Hung out with an old friend last night from my Fuller days, who now has an 18 month old and not the highest paying job in the world as an admin. assistant for an admittedly cool outfit.
www.sandamianofoundation.org
he found connection with a Mennonite church in Pasadena and has been wrestling with the idea of non-violent resistance to injustice in the world, reading guys like Walter Wink. We discussed the visceral emotional response of his family and friends to this, who question his faith etc. because he is seriously wrestling with this issue. We live in a country that thinks it is chosen by God, manifest destiny and all that, therefore anything this country does is blessed or backed by God (so the theory goes). God-talk and Jesus stufff is for your private life, turning the other cheek and all that, but not so useful in affairs of state. Religion has become privatized, governing only the personal life. It seems like taking the Gospels seriously entails this: the sermon on the Mount has both personal and social/political/economic implications. This can get lost among the bake sales, vacation Bible schools and men's breakfast, promise keeping stuff of contemporary middle class churches, who sort of accept the political and economic worldwide situation, not seeing how we in America are the contemporary Roman Empire, exploiting the Third World left and right. We talked about the four immediate responses to the non-violent resistance idea: what about Hitler? (see Bonhoeffer) what if you came home from work and someone was raping your wife? what about the Old Testament?
These may be valid objections to varying degrees, but certainly none of them apply to the rich man's war on trumped up charges we're currently involved in. My friend mentioned the same day the Virginia Tech kids were shot, a suicide bomber killed 50 students in Baghdad. Both tragic, but somehow one accepts the violence from "over there" the insanity of war and the Middle East and so what if a few more brown people die. NPR read out the names of the victims in Virginia Tech on the radio, rightfully so, but are these lives more valuable than the victims in Iraq on a daily basis? Is there such a thing as an us-them? Are there only people? Only us? All children of God? Was even Hitler beyond God's grace? Is anyone? Who gets to decide? These feel like very un-American sentiments. I mentioned my experience watching three documentaries back to back to back about victimization and tragedies in Northern Uganda (my friend is headed there with his work to shoot a documentary in two weeks), child sex trade in Manila, kids trying to make it from Southern Mexico to the US ending up homosexual prostitutes in Tijuana. Are we complicit for not doing anything about it, for flipping from Desperate Housewives to in-depth discussions of Anna Nicole's varous partners. There is a different kind of smog in our country hanging overhead, and already I am so preoccupied with my own daily mundane problems, my own trivial obsessions, I have lost perspective.
Ahem, but in the midst of this discussion, we mostly just laughed a lot, which was good.
In other news Karla wants to move asap when we get married, although we probably won't make it for another year at least. For some reason, Providence came up, it's close to Boston, not too big, mild winters, close to Europe, good schools in town. We'll see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Of course, there's the whole "job" thing, but we'll see what God stitches together.
The only question remains, should I get an MFT, a PHD in English Lit., dabble in creative writing? or stay the hell away from incestuous academia altogether?
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