A Simple Prayer

Calhouns Cannons for September 15, 2012

Dear God, creator of Heaven and Earth, please, enough already with the Fundamentalists.  We got too many of them.

 

And they’re all running amok.  Political fundies who want to rule instead of serve.  They love thy rules, but as for loving thy people, eh, not so much.  Pinch-faced, purse-lipped, they forgot to read the part about eye’s of camels and loaves and fishes and doing unto the least of thy children. Instead we get tax breaks for the rich and food-stamp cuts for the poor. 

And Christian fundies?  Don’t get me started.  Take prayer.  Didn’t you have something in your Book about making a big phony show of public prayer?  Well, I don’t think they were listening and it looks like these, thy good children, will never rest until loud, public prayers to Jesus are mandatory in every square inch of the public square.  At supermarket openings, in the halls of justice, in schoolrooms, in city council meetings, with crosses or thy commandments manifesting anywhere there’s a smidge of space on a public building or on small and tall hillocks in the wilderness, until the only place to escape the Jesus flak will be to flee into a Jewish temple or a Buddhist retreat. And even there, don’t be too sure. The cross carpenter’s are constantly at work.

And what’s with their obsession with women’s private parts, anyway?  Instead of political debates we now have politicians competing to see how many forced vaginal probes they can stick into their state laws.  This isn’t governance, it’s obsession.  And sick obsession at that.  I mean, since the history of the world, Lord, did you ever think you’d see the topic of girls holding an aspirin between their knees served up during a Republican primary campaign?  Fundamentalists and now apparently Republicans are now all about the aspirin and tight knees. That’s a bad, bad combination.   

And don’t get me started on Muslim fundies.  They’re the perfect of example of fundamentalism squared, fundamentalism to the nth degree: unquestioning and rule-riddled, bound-up, blinkered, death-loving, women-hating, sex-fearing, life-denying, sad,  furious, frightened souls that even Mohammed (Blessings and peace be upon him) and his successful businesswoman wife (You go, girl!) would gape at in utter disbelief.

And there, Lord, is the problem.  You created a complex, fluid, ever-changing, beautiful, profoundly unknowable world.  And then you created humans with an overwhelming need to create what they think are safe, secure square boxes out of a non-squared, inherently unstable, constantly changing “reality.”  The result is human-created fundamentalism of all kinds – big, hard-edged, square, stick-in-the-mud boxes in the middle of a flowing river.  Then we hide in the boxes and delude ourselves into thinking they will offer us permanence and safety.

But instead of safety, those boxes turn into prisons.  Or worse: platforms of death.

So, enough, O Lord.  Time for thee to calleth thy own back home to thy loving bosom.  And don’t worry.  They won’t mind.  They have spent centuries making up stories about their wished-for, longed-for, blessed fiery ends – Armageddon! Tribulation! Rapture!  Holy Jihad! Paradise and Virgins!  So, you’ll be doing them all a huge favor.

And then maybe the rest of us can settle down into a saner world, a world of softer edges, kinder boxes filled with imperfect, more forgiving bunglers – human beings who have enough give in their world-view to know that the magic of the world is ultimately unknowable.  So there is no need to force ourselves and others into life-limiting made-up boxes.

Instead, I’m sure God won’t mind if, from time to time, we take off our new too-tight dress shoes and dance on the grass.  Or lie in the meadow to listen to the bees, smell the sweet clover and give thanks for the warm sun pouring down on us from heaven.