Blind Side...a brief review

Blind Side, the movie is about a yuppie white Christian Memphis family who, because of the "kind-heart" of the white mother, takes in, clothes, feeds and educates a black monster of a kid from fear to fame, as a draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens.
Based on a true story, Sandra Bullock, playing the white mother married to a white man who owns 85 restaurants including Taco Bells and KFC's, drives her charcoal "Beemer" into the project to find Michael's estranged mother, and to learn his real family name, also confronts the black men who threaten "her son". "If you threaten him, you threaten me!" she jabs into his mystified ears as he sits mouth gaping in shock, after she informs him of her NRA membership and her pistol-packing capacity.
When the NAACP investigates the motives behind the Tooey family's desire that Michael attend the University of Mississippi, Leigh Anne (Bullock) questions her own ethics, value and motivations. Only then, do they release him from any pressure about his choice of university, from which to receive his football scholarship.
His reason for accepting Mississippi's offer, "That's where my family has always gone to school!" He has fully accepted their unofficial adoption, legal guardianship and virtually complete integration.
The foil for the good samaritanship of Ms. Tooey comes from her "$18-dollar-a-salad" luncheon companions who are aghast at her kindness, and abhorred by her willingness to open the door to her home to a young black man.
"You should be ashamed of yourself!" is Ms. Tooey's retort, as she picks up the tab for the gold-plated lunch.
A touching, moving and inspirational story, with a convincing script, and Bullock's Oscar-winning performance, perhaps the movie may even open a few hearts and minds. Mr. Tooey, who hires another Ol' Miss grad (a Democrat) to tutor Michael, wonders out loud, "Who would have thought that we would have a black son before we met our first Democrat!"
Let's hope the Tea Party organizers and the whole Washington establishment take the time to see the movie, and to reflect on its message(s).

The dangers of prosletyzing by church leaders

Prosletyzing, the commercialization of God, Allah!
In the southern U.S. the fastest growing churches are the Mormon and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In Africa, the rate of conversion to the Mormon chuch is astounding. In North America, the Muslim faith is growing rapidly. Through immigration, much of Europe is quickly coming to consider itself Muslim, as the birth rate falls and the rate of immigration grows.
In a commerce-driven, corporate-supported culture, where success is marked in percentage increases in dollars and/or recruits, church leadership looks, wrongly, to the growth curve of a church to assess the potential leadership of the clergy.
As a candidate for a large urban church in the U.S., I lost the competition to a person from India "who sat under a tree for one year and converted an entire village". An American parishoner once commented, "Jesus Christ was the world's best salesman" in her vain attempt to justify the American cultural fixation to salesmanship, as the core value of the "healthy christian church". In 1998, one corporately-addicted bishop issued this charge to his diocese for the upcoming year: "An increase of 10% in numbers of people and a 15% increase in revenues!" The church of my youth boasted a clergy who filled both pews and coffers while preaching unadulterated religious bigotry from the pulpit, without a whimper of protest from the congregation or its leaders.
Christians and Muslims are actively engaged in recruitment, or to use the word from the seminaries, evangelizing. On the other hand, Jews do not espouse prosletyzing, and I firmly believe they have got it right.
A relationship with God is not another "thing" to be marketed, another process to make life's burdens evaporate, or one's personal pain disappear.
A relationship with God is a sacred trust, not entered into lightly, not pursued cavalierly, and not to be sold, marketed, thrust upon another, no matter which of the many approaches is used.
Karen Armstrong, responding to readers of her new book, The Case for God, who said, "This is a hard book" said, "Of course it is, it's about God; what did you expect?"
Turning faith into a business exercise has to be one of the most diabolical hypocrisies man has perpetrated on any God.

