Christmas does not belong to objective history but to the human heart. The mythic story is told in impossible polarities. There are angels singing all around, but it is a silent night. There is darkness over all, but a bright star shines overhead. The one sent to rescue the world, is a helpless voiceless infant. As political champions and religious scholars sit in Jerusalem to discuss the coming Messiah, an illegitimate child is born in a feeding trough for cattle.
You cannot have angels singing and also a silent night. You cannot have a bright star filling the sky and the darkness described in Christmas hymns. You cannot have Herod reigning with an iron grip, and a baby born to free the world. -And yet we do. The polarities of Christmas are also the contradictions we find in life. It is not an accident that the story is celebrated on the winter solstice. Some version of the “light that shines in the darkness” is found in every mystical religion of the world.
The manger is not a location to be found on any map. It exists nowhere but in the human heart. The impossible contradictions of religion are intended to help us realize that the miracles described in scripture are not objective acts of magic, but evocative pictures of what the world looks like to a loving heart.
There was a strange silence about one particular aspect of Nelson Mandela’s life this last week, namely his socialism. In order to turn a social activist into a cultural icon it is necessary to silence his or her radical critique of political injustice and turn the message into an inarticulate homage to niceness.
Also missing in most accounts was the fact that the US opposed Mandela for much of his life.
“Even as presidents from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton denounced apartheid as a racist, untenable system, successive American administrations from the 1960s had friendly ties with South African governments and viewed Mandela with suspicion, if not outright hostility, through the prism of the Cold War.
And Mandela remained on a U.S. terrorism watchlist from the 1970s until the late 2000s. That period covers the living presidents of that period – Jimmy Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush – all of whom joined Obama at Mandela’s memorial service in Johannesburg’s Soweto township on Tuesday, as well as Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.” -Matthew Lee (AP)
The reason this history is important is because we it allows us to resist the cultural narrative that turns any radical prophetic critique of America’s foreign aggression and predatory economic system into mouthless teddy bears.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=mL1D92cG
The City of Austin received an early Christmas present with the news that United Christian Church, a UCC/DOC church located on Parmer Lane, called John Gage as its new minister. John’s return to Austin has an element of synchronicity to it. John graduated from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, but realizing his chances of ordination in the Presbyterian Church were slim to none as a gay man, he decided to move to the United Church of Christ where he has flourished. Many are struck to see what looks like a tattooed biker in a rainbow stole, but that is the kind of cultural synthesis that will be necessary if the church in the US is not to go the way of the languishing churches in Europe. John will start serving the Parmer Lane UCC Church early next year and be a tremendous addition to the voices of progressive humanitarian religion in Austin.
An interview with John:
https://soundcloud.com/workingnow/john-gage-minister-original
Parmer Lane’s newsletter:
There are some of us who, when people call us “liberal,” we don’t know know what to say. We only know that we value humanity over our nation, honesty over beliefs, the common welfare over our own personal success, peacemakers over warriors, creativity over orthodoxy, intimacy over morality and a sustainable future over an honored past. Some of us aren’t sure what that makes us. We aren’t trying to be liberal or conservative. We’re just trying to be human.
“The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.” -Barbara Brown Taylor
Jesus once said his word was like a seed. That is a very important statement. One does not eat a seed, one plants it. In becoming a plant, the seed must disappear. People who quote the bible overly much have not digested it. As an ancient stoic once said, the shepherd does not want sheep to prove they have eaten by throwing up the undigested grass. The shepherd wants the sheep to prove it by growing, by producing wool and milk. Anyone can memorize and throw out bible verses. The only proof that one has digested its message is when the word is incarnated as love.
"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and
we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them
symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally." -John Dominic Crossan
Barack Obama ran on a campaign of transparency, but his administration has been anything but that. If it weren’t for whistleblowers and leaks we would have very little knowledge of what our nation is doing in certain areas, such as the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.
Like Bush and Clinton before him, this president has been the frontman for shady treaties, the details of which are kept from the public until it is too late for any meaningful debate. The liberal website Huffington Post has released a document it claims was provided by one of the 12 nations debating the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If authentic, the document paints an unpleasant picture of an administration at the beck and call of corporate power.
First of all the document paints an image of a treaty being rammed down the throat of most of the “partners” involved.
“The Obama administration appears to have almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.”
And then there is the matter of moving the world even further from democracy and deeper into a new corporate feudalism where companies can challenge nations in court. And that “court” is a private court.
“One of the most controversial provisions in the talks includes new corporate empowerment language insisted upon by the U.S. government, which would allow foreign companies to challenge laws or regulations in a privately run international court. Under World Trade Organization treaties, this political power to contest government law is reserved for sovereign nations. The U.S. has endorsed some corporate political powers in prior trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the scope of what laws can be challenged appears to be much broader in TPP negotiations.”
The document has yet to be authenticated. To read more of the Huffington Post report and to see the actual document, press the link here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/tpp-trade-agreement_n_4409211.html
If heresy means questioning orthodoxy, then it is not only our right but our duty.
The fire of consciousness in our heads is a gift that is only honored by radical honesty and by full expression. To clip the wings of reason so that it will grow placid in its official cage is the true heresy. To claim that one group has captured the infinite into its sect, and the mystery into its creed, is that not the true heresy?
The more we love our sect, the more we must confront its arrogance. The orthodox might as well try to fit the sun into a lantern than claim the infinite mystery has been captured by them alone.
“Real journalism is “subversive” of deception that can’t stand the light of day. This is a huge problem for the Obama administration and the many surveillance-state flunkies of both parties in Congress. What they want is fake journalism, deferring to government storylines and respectful of authority even when it is illegitimate.”
“In motion now, on both sides of the Atlantic, are top-down efforts to quash real journalism when and how it matters most. In the two English-speaking countries that have done the most preaching to the world about “Western values” like freedom of the press, the governments led by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron are overseeing assaults on real journalism.
“They’re striving to further normalize fake journalism—largely confined to stenographic services for corporate power, war industries and surveillance agencies. A parallel goal is to harass, intimidate and destroy real journalism. The quest is to maximize the uninformed consent of the governed.”
-Norman Solomon
“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.” -Nelson Mandela
As Americans celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela, it is important not to rewrite history. First of all, Mandela was no saint, and his compromises with injustice are an important topic for another day.
More importantly, we must not forget how the Reagan administration, and much of America, pandered to white supremacy in South Africa. Then Representative Dick Cheney voted in 1986 against freeing Nelson Mandela. Cheney later defended his vote, “”the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization. … I don’t have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago.”
As the Bible says, human beings have a tendency to deify dead saints and persecute living ones. Mandela was a frightening figure because he spoke unpleasant truths. He was harshly critical of our nation’s tendency to side with oppressors against liberation movements. Most of all, Mandela was hated by some in America because he committed the greatest heresy possible, he wanted to weigh the US on the same scale as other nations.
So long as the term “terrorist” lacks a specific legal definition, it will be used by the powerful to deny oppressed people their day in court. Anyone who resists hegemony can be called a terrorist. Press coverage of “terrorists” will usually not include an account of the injustices being resisted. Instead ,”terrorists”will be pictured as lunatics who simply want to hurt us. While no one denies there are dangerous people who’s actions deserve to be called “terrorist,” it is also true that we have also called many people “terrorist” who’s “crime” was to try to liberate their own people.
As we see our own national leaders grieving Nelson Mandela this week, we must remember they might not be doing so if he were still alive and demanding justice from us.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/05/1260478/-Open-thread-for-night-owls-Dick-Cheney-wanted-Nelson-Mandela-to-stay-forever-in-prison?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29#