CSotD: Talking about God on Saturday?
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God is for Sunday. All righteous people know that.
At least, it sure seems that those who bang the Bible loudest on street corners are the same ones who believe that people who go to church on Saturday now are among the people who will be going to Hell on Judgment Day.
Well, I was headed that direction anyway, so what the hell — and I guess I mean that in the most literal way — let's talk about God on Saturday.
Joe Heller did this cartoon about the pope, and I like the guy, too, especially in his latest remarks, which seem to blend the message of Christ with some pragmatism about the future of the Church itself.
The question is, what difference will it make? Is he too late?
I say that as a recovering Catholic — is this guy just the Pope-of-Cafeteria-Catholics or can he make it stick? Are there enough people left in his church who aren't obsessed with sex and reproduction that his attempts to redirect its focus and recalibrate its policies can actually have any kind of weight?
I mean, the Dalai Lama is a righteous man, but Tibet is pretty firmly in the hands of the Chinese.
And it seems that you can pretend to be a staunch defender of Christian values and yet bear outrageous false witness with no sense of shame, and that's supposed to be a sin in all the Religions of the Book, not just Christianity.
One of my favorite quotes on the topic of religion and relevance — one I've used here more than once — comes from "Lancer at Large," the sequel to "Lives of a Bengal Lancer."
Yeats-Brown returned to India after WWI in search of religious meaning, and he noted that much of India remained much as it had been in the days when its holy books were written, while Christians were divorced both geographically and technologically from their Biblical roots.
Talk of springs in the desert had no real resonance for those who could get a glass of water from a tap in the kitchen, he suggested, and so we were able to speak of God in an isolated context that had little to do with our daily lives:
We repeat the rich, rolling phrases of the prophets of Palestine,
without giving them literal credence; and hence we tend to similar
hyperbole in our worldly affairs.
He goes on to quote Emerson:
If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.
Hence:
and hence:
Those who want to avoid sharing often quote the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" as an excuse to turn their backs and do nothing, suggesting that even Jesus said there was no solution to that problem.
Talk about bearing false witness! It's a wonder their tongues don't cleave to the roofs of their mouths.
Here's what Jesus was quoting, from Deuteronomy 15:
You shall surely give to him, and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him, because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your works and in all to which you put your hand. For
the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you,
saying, ‘You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and
your needy, in your land.’
The context in which Joshua bar-Joseph referenced that passage was when a woman — identified by John as Mary, the prayerful sister of Martha and the resurrected Lazarus — came to him and anointed him, to which the disciples objected, saying that it was a waste of money that should have gone to charity.
John also names which of the disciples it was, and provides the context:
Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him, "Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?" This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.
And then, in the next passage, in all three of the books that recount the story, the fellow who was so concerned about the poor heads off to collect his 30 pieces of silver.
So I guess Yeats-Brown was wrong: Nothing's really changed in the slightest.
David Horsey has a pretty good rant on the overall topic of who is benefiting from the recovery.
As for me, I think it's perfectly all right to talk about God and Jesus and that sort of thing, even if it isn't Sunday and even when you're not in church.
You won't bother anybody.
They're not listening.
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