Month: November 2023

Conflict Without End?

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So it’s time to wade into the poisoned, choppy waters surrounding Gaza. There are many shoals upon which other writers have foundered, with people on both sides of the issue stating that if you don’t agree with their position 150%, you are evil and sub-human. Almost vermin-like.

My thoughts are these. Three wrongs don’t make a right. The first wrong is the conditions Israel imposed upon the peoples of Gaza for decades. All materials sent into Gaza were viewed as being potentially diverted by Hamas to weaponry, therefore Israel must maintain a full blockade upon Gaza. This continuous isolation has led to generations of Palestinians being drained of hope for useful change.

The second wrong was the horrendous invasion of Israel on October 7. No matter the provocation, the acts of Hamas in slaughtering civilians and forcing captives into their enclave was wrong, morally and tactically. It stands as acts of barbarism without a hope for a peaceful solution.

Then comes the third wrong. Due to the interminable squabbling among Israeli political factions, the Prime Minister has had to tether himself to extreme factions in order to avoid ongoing prosecutions and imprisonment. Gee, wonder what nation that resembles? What it has led to is an intransigent government which is seeking to extend its control over others, includng the people of the West Bank. It is significant that members of the current coalition holding temporary power over the Israeli people now declare their intent to greatly extend settlements in the West Bank. All the time the fundamentalist fringe in Israel keeps growing, leading to a significant portion of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel withdrawing from society, studying only the sacred texts as their sole purpose in life.

There is no doubt that the problems of Gaza and the West Bank are inextricably linked with the existence of Israel. The Palestinians as a people were created by the dispossession of the inhabitants, in order to allow the remaining Jewish populations in Europe to have a place of their own. It was not viewed as a serious obstacle that the land already was possessed by many others. In a way, it was as if the dispossession of the indigenous people of the American west was compressed into a single episode. That act, and in the following conquests by the Israelis, have allowed the situation to fester for 75 years. Both sides in this struggle have had opportunities to withdraw from the conflict. But neither side saw an adequate solution to their distress, and their stubbornness has led to the intractable situation we now face. Israel is right, in that they cannot live next to a people whose representatives call for their complete annihilation. Since the fighters of Hamas have chosen to blend into the civilian population, any attempt to dislodge Hamas has resulted in mass civilian death and the despoiling of any semblance at civilization.

What is the answer to this conflict? I have no answer other than to say it is obvious the path both sides are on is sure to end up in more and more bloodshed. Israel is probably right in its insistence that Hamas is using hospitals and schools to shelter their operations, since Hamas knows any destruction of these facilities will be viewed as war crimes by the rest of the world. It is damn difficult to extract fighters from a city’s population when you cannot tell who is a fighter and who is not. And though it is clear Hamas only had a plurality supporting them when elections were last held, who knows what percentage would support them today. Even though their resistance will ultimately be futile, they were driven to the horrible events of October 7 because of the hopelessness of the Palestinian case. When multiple generations of people live without hope, horrible things can happen. And in the case of Gaza, Hamas, and Israel, they have happened.

Worship In A Troubled Time

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Our normal Thursday night church choir rehearsal was interrupted, by a visitor who clearly did not belong. Now our church is home to an AA meeting happening at 8, but this visitor was an hour early if their intent was to go to that meeting. He came in in slippers, which he left at the front of the sanctuary. He wore what appeared to be a hospital gown, and went back to the last section of the sanctuary. We asked if we could help, but he said he was just there to listen. I found my eyes wandering back to him repeatedly to give me a heads up should he behave even more erratically. Then later in the rehearsal, he got back up, retrieved his slippers, and disappeared.

On the next Sunday, as we were practicing before the service, someone came in and sat in the front row of pews. Again, we asked if we could help, and in a voice straight from an apocryphal movie he described how he wanted the word of God preached so as to stir up the emotions of the congregation, and he wanted to know if that was going to happen here. We let him know the service began in about 45 minutes, and he was free to go to the Adult Forum down the hall. This was a different person from the one who interrupted rehearsal the previous Thursday, but he exuded a stench of weirdness across the sanctuary.  I half expected him to have LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, but fortunately never got close enough to confirm or deny this.

Why do I mention these two invasions? Because I am convinced it is only a matter of time before we are subject to someone who objects to our openness about LGBTQ topics. I mean, after all, we dedicated a plaque to Matthew Shepard that is now above the heads of one half of our choir. Someone will enter our sanctuary with a fully functional assault rifle, and decide to make their moral stand in favor of the vitriol of the old Testament, or the various sogynies that Paul espoused over his evangelistic career. Indeed, the Jesus who spoke the Beatitudes is foreign to most of these vindictive souls, who follow the letter of the word rather than the intent of Christianity as described by Jesus. I am so furious about the perversions of Christianity we see daily as followers of Trump conflate his actions with those of their supposed Lord and master.

We at St. John’s in Charleston are particularly vulnerable. We’ve been home to a ministry that feeds all comers, breakfast and dinner, since the mid-70’s. It was literally a godsend for the working poor who would participate. But somehow since the pandemic descended, things just haven’t been the same. Now this week there was an incident that affected the Catholic school across the street, and the immediate response is to stop the serving of meals at the church. For how long, we cannot say. This will help in reducing the number of potential intruders, but for the most part, it is not the mentally unstable who participate in this ministry that cause the most concern.

It seems the whole US society is subjecting itself to an uncontrolled experiment. Unabated access to firearms with no controls whatsoever. More and more guns flood the streets, and it is obvious guns are in the hands of people who are not stable enough to possess said weaponry. Yet many cry out for even more access. We should have the ability to purchase silencers with no limits. We should have bump stocks to convert a semi-automatic into a weapon almost like an automatic rifle. And if I am accused of an offense serious enough to trigger a domestic protective order? Since I am only accused, it will violate my constitutional rights to own a weapon if the order results in the removal of my weapon. It literally does not matter that your odds of becoming a gun victim go up if you own a weapon, the answer to all weapon offenses is let’s have more weapons.

So I will continue to sit in the choir pews awaiting the inevitable. It is not what I originally signed up for in becoming a choir member. I thought I was lending my voice as my gift to our worship services. Unfortunately in this day and age, in the country I live in, more and more we sit as potential victims to the next unstable person with access to weapons, who is convinced that the moral sin of mass murder is less odious than the horrendous sin of supporting the LGBTQ community. Odds are still in my favor for not having to face such a person. But I ask for how long?