An interesting link from “Get Religion” detailing the LA Times efforts to play fast and loose with poll numbers regarding Californians opposition to same sex marriage. I’ve already seen this article, with the misleading headline, in my own hometown paper. When it comes to yours make sure you do the numbers.

Did you know that German Christian Youth at a recent rally were harassed and physically assaulted as they peacefully gathered for meetings? Find out more about this and other acts of persecution of believers at http://www.christianophobia.eu/.

Got another Obama email today. I’ve had a few over the past months.

Some have been conspiratorial, some have had facts, some have been a little of each. In this case the email was an article written, apparently, by a New York journalist which attempted to bring the “real” Sen. Obama to light. Large portions of it were accurate. Sen. Obama is very left leaning for an American politician and despite his rhetoric about change and unity his voting record indicates a person occupying a fringe of the political spectrum. People who appreciate his speaking skills, and like many politicians he is adept at saying much about little, probably have never taken the time to actually examine his record and if they did some of them may be shocked.

One of the great problems in the politics of our country is that too much of what we see and hear is filtered through media and people in this country are still naive enough to believe what the television tells them without learning for themselves. At present the television loves Sen. Obama and to date very few hard questions have been asked. The article, written by an African American journalist (therefore avoiding the Obama campaign’s not so subtle argument that any criticism of the candidate is, in fact, closet racism) opens up the record and exposes what, for traditional Christians, may be some significant issues in the realm of life, family, and marriage among other things.

The hard part came at the end when the person who sent the chain email, not the author of the article, added “The book of Revelation teaches that the antichrist will be a man of Muslim heritage in his 40’s…”. and then went one to describe this antichrist as a person with flowery language who persuades the world to follow him by offering peace and harmony and then suggests that perhaps “you know who” might be that figure. Talk about a stupid addition to a thoughtful article.

Conspiracy thinking is lazy. There is a simple reason that our culture may be on the verge of electing someone to its highest political office whose values on issues of life, family, and marriage are only tangentially connnected to historic Christian faith. We’re lazy. Given the freedom to proclaim our message and live our faith we’ve chosen largely to do neither and because of this our impact on the larger society has drastically decreased. In large swaths of America the church is no longer taken seriously because, quite frankly, the people inside the church don’t take it seriously either.

And that’s what I wrote back to the those who received the email. Conspiracy thinking is just a way for Christians to avoid responsibility and blame others for the world they let happen. When Christians bend their knees and roll up their sleeves we’ll really have the “change we can believe in”. It’s as simple as that.

When the prices rise you look for bargains and so an old friend has made a return. Pepsodent was the toothpaste I remember from my childhood, one of those products like Tide and Ivory soap that were just part of my life. Somewhere along the line we just started using other things and then when saving a dollar or two makes a difference we rediscover them. In this case Pepsodent is basically identical, in its core ingredients, to most toothpastes at about half the price. Oh, and it actually tastes pretty good too

I’ve been looking at some of the time stamps on my posts and it occurs to me that I keep some really wierd hours. It reminds me of the 36 hour, as I recall, day adopted by the Men in Black in the movie of the same name. I think the line went something like “Well either you get used to it or you go totally insane…”

The truth is I do sleep, but my mind keeps working and sometimes I get a dose of “holy insomnia” where I’ve had enough sleep and something seems to want my attention. I use the quiet of the wee small hours to pray and think and write and sometimes play music at a very LOW volume. One of the cats usually comes along to join me, they keep odd hours as well, and we watch the sun rise or listen to whatever sounds travel through the night.

The truth is I dislike sleep, it seems like wasted time. I know I need rest and and I do rest but it seems unfair that a third of my life is spent in semi-conciousness an the rest is spent in 21st century America which, sometimes, is another form of semi-conciousness.

Oh well…

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who was attending an Orthodox church’s annual dinner. From what I could get from our talk she was a nurse who had once been Presbyterian but had converted to Catholicism. I appreciated her insights but I think at one point I offended her.

She spoke of her experience of coming to the eucharist before she converted to Catholicism, and that while it was a ‘technicality” (as explained to her apparently by a Priest) that non Catholics should not receive she did so anyways and found that the experience was part of her coming to Catholic faith. It was clear from the conversation, at least to my ears, that she didn’t see the inconsistency of violating the canons of a faith as part of her journey to embrace it. What mattered was her experience. And that’s where the offense probably started.

I gently reminded her that non Catholic receiving the eucharist in a Catholic church is not a “technicality” but canon and then I pushed a bit. Seeing that she was of the same general era as myself (I’m a late baby boomer – 1960) I began to speak of how our generation was among the most arrogant ever in the world, we Americans who came of age in the 60’s and 70’s really do think we invented sex, and religion, and music, and the what matters is what matters to us, we are ruled by our experience, and anything else is, well, anything else.

One thing baby boomers do not want to hear is that they’re arrogant and selfish, even though we are to an astonishing degree. And we don’t want to hear we’re wrong on anything, even though we often are. We don’t believe in much outside of ourselves but we do believe in the mythology of our own enlightenment with a dogmatic power that makes historic religious belief look shallow in comparison. We change laws and cultures based on our whims and the sheer force of our demographic. We’ve laid waste to institutions and then recreated them in our own image, and our image is “we want what we want when we want it”. We live in the vacuum of this moment with nothing past and nothing future and we call this wisdom.

