On Capital Letters...

I do not know what I thought of capital letters when I attended Kindergarten It was just a scribing rule everyone except e.e. cummings followed. Someone’s name, a state, a capital, a city, or just something important required a bigger letter, and bigger signified importance. Since I attended Catholic school, if writing about Jesus, He always had to have a capital H even though we were using a pronoun. Because of our non-Messianic nature, our pronouns remained lowercased.  Of course, when wrote of G-d we always employed capital G. Seems we never had a straight answer about the Holy Spirit. (I not so secretly used She)

It’s funny in our typing how our muscle memory instinctually knows the exact location of the backspace key. If I would type out the words catholic church I would catch myself, get as far as cath and then back space until I correctly typed the word Catholic. This must have happened enough that capitalizing Catholic just became habit.

Well as the years went on, I found myself in disagreement more frequently with some of the foundational tenants of the church’s dogma and doctrine. To appropriately and passively express my frustration, in writing, my Cath would then backspace to type catholic. This was my own personal way of nailing my feelings to their doors. Perhaps if I used all the word document tools at my disposal, I would change the font size depending on my level of defiance. That requires more than just throwing my pinky finger in a northeastern direction of the keyboard, so lowercase it stayed.

In the book Conversations with G-d, I relished how author would capitalize words like Love and

Being Itself. This made sense to me, in the easy way rolling the window down on a nice breezy Thursday seemed. What could be more important than Love? If it was a pronoun or another name for a deity or G-d, could we not then invoke the capital H rule as we applied it to Jesus?

We could. We could do all of that. I Could Capitalize Every Word To Make Sure Everyone Knew How Important Every Word Was In A This Sentence. Off the page, do scribing rules still apply?

On the exit I take almost daily, I see a homeless man, and I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know His name yet, but whatever it is, it would capitalized for sure. According to our rules, that enough means He deserves to have His dignity recognized. And really, He doesn’t care at all if I capitalize Catholic or if I do an interpretive dance of the word. He’s just hungry and wants God to bless me. His folded cardboard says so.

When I see Him, I just want to press caps lock, so that when everyone looks at Him, instead of seeing a reason to lock their door and fain their attention to radio, they see G-d, someone whose name is capitalized, or at least someone you can lift your head up long enough to exchange a smile.