taken a bath for several days! He and his brother and father had been deer hunting and it was explained to me that not bathing was one way to not alarm wild animals. 

I could not understand that theory because he stunk to high heaven and certainly deer could smell him and know instinctively that it was a human odor. I had thought that being scent-free would be the answer and explained, I thought quite rationally, that he was riding in an enclosed space in a car for a few hours, not deer hunting, and that he should have showered before I picked him up. His answer was that he'd do that when he got back to school. (So much for liberal empathy for others.) Meanwhile I had to endure the stench so rolled down the windows. What did I know? I was not a liberal....and see!...it's a good thing I didn't marry him because right now, instead of emailing you, I'd be an uber liberal Presbyterian studying nutty Richard Rohr.

Anyway, back to James Lynch - he says that the cannibals of the Amazon are very kind people. They are also exceptionally intelligent because they know that intermarrying is not good so they raid other villages to take their women. That leaves the men of other villages without women so the cannibals eat the men "as a food source". All very ecological, you know. This is the kind of thinking of the indigenous people of the Amazon that we must revere. So I think we need to watch our backs - the liberals might get hungry.

I can only think of outrageous things - hence the shrunken head post - when reading the document since it isn't anything that makes a person think normal thoughts. It does not bring one's mind to God, but rather to the outrageous workings of one's own mind.