Grooms and Clowns
201511180642. Pleasant enough outside, balmy 74F 89% but quite a stiff breeze. Up here on the seventh floor right on the Bay and coming straight off the Gulf it must be above 20 mph and gusting forty. I like “forty” because religiously it means “a lot”. Israelites forty years in the wilderness. Moses forty days on the mountaintop. Jesus forty days in the wilderness. Forty days of Lent. The realtime weather map on my iPad shows the storm stretching from down in the Gulf all the way up to Thunder Bay, passing through New Orleans moving slowly east. Channel 13 says 90% prob of rain, but the storm’s southern tip seems to be moving north faster than east. Rain by two o’clock this afternoon, he says. We'll see.
At eighty, I’m loving a morning with nothing on the calendar. Well, examen, there’s that, prayerful self-examination, self-reflection, self-recrimination. One of my checks on myself, political, social, religious (not spiritual, I give myself F-minus, a failing grade in Spirituality), is whether other people agree with me, agree with my view, my stance. It’s one of my measures of what I am. Not who I am, but what I am. Whether I’m with the crowd, in the majority. If so, I become uneasy with myself. If I’m in the minority, such as being Anglican, Episcopalian, then “I’m good” as I say when the waiter asks if I want a second glass of wine. But if everybody seems to agree with me, then I’m pretty sure that I’m wrong; and if emotion is a driver, then I’m fairly certain of it, that my soul is in danger.
It is not my nature to be against other people. To hate, to be irrationally, or even reasonably, against others. Impossible for me to be against a child, any child. Well, any but a bully, and even a bully is that because of feeling bullied at home. I became uneasy with myself when everybody started climbing on the anti-Syrian-refugee hayride. All the while recognizing its propaganda force on me, I’m looking at the pictures and videos of the refugees from the MiddleEast, including those from Syria. All the children, some afraid, some smiling hopefully. We have been horrified that forces of evil are scaring them, driving them, from their homelands, and have so viciously persecuted Christians. Their own people of other sects too, but it’s personally more painful to read and hear of their unspeakably cruel treatment of Christians. Does their scripture require that? Flipping the coin, what does our scripture require of us?
All the problems of the world we have because we humans created them. As I’ve seen it in eighty years, most have been religious hatred based. It goes as far back in history as history is recorded, and beyond into prehistoric Times and Humans. I reckon we’ll never get it right.
People are saying, pray for Paris, pray for France. The Dalai Lama said this week, don’t pray for Paris, all the world’s problems are of our own doing, do we expect God to step in and make it all right, to solve for us the problems that we have created and continue to create? Creating peace is up to us. The holy man is right, halfway so. God who hears our prayers has not shown in history — scripturally in heilsgeschichte yes, but not in realtime — has not shown an inclination to step in, reverse our dominion, and set things right. If God does do, then God will have ceased speaking to us. Perhaps in response to our prayers God may turn our prayers around upon ourselves so that we finally get it. That would be the way to peace. The only way. But I think we are too selfish. I know I am. I don’t have an answer. Maybe God smushing my prayer in my face.
I’m thinking of a wedding I officiated years ago, a marriage that started off wrong because the groom cutely smushed wedding cake in her face, causing everyone to laugh and her to burst into tears and rush out of the room in embarrassment. I’m thinking of clowns smashing cream pies in each other’s face. I’m thinking of humans. I have no hope for the race, but I’m praying anyway. Whatever you say, God.
Windy, and loud wave action in my beloved Bay this morning.
Thos+