On Feeding The Hungry And Feeding The Ego

Earlier this week, WorldVision Charity announced that it would willingly hire Gay Christians in Same-Sex marriages.   This has caused a firestorm within the Christian community.   WorldVision is an interdenominational organisation.   As such, they have to work with people who have different interpretations of the Scripture and associated doctrines.   I imagine it’s not uncommon for people working alongside each other to have to swallow their objections to their coworkers’ beliefs.   A room filled with ten Christians will have ten different bodies of belief.  Even seated around my family’s dinner table at Christmas there’s a wide range of interpretations.   Angel sockhops in the sewing room have to be set aside for other times when Christians need to accomplish things.

So is it all right for WorldVision to hire Gay married Christians?  Sure.  Is it all right to not give your money to WorldVision anymore?  Sure.  After all, who am I, the person who doesn’t buy sandwiches from Chik Fil A, to say how another person’s conscience should direct her to spend her money.

So what’s the problem?   The problem is two-fold, as I see it.

The first problem is that WorldVision has hired divorced people to work there for years.  I have no data to prove this because nobody writes articles about it because it’s a foregone conclusion.   Divorce–something that the Bible actually says God hates–is ubiquitous in modern society.   I am not speaking against all divorced people here.  Each end of a marriage is its own story and has its own causes and effects.   It is between the parties in the marriage and their pastors and support persons.   But the fact of the matter is that if we’re going by things the  Bible is pretty clear about, divorce would rank right up there.   Actually, now that I think about it, so would “all”.  As in “For all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.”*  Yet WorldVision has persisted for most of its long duration as a visible charity upon hiring human  beings.   Shocking, yet the truth cannot be denied.   Why is it just now that millions of words are being spent across Christendom to wrestle with “how we should respond to WorldVision”?   Scratch that.  We know the reason.  It’s because right now “gay” is the number one enemy we all hate.  Nothing unites people like a common enemy and we’ve already done Divorce in the 1950s, drugs and  alcohol in the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s rights in the 1980s and…now it’s Gay people.

So what’s the second problem?  Frankly, it’s all the talk about everyone acting as though they are really aggrieved about how they spend their $35 or $70 dollars a month.  I’ve read a lot of people waxing eloquently about the various poor children in sundry villages that their family so bravely supports because it is The Right Thing To Do.     As though shining a spotlight on one’s charitable actions is all of a sudden an acceptable thing for Christians.  Even though that’s something else that Christ spoke directly against.    Everyone is so busy talking about how they feel led to withhold their charitable giving because of other people’s sin when they don’t acknowledge that the conversation itself is warned against by Jesus Christ.

…2″So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3″But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,–Matthew 6:2,3

So do or don’t do as you see fit.  But think it through all the way and make the decision quietly.   (As for me speaking about chik-fil-a, this is not analagous.  That’s not a charity, that’s a boycott.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*  [Yes, I realise this is read by people who are not Christians or who have different beliefs about sin, Grace, original sin, etc.  My point is not to argue about the nature of sin or to list sins.  My point is to emphasise that if you are looking in the Bible to seek and destroy sin, you have to look at the whole Bible.  I of course would argue that by so doing you’d see that the judgment of individuals is between God and that person, but that’s a song I sing a lot, so chances are you know the tune and most of the words.]

Read Full Post »

The Secret Behind Selling _Passion_

My husband and I had a fight on the way to Bellevue, and the  O’Tuesdays  where we ate with our group was about the worst restaurant I’d ever been to.  So by the time we were seated for our showing of Passion of the Christ I was not in the best of moods.    I allow that may be why I did not care for it.  Yes, I felt moved.  But I also felt very much as though I was being compelled through artifice to feel moved.   Anyone who watches a person endure torture and doesn’t feel moved–regardless of their feelings about the person being tortured–has issues that should be seen to in therapy.     But the movie didn’t change me.  It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.  And it ended without the resurrection, so as far as I was concerned it was no missional piece.   It was just Bible-themed torture porn.

So WHY did it make more money than a Dasani machine in Hell?    I keep reading articles about that, and those articles are everywhere now that Noah is on the way.    Some people theorise that it’s because anything with Jesus will sell to the Evangelicals.   Other people bring up the violent aspect and suggest (more politely than I just did) that the extreme level of violence appeals to some moviegoers.

I went with my Sunday School group.   Many people did; in fact everyone I know to have seen it saw it with a church group.   We all got discount tickets via a special package sold through our churches (an issue that troubled me as it tread closely to moneychanging, I thought.)  But that’s not why everyone went.

