The Marginal Christian's Handbook.

The Greatest of These is Empathy

[published on September 18 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles" blog, my previous blog]

Getting angry at the sight of another’s pain is the most natural response in the world. Why are we being forced to see it? What’s the good of our seeing it?  What do they expect us to do about it?  Isn't it obvious that there is nothing we can do about it?

Unabashed grief strikes us as embarrassing and unseemly---e.g., the widow or mother who abandons herself to emotion and howls with pain at the graveside. Our first response is to distance ourselves because what can you do or say or feel yourself in the face of it?

Even Christ got fed up and impatient being followed around by people who wanted him to fix their problems. If you can heal the sick, everyone is going to expect you to be at it all the hours there are and when are you going to have a minute to yourself, to think, to pray, to teach? Like the poor, the sick, maimed, and miserable are always with us.

I was so angry with my mother after my dad died. She just sat. I was there with her and she just sat in the chair staring ahead in the blank way people in pain do, as if they are looking at a wall a few inches away that is between you and them. I wanted to break through it, so I yelled at her. I wanted her to remember me and to care about me. I remember how listlessly she glanced up at me; it was with the expression of  a mortally injured animal---uncomprehending grief, pain, and terror. Her misery was something she couldn’t articulate or share. I was sad, but she was shattered.

There by the Grace of God Go Those Others: The Hardest Part of Christian Charity

[published on September 17, 2005]

What is a Christian's first duty to people who have suffered unimaginably and lost ? 

PICK ONE-- The greatest of these is:

1. A voluntary donation to a recipient who won't spend your hard-earned money on alcohol or drugs;
2. Involuntary donations through taxes;
3. Compassion; 
4. Pity;
5. Empathy.

(HINT:  It's the one that produces neither self-satisfaction nor self-pity, but  grief and terror)

Part of the shock of New Orleans for those of us who consider ourselves middle class has been in being forced to confront some aspects of life that we may normally be able to keep at bay.

One of those aspects is the terrible loneliness of the individual who is severed from the community.

When you pass a homeless person in the street, do you ever really stop and ask yourself what the world is like to him or her? I don’t mean just the problem of being without money and not knowing how you are going to find shelter or where your next meal is coming from. I am talking about the almost unthinkable isolation of being in need and completely alone.

What is it like for the elderly lady who is hobbling along behind the grocery cart where she keeps all her worldly goods? What would it be like to be her? What would it like to be alone, homeless, and ill?

Christianity, 'Christianity,' and Ann Coulter

    [published on September 9, 2005 in my "Flatland Oracles" blog]

An Ann Coulter speech? Thanks but no thanks. A Christian college revokes its invitation. [Salon.com]

    In addition to the Tim Grieve note, I recommend having a look at the article from Inside Higher Ed.  Here's a quote which goes to the basis of this very conservative College's decision to retract an invitation to have her speak there:

Yet in the days after Harding’s announcement, a small group of Harding alumni began voicing their discontent on their blogs. Mike Cope, a minister at Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, Tex., complained that Coulter lives in a “black/white ‘I’m-right-and-you’re-an-idiot’ world. If you don’t agree with her then you’re a bleeding heart liberal who doesn’t deserve to live here.” The problem, he said, was not that Coulter is conservative, but that her views are un-Christian.

Measure for Measure: How Much Charity Can I Afford?

When you're a bystander, far from affluent, and one of nature's misanthropes, how do you make yourself reach out?  I'm having the same trouble as the rest of the people I know balancing grace against fiscal and psychic realities.  Should I be trying to?

1.  Christian stoicism in the face of the suffering of others. I’m disturbed by the attempts I see from very good people who are sickened by the misery of New Orleans to limit and control their emotional responses.  I'm even more disturbed by my attempts (and I realize that though sickened, I am not one of the very good people).                

I realize that empathy is painful and inconvenient, but it is also the price you pay for an expanded consciousness---in a word, for God-consciousness. 

You can help the people of New Orleans by offering such help as you can offer, whether it’s much or little.  You can only help yourself by fully realizing that there is nothing but an imaginary gap in time and space between their reality (including their suffering) and yours.                

This is not the time for Christian stoicism.  I had to stop for a few deep, healing breaths when I read the account of Laura Bush’s alleged Christian stoicism in the face of the suffering of others---and I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume that she said plenty of other things that were not quoted.  I have to stop again, repeatedly, when other very good people in whose goodness I believe recite what I’ve recently  seen mislabelled  as ‘the comforting platitude’ that ‘the poor are always with you.’                

Deep, healing breaths!  Deep, healing breaths!                

That statement is not a platitude and it was never meant to comfort anyone.  It was uttered in a specific context. 

Fighting Back Against the Church of Christ Without Christ: Why Secular Humanists Need Left-Leaning God Botherers Like Me.

I found the perfect name for the "Christianity" practiced by the 'religious' 'Right'  from a book by Flannery O’Connor (who was talking about something else entirely. Though I like all her work, I am pretty sure that she and I wouldn’t see eye to eye.) But 'the Church of Christ without Christ"  perfectly describes the religion that the Right touts as “Christianity”---a sort of nominal Christianity, a religion that mandates the worship of Christ while disregarding his actual teaching.

I received a comment from Case Wagenvoord, who states:

Those on the right are Christanists who practice the doctrine of Christanism, a doctrine totally unrelated to the teachings of Christ. They should be forced to memorize Romans 8:38-39.

“Christianists.”---practitioners of the religion of Christ without Christ. You know, I don’t think he’d like them quite as much as they assume. He was constantly rebuking people for being hypocrites. And as he said to some of those tedious pharisees: “You are the sort who hold yourselves out to other people as righteous, but God knows what’s in your hearts, and the self-serving righteousness which people esteem, God despises.” (Luke 16: 15).

So-Called 'Christians.' They've hijacked my religion.

published on September 1, 2005, at my previous blog, "The Flatland Oracles."

They're wrong.  What was that he said?  "By their fruits you will know them."

So the real problem is that they don't understand the religion that they are so anxious to shove down the throats of the rest of the world.  As the man said, a diseased tree is going to yield diseased fruit 100% of the time. 

I hate the way that they are hijacking my religion.  I don't mind being considered a namby-pamby bleeding heart mawkish soft-shelled squeamish God-bothering  liberal, because at least that's consistent with the principle of loving one's neighbor as oneself, which we are told is one of the two commandments "on which hang all the law and the prophets."  I can live with being despised for being too tolerant, too ready to forgive, too ready to excuse.  I am sure I'm wrong sometimes,  but I'm comfortable with erring on the side of compassion. 

But I cannot understand---or accept---how the religion of Christ has been taken over by people whose whole religion consists in judging and excluding those who don't believe the 'right' (in their minds) creeds.