Soapbox

 

A true story, actually.

Her hands resemble wind-gnarled branches now,
or claws, clutching at the past
unable any longer  to grasp even self.
Mouth without words or teeth,
nonsense syllables are the only story she has left to tell.
She does not interact with the world around her,
just sits by the door at the end of the hall and rocks and rocks
hooded eyes gazing already into the abyss that most of us fear more than death.

She does not seem to see the young woman who is visiting,
just mutters and occasionally waves bent, twisted arms purposelessly
seems incapable of recognition or contact.
She has already left behind her life and her tasks,
her body and even her name.
But for all this indignity and terrible loss,
she will never leave behind the one thing that truly makes her human.

Look, Grandma. Look who I brought to see you.
The woman lifts a tiny, wiggling bundle from a basket
and holds it forward towards the wizened figure rocking, rocking in her wheelchair.

Perhaps it makes a sound the rest of us are too far away to hear
or maybe the old woman catches that distinct newborn smell
which I believe every creature instinctively recognizes.
Whatver the reason, the rocking stops,
ancient head on bird neck rises, turns,
frail, twisted arms raise in a beckoning
and light pours from her creased face as if a candle has been lit within.
The beautiful arc of her cheekbones is visible again for a moment as a mouth
that can no longer speak her own name
frames a single word, a most important word
possibly even a last word,
breathes it like a prayer:
Baby!

Trusting  the love that shines before her
the mother gently sets her child into its great-grandmothers arms
while its tiny clutched  fists wave purposelessly.
The frail body curls protectively now around this new, old thing
and though she can no longer hold a spoon, we all know
that she will not drop this child.
She does not know who it is, but she knows what it is
and what she needs to do.
Perhaps she simply recognizes someone at the other end
of the same journey.
She coos and mutters and resumes her rocking
but now it does not seem  a slipping away so much a motion that complete the circle.

Of all the things we fear to lose in life
the thing that we will never lose is the one that really makes us human
more surely than creativity or language or even self-awareness.
For love is not a thing we learn or acquire,
but are simply made out of,
a thing which we breathe as surely as air, that anchors us more firmly than gravity,
that fills our sails and carries us inexorably homeward.
It is the blood that flows, however weakly,
and the bones that shape us, however brittle they become.
It is the tiny fists that quest out to meet the world
and the crippled ones that draw in to protect and cherish.

Love is an ocean and we are creatures of the mysterious deep.
It is endlessly circulating, flowing in invisible, inexorable patterns
connecting everyone.
All of the ocean is contained in each single drop of water,
and  we can only drown if we refuse to open our hearts and breathe.

Well clearly I am going straight to hell.

You know why so many people are on welfare these days? You might think it has to do with the economy, the job market, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, or lack of health insurance. You’d be wrong.
It’s because they don’t read the Bible.

I know, right? What a shock! But that’s what I was told by a Biblical Historian. Which appears to be what you call a person who has a history of making shit up about the bible.

I admit, I’m kind of curious about how exactly this miracle works! You read the bible and… what? It makes you too ashamed to apply for welfare? Or does the Bible take the place of that food you can’t afford?
~A couple of chapters of Thessalonians and my appetite is just gone!

Maybe the Bible is full of all sort of “Hints from Heloise” type advise. I bet that Martha was pretty good at stretching a shekel. St. Paul’s tips on punching up your resume.

I’m also curious about whether this magic “Read the bible and get a good-paying job” thing works for atheists and Buddhists too. Can you just read it, or do you have to actually believe everything it says? I assume you don’t, because a lot of Christian folks driving around in expensive cars don’t seem to believe a lot of stuff that I’ve read in the Bible. Like about “Love one another” and “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone“.

Do we need to read both the old Testament and the New one? I just ask because, other than the Away in a Manger and the Easter egg part, a lot of  alleged bible-readers really don’t seem very familiar with the New Testament.
What about the Book of Mormon? Does that count? (I’m guessing, from Mitt Romney’s bank balance, that it counts double.)

