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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Monday, July 2, 2018

how inconvenient

“They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and "me time" the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. everyone had problems - why couldn't they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It's not like the neighbors could do anything. It's not like civil wars were their fault.”
                                                             Nathan Hill, The Nix
_________________________________________________

How inconvenient of those people to be driven from their country
By violent gangs, and drug wars
By religious extremist who are more than happy to kill

In the name of God

How selfish of them to want their children to flourish
Or perhaps
Simply live

They should know the rules.  Know the facts
That we won’t let them in
(We will pretend we might, but we won’t
Not today, Not now)

Because they are inconvenient

They intrude into our lives
They make us see things we don’t want to see
And feel things we don’t want to feel
They make us evaluate the way we live, the way we spend
And expend

They might, just might, cut into our profits a touch
They might get a benefit we don’t think they deserve
They might show up in our schools, in our medical clinics,
In our churches

They might be dangerous
Those little 2 and 3 and 6 year olds with brown eyes, and brown skin

And so we arrest them
And rip their families apart
And put them in camps (hidden from view of course)
And we justify
And shame
And minimize

And we tell ourselves that we are just following the law
We are just protecting “our” families
We are just putting America First

It is of course not just brown children on the southern border
It is black children on the streets of our cities
And poor white children

It is any child
Any child without health care, without good food
Good clothes, a chance for a good education
It is any child without hope

To live in this world as a follower of Jesus is not an easy thing
For we are called to see
Called to feel
Called to risk
Called to give
Called to include
Called to clothe and feed and house
Called to treat those around us as family

We are called
to love
in both word, and deed

It is not optional


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