[00:00:00] Jenée Arthur: [VOICEOVER]. Hey everybody. Welcome back.

Wow. It's been quite a week; a week of celebration and even somber remembrance.

First, we had the U S holiday of Thanksgiving and for all us Catholic Christians, we had the start of Advent. And for all of us of the Jewish faith, we're now on the fourth day of Hanukkah. I hope all of these holidays have thus far entailed immense love and light for you.

Just yesterday, we honored World AIDS Day—remembering the many people we've lost to the AIDS epidemic.

This week was supposed to be an episode, a long promised episode, about Dad's and my perspective on the institution of the Catholic church. It is, as you can imagine, a subject rife with conflict. But as it drew near, I had hoped instead to use the conversation, to celebrate the seemingly mass return of so many LGBTQ people to their Catholic faith due to Pope Francis being at the helm of the Church—a Pope that appears to be just about as inclusive as Jesus Christ himself.

It was all on course; even serendipitous with the arrival of a hand clipped newspaper article from my friend, Cecelia, of Michael O' Loughlin’s New York Times article about his correspondence with Pope Francis—where Mike O' Loughlin shared how his conversations with gay Catholics and Catholic clergy, especially Sister Carol Baltosiewich and her compassionate care of gay men with AIDS during a time when most people were turning their backs to the community, O' Laughlin realized that such encounters could transform the lives and the perception of gay people within the Church...and he wanted to tell Pope Francis about that.

O'Loughlin wrote a letter to Pope Francis— and Pope Francis wrote back.

The rest you can read in the article, but from the moment I read that article, something stirred in me.

Perplexed because I was getting ready to run an episode that entailed a divisive perspective of the Catholic Church and how I left the church in my early twenties and found my way back years later.

Then I realized, that story wasn't ready to be told.

What would I produce now in the 11th hour? Cause you, our listeners, count on every episode dropping every Thursday. When I should have been putting the final touch on this week's show, I sat and listened to hours of Michael O'Loughlin's brand new podcast titled PLAGUE.

And I cried.

As I listened into the late of last night, 6 episodes and 2 bonus episodes had just dropped in honor of World AIDS Day. Suddenly, my experiment, my podcast— felt small. Insignificant, really.

Sure. I'm fighting an honorable fight to defend my hypothesis of division being optional, which by the way, I firmly stand behind.

Well, what I actually realize more than ever is that division is indeed optional. We are choosing to remain divided. It's not about duality. It's about choice.

Sure. Some of it's orchestrated,. Some of it is created out of pure ignorance. Some of our division exists solely because we are pompous enough to somehow remain unbending in the thought that what we believe is the right and only thing for everyone to believe.

Well, that's wrong, plain and simple— it's wrong.

But even as my hypothesis has merit, I aspire to join people like Mike O' Loughlin, who stands with conviction to his Catholic faith—though anyone who knows me knows I identify as a Catholic Buddhist; hence the portmanteau of Cathuddhist Buddhatholic that makes up a blog in which I've written intermittently for the past eight years, which, by the way, is morphing into something entirely new in 2022.

Last night, something became clear to me. This part of the journey is over.

Dad and I still have four episodes to round out our Season One finale on December 29th. But something is shifting in me. Something wants to come forth and I plan to give it the space to unfold and reveal itself. No more forcing a square peg into a round hole

Division is definitely a choice, but it's not an illusion. It does exist. And we on both sides of the divide are to blame. Not in any hellfire and brimstone sort of way. But in holding so firmly to our convictions, that we can't see other points of view. I talk more about this in the last few episodes, so...

Last night, after listening to Michael O' Loughlin's podcast PLAGUE, I wrote a handwritten letter that began:

Dear Pope Francis,

[Laughter] I personally pray that this letter leads to something wonderful. But no matter what results from this letter, if anything at all, which today will be shipped off to the Vatican in Rome... writing it helped me see something.

And as I leave you until we meet again next week— Remember be who you are. Not who someone else outside you wishes you were.

I encourage you to live in the fullness of who you were created to be. You know who that is. No doctrine nor dogma or any other person's agenda has to keep you from being who you authentically are.

You are beautiful.

And, you matter.

Thank you over and over and over again for being here with us. It means so much to me.

See you next time.

Division is Optional