A Cloud of Witnesses

By Eric Von Salzen

A day or two after 9/11, an interfaith meeting was held at my church (St. Alban’s, Washington, DC). It was part of a series of meetings among Christians, Jews, and Muslims that had been going on for quite awhile, but they changed whatever the planned agenda had been for this meeting and focused on the terrorist attacks.

I went and listened to clergy, lay leaders, and regular folks from all three Abrahamic faiths express their shock, their sorrow, and their anger at these vicious attacks on our country. No Christian and no Jew blamed the attacks on Islam, and no Muslim offered any defense of the killers.

I think about the Muslims I heard speak at that meeting when I hear and read about the controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, the proposed Islamic center that the Cordoba Initiative wants to build a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site. If the Muslims who spoke at St. Alban’s nine years ago want to worship God in that location, how could I object? They were not complicit in the attacks; they are as much enemies of the terrorists as I am.

If the Catholic Church were to propose building a facility two blocks from the site of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, would anyone object on the ground that Timothy McVeigh was raised a Catholic?

But some people do object, including some of the families of people killed at the World Trade Center. We owe it to the memory of those who died to think about the objections seriously. We owe it to ourselves, too, because all Americans were (and are) targets of the terrorists. Platitudes about America’s commitment to religious tolerance – true as they are – are insufficient to answer the objections.

The problem, as I see it, is that the 9/11 killers and those who sent them didn’t just “happen to be” Muslims. Their Muslim faith was the central motive for what they did. They acted out of a deep conviction that Islam sanctioned these actions; more than that, they believed that Islam demanded this action.

The Muslims I heard speak at St. Alban’s that evening rejected that claim. They denied that Islam permits, much less requires, such murderous actions. They condemned as false and un-Islamic the religious claims of the terrorists. I believed them.

The problem that many people have, who oppose the “Ground Zero Mosque”, is that they didn’t hear the Muslims that I heard at St. Alban’s. Most Americans, I believe, don’t know many, or any, Muslims very well. We hear and read that al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups claim to be the “true” Islam, and we don’t have Muslim friends and neighbors and co-workers to tell us, No, that’s not true.

We have the news media, of course, and that’s what most of us rely on to learn about things in the world beyond our own individual experience. Perhaps I read the wrong newspapers, watch the wrong TV shows, read the wrong websites, but I have the sense that the voices of the Muslims I heard at St. Alban’s aren’t being heard very much. I have the sense that most Americans don’t hear, on a regular basis, prominent Muslims and spokespersons for Muslim organizations condemning Islamic religious extremism. The news has been full of Islamic extremism, whether it’s terrorism in the US or the UK or Bali, whether it’s violence or threats of violence against cartoonists who dare to depict the Prophet or movie-makers who criticize Muslim treatment of women, or whether it’s a fatwa against a novelist who criticizes Islam.

What the news has not been full of, so far as I can tell, is Muslim voices condemning Islamic extremism.

So when people hear that Muslims want to build a facility near the “sacred ground” where the World Trade Center once stood, they ask themselves: Are they on our side or on the other side? And they are not confident that the answer is, They’re on our side.

The Cordoba Initiative says that it seeks to improve “Muslim-West relations”. That is a noble goal and something we desperately need. I think they need to ask themselves whether building in this particular location serves that purpose.

(By the way, the photo at the top of this post is not the "Ground Zero Mosque", but what was once the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Spain. It is now a Roman Catholic Church. We live in a complicated world.)

Revenge of the Vampires

By Eric Von Salzen

I’m not a big vampire fan (well, in my youth I did envy Bela Lugosi for his suave neck munching), so I’ve never read any of Anne Rice’s innumerable vampire novels. I had heard of her of course, and so I was interested several years ago to hear that she had returned to the Christian religion, specifically to the Roman Catholic Church in which she grew up. She did a radio discussion about this with N. T. Wright in 2006, which is worth listening to. She was in the process of writing a series of novels about the life of Jesus under the overall title Christ The Lord, and she has now published two volumes, subtitled Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. I recommend both of them.

Now Ms. Rice has announced (on her Facebook page!) that she has left Christianity. She explains:

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

If that’s not clear enough, she lists several characteristics of Christianity to which she objects, It’s anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science, and anti-life.

If I took her argument seriously, I guess I’d have to leave Christianity, too, because I also oppose anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-science, and anti-life positions (and some of my best friends are Democrats and secular humanists). But I’m not leaving.

In part I infer that what Ms. Rice really objects to are positions of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has confused “Christianity” with Roman Catholicism. This is not surprising. When I was growing up (Ms. Rice and I are of an age) a lot of my Roman Catholic friends thought that the only valid form of Christianity was Roman Catholicism (and a lot of my Protestant friends thought the Roman Catholics were mackerel snappers). If she’d said that she’s leaving the Catholic Church for the reasons she cites I wouldn’t question her decision.

