The takeover of the Minneapolis-St Paul Airport by protestors is also something we have only partial knowledge of, though we have a bit more than we do about the shooting at present. One group that made itself prominent in the crowd were clergy. By their own statement they "prayed together, sang songs and hymns, and shared stories of those who have been abducted by ICE while at work or commuting to and from the airport." Notable by its absence is "Asking the Lord what He would have us do."
I would be very surprised to learn that ICE included "Lord, what would you have us do?" in their daily briefing, nor that Trump asks himself that question very often. But when your job is pastoral in the spiritual sense, I expect it to be prominent in your thinking. Perhaps it is, I don't know. I am irritated by its absence in the organisers' press releases, but were I there, I might be greatly comforted by how they start each morning. Yet I suspect this is deeply tied to the problems Lewis noted in The Dangers of National Repentance. Confessing other people's sins to show how sensitive you are... It is also in the category of forging God's signature under your politics. It is among the most major of sins.
Both conservatives and liberals will make strong declarations about what they understand God to be teaching and requiring. But if you cannot show the respect to other Christians to even consider their understanding, you cannot convince me you have heard the Holy Spirit. Your prayers are not prayers, but performances. Your songs are not worship but a variety show. I do not see the fear and trembling in you that at least some earlier Christians displayed.
I would expect the fear and trembling, and the soul-searching and asking for guidance, to have happened before they arrived at the airport. As to their not mentioning such things in their press releases, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." If you get irritated by things you think people ought to have said but didn't say in your hearing, you will never lack for subject matter. I would save my "irritation" for the behavior of ICE.
ReplyDeleteSez you. Do you see yourself in the poem below?
DeleteThe Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
ICE is not the source of irritation
ReplyDelete