He Maketh Me To Lie Beneath The Still Waters
Uncle Andrew
Okay, okay, I’m sorry about the title. Honestly, I am. But this really got my thaumaturgical knickers in a twist.
I was listening to NPR on the way into work today (I spent the day putting out computer-related fires….almost literally) and caught a clip from the service at the National Cathedral that kicked off Bush’s “national day of prayer and remembrance” for those affected by the hurricane. The piece I heard was a prayer, offered up by Imam Yahya Hendi, a chaplain at Georgetown Unversity (I had to wait until I got home to get the facts about who was speaking and in what capacity). The prayer is reproduced below:
Almighty, Loving, and Merciful Creator!
We call upon your Glory to bless this nation and strengthen us with your
Presence.
Give those suffering in the Aftermath of Katrina the courage to find hope
and healing. We ask for your blessings, God! On those children affected
by hunger, loss of loved ones and displacement from their homes. Give all
of our children the strength to hold true to their faith and experience the
loving kindness of our great country.
Let all the inhabitants of the America sing with joy Your praise
Let them recognize that you are the lord of all goodness.
May this service promote justice and equity and enable us to feed the
hungry, shelter the homeless and give voice to the voiceless.
May we bring the affected states back to joy and peace.
May we work together to tear down walls of separation, blame and fear
May we work side by side to put up bridges of hope and friendship!!
We ask this in Your Holy name, God!
Amen.
I apologize in advance to my friends of faith, but I simply can’t get over the 5,000-pound elephant everyone in the chapel—not to mention the multitudes tuning in—was ignoring: according to your philosophy, you people are all sucking up to the very Person who engineered this tragedy to begin with!
“We ask for your blessings, God! On those children affected by hunger, loss of loved ones and displacement from their homes.” As a result of Your hurricane.
I realize I’m not thinking of this with the requisite level of sophistication. I’m not a total maroon; I understand the concept of faith in the face of adversity, of God’s joy in beholding His children taking strength from Him in spite of their tribulations, etc., etc.
I just can’t buy it. The only thing more astonishingly unlikely to me than the actual existence of God is the possibility that He both cares infinitely for us and allows this sort of horrible shit to happen. If I thought that God existed, I’d have to conclude that He either set us loose to live or die, prosper or perish, without a moment’s thought to the consequences, or else that He is a complete sociopath, tormenting us for reasons unknown.
*Sigh* Forget it. I’m not churning out yet another fulminating diatribe on the subject of, “If God exists why does He let bad things happen to good people?” The Blogosphere is doubtless already choked with them, and everyone either knows the answer (and knows they know it) or they don’t (and know they don’t….unless of course they don’t know that they don’t know the answer because they don’t know the question. You know?)
I’m not even sure why this particular public expression of faith sparked such anger in me, but it did. (Some of you—you know who you are—are doubtless thinking, “because you hate hearing the truth!” To which I say, maybe so; in an infinite universe anything is possible. But boy howdy, I sure doubt it.)
This bug is up my ass, not yours, I’ll deal with it. I just couldn’t let this event slip by without comment.
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September 17th, 2005 at 12:38 am
You have hit upon an interesting phenomenon, praising for his greatness the same entity that laid you low.
In the lead up to the last election I was troubled by a similar quandary. Given that Bush ignored warnings about terrorism before 9/11, failed to capture Osama Bin Laden when we had him cornered in Tora Bora, mired this nation in a war in Iraq justified on a lie, placed Seattle within range of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal through diplomatic stubbornness and is slowly bankrupting this nation with tax cuts in a time of war, how can people believe that this President is such an excellent leader that he deserves a do-over?
The track record was there in 2004; the man doesn’t know his ass from leadership in the national interest. What amazed me was that when people were asked about Bush’s performance the responses were uniformly negative but when asked who should be President the majority of voters lined up behind him (We can argue stolen elections later bur honestly, you can’t steal them if they are not close). At the time I could not fathom the disconnect. However, having read you post I see that there is an entire culture of people preprogrammed to accept and extol leadership that is indifferent, contrary to the majority’s personal interest and arguably nonexistent.
