Last month Rev. Frank Schaefer was suspended for officiating his gay son’s wedding. When his 30 day suspension was over, Schaefer vowed to continue his work.
“My honest answer has to be: No, I cannot uphold the Book of Discipline in its entirety. In fact, I don’t believe anybody can…because it is filled with competing and contradictory statements.”
Schaefer was referring to the Methodist principle that pastors are to “to provide equal ministry to all people.” It is not uncommon for the traditions of a church to overwhelm and silence its core principles. At such time people of faith must be willing to disobey the church’s hierarchy in order to obey the church’s message.
“I cannot go back to being a silent supporter, I am an advocate. I must continue to speak for my LGBT brothers and sisters. I cannot repent [for performing the same-sex service]. I cannot make the statement that I will not do any more services.”
This Thursday, Rev. Schaefer may very well be defrocked by the Methodist Church. On the other hand, his judges may find the courage to do the right thing. In any case, this pastor’s courage has taken us one step closer to the inevitable day that the church will end its persecution of GLBT people and return to its true message of grace.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pastor-suspended-officiating-son-gay-wedding-vows-quit-article-1.1549478#ixzz2njk5vYEW
“While Obama referenced the Kennedy administration in his memorial, he made no mention of the multiple reports that the CIA, under Kennedy, tipped off the apartheid South African regime in 1962 about Mandela’s whereabouts. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest, a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, quote, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.””
-Juan Gonzalez
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20665-one-of-our-greatest-coups-the-cia-and-the-capture-of-nelson-mandela
The hoarding of the rich is often excused by pointing to their generosity in giving to charity, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, of the $39 billion given to charities last year $33 billion went to the richest 20% of Americans. And most of that ended up in the hands of the richest 1%.
“But a large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces – operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters – where they spend their leisure time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors.
Another portion is for contributions to the elite prep schools and universities they once attended or want their children to attend. (Such institutions typically give preference in admissions, a kind of affirmative action, to applicants and “legacies” whose parents have been notably generous.)”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/rich-peoples-idea-charity
“So somehow we had decided on the left that religion belongs to Fox Television, or it belongs to some kind of right-wing fanaticism in the Middle East and we have given it up, and it has made us a really empty — that is, it has made the left really empty. I’ll point to one easy instance. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And what America heard was really a sermon. It was as though slavery and Jim Crow could not be described as a simple political narrative; racism was a moral offense, not simply an illegality. And with his vision of a time “when all of God’s children” in America would be free, he described the nation within a religious parable of redemption.
Fifty years later, our technocratic, secular president gave a speech at the Lincoln memorial, honoring the memory of the speech Dr. King had given. And nothing President Obama said can we remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our memory of the soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And what’s happened to us — and I would include myself in the cultural left — what has happened to us is we have almost no language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk about the soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this point in our lives, this point in our national history. That’s what we’ve lost in giving it to Fox Television.”
Richard Rodriguez
“One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?”
-Noam Chomsky
What is so bad about repeating the pleasant myths of a nation or religion? What is wrong with focusing on the good our nation has done and avoiding the bad? Who is really hurt when we celebrate Columbus Day or picture the pilgrims as friendly to the native people? What is wrong with putting Vietnam behind us and starting fresh?
When we Americans refuse to fully face our past flaws, we build upon an inflated image of our own pure motives. The history of every nation is a mixed bag. We Americans are not worse than other nations, nor or we better. In the end, people are people. Patriotic versions of history build a false foundation upon which we base future decisions. Refusing to fully confront the lies behind the Vietnam War made it much more likely that we would fall for the lies behind the Iraq War.
No nation can be a decent citizen of the world that considers itself to be above the standards that would be reasonable for every other nation. We Americans see ourselves as superior to other nations based on the false history we recite. Believing our own inflated history makes it very difficult to be sane as a nation. Any who have looked honestly at American history would not want us to dominate the world any more than they would want any nation to do so. The only alternative to dog eat dog foreign policies is universal standards for all nations with no exceptions. The humility required for genuine peace will not occur until we can face the truth that frightens us more than any other – we are ordinary human beings.
Comfort is a terrible guide for the religious life. There are many beliefs and practices that make us personally comfortable but that numb us to the pain of our human family and to the demands of authentic living. If pious comfort were what Jesus had in mind, our symbol would not be a cross, but a pillow.
“Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.” -Naomi Klein
Humankind will be in trouble if we are just clever enough to see through the mythological trappings of religion but not profound enough to feel its message that we are one family and the earth is our shared temple.
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