And what about the people I know who read the Bible but are still down-on-their-luck, sick and can’t work, can’t pay their rent? Are they just not reading the right translation? Or for too few hours each day? What about all the rich people who don’t read the bible at all? Why are they rich?

Are these just mysteries we’re supposed to accept and not worry about, like how Noah fit  all those dinosaurs on the Ark?

It occurs to me that if you come from a family that spent a lot of time on welfare, chances are you got stuck in a crummy inner-city or poor rural school with text books so old that they still say “Some day, man may walk on the moon”, where maybe you barely learned to read at all.
Which can make it hard to deal with your electric bill, let alone figure out something as full of “dosts” and “begetteth”‘s as the bible.
So perhaps you don’t read the bible because you can’t read, because you’re on welfare. …But, you’re on welfare because you don’t read the Bible… And now we’re going in a circle and I have a headache.

There are churches these days that preach something called the Gospel of Prosperity. I first learned about this when the head of one of these church was in the news for getting arrested for choking his teenaged daughter.
Oops!
This guy (when he’s not off choking people) says that God’s goal for His followers is for them to be rich, and He rewards us monetarily for our faith. Kind of like your dad paying you to get a B in math (and choking you if you don’t).

I guess this works at least sometimes because God has rewarded him with  a whole church full of people gullible enough to give him their money. Though, if you ask me, that’s just a different kind of welfare.

But I’m pretty sure that “camel through the eye of a needle” part is not  in the bible that these folks read. Neither, apparently, is ‘blessed are the meek’.

And suddenly I feel like I have just reached the breaking point. It was bad enough when churches (churches!) were just saying that poor people are poor because they’re lazy (which is easy to say from the back of your Mercedes on your way to meet with your accountant about your tax shelter) and that free-market capitalism is God’s plan for mankind. Now we hear that poverty is a sign of sin!!
~Don’t give that bum a sandwich- it’s clearly the will of God that he’s hungry!

But if God makes good people rich, why did Jesus say “blessed are the poor” if the poor are poverty is a sign of sin?

After all the shit with the Crusades, the inquisitions, the genocides and the “troubles” in Ireland, I had hoped that Christianity was at least slowly moving forward, from the Wrath of God to the Love of God part. But if you watch the news, Jesus is all about concentration camps for gay people, hanging the president in effigy, making you have children you can’t afford to feed, protecting child molesters to “preserve the glory of God” and denying medical care to rape victims.

We’re told that it’s a sin to work hard and retire with a good union pension (but it’s holy to retire on money you stashed in the Cayman Islands) and that our country should take money away from school lunch programs to buy more weapons– by the very people who insist that this is a Christian nation. Did I imagine the part about the swords into plowshares?

I used to say, of people like that,  “They’re not really Christians” but hell, what do I know? Maybe they are, and I’m the one who’s got it wrong. Many of America’s Christian leaders say they know more about science than scientists and more about medicine than doctors, so probably they know Christ much better than I do.

I always thought that  Jesus was a free-thinker, but conservative Christianity has turned him into one of the Pharisees!
~If you bake those men a wedding cake, God will send you to hell!

Really? That’s why God sent Christ to the world: to punish wrong-baking? If ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ are such bad things, then why is God so tolerant of our sins, and why did He create us in so many diverse ways?
The headache is back.

If it’s all true- if that kind of mean, f**ked-up ideology is actually what Christianity means today… then I really don’t want to be associated with “Christians” and their misbegotton religion any more.

I have tried and tried to push back against these notions, to say they have no place in a religion based on a man who preached to turn the other cheek, but liberal hippie “love one another” folks like me are just out-gunned and outnumbered. The haters are the face of Christ today.**
**Coming to a taco shell or a Walmart receipt near you!

It’s not Christ the man  that I want to separate myself from- it’s the anger, the smug self-satisfied hate that has attached itself to him. The ‘masculine’ Jesus on the sites of sniper rifles; the exclusion and that pompous sense of entitlement that makes the very word unpleasant to say.