Part 2. Prosletyzing...not part of the spiritual life!
(Updated, Thursday, May 13, 2010)
Not only is this "selling" counter-intuitive to the process of conception, iincubation, growth and development of a relationship between an individual and God, it sets in motion some very sinister motives, methods (both strategies and tactics) and creates some very dangerous and even unethical situations.
Judging a clergy on the basis of his/her numbers (dollars and adherents) is a false measure of the effectiveness of the relgious leader. As one,now deceased clergy put it, "I know how to grow the numbers, but to do so would be manipulative and I refuse." Later that day, he locked the doors, phoned the police to report a death, and went to the altar where he took his own life.
the corporate culture functions primarily based on the size and the developing growth of the numbers. Even a projected demise of a congregation is used to generate headlines among the committed, presuming, usually correctly, that such a shock will generate new donations. No one who has a history with a church community will publicly advocate its demise; in fact most will find a few dollars hidden somewhere in a sock, to keep the doors open.
But it is the premise attached to "growing the numbers" that offends this writer. First, people do not want to hear "difficult messages" about the rigours of discipleship. Second, there are many "answers" that people want that honest clergy cannot give. And that is not wrong, only disappointing. Thge promise of an afterlife, for example, is one promise that only an act of faith can support. The division of the realms available in the afterlike, heaven hell (and for some, purgatory) is another concept based only on faith, and the writings of those on whose shoulders the faith is historically based. The Resurrection, in Christian theology, is a concept debated openly by many religious people, once again, without scientific or empirical evidence, one way or the other. Similarlary, the Transfiguration, the Virgin Birth, and much of the other stories deeply embedded in both the consciousness and the imagination of the western world.
One wonders if a church for doubters would not be more in keeping with the humility of discipleship than those megachurches based on the salesmanship, and the theologies of prosperity that are more closely alligned with the capitalist "profit" motive than with an authentic and growing spirituality...in relationship to what/whomever one considers God to be.

Incumbency- the greatest political cross, this year?

Today Gordon Brown is likely to lose the British election, and his job as Prime Minister.
As one pundit put it, while speaking to Charlie Rose on PBS, "It has been thirteen years, and everyone is tired of the Labour government," first led by Tony Blair and more recently by Gordon Brown.
Ironically, the same pundit also indicated that, in the current economic disaster, all three political parties in Great Britain share virtually the same policies to deal with the crisis, but refuse to divulge their complete strategy to the electorate because to do so would frighten them.
"Don't tell the truth, because the people can't stand too much truth-telling!"

Now there is an approach that has a history of some considerable length. And that history is not restricted to Great Britain. Pierre Trudeau was never going to introduce "price controls" as advocated by then Conservative leader Robert Standfield, and Jean Cretien was certainly going to abolish the GST if elected, and George Bush was only going to attack Iraq as a last resort, only after all the diplomatic initiatives had been exhausted!
How stupid do these people think we are?
And how patronizing and patronized will we put up with?
It was T.S Eliot who coined the phrase, "People cannot stand too much reality."
But in the age of information, it may have lost its relevance...because the only difference between the politicians and the voters, in liberal democracies is the timing of the release/access of information. It will all come out eventually. And when it does, it will usually confirm our worst suspicions.
Ironically, in the U.S. the history is that well over 95% of incumbents are re-elected,just because they have the funds and the gall to manage the flow of information, continually polishing their image...and this year, incumbency may be the greatest political cross, sinking many good leaders.

Is Anger the new Political Ideology?

There is a large current in the discourse in what we call the public square...
it is the current of anger, disillusionment, cynicism and even despair.
It is the tone of the discussion about economics, politics, corporations, even,or perhaps especially, talk about faith and religion. Much of it is infested with the kind of adrenalin and disgust that seems to trump all other ways of seeing things.

And let's not go to a place where "the other side" is responsibile.
All sides of the debates are, have been, and continue to be willing to engage in rhetoric of the extremes. It is as if we have turned our public discourse into an extremely cheap, nasty, testosterone-infected extreme reality TV show, often resulting in little more than demonizing the "enemy".

Are we all so bored and so filled with ennui that our imaginations are capable only of the kind of rhetoric usually reserved for the Springer-type shows? Have we succumbed to the Wide World of Wrestling's lowest comon denominator..that whenever there is loud noise, faux hate or real contempt, lots of blood and guts..there will be a large audience...
and then set out to fulfil our own meagre self-fulfilling prophecy? Are video games seeding the minds of our youth (and some not-so-young) with the pursuit of "virtual violence" and thereby the public vernacular with "gotcha" motives, methods and obsessions?

This is no longer the debate of a civilized civil society; it is now, "We hate those who oppose us, and we believe that includes everyone else, because there is no one we can trust!"

The projections of self-loathing fly through the airwaves like lasers landing on the most innocent of faces, and we claim impunity for the destruction, and call it "what's normal for today".

I recently heard a comment that seems to typify the attitude: A young female teacher remarked, "Greg Mortensen deserved the Nobel Peace prize for what he has already done, not that other guy, Obama, who got it for nothing!"

