Alert readers have asked the question as to whether the votive is of St. Martin De Porres or Senator Obama. Here is a larger picture. Here is a link to a site offering Obama votives. Here is a link to an artist who has constructed a statue of Sen. Obama as a saint/messiah. Here is the link to the Obama Messiah blog.

Here is a picture of St. Martin from St. Martin of Porres School

Perhaps someone noticed the similarity and superimposed the Senator’s face on St. Martin’s body? They say that everyone has a double, perhaps Sen. Obama’s is St. Martin? Interesting to note as well that his day is November 3rd, one day before election day.

It should also be noted that a fair number of folks have put the Senator’s face on religious gear as part of their critique of what they believe to be his overarching sense of himself.

10 important questions on the recent Wall Street bailout…

Read, discuss, and if you’d like pass it on.

Hat tip to Rod Dreher

Click the link here for the story of the Obama votive candle, with the Senator in the guise of a saint.

Some of you may wonder why I keep an eye on the Obama as “messiah” thing. I find it curious for two reasons. First it shows that some people, even people who would probably reject Christ, still have an innate need for a savior, a desire for saints, and the belief there is something greater then themselves to which they can be vicariously attached. Second it shows these folks are willing to use historic and traditional trappings to understand their sensibilities. The votive candle with Senator Obama on it uses very traditional Catholic imagery and there may be an icon of the Senator somewhere even now.

Some will dismiss this all as well, “That’s just San Francisco…” but whether we agree with the politics of the Senator or not his presence has brought out a hunger for a savior in many people a hunger sometimes expressed in Christian traditional language and images. It will be interesting to see, of course, how these people react when they discover their saint and savior is just a human being but discerning Orthodox will see in these demonstrations of a secular piety a kind of opening through which we can present an authentic Savior and an authentic faith.

No other question cuts so close to the heart of the culture wars as the question of abortion. The abortion debate is about more than abortion. It is about the nature of human life and community. It is about whether rights are the product of human assertion or the gift of “Nature and Nature’s God.” It is about euthanasia, eugenic engineering, and the protection of the radically handicapped. But the abortion debate is most inescapably about abortion. In that debate, the Supreme Court has again and again, beginning with the Roe and Doe decisions of 1973, gambled its authority, and with it our constitutional order, by coming down on one side.

Thoughtful and insightful. Read more here…

October 19, 2008

As I grow older I have come to realize that I don’t belong in this world and probably never will.

It’s a feeling like knowing the girl you’re dating, as pleasant as she may be, is not the one and sooner or later you’ll have to move on. I find myself looking at the world as if I’m present but not attached, observing everything and even taking part but knowing I was designed for something else, somewhere else.

I watch the world and its troubles and I care, and I try to do what I can to make things better, but I know this is just a place in the timeline and eternity is what ultimately matters. There is something else and as I move closer to the horizon I realize that something else is what this part of the journey is all about.

That’s the gift of traumatic times, they provide that most precious commodity, focus, the ability to see clearly unencumbered by the distortions of comfort and success. They strip away pretense and level all false gods at the knees. Those who understand this rise above and those who can’t or won’t are condemned to the panic of the herd.

The pundits ask what these times are all about, the confusion, the strength of the rich and powerful being flexed against the weak, the shallow moral waters, and the sense of foreboding that permeates throughout. They wonder what it means but those of us who follow Christ already understand.

Nothing of this world lasts forever. Every house, save one, is made of sand and every dream is twisted by mortality before it closes its eyes in death. Everyone seems to be shouting all at once but the discerning, the illumined, will understand.

It is not for us to make this world, its life, its values, and its impermanence, our final destination. We are here, for sure, called to live in and among and do our best to be light and salt and yeast for the sake of love but we belong, as the Scriptures says, to a city whose foundation is built by God, a new Jerusalem where the tree of life, uprooted in Eden, again yields its leaves for the healing of the nations. Wherever we may find ourselves here we belong to a place where God dwells with us and every human tear is wiped from our faces.

Knowing that we can live in the present and for whatever future may come and live fully, truly, and with purpose. Those things a passing world values may elude us but we never ultimately belonged here in the first place. We can have a true sense of things because while we care for this place and this moment we realize there is more and we live with that more present in our hearts.

That is what I wish for you today, a spark of something that reminds you not be troubled. Our Lord has gone before us, to, as the Scriptures say, prepare a place for us and every day we’re closer to home. The world has many troubles, Jesus told his followers, but he wanted them to understand that he had overcome them so they would not lose hope.

Open your eyes and see. Open your heart and receive. It’s glorious and when you do, nothing, not even this world, will ever be the same.

A Smith College newspaper editors says “Obama is my Jesus…” and describes her conversion.

I’ve officially been saved, and soon, whether they like it or not, the rest of the country will be too. I will follow him, all the way to the White House, and I’ll be standing there in our nation’s capital in January 2009, when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. In the name of Obama, Amen.

