O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

[poliphilo]

The world is always about to end.

I remember driving through London in my Dad's car (a winter's evening with the street lights winking on) and seeing a poster which said JESUS IS COMING BACK. And underneath was the date 197* with a trompe l'oeil paper fold obscuring the final digit.

When I was seven or eight some religious group announced that the world would be flooded at mid-day. There I was, eating my school dinner- I visualize it as fatty roundels of lamb with boiled potatoes and cold beetroot- waiting for the mile-high wall of water to show up on the horizon. I was going to survive of course. I would grab hold of Ainsley Smart and the two of us would swim until we found land and live out the rest of our lives as a pair of Crusoes. What fun it was going to be!

And all through my adolescence and young manhood there was the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Now we favour meteorites and global warming and super volcanoes and Al Quaeda.

While the true believers still count on Jesus. And this time there's no mistaking the signs...

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Just yesterday (she said conversationally) I was taking a shower and thinking about Jesus and how he apparently showed up to help out during a crisis.

If true, then he might want to think about reincarnating and showing up again.

Colin Powell has just resigned, and all the other moderates, and Bush is appointing mouthpieces, I suspect, beginning with Condolesa Rice as Sec. of Defense.

This is going to be a grim, hardball time, no compromise and no moderation.

I wonder if Jesus would show up in Iraq?

Gee, wouldn't it be funny if he reincarnated as an Iraqui?

This morning on the news, there was a video of some marines tromping through a mosque, looking over the dead bodies.

"Fuck, this one's fuckin' faking!" yelled a marine. "He's fuckin' breathing!" His voice wasn't fearful or tense. It was mad. How dare this man get away with playing dead?

He shot him in the head.

We didn't see that part, mercifully--only a new spray of red on the wall.

The faking man had no weapons.

If Jesus wants to come back and do something, I'm all for it.

I double dog dare him.

(But why would he? Once burned, twice shy.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

They didn't show us the spray of blood- but they told us about it.

Of course it's always a grunt who gets fingered for this sort of thing, never an officer and never, but never, the guy at the top.

And here's an irony. It takes a far-right president to appoint a black woman as Secretary of State.

In succession to a black man.

It's going to be a hard time. Yes.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

PS. But my hope is that another four grim, hardball years, plus the failure of the grim, hardball policies is going to make us so sick of these grim, hardball people that they and their kind will be out of office for a long, long time.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Whoops. Sec. of State, not Defense...yes.

She is so much his friend that he came to her birthday party last week.

About four years of grim policies:

There's a smug feeling around here right now--I can just catch it in the air--all those Evangelicals are settling in with their man, because God answered their prayers.

Their church signs are positively euphoric of late: "Support our President while he prays!"

I worry about this: our staid Episcopal Church is losing members every week to the big Evangelical church over by the Solway bridge, where they have Praise singing and trap drum sets. We've lost, in our own church, 150-200 people a week in the last year. And we're a church with a million-dollar budget.

I want to know what's driving this? Because that's where to focus, I think, not on the Evangelical movement, but on its magnetic pull.

Perhaps incorrectly, I find the movement patriarchal--"Do this and be saved. Don't do anything else."

Why is everyone wanting to be told what to do? Is it a population thing, partly? So many people = a sense of instability in community, requiring a strong hand? Is it a loss of belief in God? Because emotion can FEEL like faith, if it's whipped up enough.

Whatever it is, the next candidate better address that hidden need if he/she wants to win. I think.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can only speak from personal experience.

I was a newly ordained episcopal minister. I had doubts about my faith and the job I was doing (which seemed mainly to be about reinforcing middle-class morality) and I didn't get on with my (deeply conventional) boss.

And I met a couple of people on a train who were full of the joy of the Spirit and I wanted to have what they had.

It seemed their religion was so much fun. Also they knew for a certainty that what they knew was right.

I drifted away from the movement after a year or two because it was so limiting. And the culture was just as philistine as that of the mainline churches.

The really scary thing is that a bond has now been forged between evangelical religion and far-right politics- to the extent that people within the movement think of it as necessary. Only it isn't. I was reading an article the other day by a Baptist Minister (I forget his name but he was the guy who advised Clinton after the Lewinsky affair) and he was saying, no, I'm a Biblical fundamentalist, but I believe in taxing the rich to help the poor and in the ministry of women (because there's Biblical evidence for it) and I don't see that it's my job to sit in judgement on other peoples' sexual mores.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The really scary thing is that a bond has now been forged between evangelical religion and far-right politics- to the extent that people within the movement think of it as necessary.

Yes--another irony, that we talk about the necessary separation of church and state and yet have chosen a reformed sinner to guide us into the church basement for a big parish meeting.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A propos all we've been talking about, do you know this website?

http://www.truthout.org/overview.htm

They print a selection of the best left-leaning journalism from around the world.

They send me daily updates by email.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen this site before. Thanks! I've bookmarked it.

I really need a fix of some juicy, "left-leaning journalism from around the world."

Maybe it will give me new hope--it's a bleak red zone here in East Tennessee.

The smell of irony in the morning

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

I made this comment in my journal not too terribly long ago...

So, here in America, people are gnashing their teeth and talking about how awful it is that certain world governments are slaves to Islamic fundamentalists....

Replace the word "Islamic" with the word "Christian"

and isn't that exactly where America is headed, if in fact it isn't pretty much there already?

Re: The smell of irony in the morning

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I do remember that well-thought-out post of yours.

It's a scary thought: the self-righteous in charge of the world.

Temporarily.

Re: The smell of irony in the morning

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And it's not just the Arab world and the USA. India has its Hindu fundamentalists (who until recently were in government)and Israel has its Jewish fundamentalists who are helping to push along the crisis in the Middle East.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I mean our attendence is generally down from last year by 150-200 a week, not that we're losing that many more a week!

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

Oh, it would be very amusing if Jesus were to come back and convert to Islam. My ex-boyfriend always said that Jesus was probably just a big hippie stoner type ^_^

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't think he'd be at home with his fundamentalist followers. I mean, Jesus was a bit of a party animal. When the booze ran out at a wedding he was attending he turned water into wine.

[morrison-maiden.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think he'd be an extremist, but I don't know. I think Christianity is turning into something he wouldn't like, especially since he was Jewish 0__~

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, Jesus was never a Christian. He was a Jewish teacher/prophet. No-one involved in the early days of Christianity had any intention of creating a new religion.