Dear Hollywood:  Everybody went to see Passion Of The Christ because Mel Gibson sold himself as a Member Of The Team.   We didn’t go to see Jesus.  We didn’t go for a cheap date.   We didn’t go to see a man beaten bloody and suffocating to death.

We went because Mel went to every TV show and magazine in the English-speaking world and told the story about when they filmed the crucifixion scene it was a closeup of HIS hand driving the nail.   And every one of us knew that to be a very deeply personal expression of Christianity because we know the verse that says “when you sin you crucify Christ anew.”  We knew that Mel was One Of Us.

Nothing will motivate Christians faster than to give One Of Us a position in what many of us see  as The Enemy Camp.   We are  in a schizoid culture of faith.  We want to believe that Christian presidents and politicians are a natural and frequent occurence, yet we believe that Christians in “the media” (eg. films and television and newsertainment) are rare as hens’ teeth and often barred from positions higher up the food chain than coffee girl.    So when you tell us that The Biggest Movie Star In The World is part of the faith and that he spent his own money in defiance of The Studios to make this movie about Jesus…well, you’ve just passed the biggest offering plate in the world.

Read Full Post »

How To Look Stupid Forever

Parenting a dog is often like having one of those first-generation voice-command phones.   You have to be veeeery careful not only of what you say but how you say it.  Because the thing they learn is the thing you’re going to be stuck repeating a thousand times a week.    So just as my father had to shout “DAVE TWO HOME” in just exactly the right way to get his phone to dial my brother’s house, I am stuck saying some mightily bizarre things to get my dogs to respond correctly.

The prime example begins with my Croc Knock-offs.   I was told in one of the fora for sick people who whinge to each other about how sick we are (there are only a few of those on the internet) that Crocs were the best shoes for arthritic feet.  And I don’t mean “oh, these are the best shoes.”  I mean “These shoes will cause you to send letters to your God and the gods of all other religions and your congressional representative to express your gratitude for the wonder of how they cradle your feet.”    It was an emphatic and near-endless endorsement.   So I got a pair of knock-offs on close-out at Target.  This is a side benefit to not having children.  You can take your vacations when everyone else is back at work in September.  That means you can shop for those vacations when all the vacation clothing is on close-out.   Of course this means you head to Disney World in what are effectively society’s unwanted castoffs.  But they are bargain castoffs.  So.  And so.

These shoes were indeed the bargain cast-offs of the Croc world.  Two dollars apparently buys you an open sandal in vivid magenta, with a weird sort of bias crossing the top of your foot.   Are the comfortable?  Very.   Could I walk all over Disney World unaided by the wheelchair?  Were these Crocs the Marjoe Gortner of footwear, healing my feet on contact?  Not quite.

Can I wear these shoes anywhere other than a Floridian vacation destination without looking like someone who has to have her home address pinned inside her shirt before she leaves the house?   No.  Emphatically no.    That means when we returned home to Tennessee and our furry surrogate children, the Most Wonderful Shoes In Creation got relegated to the basement closet.   The only time I wear them is when I have to slide something on in a hurry to get my  disobedient dogs to stop re-enacting a Duran Duran video and come inside.

Now, when I reach the point of charging outdoors in the dead of winter to bring in dogs who have been called (thrice) and “didn’t hear”, I am not in the best of moods.   And I am not hesitant to tell the dog about that mood, either.   “You made me get my pink shoes!! That is NOT good, young man.  GET IN THAT HOUSE!!!!”      After a month I found  that  even opening the back door with the pink shoes on my feet got them to hustle inside.     Fast-forward three months to March.   “Come in” doesn’t work.  “Get inside” works sporadically.   But open the back door and yell “PINK SHOES”…the dogs come running.     And yes, it’s great to have them come on command.  But I’m still stuck with yelling what sounds like nonsense out my back door.

Read Full Post »

Ashen Wednesday

Appropriately enough I received a follow-up call this morning from the Oncology Center regarding my anemia.   Time for another infusion of iron and injection of B12!   I appreciate that life has that much of a sense of humour.

Probably in tandem with my recent rage I’m also enjoying the sickest bent of humour in society lately.   This is the type of mood wherein I laugh at bleak jokes.  Then again, I’m always  one to be struck funny at funerals.   It’s not polite, but there you go.  I’m ghoulish.     I’m repeating here the thing that happened yesterday and was posted to facebook because I want to keep it for always and if there’s one thing about FB that sucks it’s the complete lack of permanence.    Everything ostensibly stays in their vaults but YOU can’t access it.   Sometimes I wonder if they don’t do that on purpose.   For whatever reason it means that although I may use the site as sort of a micro-blog  it is in NO way a journaling tool.  If you don’t want to lose a recipe you have to put it in bookmarks or Pinterest.   If you don’t want to lose an anecdote you have to blog it.

