Once upon a medieval adventure, I was a clergyman.
How that happened is complex. I believed, early on,
that the task of a pastor was to interpret what happened,
a couple of thousand years ago, into terms that made sense
to someone living in the 20th century, it being the 20th century.
After all, to take the religious stories literally would demand
that one take the miracles literally, for instance, that
people could rise from the dead, or fly off into heaven,
or walk on water. No one, I thought, could take that literally.
I was wrong.
While I was trying to talk about what it meant for Joseph
to wrestle with God all night about his devious life,
many of the parishioners wondered why God did not pin
Joseph right away. Or while I was trying to understand
what those first, discouraged followers of Jesus were thinking
after he had been killed, and how they came to believe
that his death was not the end of everything they believed,
and how resurrection-talk was an affirmation about going on,
they wondered whether angels had real feathers.
It was most startling at those times when those genuinely
kind parishioners would invite the pastor and his family
to have Sunday dinner with them. Not always, perhaps not even
most often, I was treated to a version of religious belief
that made me wonder whether our host was mad.
I would be told of all the signs that indicated that the earth
was going to come to its horrendous end, probably before
the potato crop was ready, or how blood would flow
waist high somewhere in Israel, and God would . . . , oh,
I don't know: send millions to eternal fire and torture.
"Does they really, literally, believe this?", I would ask myself.
They did. There were a lot of people like that. Had the subject
not been religion, any sane person would have said they
were stark, raving mad! Lunatics, having me to dinner!
"What do they see, when they look around at the world?",
I used to wonder. "Can they not see that the earth is millions
of years old? Have they ever seen an angel? Do dead men
walk?" They lived in a different universe. They didn't see
an almost fanatic prophet, put to death. They saw invisible things.
I had thought that religion was a way to wrestle, if not with
God all night at the river Jabbok, at least with oneself, and
with what it means to be born, to grow up and recognize
what a glorious thing the universe is, what it means
to fall in love, and to nurture new life, and to grow old, and die.
I had thought that the lure of Christianity was something
about caring for each other, about building community, and
maybe coming to such as end as might be worth a song.
I saw a clip of Mike Huckabee, sitting with a preacher,
discussing whether what was going on right now meant
that Armageddon was just around the corner, when God
would put an end to all history, and Jesus would come again.
Sister Sarah Palin joined her pastor, in front of her church,
and helped to cast demons out of a woman. Demons!
Newt Gingrich says that allowing an Islamic group to build
a community center two or three blocks from where the Twin
Towers were is like "putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust
Museum." God's Angle, Sharron, says that God has personally
picked her, personally, to run for the United State Senate
as a Tea Party Republican.
Steven Schwarzman, billionaire founder of the Blackstone Group,
says that Obama's proposal to raise the tax rate on the richest group
of Americans almost as high as ordinary people pay is like a
"war . . . like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Is he mad?
Our Newt, again, is the same Newt who went to his first wife in the
hospital, as she was dying of cancer, and asked her for a divorce
so he could marry someone else. His second wife said Newt
had already proposed to his third wife when he first raised the subject
of divorce. He is the man who is lecturing to us about ethics.
Our political life is filled with people who want to ask you to
Sunday dinner and talk about some other universe, where they live.
How that happened is complex. I believed, early on,
that the task of a pastor was to interpret what happened,
a couple of thousand years ago, into terms that made sense
to someone living in the 20th century, it being the 20th century.
After all, to take the religious stories literally would demand
that one take the miracles literally, for instance, that
people could rise from the dead, or fly off into heaven,
or walk on water. No one, I thought, could take that literally.
I was wrong.
While I was trying to talk about what it meant for Joseph
to wrestle with God all night about his devious life,
many of the parishioners wondered why God did not pin
Joseph right away. Or while I was trying to understand
what those first, discouraged followers of Jesus were thinking
after he had been killed, and how they came to believe
that his death was not the end of everything they believed,
and how resurrection-talk was an affirmation about going on,
they wondered whether angels had real feathers.
It was most startling at those times when those genuinely
kind parishioners would invite the pastor and his family
to have Sunday dinner with them. Not always, perhaps not even
most often, I was treated to a version of religious belief
that made me wonder whether our host was mad.
I would be told of all the signs that indicated that the earth
was going to come to its horrendous end, probably before
the potato crop was ready, or how blood would flow
waist high somewhere in Israel, and God would . . . , oh,
I don't know: send millions to eternal fire and torture.
"Does they really, literally, believe this?", I would ask myself.
They did. There were a lot of people like that. Had the subject
not been religion, any sane person would have said they
were stark, raving mad! Lunatics, having me to dinner!
"What do they see, when they look around at the world?",
I used to wonder. "Can they not see that the earth is millions
of years old? Have they ever seen an angel? Do dead men
walk?" They lived in a different universe. They didn't see
an almost fanatic prophet, put to death. They saw invisible things.
I had thought that religion was a way to wrestle, if not with
God all night at the river Jabbok, at least with oneself, and
with what it means to be born, to grow up and recognize
what a glorious thing the universe is, what it means
to fall in love, and to nurture new life, and to grow old, and die.
I had thought that the lure of Christianity was something
about caring for each other, about building community, and
maybe coming to such as end as might be worth a song.
I saw a clip of Mike Huckabee, sitting with a preacher,
discussing whether what was going on right now meant
that Armageddon was just around the corner, when God
would put an end to all history, and Jesus would come again.
Sister Sarah Palin joined her pastor, in front of her church,
and helped to cast demons out of a woman. Demons!
Newt Gingrich says that allowing an Islamic group to build
a community center two or three blocks from where the Twin
Towers were is like "putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust
Museum." God's Angle, Sharron, says that God has personally
picked her, personally, to run for the United State Senate
as a Tea Party Republican.
Steven Schwarzman, billionaire founder of the Blackstone Group,
says that Obama's proposal to raise the tax rate on the richest group
of Americans almost as high as ordinary people pay is like a
"war . . . like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Is he mad?
Our Newt, again, is the same Newt who went to his first wife in the
hospital, as she was dying of cancer, and asked her for a divorce
so he could marry someone else. His second wife said Newt
had already proposed to his third wife when he first raised the subject
of divorce. He is the man who is lecturing to us about ethics.
Our political life is filled with people who want to ask you to
Sunday dinner and talk about some other universe, where they live.
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