What?
Chief among my repertoire of wicked habits may be that I take myself overly serious. But friend Jane put me onto The Babylon Bee, a gutsy online shimbun, a ribbing Zeitung that's sometimes almost but not quite biting, that appears in my email box just when I need it. Every Babylon Bee article hits the target and every target damn well has it coming. As for me, certain of nothing, I try to take nobody and nothing too serious, especially DThos+ the Holy Man as he grimaces at me mornings from the mirror: Jiminy Christmas, what a schlemiel. If self-deprecation is my talent, it's because I know myself as no one else does, not even Norm, my Navy buddy and co-conspirator of Yore and Yet. Anyway, here’s a Babylon Bee article I appreciate:
Progressive Reverend Draws Question Marks With Ashes On Parishioners’ Foreheads
March 1, 2017
GREEN WILLOWS, SC—Sources from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church confirmed Wednesday that progressive Reverend Laura Frier rubbed ashes in the form of a question mark on every parishioner’s forehead, in lieu of the traditional sign of the cross.
“We just really don’t know, you know?” the Reverend said. “We knew we couldn’t go with a cross—far too offensive, really. We felt the question mark was much more open and inclusive than putting the horrifying symbol of a Roman execution device on everyone.”
“That’s what the gospel’s all about, I think? I just don’t really know,” she added.
As parishioners lined up to receive the traditional mark of ashes at the front of the church, Frier solemnly marked them with the sacred question mark symbol while speaking the words of blessing, “Question everything,” over each person.
At publishing time, reports indicated that other progressive ministers had spelled words like “RESIST” and “REALLY?” using the blessed ashes from the Western Christian tradition.
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From the self-ridicule that is my favorite, including such as the above lest I take myself seriously, lest we take ourselves seriously, I turn to the following, to what’s below. The portrait caught my eye.
I have so wanted to like this man, whose father I love, but the son I loathed as a disastrous president whose IQ was to tag doggedly along behind monstrously evil war criminals with their crimes against humanity; but who I thought, then I changed, now I think again, is good at person and good at heart, a decent and nice man, a Mensch. But for his drunken years at Yale, a real Southern Gentleman. I have longed to love, respect and appreciate him as human being, neighbor and fellow-American. At last. I may have found him. The linked article was moving, at least to me, for me. And flipping through the pictures of his art, portraits of injured veterans, touched me, changed me. I will even buy his book. I mean it. He's a human being, an ordinary person after all. But for the company he kept, which my mama always told me is how we are judge, he may have been a child of God all along.
DThos+ muttering and puttering along
DThos+ puttering along