Maturity is not defined only by cynicism, or by contempt or by hostility.
It can be, and I thought used to be, defined by some kind of balance and some kind of celebration of equanimity and of gentle thankfulness!
Or is such an attitude and tone "too weak" and "not male enough"?
As our leaders prove the narrow limits of "hard power," while their "soft skills" lie mostly dormant, are the talking heads turning our public vocabularly into "name-calling-bullets" and firing randomly into the throng of suspects in pursuit of better ratings and more personal celebrity? More violence without literal blood shed, only metaphoric!

Bullet's Release

black saints on fire
those garbagemen in
Memphis, 1968,
wearing placards and hearts
screaming silently
I Am a Man
refusing to accept the
mis-treatment of bigotry,
supported by Dr.King only
to have him fall to
a bigoted 30.06 bullet
from the bathroom of a
flophouse
on a motel balcony
larynx deceased,
yet voice, song, soul and dream
still soaring

"Loser" written all over his forehead!

While watching the PBS American Experience on the Shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King, I learned from Dan Rather, interviewed while still with CBS, that James Earl Ray was a complete and total loser: "He had LOSER written all over his forehead!"
Easy to condemn a man long dead, proven guilty, without much to boast about while he was alive!
Problem: American society is very unkind to "losers". They like only "winners"!
And in a simple machiavellian, binary way, American kids learn the wardrobe, language, attitude, interests and isolation of losers at a very young age!
Sometimes, in the past, such losers were "fat" and played the piano, and did not "do sports" and were "poor" and their parents had a very, very modest house, often did not drive or own a car, were collecting food stamps, and had significant gaps in their earning history. Sometimes, they were black, or brown, or red or yellow, anything but white.
In Ray's case, according to one of the historians, his family literally had to break the wood inside their house to burn in the stove to stay warm.His father and siblings were "in and out of jail" and his early teachers found him difficult.
Given the conditions, I can imagine being "quite difficult" as a youngster, if I had been subjected to such a childhood. Who couldn't?
And yet America still champions the right to bear arms, the freedom of the individual to become a "winner" no matter the roadblocks, and the right to "trash" those who can't make it. Trouble is, more and more people are falling into that group, through no fault or lack of effort on their part.
I have been called a loser, by some who considered themselves very important, very politically correct and very superior. And it hurts and leaves scars that often wont heal! I wonder if Rather has ever been called a "loser".

Politics of the 21st Century...religion?

In a review of Karen Armstrong's book, The Case for God, the United Church Observer, in the current edition, writes these words, while declaring Armstrong's book to be one of the most important books to appear so far this century,"The politics of the twenty-first century is religion."
Unpacking such a declaration has to include the reviewer's perception that all politics is now based on religion, on religious affiliation, on religious perceptions and beliefs and on religious principles. Without exaggerating these words, one has to come to the position that religion has become so important to the life of the twenty-first century that it has, or at least will, subsume the political debate.
There are real dangers to such a view, stated as speculations, without in any way attempting to denigrate the judgement.
First, we all know the dangers of countries that have become theocracies.
Second, we also know that there are religious attributes, attitudes and beliefs attached to each and every political leader in each and every country, yet never before have these been so scrutinized, unless we recall the furor around the elections of the first Roman Catholic to the Presidency of the U.S.
Third, if politics is (or will) become religion, then this (Observer) writer must be hoping and expecting a vibrant dialogue about God, as one of the central questions within all political debates.
How does God, for example, fit into the debate over budget allocations, including allocations for military purchases, including foreign aid and whether or not such funding can be used for all options for maternal health, including allocations for taxes to curb greenhouse gases and thereby begin to control global warming, including allocations for border control to address the immigration "problem" not only in Arizona, but in each country?
What does a religious perspective say to questions of nuclear weaponization of Iran, North Korea, and the somewhat lame reductions in the arsenals of Russia and the U.S.?
If the Muslim faith, according to its jihadists, considers the U.S. to be, or be equal to Satan, how does a conservative Christian country respond to such an allegation?
If politics is religion, how do the countries reconcile the different religious beliefs operating within their borders, and learn about those various religious positions, when dealing with the leadership in other countries?
If politics is religion, then there is the potential of an assumption that political leaders might consider they are, in fact, working for and in the name of their particular God, and that would conceivably enhance their commitment to follow the dictates of their God, as they believe them to be.
And yet I would suspect there is not a single political science course offered in a single North American university entitled, "Politics as Religion" or "Religion as Politics"....is that to come?
Is the Observer reviewer doing some wishful speculating, or some fearful demonizing or something else?