Freedom of Worship [Rockwell] graphite copy | Angel of Grief
I found this in my Inbox the other day:
“A little virus can’t stop us – we have God on our side, so we continue full steam ahead to do His will!”
I have written the author and have explained that while I believe this comment wasn’t intended to be insensitive, it is insensitive.
As of this writing, 139,143 deaths [Last Updated on the Presidential Public Calendar: Jul 14 @ 10:00pm] have occurred in the US due to the “little virus” that has rocked the entire world. 815 of those deaths have happened in the last 21 hours of this writing. Many of those who have died were people of Faith who had other plans than dying. While awakening in the Afterlife will probably have large elements of joy, those who are left behind won’t feel the same way. Those left behind experience grief; sometimes paralyzing grief.
The President seems to be determined to not mention the deaths of 139,143 citizens of this country. As Joe Biden put it recently, pointing to Trump in March declaring himself a ‘wartime president’ in battling the Corona virus, Biden said:
“What happened? Now it’s July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered — waved the white flag and left the battlefield.”
A Leader of his country would have used the last three months to prepare to fight this ‘little virus’; the hospitals of this country are no better prepared with Personal Protective Equipment than they had been in March. Thanks to those people who partied like 2019 on Memorial Day, and Fourth of July, and a lack of mask-wearing among those who somehow believe wearing a mask attacks their First Amendment rights, hospitals all over the country have filled to capacity. Human stupidity seems to know no bounds.
With rising Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations sending many states backward in their reopening plans, one health expert warns that if the US continues on its current path it will reach “one of the most unstable times in the history of our country.”
“We will have hospitals overwhelmed and not only in terms of ICU beds and hospitals — and that’s bad — but exhausted hospital staff and hospital staff that’s getting ill themselves,” Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN Friday night. “So, we won’t have enough manpower, human power, to manage all of this.”
Only five states saw a decrease of at least 10% in average new daily cases over the past week. And the US set a record for the highest single day of new cases for the second time this week with 66,627 cases on Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
There have been more than 3,225,721 confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, Johns Hopkins University said. That’s more than the population of 21 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, according to data from the US Census Bureau. [data not current]
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/11/health/us-coronavirus-saturday/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3npV0sdiRRWAeHoFGtmVJu01NBtnv9iLAeAwT3IrTOsbgtu6uCz1ftajk
President Trump once again questioned the expertise of his top public health officials Monday morning, retweeting a conspiracy theory from former game show host Chuck Woolery, who suggested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the “Media, Democrats [and] our Doctors” are lying about COVID-19 in an effort to hurt Trump in November’s general election.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/890384330/trump-again-casts-doubt-on-fauci-as-covid-19-cases-surge
Amidst the Pandemic crippling America, I have a problem with the “White Evangelical Church” and it is unexpected. I had expected better.
This will not be well received by many.
I know of individuals who will find these images extremely offensive. If this offends you, please stop reading. It won’t improve.
I don’t have image credits, apologies.
I came to Faith forty-seven of my sixty-eight years ago. I had never stepped into a church before my third year of college. Faith and religion were not discussed during my upbringing. I knew that my beloved grandmother called us ‘heathens’ but I had no idea what the word meant; and wasn’t curious enough to open a dictionary.
I was loved into Faith by a group of college students who did not try to convert me, they did not try to make me into someone I wasn’t. They simply became my friends. In time,
I wanted to make myself into someone I wasn’t.
Religion is really weird, if you’ve never been exposed to it. Often weird, even if you have been exposed to it. During the two college years that followed my introduction to Faith, I visited a variety of churches. I came to the conclusion that most people who have spent their lives in a certain denomination [of the hundreds of denominations around the world] seem to have no idea that people in other denominations ‘do church’ differently, even though denominations come into being as the results of theological arguments.
I consider myself to be non-denominational; although I apparently am still a Presbyterian Elder, even though I haven’t been in a Presbyterian church service for over a decade. I was baptized as an infant in a Congregational church I’ve never entered since, and I was baptized as an adult in a non-denominational church. I was ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’ at a Crusade, for those who see this as a major qualifier.
Even within those Lutheran/ Presbyterian and non-denominational churches I have called ‘home,’ there is a lot of variation. Missouri Lutheran churches are different from Evangelical Lutheran Church[es] in America; and they are different from the American Lutheran Church[es]. A lot of the differences between the denominations involve how they think about people who are different than they are, and what role they should have in the church.
