HEY BIG SPLENDOR

The Pope passed away in April and we all got to watch the gilded spectacle of a papal funeral in Michelangelo's Megachurch. All that ornate architecture and finery, and I've never seen so many gorgeous gowns and miters of vermilion and gold! It's no wonder the priesthood attracts so many gays!

Oops! That wasn't very politically correct of me, was it? And my "oops" was a little insincere too; after all I'm writing this out and not speaking off the top of my head. Oh well, I was just trying to get in the column's ice breaker joke at the Catholic Church's expense. You gotta admit, though, it was pretty amazing to see all the splendor the faithful's donations have bought over the generations. You know, the donations most people think are for the "good works" of the Church.

Okay, I'm being disingenuous again. To be fair, the Church does do a lot of charity work, and I wholly support that, but it's not the only thing the Church spends its money on; there's a lot of property to maintain first. Whatever happened to that simple carpenter in dusty sandals working among the poor? Would Jesus recognize the church that his ministry started? Maybe he would've recognized his teachings in the work of Mother Theresa, but probably not in John Paul's funeral.

Can you say "disconnect"? That's the problem with any religion, they start out just fine and then they slowly become forgetful of the original intentions. Um, except of course where the original intention was human sacrifice! Get it right people, just because something is old or traditional doesn't make it right. Some religious "fundamentals" are better left on the trash heap of history. Conversely, my last statement does not mean ALL old religious precepts are outdated and useless. Getting back to fundamentals just means different things to different people.

I think most people would recognize non-violence and charity as fundamental teachings of Jesus. Even though I don't go to church, I still practice that part of the faith, while trying to leave the various superstitions found in the Scriptures behind on the aforementioned dust heap. Lots of people do the reverse; it seems they forget all about charity and non-violence, especially when it comes to supporting their government. I've been reading a great book called God's Politics that talks a lot about the kind of disconnect among our supposedly compassionate Christian leaders, both Republicans and Democrats. It's by an evangelist named Jim Wallis.

Yes, I did say "evangelist".

Any regular Closet Philosophy reader knows I'm hard on fundamentalist dogma, but I think Wallis has his very Christian heart in the right place. I would vote for him as President in a second, and over a lot of secular liberal politicians I could name. Why? Because he takes his Prince of Peace straight, without accommodations. When he reads "blessed are the peacemakers" in Jesus' Sermon On The Mount he really tries to make that his vocation. He also takes seriously the Bible's demand to help the poor, saying that in affluent America too many churches have forgotten this duty.

Wallis gives a quote from Matthew, chapter 14 verse 7, that says "the poor you will always have with you." He says many in the Religious Right lift this out of context and interpret it to mean that there's nothing anyone can do about the poor. Wallis says that they haven't read the whole passage. Matthew's statement is not about the poor's lack of economic ambition. Rather, the verse is in the middle of a story about Jesus visiting the house of a leper and it means that Christians are supposed to minister to the poverty stricken, that they should always be among them, helping them. The passage is a call to duty.

Unlike Biblical invocations against homosexuality, of which there are only a few, there are literally thousands of references to helping the poor and less fortunate, and not only in the New Testament but in the Old as well. To take them out would leave the Bible in tatters, or as Wallis puts it, it would be a Bible "full of holes." He spends a whole chapter on this, talking about how affluent churches in America are disconnected, isolated both physically and mentally from the poverty of others.

To me it seems like many preachers promote a faith based on personal rewards. For some it's a focus on the eternal reward; others believe that God has blessed them with earthly rewards. Far away from the misery of the inner city, too many of the faithful just drive their SUVs to their modern, angular megachurches with the nifty see-through acrylic podiums, TV cameras and sound systems big enough for a rock concert to sing hymns once or twice a week to get their reward. They never seem to notice that their churches have the same kind of encrusted opulence that Martin Luther saw in the Vatican centuries ago and spoke out against. In a similar way, when our leaders meet at a prayer breakfast for the powerful, it seems the Christian thing to do, but how many times have they cut programs for the impoverished later in the day? Who has hijacked their Christian principles?

It's a small congregation of smiling fascists that is facile with the language of the Bible and currently they control of two thirds of the government. Recently they decided they need a stranglehold on the last third too. To this end they whipped up a campaign against "judicial activism" and made their poster child Terry Schaivo.

I heard that groan and I agree! An awful lot of space has been devoted to this and the poor woman is already dead. Maybe everyone's tired of the arguments but the controversy was primarily a philosophical one and I want to get in a couple thoughts.

First off I'd challenge anyone to find the phrase "sanctity of life" in the Bible. "Thou shalt not kill" sounds pretty close though, doesn't it? Trouble is there were exceptions to that rule even from the outset. Remember the scene in the Book of Exodus when Moses first comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments? He finds his tribe of recently escaped slaves worshipping a golden calf. What most don't remember (or never read Exodus 33 in the first place) is how several thousand of these idolaters were purged with the sword by Moses's followers. After Moses was gone, there was plenty of killing as they fought their way into Canaan, too. Since the Bible's authors clearly thought some kinds of killing are acceptable, if I were translating Exodus, I'd probably make the commandment "Thou shalt not murder." So was Terry Schaivo's death murder?