Perhaps what some pundits are saying about people of faith putting this President back into the Whitehouse is true. However, given Bush’s performance in this first year of his second term (Social Security privatization, Teri Shivo, Cindy Sheehan and Katrina) it seems apparent that voting based on faith makes no sense whatsoever. Is it any wonder that the non-religious amongst us are up in arms over attempts by people of faith to break down the wall between church and state?
September 17th, 2005 at 10:29 am
For centuries we have been killing each other in God’s name. And the bible says we should love God and fear God. What kind of belief system wants you to live in fear of something? Thou shall not kill apparently doesn’t apply to anyone who doesn’t share your personal beliefs. If there was an all knowing, all caring being, he seems like a bit of a hypocrite to me. God works in mysterious ways. Sounds more like a lame excuse by the faithfull to explain away why their God is screwing them over.
September 17th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
See,fearing God makes perfect sense to me, if you think He/She/It exists, and that He/She/It is responsible for terrible things happening in the world for no apparent reason. It’s the love part I just can’t wrap my brain around. But then again, no one in this modern world of ours would choose to worship Someone based upon fear alone, so maybe love is a vital part of the advertising.
There’s a simple line that I haven’t crossed: I don’t hear the voice of God, so I don’t have any assurance that He is benevolent, that all this crap happens for a reason. Those who hear Him—including people I love and admire—don’t need an explanation. In fact, demanding an explanation would be a terrible insult to Him, like an infant questioning the wisdom of its parents, only a jillion times worse.
I can’t say for sure whether those who hear God have it right or not. Not knowing if something is true is a long, long way from proving that it isn’t. On the other hand, pretending that something is true when I have no evidence whatsoever from my senses or my intuition to say that it is seems like the lowest sort of social behavior; that’s how tyrants come to power.
September 18th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
1. You have to stop listening to NPR or you will wind up with ulcers to go along with your other pleasantries. You have more rant entries as a result of stuff heard on NPR than anything else, (um, maybe…).
2. I think what the nice man praying on the radio was saying, (only he didn’t have the guts to use these words) was: Thank God it wasn’t us!! Since he felt that wouldn’t be well received on national radio, he switched to something less direct, and much more confusing.
3. I question the answer of the question you answered when I asked what’s the question for which you had the answer.
September 19th, 2005 at 7:34 am
Oh, you’re no doubt right about that, but I’m sure I would get the same ulcers from commercial news radio….but I’d also get repetetive stress syndrome from stwitching stations in a vain attempt to avoid commercials.
If so, I have to wonder what God would make of what the imam decided to say publicly. That’s just the kind of mealy-mouthedness that would set me off, were I in His shoes.
Well I like to know what I’m doing when I do it and I do what I’m doing ’cause I don’t know what to do when I’m not doing it.
September 19th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Setting aside the admittedly interesting “is the deity there and did he/she/it cause this” issue for the moment because I have to share something else… There’s the other elephant in the room with that prayer, you see (emphasis added):
“Let all the inhabitants of America sing with joy Your praise
Let them recognize that You are the Lord of all goodness.”
– despite the fact that we’re supposed to be a) a pluralistic country whose inhabitants don’t all recognize the same (or indeed any) deity and b) a secular nation and not some theocratic state. Not that Twinkie and his cohorts respect either idea, of course…
Bleah! Ptui! Schnork! I can handle the idea of a National Cathedral, assuming it to be a multifaith and nondenominational building. But I really have problems wrapping my brain around a “national prayer” to the Christian god in all of our names, whether we believe in Him, Budda, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or nothing at all. Separation of Church and State, anyone? Bueller?
September 19th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
It’s even more disturbing–or amusing–or both–than your well-worded gripe would suggest. The guy doing the praying was an imam. Which Lord of all goodness might we be talking about again? His God might have a bone to pick with the builders of the cathedral regarding the propriety of elevating prohpets to a level not befitting their stature.
Oh well; I suppose pluralism has to begin somewhere. If Christians and Muslims can get together on something–anything–that’s probably a good sign. Er, so long as the thing they band together over isn’t their mutual dislike of the Jews, Buddhists, Flying Spaghetti Monsterites, etc. 😯