Tread lightly on the things of earth

My friend Dale writes about not only his Kerry/Edwards yard signs being stolen, but his God is Not a Republican or a Democrat sign was taken, too.

I’m at 7-8 9 10 11 12 Kerry/Edwards signs stolen during this past month the past 6 weeks. Just flat-out made to vanish under cover of darkness. This phenomenon recapitulates for me an entire worldview’s unfortunate M.O.: trespass, steal, suppress dissent and all contradicting evidence. It’s a strange and unconvincing plan from people preaching “freedom” and “democracy,” I think.

Two things help me short to ground my occasionally flaring anger at practitioners of this M.O.: specifically, a boxful of K/E signs that allows me to replace the sign daily if necessary, and generally, (mis)remembering the adage “Anger is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” (Google reveals Malachy McCourt actually said “Resentment is like …” but that’s close enough to work.)

Beyond my obvious-but-ridiculously-hard choice not to take poison, my prayer asking how I’d best respond keeps returning an image of the prodigal father — that is, one extravagant with his love — who watches, watches, watches for his wayward son to repent and come home, and when he finally sees his son a long way off he runs out to embrace him.

Yikes, that’s a difficult example to follow. (Whether father or son.) But imagine the result — the homecoming — what a celebration that will be!

Dale’s sign, “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat,” refers to Sojourners’ ongoing petition to “take back our faith,” a stance I support as well. (Sojourners is “a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.”)

In his About.com article on this topic, Charles mentions the conviction —

A politics that privileges the powerful over the weak and the rich over the poor, and favors violence and the unilateral use of force over the use of diplomacy in the resolution of international problems, cannot be reconciled with biblical ethics.

That’s my inescapable conviction, too, one that arose in me during several years of seminary study:
I cannot reconcile prevailing U.S. political behavior with biblical ethics.

It’s not an exclusionary, “my way or the highway” kind of conviction — because I don’t know everything — but it’s nonetheless a fire-in-the-bones conviction in me that I understand as providing sufficient work-that-needs-doing to last me the rest of this lifetime.

For me and my house, then, this conviction is why I’m happy to support, work for, and vote for Kerry/Edwards and the Democratic worldview, however short of perfect it may be, and why I’m unable to ever, ever, ever support the Bush/Cheney worldview.

(“My house” tells me right away whenever she thinks otherwise. :-) )

half a day later:

And sometimes, like now, rage seems like a perfectly appropriate response, not to be shorted to ground. Meteor Blades reminds me:

In between my unfettered rage at the ideologues who lied us into the Iraq war and my cautious elation that we may elect someone who brings an end to that nightmare, I sometimes catch myself going numb. The statistics are numbing. Perhaps 25,000 people dead, most of them civilians. Perhaps 100,000 wounded, many of them maimed forever. …

Damn, bouncing between idealism, rage, and numbness is awkward. But part of human being, I think. Seasons turn: buds of spring burst to life, ease into fiery summer, wind down to autumn spent and brown, then cool down to icy winter, and back again. Likewise, our bodies run in cycles, ebbing and flowing throughout the day, the month, the years. Even scripture is cyclical, boldly wandering through the range of human emotions, unflinchingly touching on all extremes.

Life’s a rollercoaster all over, I think. Some of us loop-de-loop more than others, and some of us half fall out, but none of us bounces alone.

O Lord, just please deliver us from permanumb.