And Jesus saw the multitudes and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shpherd…

But worth reading…

It is long past time to get back to basics — to faith, to church, to principles, to relationships, to integrity. We are, I believe, about to be tested in a most difficult and frightening way — a darkness the likes of which we have not seen before, and may never see again. The provocation may be known, or unknown, be it nuclear terrorism, or some yet-unseen financial collapse; a cataclysmic natural disaster; or a butterfly in some unknown location flapping its wings and setting off a chain reaction which ignites the world in conflagration.

I have shared, with more or less intensity some of the sentiments of the author of this post, the sense we’re on the edge of a very dark and hard era. And as a child of my culture I sometimes fear the things I may have to face, the loss of my comforts, the pain of losing my soul’s flabbiness, the uncertainty of whether I will have what it takes to endure.

Yet at the same time I feel very free and this is one thing I wish the author would have addressed. These hard times are distilling the extraneous from me. I’m far from where I need to be but at the same time I sense a clarity about who I am and should be and more important “whose” I am. Despair leads to questions which lead to searching and then to discovery and rest. I hate the thought of what these times may be like but I feel closer to all the things that matter in ways that I never have in fatter times.

I watched the debates tonight, at least chunks of the whole thing, and my first impression is that Sen. Obama looked like a man who senses victory and Sen. McCain is beginning to look spent. That’s the drawback of these things, impression is everything, content is secondary.

Going beyond the art of looking good on television (anybody but me seem to notice that Sen. Obama seems to be going “grayer” in the hair over the past months?) were the words themselves and for those of us who value, as the Roman Church has called it, the “culture of life” those words are foreboding. Sen. Obama is basically and profoundly “pro-choice” and it was clear in the debate that position would the policy of his presidency. Certainly it will influence the laws he signs and the judges he appoints. Combined with the possibility of a Democrat “super-majority” in Congress the pro-life cause will take a beating in the next four to eight years if Sen. Obama is elected. No amount of calm TV presence can obscure this central truth. Despite the Senator’s non partisan rhetoric pro-lifers will have no place at the table or even in the room of an Obama administration.

And in one sense this will be an enormous setback. The small and reasonable restrictions on abortion, the product of years of hard political work, will be swept away, the freedom of protest will be curtailed, and more millions will pour into agencies and groups that support abortion. This is what we face. Yet at the same time we who believe in the sanctity of life will need to do what we should have been doing all along, focusing not just on the larger picture of laws and public policy but on each individual person who has a crisis pregnancy, each person who struggles with their sexuality, and each family that needs help. We need no laws to do this and there are no laws that can effectively forbid it.

This also underscores a central challenge for our call to be salt and light in this culture. For too long we have focused on the larger world of politics and structures to support our vision of what society should be and in doing so we have ignored a central truth of our Faith, that the world is changed as each individual is changed by the reality of Jesus Christ. For too long we have asked the government, the structures of our culture, to do what we should have been doing all along. Now faced with the possibility of a government hostile to much of what traditional Christian faith would espouse in the area of life, the failure of that policy has also been exposed. Yet even that exposure, that vulnerability, has the potential to turn, again, our hearts, our efforts, and our lives to both the message and the method of the Gospel. How ironic would it be if we, stripped of our temporal power, discover again the fullness of the Gospel and the Senator’s claims of hope and change find themselves realized not in the government, but in the Church.

When that happens the real revolution will begin.

Some new research that may provide hope for victims of spinal cord injuries.

As a former chaplain in health care I’ve had the chance to see the enormous devastation caused by spinal cord injuries. In my particular circumstances, working in a number of inner city nursing homes, the injuries were often related to gun shot wounds. When you see young men in wheelchairs in the inner city the chances of their being there due to diving accidents is generally pretty slim.

And the devastation these injuries cause is profound and expensive, regardless of the cause. People with spinal cord injuries can require permanent attendants, expensive mobility and medical devices, and constant medical care. With spinal cord injuries there is only a matter of degrees, even those who have the smallest amount of injury will still have their life permanently changed. Being a 20 year old man facing a lifetime in a wheelchair is a prison all by itself.

Through the years living with and serving the ill and struggling I’ve had a dream for this country, a dream that somehow we could use our tremendous wealth for the alleviation of disease and human suffering. As I’ve watched over the years I’ve seen my country spend billions in aid for countries that repress their citizens and never support our ideals. I’ve seen even more billions spent on ever more expensive tools of war. I’ve paid attention as money has been thrown in piles at utopian social engineering schemes, ineffective wars on poverty, and thousands of useless pet projects. And I imagine what could be different, what could be better, if that money, or even a portion of it, would have been used for the elimination of illness and disease. Why is it that a country that can put human beings on the moon with computers less powerful than my laptop seems unable to find a cure for cancer, eliminate malaria, or do the research needed to treat spinal cord injuries.

I’m still asking those questions, probably always will. Hey, a guy can dream can’t he?