by Damozel | I've had a long day of praying and waiting, waiting and praying. Being a certain sort of Christian, I assume that God knows what he is doing all the time and always knows what everyone wants in his or her heart; I also believe that life is demonstrably not about trying to be happy all the time or to live forever, but something else, a different sort of opportunity. I therefore believe that prayer is pointless on some issues: things I don't like and feel I can't bear will happen. But of course, a priest I know once pointed out, the answer to a prayer is not invariably, "Yes."
Prayer is for filling in the time when there's nothing else to do but that, I guess; and also because you might as well ask. To quote a character in a Flannery O'Connor novel I read in my twenties, how can you get what you don't ask for? You might as well ask. Anyway, that sense of connection and communication can keep you from going insane when there is literally nothing else to be done. At least you can ask for the kinds of things that can make a difference in the meaning of a situation: courage, support from above or within, that sort of thing. And you can register what sort of outcome you want. Who knows, maybe it does make a difference sometimes? And so far my prayers have been "answered." Answered with a "yes," I mean. Unless, of course, it's what was going to happen all along anyway.
I haven't felt up to BN-Politics, or politics, in the interim. Sometimes you need to focus your mind on other things. I focused mine, as I said, on prayer, but I am not very good at sustained prayer, so in the interim I focused on the British version of Spongebob Squarepants. Yes, I said the British version of Spongebob Squarepants. Here's an exemplary one, the one where Spongebob learns to drive: Part 1 and Part 2. I cannot overpraise the brilliance of this and I deliberately picked the one with the fewest swearwords. It might not even have any; I can't remember. But if you like that, and can cope with the British love of scatological humor, you might enjoy Spongebob's British campfire song (The La's (sp?) "Son of a Gun"). But you have to hold on past the diarrhea jokes.
Even at life's hardest moments, when every nerve is raw and strung and vibrating, you can find glimpses of the divine hand at work in unlikely ways and I am pretty sure that---unlike so many of his followers---God likes a laugh. Of course I love the real Spongebob, but somehow this just rounds out my appreciation for him. It's like the shadow Spongebob.
Anyway, to come round to my point: "The Sideshow" pointed me to this WaPo article (reprinted in The Raw Story). This Sideshow article post has several points in it that really resonated for me today and that want further thinking about, including an observation regarding the Brits' NHS and Bush's notions of "royalty."
But because I just finished the piece on the Archbishop of Canterbury's interview with Ricky Gervais (straight out of The Extras, but with the eminent doctor in the Andy Millman role), this particularly struck me: "The Raw Story has actually headlined the fact that Harold Meyerson's op-ed in the WaPo the other day was about the hypocrisy of GOP "Christians"."
That piece, the WaPo one, is here: "Hard-liners for Jesus." The Raw Story headline:Post columnist compares 'Christianized' GOP to hypocrisy of KKK I'd say a more apt comparison (and one that would sting more for the people in question) would be to the hypocrisy of certain conspicuously righteous and self-righteous scribes and priests of Judea, whom Jesus---for whom "righteous" in that context is a really bad word--- constantly anatomizes as "hypocrites" and "snakes" and so forth. But here's some of what Meyerson (editor of American Prospect) says:
My concern isn't the rift that has opened between Republican political practice and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Constitution that there would be no religious test for officeholders in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel's Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.
The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he's a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.
It's not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.
But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.
Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. (Hardliners for Jesus)
The reference to the KKK isn't even really that germane and I'm really sorry that Meyerson went there because it's so inflammatory that the people to whom the article applies are going to use offended sensibilities and outrage to avoid thinking about the more uncomfortable aspects of this article. .
The emphasis should be on the hypocrisy, and anyone who reads the Gospels closely can see that hypocrisy was one thing that made Jesus furious. His most searing rebukes are for exactly that sin.
This comes back round to the distinction made by Bill McKibbin in his Harper's article (The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong) between Christians and Christianists, i.e., the division between Christ and the Church of Christ without Christ, where piety is placed in the service of a philosophy of individual aggrandizement.
Have you noticed that pious people, now as in the time of Christ, don't take Jesus seriously when he says something that points out the divide between being and seeming? They are so busy trying to find authority to exclude homosexuals and punish the poor that they forget that Jesus said that it is harder for a camel rope to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
And that's not because God doesn't love the rich; it's because the rich are too busy trying to hold on to what they've got to notice that the kingdom is upon them now.
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Christianity v. 'Christianity' and other postings here
I think that people get so caught up in a church, that they forget that the more important part of the equation is Christ. Without a Christ there are no Christians but without Christians there is most certainly still a Christ.
Posted by: Traveler | June 30, 2008 at 01:12 PM