So, although I believe all that and hope and pray enough of us recover some sense of sanity and preserve a shred or two of civilization for a future time, I didn’t give her the full dose but enough to get her face scrunched up. And then I talked about Orthodoxy and how there was faith that transcended time and even the individual but by then the wall was probably up. When I spoke with her later she kind of mumbled about how this was one point on my “journey” (dang it all if we are always journeying and never arriving at anything except ourselves) and so on. At first I was concerned but then I realized I was running up against the real American religion and sometimes it takes a while to wake a sleeping person.

Some time later it occurred to me how much I still buy into all the “stuff” of my generation. I would hope that I am aware of at least some of my delusion but the truth is that I’ve got a long way to go. Our culture is in a messy place right now, top to bottom, and this is largely because the generation in charge of most things, mine, has bought into a whole set of lies about life and faith and reality which are bearing bitter fruit even as we seem unwilling to change. It seems that to admit we were wrong and that parts of our wisdom are foolish and even dangerous is too much to ask. We’re the monkey with the hand in the gourd grasping on to the fruit and unwilling to let go even when we see the hunter approaching.

Regardless it was a time for me to see how much I live in the matrix of this world, still, collar and all.

Sigh…

From time to time I’ll browse the web looking for old friends. As time goes by the memory of them grows more special and it’s interesting to see how life is treating them.

Tonight I browsed through the reunion site for Wausau West High School, class of 1979. Had we not moved to Minnesota in 1975 this would have been my class and as I looked through the names many of them were still familiar. One of my classmates is a minister in the suburbs of Minneapolis, another works in public affairs at an electric company in Wausau, many are still around town and some who I would like to have found were simply lost. It’s all part of life I guess.

I find myself praying sometimes for people who’ve probably forgotten I even exist. Some are friends who drifted away over the years, some are people who I’ve hurt by my own selfishness, some are just passing acquaintances. Either way I truly do desire that God’s blessing would follow them wherever they are.

This is especially true about Mahtomedi High School. The truth is that those years were hard years and I felt liked I never belonged there but its something that can’t be undone. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to pray for everyone in the class of 79 in the hope that somehow it would, behind the scenes, make a difference for them and for me as well. For them I hope its an unseen blessing helping them along the way. For me its an ongoing opportunity to give and receive forgiveness in the act of prayer.

On these nights when I see the names and remember the faces and the times past as I google folks in the hope that someone familiar may appear my heart feels tender and a little bit melancholy. A part of me wants to get on the phone and say “Hi, do you remember me?” in the hope that somehow the old connections can be reanimated. It’s probably not to be but the thought of it is comforting.

However time has taken us apart I do hope to see them in heaven.

Today as I heard the news that the California Supreme Court had decided in its wisdom to declare same sex marriage a civil right I felt a wave of sadness.

On a constitutional level this decision was horrendous. The people of California had already voted in a referendum to affirm the traditional definition of marriage and the Court, like in Massachusetts, simply decided it knew best and did whatever it pleased. Why have people vote and a Legislative branch if Courts feel they can simply decide any issue? We have created a government here in the United States where basically five people, any majority of the federal Supreme Court, rule. Each time a court acts with the cavalier disregard for history and the rights of people to enact law through referendum and legislation democracy and representative government dies. And every time the people and legislatures meekly submit to these kinds of abuses the stage is set for either revolution or tyranny.

On a personal level I feel sorry for the people in California. At some point in the future the folly of these actions will bear bitter fruit. No the sky hasn’t fallen in now and may not for some time, after all the mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine, but there will be a time when the pain, disease, and suffering caused by people who believe their right to sexual expression transcends common sense and even science will come to a head and it won’t be pretty. Already we have spiraling rates of STDs, broken homes, psychological wounding, and the extraordinary social costs that come with them all. Yet instead of seeing these as calls to reexamine our vision of sexual and moral life we plunge in further, “waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says march on…” Some future generation will have to clean up this mess and until sense returns a lot of people are going to be hurt and some will die. What a shame!

I have to admit there is a part of me that would like to grab, as it were, a musket and take back my country from the selfish and short sighted fools who often are in charge of things. That’s not, however, our way, but one thing is certain. We Christians have got to look at events like this and realize its time to end our passivity and live our lives as Christians knowing that the only way this will change is to change our culture from the ground up, one person coming to Christ (and sanity) at a time. The people who have made these horrible decisions will have to stand before Christ for what they have done, but so will we if don’t hear the call in all of this and realize that we need to combat this darkness the only way with can, with the Light of Christ.

From time to time I post the www addresses of sites worth considering. One such site is Lifesite News. Here you can get information on life issues, moral issues, and coverage of government actions in a way that you’d probably never find in the mainstream press either in Canada or the US.

Like any other site I recommend you need to visit and make up your own mind as to what you’ll keep and what you’ll toss but this site is certainly worth a look.

Now we know why our vacation plans fell through. Had a visit from a plumber and electrician. The plumber was cheap but the electrician was around $2000. Oh well, to everything there is a season…