Calling myself a Christian now just feels kind of… off, like wearing a shoe that has stepped in dog shit, and you scraped it as best you could but it just never smells clean again.

So I’m tossing that shoe in the trash of ideas and I’m just going to start my own religion. This is not exactly Martin Luther nailing 95 theses to the church doors, but I’m gonna give it a go.

In my new faith, it’s a good thing to read the Bible, because it has so many important things to say. But if you dont… or you can’t… that’s ok. Just be a good person: share, and help others when you can, because really, that’s all Jesus was trying to teach us anyway!

Don’t think that what you believe makes you better then those who believe differently. My religion won’t  treat being ground between the teeth of poverty, or being raped, or being homeless, or loving the wrong person, or caring for the health of only world we have, or finding your inspiration for loving other people somewhere other than the Bible-  as a sin.

I’ll follow a faith that cares more about what’s in your heart and how well you treat the world around you than it cares about where you’re sitting on Sunday mornings, or what you’re wearing when you sit there.
A sometimes similar, but definitely separate religion, with a different name.

One that believes that if God’s entire purpose was to make a few people on a puny planet in this tiny galaxy ‘rich” then He isn’t much of a god at all, and He wouldn’t be called the God of Love.

It sickens me the way people stick their flag in the name of Christ and declare that land to be their own exclusive property and to hell with the millions of other people who just happen to also be here- hello!
Clearly, in their “Christianity” there’e no room for me.

And not much room for Christ either.

They’re so busy erecting “No Tresspassing” and “English Only” signs and beating us weirdos over the head with their bibles that they pay scant attention to what Christ actually says in the darn thing.

I’m tired of all the self-satisfied would-be martyrs whose faith seem to be fuled by how many people they can keep out of the club, and think that giving equal rights to people who aren’t in their club is somehow persecuting them. People who can’t see that ending marriage segregation    has nothing to do with them and their beliefs.
Because everything always has to be about them and their beliefs!

So while my new religion will talk alot about the great things a man named Jesus said and did, it will focus on the spirit of his message, not the letter of some violent, bronze-age laws.

It will recognize that a religion that has rules and regulations and secret handshakes, special hats and magic underwear has lost all touch with the divine. The most important tenet of this faith will be the “Do unto others” stuff; the “As you have done for the least among you” part.

Now you’re probably thinking that this sounds like just another little branch on the great tree of Christianity, but I tell you, I am jumping off the tree and starting my own garden. Because not only does Lady MacChrist have blood all over her hands, it turns out- she doesn’t even want to wash the blood off! She’s proud of it, thinks it gives her social status, proves she’s the chosen one.
Not me. Not any more.

When people ask me “Are you a Christian?” I”ll say “No fu*king way. I am a Loveist.” Because the most important part of my religion will be love. Turns out, John Lennon had it right all along.

The Beatitudes of the Loveist

~Blessed are those who have fallen away, for they will learn to climb higher.
~Blessed are the ever searching, for they will never become know-it-alls.
~Blessed are the uncertain, for they shall not put themselves above others.
~Blessed are the ones who wear their heart on their sleeves and the ones who roll up their sleeves.
~Blessed are the compassionate, for they approach the divine.
~Blessed are those who pass through storms and learn to read by lightning.
~Blessed are the open-minded, the flexible and adaptable, for they are as a  window.
~Blessed are those who do not speak, for they teach us to listen to the stillness.
~Blessed are those who are always moving forward, for they do not cling to what has been.
~Blessed are the tuning forks, for they set others  ringing.
~Blessed are the unwelcome, the wrong of color or creed, region or religion, for they push down walls.
~Blessed are the joyful, for they shall cry purposeful tears
~Blessed are those who burn with purpose, for they  light the way.
~Blessed are those who give without counting, risk without blinking and love without thinking.
~Blessed are the many  obstacles strewn in our path, for they teach us how to dance.