Distracted Mind

The original bad boy of the Reformation, Martin Luther, had a saying: “Sin Boldly.” Strange saying for one of the founders of the Protestant movement, but it’s a good one. Sin like you mean it and repent because your soul depends on it. Don’t do anything half-assed and don’t be safe.

This doesn’t just apply to sin–it applies to everything in life. Live large, take chances and don’t be afraid to stand up for what’s right. Being wrong is ok too, just be ready to change when you realize you’ve erred. Don’t confuse this with the John Wayne type of “Make my Day” macho christianity James Dobson and his ilk are trying to sell though–this is eyes open, fully conscious spirituality that’s not afraid to admit mistakes.

The Evangelical Lutheran church is doing this today, addressing the roles of homosexual christians in the church. They’re not traveling unexplored territory–the United Church of Christ has accepted homosexual christians for a long time and the Episcopalians have done so for years as well. What they are doing is bucking the increasing trend of hatred and bigotry within christianity. They’re finally welcoming people who were born different, want the same things out of life and want to worship God. That seems like a natural step, but sadly it isn’t one that the church has been brave enough to take until now.

I can’t tell you how many times the church has voted against accepting homosexual members as they are, in committed relationships. They were afraid of the outrage (cue pearl clutching) of their more “conservative” membership. They hurt a lot of people and alienated a lot of christians in their continuing decision to reject gays and lesbians from the clergy and from being “real” Lutherans. I can tell you that the ELCA’s continuing decision wounded my own family considerably and turned my own sister away from the church and from christianity. It also had a very large part in my boycott of organized religion.

I’ve thought for a long time that the ELCA has drifted far away from Luther’s original proclamation to sin boldly.
Luther was not one to shrink from adversity — he stood up to the Catholic Church, left a monastic life for brave new territory as a heretic, and married Katherine. Katherine was no wallflower either: she repeatedly ran away from convent life, once running away in a herring barrel with several other sister nuns, getting the hell out of a life she didn’t want. These were the founders of the church that would eventually play it safe? I wish I could have been there for the vote (which took place on my sister’s birthday, coincidentally), just to stand up and holler “What took you so long?” The ELCA played it safe for too long–at least they finally woke up.

Neither Martin nor Katherine lived safe lives. They took risks, and the risks weren’t always calculated. I look at both of them as true heroes, albeit deeply flawed ones, like every other human being. They believed that living, really living, is not always safe. Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t glamorous and the consequences ain’t always pretty, but at least you can take solace in knowing that what your beliefs aren’t being compromised.

The thing that I admire about Luther, in spite of his many flaws, is that he played David to the Catholic church’s Goliath. He nailed those proclamations to the cathedral door, knowing that he would be branded a heretic. That wasn’t a light weight charge in those days–it could have meant his death. Luther did it anyway, taking organized christianity and setting it on its side. The ELCA is doing that again, even in the face of a schism within the denomination. Just as Christ accepted people from all walks of life, so will the ELCA. If they keep going in this direction, the ELCA might persuade me to go back to a Lutheran church on Sundays. For now, I’ll just say it again: it’s about damn time.

So my last post was a few months ago–my father was starting to turn around, things were looking lighter. Too bad the light went out.

My dad died two days later, on March 20th. I got a call from my brother on the 19th saying that my father’s health off the ventilator was going south. Because he had a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, we didn’t take any heroic actions to keep him alive. Instead, the doctors taped a magnet over his defibrillator, took him off all medication except a few painkillers that eased his suffering. They kept him off the ventilator, made him comfortable, and we waited for the inevitable.

It was strange, watching my dad slip away. He had gone from the stern, quiet Scots-Irishman that I knew to a frail, shaking impersonation of my father. Still, when they took him off of the vent and all the other drugs, we saw glimmers of the old Dad. At one point, he shakily pulled my sister and me down to his level and whispered as loud as he could “Where did you guys find this joint?” It was as if he thought we had hoodwinked him into going to some seedy bar! Later on, when my mom, my aunt and uncle and my brother and his wife were sitting around talking in the hospice room about how my parents met and became engaged, my father woke up just in time to remind everyone exactly how much my mother’s engagement ring cost. It may have been the last time he was conscious.

I wasn’t there when he passed–it was at night, after I had taken the kids back to my parents’ house to sleep. My mother, my father’s brother and his wife, and my brother and his wife were all there. They said it was peaceful. I was there, however, for the following days of preparation, planning and grieving. It’s weird–I think the biggest emotion I felt the entire time was anger. Anger that my daughter would have to have her fifth birthday the day before her grandpa’s funeral, anger that I was so sick that I couldn’t sleep for all the coughing, angry at certain family members for letting my dad go on in his condition without considering his wishes. I was just a big seething bucket of pissiness. Tears didn’t really come until a lot later.

