Bada-Bing!

“Gentle and merciful Lord Jesus, I want to speak now to you with an open heart and honest heart. Tonight I ask you to take my sins and the sins of my family in to your merciful heart. We have chosen this life in full awareness in the consequences of our sins. I know that Christopher's life is in your hands and his fate is your will. I ask you humbly to spare him and if it is your will to spare him, I ask that you deliver him from blindness and grant him vision, and through this vision may he see your love, and gain the strength to carry on in service to your mercy.
In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.�
Carmela Soprano, Episode 22, The Sopranos

“Any politician who pimps family values,� says my lawyer friend, “has never been in a good old fashioned will contest.� In that same spirit, HBO and the creators of the sixth season of ‘The Sopranos’ have put f. v. on full display in their first episode, ‘Members Only.’ Care-giving, Love and Loyalty fill nearly every scene. Just maybe not the kind you might see on the Hallmark Channel. But what, you may justifiably ask, has any of this to do with the Christian Left. Well, a lot, I’d like to say.

The family in question is of course a New Jersey crime family, more than just blood relatives. Tony Soprano, the capo, takes ‘points’ from the profits that his men earn from loan sharking, influence peddling, protection rackets, you know, the usual. In return, he gives them his protection. But that’s only half the story, or less, as the show gives viewers a look at the home life of a Mafia ‘made man’, a life lived out in an upscale suburban neighborhood with All-American kids and a soccer mom kind of wife.

In one scene in the season opener, we see Tony, and his wife Carmela, eating sushi and drinking wine at an expensive Japanese restaurant. They are awash in the sensual pleasure of the luxury that mobster money can buy. Tony does a little boasting about his recent successes in ‘this thing of ours’ as the dons are want to call their business. But he also confesses to anxiety, “Why do you think I toss at night? It ain't just the apnea.� A little later, again coming out of a fine restaurant,Carmela tells a friend:“I’m worried.� Her friend replies. “Everybody worries!� “No,� Carmela says, “I am worried all the time.�

So what has the Sopranos worried? Could be living a life of privilege and luxury all gained by violence and the oppression of vulnerable people. In earlier years, her priest has counseled Carmela that she had to make a decision about whether she can maintain her own salvation and still live with Tony, enjoying the wealth that comes from living in the protection of a leader in organized crime.

In fact, in the most recent episode, when Carmela gets too inquisitive about the disappearance of a young woman who had been discovered as an FBI informant, Tony distracts her by buying her a new Porsche, “…a Cayenne, you know, like the pepper,� as she tells her friend. For the people to whom they are loyal, the Soprano family are fiercely loyal and protective. The rest had better beware. Not unlike, say: “God bless our troops.�

For an American, it is the most pressing political and spiritual question of our time, is it not? How can we thrive in this land of the free when so much of our economic advantage rests upon the backs of the poorest of the poor in this world? Do we delude ourselves into the belief that our material security comes from our hard work, and not from the geopolitical fury that our military rains down upon the errant freeholder in resource rich, cash poor emirates the world over? Even more importantly, how should we respond to these circumstances? As Carmela says, Father forgive us, we have chosen this life in full awareness of the consequences of our sins.