Don't read blogs

I blame Amy Welborn.

This morning at breakfast, my eight-year-old mentioned that a Catholic woman we know told him there was a book that would completely change how people thought of the Last Supper. Since she had mentioned the book to me a couple of weeks ago, I knew she was talking about The DaVinci Code.

There was a time -- some folks call that era "February 2004" -- when I would have said I benefitted from reading blogs. In particular, I would have said reading open book gave me the benefit of knowing enough to avoid The DaVinci Code as an irritating time-waster.

But now, with the scales new-fallen from my eyes, I see how wrong I was.

Because if I didn't read blogs, I wouldn't know much of anything about that book, and I would have accepted the copy offered me last Fall by a friend, and I would have set it on a shelf among two hundred other unread books, and I would have said, "Oh ah?" when the woman told me it was intriguing a couple of weeks ago, and I would have said, "Really? Huh," this morning when my son told me it would completely change how I thought about the Last Supper.

But no.

Instead of, "Really? Huh," I said, "That book is complete junk, written by a fool!" Later, I got angry at the woman for exposing my child -- however obliquely -- to an anti-Catholic conspiracy theory. Later still, I got angry at her for forcing me to plan a parish-level response to The DaVinci Code, which necessarily involves a) planning a parish-level response, something I'm neither competent at nor authorized to do; and b) reading The DaVinci Code, and the only good thing about reading The DaVinci Code I can think of is that it isn't Atlas Shrugged.

Now, I'm mad at Amy Welborn, for leading me down the "it's not 'just a novel'" path to begin with.

And I have to tell you, it's not at all satisfying that the next thing I have to do is buy Amy's book.

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