Really, the whole thing was surreal. Planning the funeral at the funeral home, finding out the different options for burial/cremation, having to go through all his old photos to find just the right ones to display at the wake (and it was a dry wake… damn Lutherans!). There are so many ways to spend money on a dead person and not many of them make much sense!

The viewing was, in a word, interesting. I’m not a fan of open caskets. With as frail as my father had been, combined with the wait for the viewing, it was something that will stay with me much longer than I’ll ever want. All I can say is that when I die I want music, booze and a box of my ashes spread over the Wicklow mountains, far from some sorry, lily scented funeral home. I want memories to be happy.

So why am I writing this over two months later? Many reasons, most of them don’t make sense. The biggest one is because I couldn’t put anything into words until now. There are so many things that have happened in the past few months, and so many more that are rendered sad now. The first Father’s Day without my dad, my daughter’s fifth birthday–the first one my father wasn’t there for. I called his cell phone to hear his voice one last time, only to be disappointed because the service had already been turned off. Good news is a little less so because there’s one less person to share it with. I measure things in how my dad would look at them. I see him in my son’s face every morning when he wakes up. I hear him laughing at my little family’s antics and I cry a little, then laugh a lot.

The tricky thing about faith is that it’s a belief in a God that isn’t very vocal. Sure, holy texts reveal that God spoke to prophets and common folk, but when’s the last time you heard of God talking to Joe Blow in the modern day? Have you seen a burning bush, lately? Some days I long for a Monty Python-esque hand of God to come out of the clouds; it would sure beat quiet introspection and meditation.

God becomes a sticky subject when tragedy plays out, especially en masse. Holocausts, genocide, disasters, wars, we wonder why God is mute. When Pope Benedict visited Auschewitz over the weekend, he was moved to ask “Why, God, did you remain silent?” Perhaps the answer isn’t in God’s silence, but in our resolute deafness to the signs.

When Hitler was in power, the evil was gradual. It started with speeches, then propaganda, then segregation, then disappearances. Did people know what was going on? Probably, though many people just didn’t notice. It was business as usual. By the time awareness crept in, it was too late.

When Rwanda’s genocide achieved momentum, we were deaf to the calls for help. It was a blurb on the news as we rushed to work, a bit during dinner time. Only now does the full horror of the murders really reach us, over a full decade later.

The same scenario plays out over and over again. History repeats itself more often than a bad burrito. We hear about horrible violence and monstrous acts, often too late. We embrace inaction because we don’t know what else to do.

We see photos of atrocities every day, so many that we become immune. And yet God’s silence is deafening — the sound of blood beating through your ears. Is it really that God is silent, or are we just not paying attention?

God’s vocal chords are humanity. If we remain silent, God remains silent as well. Pope Benedict wonders why his God, my God, didn’t speak up during the Holocaust, but the answer is clear: God was screaming. Every person beaten, every shot fired, every child and parent gassed was a cry out for help that was smothered before it was heard — suppressed by fear.

Why, in present times, does God remain silent? We see war crimes, torture and monstrous acts every day and they just keep coming. We don’t live in Nazi Germany, but some still remain quiet in their fear. Fear for their jobs, their families, it makes no difference. There are voices clamoring above the masses of pop-news, though, to get the truth out.

If you think that God is silent, just raise your voice.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the farce known as “The War on Christianity”. While the absurd idea of a war on a mainstream religion gives me an inner chuckle, it also gets me a little angry. As a Christian, I don’t feel like I’m at war with anything except misguided attempts to hijack my religion for political reasons.

These so-called “wars” on Christmas, Christianity and now even Easter are nothing more than frontal assaults on the intellect of the American public. Senator Delay, Bill O’Reilley, and the rest of the schmucks that opine about these attacks on their favored religion and holidays are no better than streetwalkers, pandering to anyone foolish enough to listen. However foolish, these “wars” are symptoms of a larger problem: mainline Christianity is being overwhelmed by a radical minority hell bent on dominating the religion and revising it to fit their narrow views.

As a Lutheran, I never thought of my flavor of Christianity as “progressive.” I grew up with the whole “Love the Lord your God and love your neighbors as yourself” spiel, believing that the best kind of evangelism was ministry through living. My family, for all their various human flaws, never taught me to push Christianity on my Jewish and Muslim friends, though later on I learned the technique from my new and interesting fundamentalist friends.

We were taught that the best ministry was by example: live a life that others want to lead. This type of evangelism is more difficult than street preaching or bible-thumping because it requires sincerity. These are not qualities inherent in today’s political talking heads and they’re not usually found lurking in the larger than life personalities of the religious right. Instead, we have paranoid leaders lurching at ghost-enemies, claiming to be under attack from all sides.

