#RevThread #147
A Retired Pastor’s Plea
1/ Occasionally I get into the control delusion. Well, more than occasionally. And then something happens that reminds me: Control? Not so much.
A Retired Pastor’s Plea
1/ Occasionally I get into the control delusion. Well, more than occasionally. And then something happens that reminds me: Control? Not so much.
2/ So consider that we were tottering along as the richest, most powerful, most everything country that ever could be. And we had as a leader a mobbed up guy who was, lots of us dreaded, a shoo-in for re-election. Can old Joe ever beat almost-as- old Don? Probably not.
3/ Old Donald has no morals, grifts along getting richer and more powerful by the day, going to wherever the Dems were doing a primary and out-staging them with his cult rallies. And the economy was booming and the stock market was soaring and Brad the tecno-genius ...
4/...and Vlad the Impaler were coming after us from different directions and we so needed to get together in some desperate effort to restore our democracy. Remember? A couple of weeks ago?
5/ Turns out that we hadn’t noticed something. I’m no scientist, but I’ve studied it. Off in a remote province of China, probably in a bat cave, a bug that had only mutated into existence 17 years ago, was multiplying.
6/ It was a living thing, and it was growing more numerous, it was swarming, it was looking for a home. People started breathing it in, but didn’t notice it -- felt nothing.
7/ And the bugs would dwell a bit in the human throat and get breathed out into the air only to be breathed back in by the person closest, then descend into the lungs, both lungs, of both people and then would find a spot, a tiny spot between an alveoli & the flesh of the lung...
8/... and it would nest in and multiply there. And it would harden, making tiny points. And the lungs would begin to bleed. And the person would send the entire immune system against it and sometimes kill it, and sometimes couldn’t.
9/ Nobody whose immune system was weak or otherwise occupied could survive it.
10/ Since neither the one breathing it out nor the one breathing it in felt it or knew it, soon hundreds and hundreds of humans around the world were giving it to thousands and soon to millions.
11/ And great nations ground to a halt. Our own super dumb leader flailed about and let it spread and spread with no resistance for months. And the stock market crashed and the economy ground to a halt and hundreds began dying as thousands were spreading it, all unknowing.
12/ It’s all more than a tad apocalyptic. The worst pandemic since TB, occurring when we are enduring the worst leader in our history.
13/ Those two forces -- aided by the mobsters who always lurk below the surface, and by the country club wannabe aristocrats always looking down on those who haven’t inherited tax-free wealth...
14/... and by the endless greed of the GOP and by the terminally stupid Prosperity Gospel betrayers of Christianity -- are plunging America and the world into a desperate depression, just when all our resources are needed to combat the threat of climate change.
15/ Otherwise, things are just fine.
16/ We’ve been invited, once again, to step out from the control delusion and to change our lives in order to live -- and in order not to kill others unintentionally. The truth is, we desperately need one another.
17/ At the core of both the Torah and the New Testament is this command: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
18/ At the core of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Islam is the call to compassion, to the defeat of the ego-driven greed that wrecks community and landscape alike.
19/ Running through all the scriptures of all the great faiths and through the Declaration and through manifestos of most forms of socialism is this idea: every person carries within her or him the image of God.
20/ Being conscious of that is not the answer. But it is the beginning of the answer. This moment will be remembered under the rubric of “Men behaving badly.”
21/ The earth, and every person on it, is sacred. Let us grasp that, remember the depths to which greed has plunged us, and begin the rebirth by cherishing one another.
