It’s so sad,  and depressing, and discouraging to see all the cynicism, mistrust,  and prejudice in so many people,  all around me, everywhere I go.  So many of these people are even close to and involved in churches,  and I wonder how they come to think and feel and believe and live in this way.  It’s so ironic that they have been not only not stopped from being this way by being “church folk” ,  but they have even been encouraged and brought up in this VIA the church.

The church is supposed to be our hope to escape the snares of this world,  but instead ends up underwriting all of it,  and focuses instead on trivial things;  trivial in light of the things we allow to happen around us without confronting it all and embodying a church that demonstrates by its life how absurd this all is.  And to top it all off,  the church has seemingly become a place where it is no easier to find friends and people who want to share life and find it in the community that God has called us to be.  Instead,  we are into entertaining ourselves with anything BUT trying to discern what it is God is calling us to do with our life together. Just what does this place of call and community have in store for us?  And why aren’t we more diligent in building a place where this new kind of community can grow? 

I’ve been absent from blogging for the past couple of weeks.  Part of that time I have been reading about the way the Western explorers and later settlers came in and practically destroyed the native way of life in the Americas (starting with watching “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” on New Year’s Eve).  I followed that by re-reading Howard Zinn’s 2 chapters on the native American subject in his A People’s History of the United States,  and then  checking out the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. 

All of that history is that of greedy ambitious people who convince themselves that “prosperity” is theirs to define and then to take even as they obliterate any and all who stand in their way.  All the while,  the way of life of the native Americans was dismissed as savage and backward,  and it was up to the “civilized” to show them a proper way to live.   But this was not a “choice offered”.  It was an ultimatum.  Any resistance to this “displacement and “replacement” was met with genocide.   It is obvious to see who was civilized and who was barbaric,  and thus revealed the poverty of spirit behind that type of ideology which was able to ride cruelly over an entire race (millions between 1492 and 1900,  which translates to who knows how many future lives). 

And so the sense of distress with which I started this post only continues this march toward satisfying the drives instilled in us by the world,  and it has led us to grow “churches” that repudiate the notion of interdependence and create our own variety of the “American dream”;   a version that that shows practically no signs of being an alternative.

I’m still in this “how long” state of lament re: the church.  It seems to me to be more like an eschatology than a present reality,  even though I believe in the possibilities of the latter.