But by saying that she’s leaving “Christianity”, and by identifying all these negative characteristics with Christianity, she’s made a fundamental mistake. Although there certainly are Christians who hold the views to which she objects, not all Christians do so. And more important: These positions are not an essential part of Christian belief or Christian theology. Yes, yes, I know that Paul said some beastly things about gays and women, but that doesn’t mean that you have to believe that all gays are idolaters, or that women must be silent in church, in order to be a Christian. Christianity is about faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Savior of Humanity. If Anne Rice remains “committed to Christ as always” (as she says), she’s a Christian whether she likes the name or not.

The other thing that’s wrong with Ms. Rice’s announcement is that it reflects the notion that you shouldn’t be part of an institution that has objectionable people in it. Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t join a club that would accept him as a member, and Ms. Rice won’t belong to a church that has any sinners in it. She’s going to be mighty lonely. She would do well to read Paul’s letters to the Corinthians to help her understand that our church is made up of flawed people, who are nevertheless called to a common faith.

The attitude that Ms. Rice displays is by no means unique to her or to the Roman Catholic Church. It is an attitude that lies behind much of the friction and fragmentation in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, the idea that we won’t sit in the same pews, or kneel at the same rail, with “THEM” (whoever “THEM” are). Ms. Rice describes Christians as “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous”. The description fits not only Christians but all human beings. Yet we are called to break bread together.

When the Holy Spirit touches the heart of Anne Rice and brings her back to the Christian community, she should be welcomed.

Impasse on Women

The Church of England still seems to be having trouble finding its way into the 20th Century. The C of E had previously decided to allow women to become bishops (I look forward to the forthcoming BBC series, The Bishop Of Dibley), but to avoid offending the "traditionalists", the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that each female bishop be paired with a "complementary" male bishop -- apparently not for the purpose of keeping the flighty little thing from getting her knickers in a twist, but "to minister to traditionalists unwilling to accept a woman as the head of their diocese." So the New York Times reports.

The General Synod, however, has rejected that proposal, leaving the traditionalists with no choice, I suppose, but Rome or a stiff upper lip.

Perhaps, though, the Episcopal Church could regain the favor of the ABC by agreeing to pair each of our gay or lesbian bishops with a "complementary" straight bishop. What do you think?

By Eric Von Salzen

Hilarious Video - Must Watch This

OUR FATHER’S DAY

By Eric Von Salzen

As Christians we believe in a peculiar kind of God. The God we believe in not only created the heavens and the earth, but this God also loves us, each one of us, as a father loves a child. We have this on the authority of the Son of God himself.

It must have seemed quite remarkable to the followers of Jesus that he addressed God as his father, and even used the word Abba, which implied an intimate family relationship with God. But then, perhaps his followers said to each other, Jesus could say this because he was something special. Even before they began to realize who Jesus truly was, they thought he was at least a prophet, and perhaps even the Messiah, the Anointed One, someone with a really special relationship to God. The son of the Emperor in Rome might call Caesar “Daddy”.

But no, that wasn’t it. Jesus told them that God was their father, too, and they should address him the same way he did. That had to be shocking. The God who created the entire universe, the God who spoke from Mount Sinai in the thunder and lightning and smoke, the God who feeds the young lions and made leviathan for sport, the God that only Moses could talk to face to face, and even he not always – this God they were to call Daddy?

And what kind of father this God was! In what must be his most famous parable, Jesus described a father running to greet his returning prodigal son and throwing his arms around him. This is a father who casts aside his dignity for the love of his child. In our mind’s eye we see the old man running up the dusty road toward the distant figure of his son, his white hair streaming behind him, his robes flapping around his pumping legs, perhaps a lost sandal left behind in the dirt. Is this how we are to imagine the God who answered Job out of the whirlwind and told him how he made Behemoth and Leviathan? Is he that kind of father?

Yes, just that kind of father.

I know that there are some among us to whom the word father does not arouse warm and fuzzy feelings. Fathers are sometimes abusive, irresponsible, cruel, deadbeats, aloof, or absent. Jesus clearly didn’t have fathers like that in mind when he called God Daddy and said that we should, too. It was the earthly Jesus who said these things, before he died and rose again, and I can’t help but think that he was influenced by the example of his earthly father, Joseph. I have a warm spot in my heart for Joseph, because, like me, he was a stepfather. The scriptures don’t tell us much about the kind of father Joseph was, but we can infer that he was the kind of father Jesus wanted his followers to think of when he described God as their father. This kind of father.

I’m fortunate. I had that kind of father. I wish I’d had him longer – I was 33 when he died – but I knew what a father is supposed to be, thanks to him. Now, a generation later, I see my stepson being a father to his three wonderful little girls, and I learn again what a father is supposed to be.

Happy Father’s Day.

Through A Glasspool Darkly, Part Two

Anglicans cut Episcopalians from ecumenical bodies
Isn't this unnecessarily violent?

Is The Archbishop of Canterbury Next?

The Telegraph reports from London:

Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin.

It couldn't happen here, of course. We have our First Amendment. But I guess it can happen in the UK. Where could it lead, do you suppose?

By Eric Von Salzen