Peter And John Paul
Apr. 9th, 2005 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI'm in the middle of reading Roger Lewis's enormous Life And Death Of Peter Sellers- which runs to over 1,000 pages. Sellers was always peculiar, but career success drove him over the edge into full blown paranoid schizophrenia. Oddly enough, his madness never affected his art- and he was as capable of giving wonderfully sensitive performances at the end of his career as he was at the beginning (though the films he graced with those amazing performances were frequently wrecked by his wayward behaviour.)
A little money, a little power- and Sellers turned into the Emperor Nero. As I've been reading this 20th century morality tale I've been thinking about the Pope. John Paul II was an immeasurably stronger character than poor Peter, but what did it do to him to be elevated to a position where he had no equals, where there was God, then himself as the unique mouthpiece of God and then, very far below him, everybody else?
Did he have doubts? Did he ever wonder whether he might be wrong in the opinions he laid down as law? And did he have any friends? Peter didn't; it's very hard for the powerful to have friends; people are afraid of them. So was there a secret room in the Vatican where John Paul could slob around in a tee-shirt with his shoes kicked off, drinking beer with his cronies, watching TV? Were there people around him who called him Karol? People who were allowed to tease and twit and criticise?
Seems unlikely, doesn't it?
And if he never came off duty, never allowed himself to be vulnerable, how inhuman he must have become!
A little money, a little power- and Sellers turned into the Emperor Nero. As I've been reading this 20th century morality tale I've been thinking about the Pope. John Paul II was an immeasurably stronger character than poor Peter, but what did it do to him to be elevated to a position where he had no equals, where there was God, then himself as the unique mouthpiece of God and then, very far below him, everybody else?
Did he have doubts? Did he ever wonder whether he might be wrong in the opinions he laid down as law? And did he have any friends? Peter didn't; it's very hard for the powerful to have friends; people are afraid of them. So was there a secret room in the Vatican where John Paul could slob around in a tee-shirt with his shoes kicked off, drinking beer with his cronies, watching TV? Were there people around him who called him Karol? People who were allowed to tease and twit and criticise?
Seems unlikely, doesn't it?
And if he never came off duty, never allowed himself to be vulnerable, how inhuman he must have become!
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Date: 2005-04-09 03:23 pm (UTC)Karen attends Friends' Meetings.
Yes, I can imagine you there very easily.
As for Spong, I am still reading.
He says, "Can a person claim with integrity to be a Christian and at the same time dismiss, as I have done, so much of what has traditionally definied the content of the Christian faith? ... My problem has never been my faith. It has always been the literal way human beings have chosen to articulate that faith.
"I continue to insist that I am a Christian. I hold steadfastly to the truth of the assertian first made by Paul that 'God was in Christ.'
"I call the church to a radical shift from the way in which it has traditionally proclaimed its message...the Reformation dealt primarily with issues of authority and order. The new Reformation will be profoundly theological, challenging every aspect of our faith-story...Christianity postulates a theistic God...the time has come when all of us must move beyond the deconstruction of these inadequate...symbols...and chart a vision...of the timless God-experience, [as differentiated from] the time-warped God-explanations of the past."
Karen attends Friends' Meetings.
Yes, I can imagine you there very easily.
As for Spong, I am still reading.
He says, "Can a person claim with integrity to be a Christian and at the same time dismiss, as I have done, so much of what has traditionally definied the content of the Christian faith? ... My problem has never been my faith. It has always been the literal way human beings have chosen to articulate that faith.
"I continue to insist that I am a Christian. I hold steadfastly to the truth of the assertian first made by Paul that 'God was in Christ.'
"I call the church to a radical shift from the way in which it has traditionally proclaimed its message...the Reformation dealt primarily with issues of authority and order. The new Reformation will be profoundly theological, challenging every aspect of our faith-story...Christianity postulates a theistic God...the time has come when all of us must move beyond the deconstruction of these inadequate...symbols...and chart a vision...of the timless God-experience, [as differentiated from] the time-warped God-explanations of the past."
<i-A New Christianity for a New World, John Shelby Spong</i>
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Date: 2005-04-10 01:42 am (UTC)This, anyway, is the conclusion I have drawn. I can experience God by looking out the window, by talking to people on LJ, by doing any number of things, so why should I also turn up at Church and sing hymns- unless of course I have a taste for it (which I don't and never really have done.)