 |
| Dr. Seuss (1940) |
A Miami Herald columnist is just askin'.
"What if God were one of us?" Leonard Pitts wants to know.
"Singer Joan Osborne famously asked that question in 1995," he went on. "In her Grammy-nominated hit, 'One Of Us,' she envisions the author of all creation as 'a slob like one of us, just a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home.'"
Hmmm . . . well, um. . . .
NO, we have gazed at our pseudo-spiritual navels quite enough, thank you very much.The idea of eternity contained in mortality was controversial. But it turns out that envisioning God as “one of us” is not at all uncommon. Indeed, our conceptions of God tend to be colored, perhaps inevitably, by our social affiliations. So says a new study in which University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers tested 511 American Christians to see how they envision God.
The one thing respondents agreed on was that God does not resemble Michelangelo’s stern old white man with a flowing beard. Other than that, there was no consensus. African Americans saw a God with African-American features. Young people saw a younger God. Liberals saw a loving God with younger, more feminine features. Conservatives saw a God who was white, older and who radiated power.
In other words, when we see God, we see ourselves and our values. But we may want to look again.
We should look for all the ways God has come to us throughout creation -- how He comes to us still. Perhaps, just perhaps, we should for once consider what the hell has happened to heaven whenever it has come to earth.
It should not be necessary to point out, as much as I love the Joan Osborne song, that "One of Us" merely restates what Christians have known for millennia -- God was one of us. He was . . . is . . . a Palestinian Jew, name of Jesus.
By contemporary American standards (and particularly those of the combed-over troll we call our president), Jesus Christ -- second Person of the Holy Trinity, son of Mary and one with the Father -- was a loser. He had neither a pot to piss in nor a window to piss out.
If the Border Patrol caught Him on the Mexican border . . . "Oh, Jesus. Another damn Honduran" . . . God incarnate would not find His predicament an unfamiliar one.
 |
| Children in detention facility, McAllen, Texas |
WAIT. We were talking about how God is like us, remember?
Shut up.
When Jesus was an infant . . . His parents had to flee with their firstborn son across the Egyptian border as undocumented aliens. King Herod, of the MS-13 Herods, had put a price on His head.
Years after the family returned from exile, folks in God's hometown tried to throw Him off a precipice. Something about crazy talk and blasphemy.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, the Roman centurions tortured and lashed Him until His back was divinely raw hamburger, then they jammed a crown woven of 2-inch-long thorns down onto His head. They mocked Him, and then the local man from Rome, Pontius "What is truth?" Pilate sentenced Him to death at the unruly urging of a first-century conservative political base.
Then the authorities made Him carry the heavy, assembled wooden beams he would hang from to the site of His execution. Then the guards nailed his wrists and ankles to the cross and raised it up, so He would hang there and eventually suffocate.
While His mother watched.
Pitts again:
Consider that, then consider this: On the same day the study was reported, CNN.com ran a story about an undocumented immigrant from Honduras who says federal authorities grabbed her infant daughter from her as the baby was being breastfed When the mother complained, she was handcuffed.
It was just the latest outrage of the government’s so-called “zero tolerance” immigration policy, i.e., its decision to criminally prosecute every person who attempts to illegally cross the U.S. border. Until that decision last month, detainees primarily faced civil deportation hearings.
Since that decision, hundreds of children have been separated from their parents. Some detainees say U.S. officials told them their children were being taken for baths, then stole them away. They say no one will tell them where their kids are. Toddlers are being left in an unknown land with strangers, crying for parents they cannot find. The emotional trauma America is inflicting on these kids is incalculable. . . .
No, this is evil — a just-following-orders, look-the-other-way, not-my-fault species of moral putrefaction brought to you by the most ostentatiously Christian political party in one of the most noisily Christian nations on Earth. The hypocrisy of it reeks to, well … high heaven.
 |
| Wikipedia |
Ask me how -- I'm a Southerner, and we specialize in that shit.
What Trump is doing isn't new, it's just that he's so brazen about it, media technology is better now . . . and this administration adds a whack je ne sais quoi to every single thing it touches.
Furthermore, the only point to this Hitlerian spectacle on the Mexican border is sheer terrorism. It's that simple. You terrorize anyone thinking of illegally crossing the border -- or legally seeking asylum -- into not doing it.
Please. The administration has admitted as much any number of times. Don't even argue the point.
Al-Qaida flew jetliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to terrorize Americans right out of the Middle East. That terrorism worked about as well as this Trumpian terrorism will.
We Americans are the biggest hypocrites in the world, and the stupidest. Laura Bush correctly compared the aesthetic and means of this terrorism to the Japanese internment camps we built during World War II, but the spirit and tactics of what's being done in the name of the American people today is pure 9/11.
About which I'm sure Jesus Christ was giving Osama bin Laden a big thumbs up. Yeah, that's the ticket. Right, Jeff Sessions?
No comments:
Post a Comment