Thursday, October 17, 2013


                       “I grew up believing in a loving and kind God, who made it clear through

                        these sacred pages that He was on the side of the poorest of the poor,

                        the lowliest of the lowly. I’d never heard anyone qualify God as a Conservative,

                        or a Liberal. He’s God, for goodness sake! The Creator of worlds, defender

                        of the pure in heart, father to the orphan and husband to the widow, and lover

                        of my very own soul.
 

                        He ordained laws so men might understand how to live rightfully. He laid them

                        down in black and white. But the law would eventually find its fulfillment

                        in the unequivocal sacrifice of His Son, surely the most grand and loving of

                        Divine gestures. What was black and white was finally renewed and fulfilled in

                        shades of a quite luminous and translucent gray. Gray is the color of grace.

                        The Law becomes Love. And you and I call Him Jesus Christ.
 

                        We know that grace is not black and white because we no longer, after all, put

                        people to death for eating pork, or for marrying outside their race, or for loving

                        someone of the same sex. This frustrates many who prefer things to remain ‘black

                        and white,’ who simply do not operate easily outside the borders of legalism.
 

                        But it is outside those borders where grace reigns supreme, and where the wars

                        that rage on against fear are won or lost.
 

                        How then do we, the Believers, those whom Jesus calls ‘Beloved,’ how is it

                        we come to rally ourselves around the fear-mongrels, whose sole aim is to

                        squash and suppress the desires and hopes of those they pejoratively call the

                        ‘bleeding hearts.’ The bleeding heart desires not only justice, equality, and

                        reason, but also compassion, wisdom, and truth. I think it was Jesus’ bleeding

                        heart that bled most, wasn’t it?
 

                        In this land that still represents to the rest of the world the ‘last best hope,’

                        we contend with what we like to call the ‘war on poverty.’ But this war has

                        little chance of success when the poor are viewed only as those whose

                        poverty represents a kind of laziness; an insufferable sense of entitlement. 
 

                        This land of hard work mixed with what used to be a large dose of kindness, is

                        filled with far too many today who believe that indeed the class war exists, but

                        in reverse, that the war is against the rich, those who’ve accomplished the great

                        American Dream, (mostly all on their own, they will tell you). They have little

                        interest in showing compassion toward those who haven’t achieved The Dream,

                        other than to allow their good fortunes and their peculiar goodwill to

                        ‘trickle down,’ like a labyrinthine economic pinball machine; or a sewer.
 

                        Once we were a nation of ‘receivers.’ Now we’ve become a nation of

                        ‘achievers.’ We’ve become a people who believe that entitlements are due

                        only to those who, by their own sweat, have found favor in God’s sight,

                        a favor bestowed on those who’ve accumulated the most toys. 

      

                        We are fearful of the poor, afraid they will take from us the things we believe

                        we’ve earned, mostly on our own. We are fearful they will take power they don’t

                        deserve. Power, after all, has a high price and must be paid for.

 

                        We want so much to believe we are, or once were, a Christian nation. History is

                        selectively recounted, and the past can be reshaped to aid our sense of security

                        in what we believe, as though what we believe needs the approval of an entire

                        nation, and the power of majority rule.
 

                        Would you still believe what you believe, if you were the only one? If the road

                        we’re on is as narrow as we’ve been told, then why in the world do we seek to

                        claim an entire nation for it? Why do we seek to make our faith and trust in

                        God so strangely synonymous with patriotism, democracy, capitalism, American

                        exceptionalism, and what we like to believe were the pure hearts and minds of

                        the founding fathers?   

 
                        We can, if we choose, transpose these sacred pages to fit a more militant

                        Christianity, and create a more dispassionate Christ. We can, if we so choose,

                        justify our condescensions. We can, in our search to write our own Book of Life,

                        stand together, roll up our sleeves, lower our collective shoulders, and shove the

                        camel through the eye of the needle.”

 

 

 
                                                                                                   Gideon Morrow

                                                                                 Portions of a speech given at Yale Divinity

                                                                                                  September 22, 1982
 
 
 
                 (From the soon-to-be published book, 'Lamentations of a 20th Century Man,'
                  by Jeff Kidwell)

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