Someone once told me that forgiveness is like the ringing of a church bell. The pain of wrongdoing goes in waves like the volume of the bell’s ringing: the first toll is the loudest and most painful, and every time after that the sound diminishes until it’s no more than a whisper in the back of your mind.

As a Christian, I struggle with forgiveness. Not the action of forgiveness, but whether or not it’s actually possible. How can I, as an individual with a working brain, look at my transgressors and say “I forgive you”? How is it possible to look at someone that has wronged you and say_”It’s ok–I forgive you.”_ Read the rest of this entry »

Fred Clark at [slactivist](http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/) links to [this Newsweek article entitled "Cut, Thrust and Christ;
Why evangelicals are mastering the art of college debate"](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11078887/site/newsweek/). Yes, Fred, the article is creepy, but more than that it’s a wake-up call to those of us that don’t subscribe to Reverend Jerry Fallwell’s brand of Christianity.

Falwell’s Liberty College has a varsity debate squad that’s beating Harvard (yes, the Harvard with the Ivy and the Skulls). Conservative Bible colleges all over the United States are spending more on their debate squads and concentrating on winning the argument, but not on being right. Perhaps it’s time the rest of us remind them that talking the fastest and loudest doesn’t convince everyone that they’re actually saying anything.

I’ve talked about Rod Parsley before, and I’ve talked about Kenneth Blackwell. These two are scary, scary individuals, and it’s even more frightening that the republican Blackwell is running for governor and is a good buddy of Parsley and is very much a favorite of the religious right. He’s one of the big supporters of Reformation Ohio, a “religious” movement to recruit voters and bring Ohio “back to Jesus”. I’m worried about their perceptions of bringing Ohio “back to Jesus” and I’m concerned about their collective predisposition toward legislating behavior.

Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Gustave Dore

Blackwell is a contender for the governor’s seat in 2006 and his backers will definitely call in their markers if he wins. These people were behind the defeat of equal rights in 2004’s Issue 1, they claim to be the “moral majority”, and they claim to know God’s plan for this state and this country.

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, and I’m not sure that Blackwell, Parsley and the rest of them are on the right side of the coin on this. I haven’t found anywhere in the New Testament that specifically says that everyone has to follow the same rules and laws, but I have found several spots that have said that Christians are called to follow Christ’s teachings. In other words, Christ’s law is separate from the law of the land, and those that follow him are called to follow Christ’s law _in addition_ to the law of the land. Christians are called to be set apart from non-Christians by following Christ’s law, not by forcing non-Christians to follow the same laws. This is how Christ called his followers to be examples for everyone and to be forces for good in a not-so-great world. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not the type of person who usually writes on the talking points of the Sunday sermon, but this one was _too_ good. It was about politics, power and religion and it was one of the best off-the-cuff sermons I’ve heard in years: theologically sound, pertinent to current events, and passionate. It’s about where we’re going wrong as a culture.

My pastor had a different sermon planned for Sunday, one about stewardship and Christian responsibility, but the one he preached was about outrage and hypocrasy. The gospel scripture was [Matthew chapter 22, verses 15 through 21](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022:15-22&version=31;). In the targeted passage, pharisees approached Jesus with a question that was deceptively simple: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?”. Jesus chides them for attempting to trap him with a political question and asks for a coin, then asks whose face is on that coin. The answer: Caesar’s. He then says to give Caesar his due and to give God what is God’s. A simple answer, but one that speaks volumes. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a hard entry, but it’s one I’ve wanted to write for a while. It’s about how I came to be who I am, where I’ve come from and how I changed.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a minister. I had all the answers to questions of faith and dreamed of leading hundreds of people to _Jeeezus_. I was a judgmental little shit and a hypocrite, but I had good intentions. In many ways I mirrored so many fundamentalists out there today, which is why fundamentalists scare me shitless.

I loved my neighbor, as long as my neighbor went to church, abstained from sex until they hit the marital hay, and they refrained from entertaining naughty thoughts about their buddies in the locker room. I was properly penitent in church, played by the rules, and I was only bad when no one was looking.

I did, said, and thought some really horrible things, but I figured that my hate was justified because I was a Christian. I’m still doing my penance for that awful little girl I once was, not because the Bible, a minister, or Jodie Foster tell me to, but because I just plain feel bad about the things I said and did.

I regularly told my parents that they would go to hell. Read the rest of this entry »

37″Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40″The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Matthew 25:37-40

Listening to an NPR podcast today, Tim Wise offered some commentary on religious prejudice, the poor, and Katrina. It seems that Wise overheard a conversation damning the poor of the South, specifically of New Orleans, for not evacuating when it was apparent that Katrina would hit the Gulf. This conversation took place after the participants said grace, blessing their chimichangas. It made Wise sick. It made him say that he was thankful not to know _their_ god. I’m grateful I don’t know their god either, but I know a lot of people who seem to be on a first name basis with him.
Read the rest of this entry »