Soggy Cardboard

[poliphilo]

So I spent most of yesterday doing religion. First we had our own Sunday morning service in our own home church. Then- for reasons I have to be vague about- we whizzed down to the south of the city for a praise service in Urdu- which was fun. Then we went into a meeting with a couple of evangelical clergymen. Now maybe I began the day feeling a bit tired and grumpy- I believe I did- and that may have skewed my perceptions- but, really I don't think that wholly explains why- by the end of it- I was feeling like I'd had a tabernacle of soggy cardboard erected round me and I needed to punch my way out into the clean air. In the evening Ailz and I found ourselves discussing the God of the Torah- and what a frightful old ogre he is- and how if the story of his relationship with his chosen people were acknowledged to be the fairy story it so clearly is he'd be the villain of it.

It feels cheap to be taking shots at the Torah-  too easy- like punching out wet cardboard- but then I remember how the last US government ran its foreign policy on the basis of the Bible's bronze and iron age predictions- and it seems like something that- however distasteful- really needs to be done.

I go to church because it's a place where there are windows open onto other realities. I like to feel the wind that blows through them. We heard a sermon yesterday on Jacob and the Angel- which is just such an open window. But then the guy has to insist on the story being historically true -and how it represents an undercover appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament- and the effect is as if he'd filled up the window with damp cardboard. 

I like these people. I don't like how they think. It tries my patience. If I didn't have promises to keep I'd walk away.
 

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Our sermon yesterday was by our young priest assistant (who looks like an unworldly monk and is given to odd literary statements, as in his welcome yesterday, when he said: "It is a good morning here at Ascension, where outside there is rain and verdant spring"), and he told us he had once been very ill in the hospital and so afraid he was dying that he was shaking, when at the foot of his bed he saw a "blue light" and heard a voice saying "Don't be afraid. I am with you."

(I would have thought the blue light meant that not only was I ill but about to be abducted by an alien! Which may explain why my guardian angel hasn't shown up.)

He said he had told few people about his encounter, which stopped his fear (he got well later), until after a church conference at which he was told by a priest his own "guardian angel" story.

--

I go to church because it's a place where there are windows open onto other realities. I like to feel the wind that blows through them.

That's a beautiful way to put it, Tony. The people's thinking is just a guess. They too go to church to feel the wind. That's all any of us can do here.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I love that story about the blue light.

I just wish the evangelicals won't so cocksure about their guesses.