I valued my association with the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary over a number of years. My biggest complaint about Catholicism is that I am discouraged from partaking in Holy Communion because I’m not Catholic. Catholicism, in my opinion, does ‘wonder’ far better than Protestants.
I am not aware of any churches that call themselves the “White Evangelical Church”. Belonging to the WEC has to do with an attitude, and a particular practice of applying the New and Old Testaments to life today, as they view life today. They are fond of rules, based on the particular Bible they use while taking sentences out of context. The WEC tends to accept, without question, that the Holy Bible, as we know it today, is written by God Himself, through human agents.[I started going there while writing this; there is too much stuff to cover for the uninitiated] The WEC has a ‘training manual’ of sorts taken from the writings of the Apostle Paul, and others, directing parents in how they should raise godly children. It was helpful during our child-rearing years, because I was clueless. I was friends with one ‘godly child’ as I grew up; don’t recall meeting any others.
The current resident of the White House, the man who sits behind the Resolute Desk, is the exact opposite of what that ‘training manual’ teaches. Prior to 2016, before he became Very Famous, I would have heard countless sermons on the despicable behavior of this man. Since he was merely a celebrity, the Church did not care what he did. Now the WEC believes that he was sent to the Presidency by God. They talk about him being like King Cyrus, not a Jew, who allowed the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple centuries before the coming of Christ. They should probably look at King Nebuchadnezzar—he ended up cursed by God, eating grass in the fields, like a donkey, for years; because of his arrogance.
The desire for political power is destructive to the people of God.
While I’m not a ‘fan’ of the X-files, I found the series interesting—the lapsed Catholic surgeon who did not believe in the paranormal; and the atheist who did believe in the paranormal—just not caused by God. They frequently bring up theological questions:
SCULLY: I have a patient. A young boy with a rare brain disease, and he’s very, very sick.
MULDER: Why haven’t you told me about this before?
SCULLY: I thought there was something I could do.
MULDER: There’s not?
SCULLY: Well, there’s radical treatments but nobody wants to talk about those. Even the experts say there’s nothing to be done. Nothing but let him die. So, I’m lying here cursing God for all his cruelties.
MULDER: And do you think God is losing any sleep?
SCULLY: Why bring a kid into the world just to make him suffer? I don’t know, Mulder, I’ve got such a connection to this boy…
“Why bring a kid into the world just to make him suffer?”
We are only able to look at our lives in the Present. We have hopes for the Future. We can remember the Past, but we cannot relive it [although people persist in the attempt]. I believe that Creator sees our entire lives, front, back and sideways. Creator sees our lives as a whole, not as the 525,600 individual minutes we live through in a year. I believe that our lives are Known from the beginning of Time.
I’ve often said that on the rare occasions when my illustrations include a villain, I would not throw the villainous character away, because I created the character. I cannot throw it away. My creation involves pain, it involves frustration; the creation is a product of my work. The character is a villain because of a story, and may always be a villain, if I use the character again. One villain in particular will ALWAYS be a villain. This particular villain has caused so much hurt and pain that he can never be redeemed in his lifetime. He has a mental illness that prohibits him from expressing that which we might call humanity.
Humans ask how can it be that a Loving Creator could possibly create beings who suffer; beings who may only experience suffering in this life. How could a Creator be so cruel as to allow Pandemics to happen? I believe that part of the answer is that we are more than the lives we live here. As Yoda said, we are luminous beings…
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you, hmm? And well you should not, for my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Everywhere. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere.
I don’t object to identifying “The Force” with the Creator—that which is True on Earth has to be True throughout the Universe. Otherwise, it isn’t Truth.
The first intelligent life from another planet we meet, may look like these beings…
If the story of Jesus is true, then these beings will also have a ‘Jesus story’—the story of the Creator of the Universe entering time and space and living like themselves; dying at the hands of the religious elite and rising again to new life. Inviting these beings to join in on that journey.
If our understanding of Jesus as the Creator of the Universe cannot tolerate the appearance of Believers in this form, ‘in the image of their Creator’; we might need to reconsider our beliefs…
I believe that we are created for Eternity. Eternity is far more than ‘a long time.’
With Eternity as our Home, the trials here on this broken world will be an eyeblink in the span of Eternity. I’m not blind enough to think that such an idea makes the suffering good; the explanation is simply part of the rest of the story.
We do not now have the ability to understand the rest of the story. I’ve heard people express the idea that we will arrive in Eternity Future in our present form. When Jesus was resurrected, people did not recognize Him until He desired it. We are not our bodies; we are our soul.
For those who believe we don’t have souls, I hope that idea changes.
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 