Thus beginneth the repeat:

I was watching a true crime show where a woman’s dismemebered body was found floating in a lake near her family home.   There was the requisite segment where those who knew her talked about how devastated they were by this.   (And of course we had to hear the usual tommyrot about “why kill her?  She was so pretty!”  As though we are fine with ugly people being slaughtered.)   Her former boss, the editor in chief of the local paper said  that everyone was asking “why? why? why? And it was because Karen was such a bouyant young woman and everyone liked her.”   

That really happened.  And it will never not crack me up.

Thus endeth the repeat.

And yes, it is Ash Wednesday, which means that we begin Lent.   I didn’t grow up practicing Lent.  It’s one of those High Church things that the Mennonites abjure out of tradition as much as anything else.   It wasn’t until 2000 that Lent became more of a practice in the Low Church; now most places at least name-check it.    I personally have a philosophical objection to the Give Something Up idea; since I didn’t grow up in a church where it was a matter of course and therefore part of the fabric of my tradition it strikes me now as odd.    We’re celebrating Christ’s sacrifice that allows us to approach the throne of Grace…by focusing on _works_?   It seems wrong-footed to me.    I do use the 40 days to focus on Wandering and to ponder the miracle of Grace.

For me the worst part of Lent are the casual jokes:  “Im so ready to get back to eating chocolate! I can’t take it!”   It seems to make too light of something that is very essential to the faith.   Which I realise now is odd coming from a woman who just 300 words ago admitted she laughs at funerals.

Read Full Post »

That Weird Awakening

Lately I’ve been inundated with things that are related to my primary fiction work.   I’ll turn on a news program and they’re airing a story that has a direct link to my novel’s world.   A friend will text me a piece of information ostensibly for some other purpose and it will fit neatly into place in my story.

It’s a very strange feeling, because it truly seems like the lines between that world in my head and the world outside of it are breaking down.  It’s either madness or the very strange fuel that propels creativity forward.

I’ve always hated that stereotype of the author as a mad creature with a tenuous hold on reality.  If anything an author has to consume much more reality than the average person.   Telling people about whole worlds requires that one be observant of whole worlds.   (Yet another reason most works by people under 35 have a lack of flavour.)    So yes, you can’t be insane and still be a writer.

But perhaps you can feel a bit unmoored by the fluidity of it all.

Read Full Post »

What I’ve Been Doing For A Month

I’ve spent a lot of time writing fiction.  So I haven’t been doing long-form journaling.  That’s a good thing because the stuff I’m inclined to write about isn’t that palatable.

I’ve been so frustrated with the selfishness in the world and all the ways I see it implemented, and yet I feel if I write about it that crosses the line into me, myself being  just as selfish as the things I’m judging.   And I’m frustrated with myself for judging at all.  It’s a sin, it’s Christ’s grave warning to us and it’s a temptation I’ve been acceding to far more than I should.

I think it was selfish of a man with children to abuse drugs and to kill himself.

I think it is selfish for someone who has married another person to leave that person when he is sick with a mental illness.

I think it is selfish for people to insist that their religious beliefs must dictate the public policy of a nation where not everyone shares those religious beliefs.

I think it  is selfish for  me to make a list of things that other people have done.   Good lord, aren’t I selfish enough for all of the world?  Yes.  Yes I am.  I’m selfish for not working to be outside of my own head more often to be there for the people who need me.  I’m selfish to think that  my opinion is worth more than another person’s.  I’m selfish to think that after reading a few articles or blog entries I can know all of the dynamics of a private life or private relationship.    I’m selfish for using other people’s problems as  a way to distract myself from my own.

And I’m realising as I sit here and bang these thoughts out on the keys that I’ve gotten to the place where I’m allowing my judgemental nature to supercede any kindness or grace that I could be showing.

Then there’s the bigger question:  what in my life right now has me so angry that I have  this anger I’m turning outward.   I don’t think it’s my health; I’ve been dealing with health issues so long it’s almost a non-issue on several levels.   But maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I’m not coming to terms with it in the way I thought.   Maybe I’m angry that my parents are aging past the point of being able to laugh it off.     Maybe I’m angry that I feel trapped in a situation where I can’t work.     I don’t know.  I need to think about it.   But in the meantime, I’ve written this down in a place where folks can bear witness, press down and shake together the judgement I’ve meted out against others and hold me to it.

Read Full Post »