Greetings fellow pilgrims! Your humble scribe once again beckons you to waste a small portion of your remaining life experience in a puzzled, but hopefully bemused, attempt at trying to make some literal or figurative sense out of my mental wanderings through the vast, uninhabited wastelands of cyber space. Fresh off my MOST popular blog offering of a month or so ago (WITH A COMMENT, FOR GOSH SAKES - no wait, NEVER MIND), I want to follow up with an insightful bit of drivel regarding a couple of loosely related (in my mind all things are loosely related) topics.
Starting with Happy Easter! The thing here, if I may, is that the older I get the more the simplicity of Christianity means to me. I know we are talking God stuff here, which means, or should logically mean, that nobody has any idea of what they are really talking about and nobody has any right to presume to tell anybody else anything about anything, since God is totally beyond our capacity for thought or appreciation, except it's not. Because of simplicity. God, being the amazing Supreme Being, He is (note that the pronoun "he" is simply a convention - don't get sexist), broke things down to things so simple that even an imbecile like yours truly can start to get the idea. What does it mean for an immaterial. immortal, cosmic being to love? Not a clue. What does it mean for Jesus to love? Easy, he told us. Greater love has no man but to lay down his life for his friends. What does my behavior, often so selfish, hardheaded, hurtful, ignorant, spiteful, malicious, and simply mean that even I can't reconcile my life to any concept of "good" have with relation to a perfect, loving being? Not too much it turns out. Actually it sucks. God is, as He should be, appalled and repulsed. If he were not appalled by parts of me, I would not have a lot of respect for Him, since I am appalled at parts of me. So now what? Well, says God, you won't understand this completely, but somehow, by actually becoming a person, and doing things like living, being murdered, and coming back to life, I take care of all that somehow. You don't, you CAN'T understand it, and as a matter of fact it will sound ridiculous, if not insane, but I'm the Supreme Being here so I make the rules, and, well, it works for ME, so there you are. All you got to do is accept it. At least from your perspective, anyway. I have a lot more to do with you, none of which you can understand or do for yourself, but it needs to be done. So I do it with things like bread and wine. Simple stuff. But when you open your hand and take the wafer, you are taking ME. Across all time and space, across all understanding and knowing, I will be with you Steve. And IN you. And you IN me. Simple, yet more profound than all the brains on earth can ever begin to comprehend. The trick is that you sort of have to be stupid (Jesus said childlike, but stupid is more appropriate for some of us) to believe all of this. So stupid that you think you can understand what you can never really understand, but you can understand, at least a little. And that's enough. Happy Easter. Go eat a chocolate bunny and hide plastic eggs. How's that for stupid.
Now, I had a very upsetting incident happen to me the other day. I was speaking to my pastor, at my mainline, liturgical church, and it happened to be the morning after the Brussels bombings, and I made a snarky (surprise!) comment about the "religion of peace." Faster than a speeding liberal, my pastor admonished me that Islam had absolutely nothing to do with the bombings, and that Islam was, basically, just like Christianity in its respect for all human life. A person standing by helpfully added the ever-popular "KKK" and "Crusades" comments to show how awful Christianity was, demonstrating conclusively that we had no place to judge. I asked my pastor how he could say such a thing, considering the people doing the bombings were explicitly clear that they did so for religious reasons, and his response was that he knew "good" Muslims and they say that their religion is peaceful. So there. End of discussion.
To which I say, "horse hockey." No, all Muslims are not violent. The vast, vast majority probably want nothing to do with warlike jihad. Some aspects of Islam are progressive, or were, comparatively in the Eleventh Century or so, and some Muslim majority nations are almost, but not quite, up to third world Christian standards regarding human rights and personal liberties. But that doesn't answer the question. Why are Muslims, right now, acting like they were back in the Seventh Century on purpose, and why are we afraid to call religious barbarity for what it obviously is? Just tonight the news reports that Christians in Pakistan were bombed while celebrating Easter and a Roman Catholic priest was actually crucified by ISIS on Good Friday. But it's not religious. Couldn't be. Strangely enough this entire mess makes me reflect back to my first point; you have to BELIEVE the TRUTH, even if the truth is uncomfortable and doesn't fit your preconceptions of how the world ought to be My pastor seems to be unable to see a reality that he feels (I'm sure) to be opposed to his faith. But its still a truth. There IS something religious going on here. It's not the Middle Eastern economy stupid. It's how they understand God that's the problem. Failing to see truth is just the flip side of unbelief, and it makes me wonder if I am in the right church. Time will tell, I suppose.
Speaking of time, did someone say unisex bathrooms? Well, of course we in NC are now embroiled in a conflict regarding transgender people and public restrooms. As if we didn't have real problems to worry about. But anyway, the media is doing its best to stoke the flames and keep people confused. One side says they are worried about sexual predators and the other side shows pictures of "guys" that look as beefy as Arnold did back in the mid 1980's, and then informs the reader that "Suzie" was born female. Which bathroom should Suzie use? How about the one that appears correct now? Power-lifters with 40 inch biceps to the guys, and anybody in a dress to the girls. What's the problem? Admittedly, my perspective is shaded by my 5 years of living in Japan, where going to the public toilet was something of an adventure every time. It actually took me a while to get used to going whiz at a urinal with a smiling 60 year old Japanese cleaning lady standing RIGHT beside me, waiting for me to finish. Happened all the time. The funniest incident was in a small town, where a group of us Americans had gone for a field trip. The lady's room was located in the back of he men's, meaning that a line of extremely embarrassed American women had to run a gauntlet of Japanese men busily going tinkle on each side of them before they could get to their bathroom. No harm, no foul. Nobody seemed to mind really. It certainly wasn't a national issue. Which I guess is my point, if I have one. People are again having trouble seeing. Or at least they are having trouble seeing anything other than their own narrow perspectives. And bathrooms? Really?
So, kind and patient reader, who is almost certainly non-existent and purely a product of my fanciful imagination, where does all this leave us? Maybe back where we started. With simplicity. God is real, He did have a Son who rose from the dead. Not all believe, and some even persecute and kill those that do. This is a spiritual issue, not a sociology experiment. And we get all in a huff over things that don't matter all that much. Let people choose where they should attend to their business as long as they don't interfere with anybody else's. That's not what we are here for. It's Easter. There is a miracle to believe.
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