means well

Saturday morning, coffee, breakfast of shrimp 'n grits, cheese grits from supper last evening, shrimp left over from Kristen's birthday supper here Thursday afternoon evening. Laced with Tabasco and only lacking whatever that thin, buttery gravy is that gets served over cheese-grits in the restaurant experience.

shrimp 'n grits being a late innovation into high fashion, like collards, with our Southern food

Excepting rising for the four-minute sacrifice at three o'clock antemeridian, slept Thursday night from eight-fifteen to six o'clock Friday morning. Something about cumulative exhaustion that I hadn't realized, was unaware had crept up on. Linda slept from eight to four.

Seemed resolved Friday morning as I finished a second mug of black with a square of dark, looking at the Bay, and thoughts drifted through consciousness - -

Pig's heart, a man gets a genetically adjusted pig heart and everyone rejoices until revealed that the man has a criminal record of extreme violence, at which point joy explodes into a cloud of moral values and judgment: was the man a worthy recipient? was it a worthy sacrifice of the pig? Who says one animal's life is more valuable than another animal's life? Animal Farm comes to mind, four legs good, two legs bad evolves, doesn't it, into four legs good, two legs better. Whose legs and which animals? Depends on who's standing on them. About the felon? are humans to be graded worthy v unworthy, the worthy healed and the unworthy cast off, left sick and lame? And how about the animal sacrifice?

It can become quite personal, can't it! I've had both aortic and mitral valve surgery, with bovine pericardium tissue replacing my aortic valve, and said to be good on average for ten to fifteen years more life, deeply grateful for medical science, and skill, and medical insurance, and animal sacrifice. Are humans more valuable than bovines and porcines? Evidently so to us, as we harvest pigs and cattle for food as well as medical parts. Who makes the value judgments? Power does. Whether in the food chain, or medical supply as this, or politics, or economics, or religion, or war, the way of life is what power says. What if the felon had received the heart of an innocent person killed in an accident? Not an issue: he wasn't eligible. Would it have been more acceptable had the pig's heart recipient been a decorated war hero or someone's child? Organ donors: who gets the donation? Who chooses? Who makes the value judgments? It's a power play among creatures, greater v lesser, lower animals v higher animals.

Higher animals? Humans are higher animals?

The mind circles round value judgments and power. In the novel* I may finish reading today, a child dies from snakebite: her missionary preacher father's instant reaction is not grief, but a realization voiced: she wasn't baptized, she wasn't "saved" so cannot go to Heaven. Her father's loss: a soul he cannot claim credit for winning in victory over hellfire.

Disturbing, systems of belief that are a power play. That humans whose religious fabric weaves afterlife possibilities of either heaven or hell (hades with degrees including limbo and purgatory), asserts that human authority, decisions, action/inaction, withholding or granting, wields power to control whatever happens to humans after death, power over what happens or does not happen in what would seem the exclusive domain and province of a Creator - -

That his daughter did not walk down the aisle to accept Christ and get baptized means she goes to hell is his religious faith.

The circumstance of Kingsolver's novel is evil personified: arrogance, condescension, greed, certainty - - specifically religious, moral, and political certainty - - self-justification, racial and cultural superiority, entitlement, hypocrisy, absence of self-awareness, power, with utter rubbish, garbage, St Paul's NT Greek word is σκύβαλον religion, politics and racism, surfaced in exposé historical fiction about American and other white missionaries called and sent to save the lost pagans of the Dark Continent. And into colonialism and intervention that destroys.

Historically, well-meaning white supremacists venturing forth from Europe and America to save the dark unsaved in their mud huts have been as much and more Episcopalian, Anglican, as the Baptists, Methodists and Roman Catholics in Kingsolver's story. Indeed, that Anglican missionaries instilled the religious and moral certainties of the Anglican churches of Rwanda and Uganda, where current Anglican archbishops propound the death penalty for homosexuality, is our own doing, yielding the ultimate in religious certainty. Historic fictition, informed by research and personal knowledge, and based on fact, reveals truths and exposes the morals of an era. Shaking my personal memories of raising funds to send forth missionaries to Africa, Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is among the most "right on" stories I've ever read.

So the story. If Ruth May had been RC she may have gone to Limbo instead of authoritatively consigned to Hell by human powers that be, because she was not saved and baptized.

"the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home." Contemplate the photo above, from Hubble peering deep into our universe, an infinitesimal, invisible to the naked eye section of creation. That human institutions assert authority and power over the ways of eternity, even the fate of humans who are not members of that institution, and actually believe themselves, is arrogance and certainty that plays on fear, devolves into the absurd. But in the end it doesn't matter for the departed, whose eternal destiny is not in human hands at all, but in the mind of God.

* again, B Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible