Category Archives: Life reflections

Dear Pro-Lifers

Posted on by
21

TW: this is an intense blog post.

Dear Pro-Lifers,

Now’s your chance. For decades, generations, we’ve been crying that all life matters, that God’s will for us is to be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it (which is the Old Testament maxim by the way, the NT says go preach the gospel and Love one Another as God has loved us).

Pro-life progressives

I know you feel persecuted, that we as Christians are coming in for that cursing and reviling that is supposed to signal we’re blessed. But, team, bad news: we’re getting cursed and reviled because we’re acting like asshats. Coughing and walking around unmasked, unvaxxed in public spaces crying “freedom over tyranny” is not preaching Jesus, crucified and risen to bring redemption to every human who chooses New Life. It’s being asshats.

NOW IS OUR CHANCE. Mask up, to prove you love people in Jesus’ name, and so the predictions of 150,000 deaths per day in August’s peak can go down to 1500—as the best modeling math says it would.

Vaccine is the gift of a loving God who created science so we could learn the rules. We don’t fight gravity on a daily basis, declaring it tyranny from the Satanic underworld (even though it pulls down). We thank God for a sense of right, wrong, balance, and even fun, as we buy our kids trampolines, knowing they’ll come back to us after they launch squealing with glee into the air. It’s part of God’s natural laws. It’s freaking science. An awesome gift from a loving God.

Time to prove we are Pro-Life: value the life of my 79-year-old husband, who could get sick because Walmart is full of Right to Lifers. Value the lives of your neighbors as yourselves. Prove the things we’ve been saying for so long about how much God values individual lives. Not the thing a Pro-Lifer sent me in a long Facebook diatribe, that sacrifices of the non-innocent must be made for the greater good of Freedom.

Don’t try that “we meant innocent lives” argument, because the next step in that dance is turning the “why we shouldn’t abort” argument back on you: a child born into poverty in, say, India, where poverty means not eating rather than eating crappy commodity food, cannot be aborted to avoid starvation, because who made us God to judge what could happen to that child over the years. That child could grow up to cure cancer.

But we have Freedom to judge adults, perhaps like my husband a senior citizen who devoted his life to making the world a kinder place, and other adults who have tried to follow God’s laws their whole lives? Because “they’re not innocent lives?” Why, because they don’t go to your church— or, at this point, live in your theological encampment?

Pro-Life is so easy when it’s the Unborn. They don’t demand things, and once they’re safely out of the womb, we can dismiss the situation—we’ve been doing it for decades. Our work there is done: no safety net, no soup for them, because, work for it. Except we just said have that baby or go to Hell, so working for it is not exactly an option, ‘cause, see, not everyone lives in the nuclear suburban lifestyle some preach God ordained, so friends and relations can’t watch the baby.

These days, when someone asks about my beliefs, I say “New Testament Christian, not Republican Christian.” And they laugh. But this isn’t funny. The NT maxim does say “the gospel is preached to the nation, and then the end comes.” This “my freedom over your safety” message isn’t good news, that Jesus loves us and made a path to redemption for us. It borders on prosperity gospel; God loves ME and neither one of us cares what happens to you. It is a nasty message full of briars and thistles choking out True Life, all about how we can cause the deaths of others with impunity because, Freedom.

We’re doing it wrong, pro-lifers. Mask up. Vaccinate. Preach the Good News. And then the end will come. We’re not going anyplace swimming in circles in this stew of useless vitriol. God loves you, and I ain’t wearing a mask. God loves you, and the virus is fake. God loves you, but I don’t.

Please, please, get this right, Pro-Lifers. What Life do you stand for: the one you believe God wants to give everyone, or the one God wants to give you, full of preferential treatment and favor because you know God personally? You know that was the plan for all of us, right, to know God and make God known, and enjoy the knowing along the way?

Pro-Lifers, we are fond of scriptures. Try these: Isaiah 54:2 “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities.” Expand the definition: Pro-Life isn’t supposed to mean, cannot realistically mean, unborn only, and be a message of love for humanity. Not in a pandemic, kids

Matthew 18:6, Luke 17:2 – don’t make the little ones, the ones who don’t know God, stumble.

And Mark 16:15 – go into the world and preach the gospel to EVERY LIVING CREATURE.

Please, Pro-Lifers, last chance: get this right. There’s a world out there that needs to know the Loving God we know. Not the hissing representatives between God and them.

An American Stranger

Posted on by
2

Jack fails abjectly this week – Wednesday post on Friday – –

This post is about the attitude of some Scots towards Americans and why –

Wendy in Scotland

When Wendy came to Scotland twenty five years ago and we married, she was finishing her PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland. She had worked for years as a community based storyteller and her dissertation examined professional storytellers in Great Britain, Ireland, Canada and the US. When she arrived she set up a group non-profit called Storytelling Unplugged with local storytellers that also used storytelling in the community including a children’s’ hospice, but began to encounter some problems from the cultural establishment. This was partly anti-American, partly professional jealousy and partly because I had recently divorced and (wrong) assumptions were made. Although Wendy was creating more storytelling opportunities for more storytellers, the anti-American sentiment during this expansion even included “don’t all Americans want everything bigger?” She got tired of it and turned to writing.

Colin in pensive mood

My old friend Colin moved from Aberdeen to Fife in the 1970s and we became compatriots on the musical scene. A fine singer who had helped organize the Aberdeen folksong club, he had driven buses there during his summer vacations. So when I started my small group tours of Scotland he was a natural to drive the seventeen seat minivan. But he was a retired teacher of English Lit in the local high school and then of communications in the community college and had a keen ear for language. Having lived in the US for a while I had learned to ‘code-switch’ between British English, US English and Scots and Colin very quickly learned to do the same. He made many long term friends among my ‘tourists’, although I could never persuade him to come and visit here. Despite his fondness for Americans, he never cared to see America.

Mike in contemplative mood

Another old friend was Mike who had played keyboards, pipes and whistle in my folk band. He did visit us for three weeks and charmed everyone he met. He had rented a car for the duration of his visit and delighted in getting out and about, even getting lost a couple of times. He was happy to play whistle and speak some Gaelic to a class I was teaching at the time. Although a devout Catholic he was very ecumenical and while with us he attended our Quaker Meeting, played a piano prelude at the Presbyterian Church and was mistaken for a visiting Priest at the Catholic Chapel. Once Mike went a day journey that had him asking directions everywhere, and everywhere he asked, people offered him hospitality if he didn’t think he could get back that night!

What to make of all this?

Well – Scots abroad certainly seem to find welcome signs wherever they go, and I’ve definitely experienced that. Whereas Americans abroad often find go home signs – particularly if they’re seeking to settle down. Scots like Colin and Mike were willing to ditch any prejudices and simply meet folk as they found them. The only time I ever encountered any hostility in the US it wasn’t cultural or even ant-immigrant, although it could have been seen as that. Just like Wendy in Scotland I ran up against someone who felt their little world was being challenged and their piece of the pie might be cut a little smaller, rather than enlarging the pie.

Isn’t that interesting? Of course it has no relevance to anything happening in the world today, or in America….