The Mourning After
My friend is gone, the house is still, I’ve slept around the clock almost twice. How Sandy, who resumed 10 hour days Wednesday, manages I don’t know. I hoped to write about his stay, but like an Orthodox Jew on Temple Mount not knowing precisely where the Holy of Holies is, I choose not to walk anywhere.
I think of these lines from Stephen King’s Rita Haworth and the Shawshank Redemption (an incredible piece):
We’re glad he’s gone, but a little sad, too. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
We spent the last couple nights at the movies: Gandhi and Pope John Paul II. I agree with Gandhi’s statement, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
Invisible Violence
I am convinced that one of my and the Western church’s chief sins is materialism. We’ve had several Enlightened Ones now, Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and others who have shown us that God empowers the poor to change the world.
There are 9-11 massacres happening every day among nameless millions who lack food, water, vitamins, shoes, childhood inoculations. But they are invisible, they are institutional. Nobody sets out to harm them. They just fall to the side because of globalization policies that give preferential terms to the wealthy.
We do not realize when we shop for the cheapest price we are perpetuating child labor; when we buy multinational brands we enable employers who pay less than a living wage for commodities like coffee, while drug lords pay handsomely for the drug-makings that poison our streets.
I feel so damned helpless.
Learning to See
I am fascinated by Charles Freer Andrews, the Anglican clergyman who spotted Gandhi early on and quickly allied with him. How did he see differently from other Christians? I’ll be commenting on his biography in awhile.
(I’m half through three or four books: The Life of Dialogue, Anglo-Saxon Spirituality, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, by Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, friend of Gandhi, an overview of one kind of Hinduism, a religion I’ve never understood.)
Sick of Religion
We had a get together of my wife’s relatives, some of the best people on the face of the planet. And as we usually do, our conversation turned to the Southern Baptist history of the last 30 years, much of which is written in our families’ sweat and blood. But my son left the room. After awhile I went to find him.
He said, “Dad, I’m sick of religion. I’m not interested in religion, it’s not my thing.” He no longer goes to church, although we raised him to. In that moment I got a glimpse of myself. This is what my sectarianism has done! God, have mercy!
Mid-Year Milestones
Tonight we’re celebrating my son’s birthday, bringing in meals from Outback. Sunday will be Mother’s Day, then wedding anniversary and our birthdays, all bunched up in the middle of the year.
But I’ll have to punch my way through this damned depression to do all that. Writing is the last thing I want to do. I’m out of pain meds until next week sometime, and pain hovers at 5 or 6 or more. Not only that, I’m depressed as hell.
Tags: C.F. Andrews, Gandhi, poverty, Shawshank Redemption