In Ecclesiastes the Bible also says that "To every thing there is a season," and there is a "time to live and a time to die." In the sad case of Mrs. Schaivo, who's to say that God wasn't calling her home years ago and we were not ever supposed to be keeping her body alive by artificial means? Certainly a Christian Scientist would agree.

Let's examine her state from the other direction. Let's say that her parents were right, that Terry did indeed have a "minimal consciousness," that somewhere in her brain a spark of her former self was still aware of her surroundings and who she was. Heck, let's say her whole mind was in there. Can you imagine waking up every day inside a body that doesn't work? Your arms don't respond. You can't scratch any itch. You can't tell someone to scratch the itch. You can't even eat. This was why she was on the feeding tube, because she would have choked if food were placed in her mouth. Is that not a description of a living hell? Our constitution has an injunction against "cruel and unusual punishment;" surely her existence was something like torture if she were minimally conscious. If it were me trapped like that I'm sure I would have gone insane after the first couple weeks. Mrs. Schaivo was like that for fifteen years. If her random movements did have meaning, who can say that she was not asking for someone to end her torment?

When is it "a time to die?" The bar should be set high, but at some point we have to let go. We would like to put things in tidy little boxes, but too often things are not that easy. The media circus has moved on but as the boomer generation grows older, we are certain to see more of this kind of dilemma, where an irreparably damaged person is kept with us like a ghoulish museum display, past all reason and compassion, until it is our turn for the same treatment.

I am far from Florida and the Schaivos, and this is all my conjecture. I am first to say it's not my decision to make. However, I can relate. There is a young member of my extended family who is severely disabled. Her body doesn't work very well because of an infection she contracted when she was only days old. She can't walk, but she can communicate and eat and does a thousand other things Terry Schaivo could not. We love and care for her and that care was never in doubt. The point is that all these cases are not equal and each must be decided on their own merit. Our family would resent the government telling us what to do, just like thousands of other families with disabled loved ones.

The thing our Republican grandstanders have got wrong is that the courts didn't tell Mr. Schaivo what to do. They actually supported his decision. They weren't involved at all until Terry's parents disagreed with his decision to stop prolonging her body's life. They ruled the way they did because he, as her husband, has all the legal rights in this case. If the positions were reversed, where her parents wanted to end Terry's suffering and he wanted to keep her alive, then the courts would have supported his position that way too.

The disgusting thing about this is the way that Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Dubya and the other Republicans cried foul about the rulings in this case, as if the courts went off on a wildly unjust tangent. Instead, every legal precedent points to the husband's control. Any judge interested in upholding the law would have come down with the same ruling. The proper solution is for the Republicans to change the laws to what they think is better. Instead these neo-cons are saying the courts are corrupt, that they do not uphold the law, that the judges should be changed to their liking. That's their real goal. Terry Schaivo's death does not really matter to them; it's being used an excuse to gather even more control over the government. A Republican memo leaked in April said as much. But in spite of the memo's exposure of their venal design, they clung to their "sanctity of life" argument in public, resolute in their quest for power.

Senator Frist and others took this manufactured controversy to the Religious Right directly, broadcasting to the faithful in their churches, saying that Christians have been persecuted by the judiciary. Well! I've never seen a persecuted group looking so clean and well pressed! And nary a burning cross on the megachurch's lawn either. Seriously, if Jesus were at that service he'd probably throw Delay, Frist, Dubya and the rest of the gang out of the church for saying that, just like he threw out the moneychangers from the temples of old. Now there's some fundamentalism at work for you!

It's sad that the Right has co-opted so much of the energy of well-meaning American Christians for their power games. The truth is that the Liberal tradition in this country is also in line with Christian fundamentals, perhaps even moreso (gasp!). "Liberal" simply means generous. Christians are supposed to be generous in helping the downtrodden, the sick, and all the others less fortunate than themselves. Americans were following Christian principles when they created programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Social Security, and Medicaid, even though our secular government is carrying them out.

Christian principles also sound pretty Liberal when they exhort us to respect people of other faiths, reminding us that we "were once wanderers in the desert." I would expand this to include other ethnicities and other lifestyles as well, yea, even unto all those lovers of vermilion and gold splendor who live in San Francisco.

You know, the 49ers fans! They had a really bad season last year and are definitely wandering in the desert. Who did you think I was talking about?

Anyway, we now have a new Pope leading much of the Christian faithful. Let's hope he leads them in the ways to expand the charity and good works of the Church as Jesus himself would have. And let's hope that our elected leaders actually act on their Christian principles, too, instead of just saying how much they respected John Paul as a man of peace while indulging in war.

Right now I have this strange compulsion to go back into the Closet to find my copy of Ray Stevens's "Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on His Television Show?" Till next time thanks for reading and the Closet is closed.

© 2005 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The Publisher and Editors of Cosmik Debris Magazine wish to make it clear that the opinions of Mr. Pipes are his and his alonFE MV

ALRIGHT, LISTEN CLOSE BECAUSE I'M ONLY SAYING THIS ONCE! We've hijacked the Republicans' Christian Values, and we'll crash them right into the tarmac if we don't get our demands! Okay, pay attention... We want four parachutes and unlimited access to Tom DeLay's political fundraising machinery. We're not fucking around here! You've got ten minutes! No tricks, or all these Christian Values are RUNWAY ROADKILL!! That is all!

++3Wmvc #e4 .egally responsible for his statements, or the statements of any other columnist in the pages of Cosmik Debris Magazine. Thank you.