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Today I discovered a second word that can be its own antonym. (The first is ‘cleave’ – ‘cleave from parents, cleave to wife’.) My one is ‘certain’. As in: ‘there is a certain sense of solidarity between us’. Which could mean either ‘there is undoubtadly, definetly a sense of solidarity between us’ or ‘there is a particular, limited sense of solidarity between us’. It’s a technical call, certainly.
In a newspaper clipping from a friend in the States, Father Anthony Ugolink says:
I am an Eastern Orthodox priest. My church marries only people of different genders.
A few passages in Scripture provide our justification. To find those quotes, you have to sift through thousands of passages which preach a bold advocacy for the poor and the condemnation of the rich who don’t help them out. They’re not often in letters to the editor. Perhaps they look too much like ‘class warfare.’
But Christians can’t be selective in their choice of revelation. God no doubt repeats the messages to which the stubborn are most resistant. It’s easy to amend documents forbidding sins we see in others. It’s harder to spend real money (yes, even tax money) to alleviate human suffering.
So I don’t marry gays. But oddly enough, whether Massachusetts marries gays or not doesn’t cause a stir in my congregation. You see, I have parishioners
without health insurance.I have retirees whose health benefits have been slashed by former employers whose headquarters have fled abroad. I have working mothers who can’t get their teeth fixed and who can’t find day care. We are praying for one uninsured friend who has a tumor which prevents him from speaking. He has to wheeze through a tracheal tube and beg for chemo-therapy treatments, the cost of which will ruin him and his small business. (The president could have made his ‘small business’ speech from his front porch.)
So what stirs the church to action? Same sex marriage (and lots of campaign money).
What I see growing here in Lancaster County is not Christianity, it’s a cult of civil religion that defiles the church by making it a base for a political party. The cult infects and it corrupts. It feels good to be congratulated for your ‘values,’ especially when you have to do so little to prove them.
I pray the church here will not sell its soul. The Democrats have no monopoly on sin. No party is perfect—especially any party which promises you quick and easy virtue in return for your vote.
Said Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
If we could read
the secret history of our enemies,
we would find in each person’s life
sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility.
[via DD]
Have to stop watching TV news. Every event I or anyone I know has been involved in that was televised got completely garbled and completely misrepresented by the time it got to the news. And it’s that simplified filtered and altered version which becomes the raw material (the ‘facts’) of subsequent public discussion.
I have an idea that a network of trusted bloggers might be a solution. I have been fairly unimpressed with Aotearoa Independent Media Centre so far, which seems at least as narrow as the mainstream.
Who can I trust to interpret happenings around here?
Aaron says dressage is more absurd than synchronised swimming and I strongly disagree.
This afternoon before lunch with Dad I returned Terenesia – the second Greg Egan book I’ve read – to the library. Like Diaspora, it is full of amazing ideas but tails off towards the end. It feels like the books need some overarching ‘point’ to tie them into a satisfying whole.