If we want reconciliation in the human family, we need to acknowledge and abandon impediments to this reconciliation. Somewhere between the highly dysfunctional human family and the small units, often called families, which variously raise, nurture, or torture us, and directly or indirectly teach us to survive, cooperatively or competitively, lie highly dysfunctional cultural formalities known as religions which seek to preserve their own existence as their paramount concern. As to the latter, mine is called "Christianity." I have come to believe that "Christianity" cares very little about the human family and only pretends to care about our small units of existence, seeing them primarily as donor units, and seeing itself in competition with other religions for these donor units. "Christianity" is not only comfortable with the competitive model but also willing to cheat and spin more than Karl Rove in an election. This is not picking on "Christianity," but since many of its adherents openly seek to dominate, i.e., have "God bless," America, we all have a stake in this fight. In many parts of this world other religions are primary oppressors. Where I live, "Christianity" is capitalism's main loyal servant, tax-exempt religion, not quite a state religion but pretty close these days.
This is not a theological text. It is not written by a theologian. But I am virtually nailing it to your church door, if you have one, and mine. It is written for all who bear the historically oppressive name "Christian," of all income and wealth levels, skin tones, sexual orientations, and denominational branches, but, while most of us "Christians" have committed the sin of oppression to one degree or another, in one form or another, the more oppressive of us the more in need of repentance, and therefore, this text's special target audience is those "Christians" who tend to be most powerful and capable of oppression: conservative "white" heterosexual male "Christians" growing up in the U.S., four of whom control the Supreme Court of the United States, thanks to a conservative "black" heterosexual male "Christian" who made their cause his cause, and their cause is "Christian" but not Jesus's.
My qualifications are (1) having walked the aisle and made "a public profession of faith" at the age of five at the Central Baptist Church of Little Yazoo because my father, the pastor, told me that otherwise if I died I was going to hell no matter how good I was; (2) having escaped, and survived, that and the rest of my fundamentalist childhood and youth, including the ninth grade "your son smokes pot too" incident still breathing but with a lot of internal non-physical injuries; (3) when I was 27 and still thankfully unmarried and childless, and therefore capable of breaking the cycle of inherited craziness, having briefly abandoned my career and the established "Christian" church, dropped out of society, and began to face life more honestly, complete with a short-lived second-coming to pot and a permanent abandoning of all fear of hell; and (4) in late middle age realizing that what is killing Christianity is that it is trying to be "Christendom," so domb and unwilling to drop its pretentions and grasp the simple message of deep reconciliation preached by the working class carpenter and suppressed by "his" established "Church." Unless we abandon these pretentions and grasp that simple message, the established "Church" will slowly die a deserved death and, sadly, the value that could come from the message will be lost on the scrap heap of human delusions in service of oppression. The work of justice in the service of love, aka, reconciliation, is the only thing that can save humanity, and the only justification for the religion whose namesake inspired it. [9/15/14 Edit: I disagree with myself here, sort of. I think that I was correct in terms of Jesus's intent. I cannot read the Sermon on the Mount and not see a revolutionary liberating Jesus who wants justice in the service of love in order to save humanity. But, it is also possible that this is asking too much from Jesus's people. We are made of flesh and blood. The problems are overwhelming. We cannot, most of us, have the tenacity to "take up our cross and follow" Jesus. We also get family and other obligations that prevent us from being free moral agents. In contrast, nonetheless, when I sat in church this morning, I was struck by the beauty of the spiritual experience. I wanted and received a feeling of "the love of God," the kinship of this amazing wondrous mystery culminating in Jesus and his sacrifice that I have become a part of somehow, wonderfully washing and enriching me with the Holy Spirit, or at least the feeling of a better quiet internal world. The external world can never measure up. It is entirely possible that Christianity is only capable of supplying a beautiful spiritual experience and cannot drive a revolutionary engine. Not that Jesus wouldn't want it to do so, but that human beings cannot be the agents of change and can only be the agents of idiosyncratic joys, failures, etc.--and Jesus loves us just the same. And maybe that is enough to justify Christianity after all. Food for thought, should anyone one day read this edit to this diary.]
But first,
the "your son smokes pot too" incident
The first month of ninth grade at the superficially integrated Leesburg High School in the autumn of 1973, in the central Florida county that gave us Devil in the Grove, was initially shaping up to be interesting if not socially promising for your reporter but was about to get dangerous and depressing. I had begun the school year on a "high" note. I had gotten high and gotten snobby about my newfound druggie coolness. I had a cool new friend named Ray, who was also a ninth-grader and whose father was a factory worker at the Minute Maid plant.
Late in the previous school year, Ray and his family had moved to Leesburg from Mt. Dora. By then, I had been on a downward social spiral centered around eyewear, having broken my cool aviator glasses for the second time, and my cash-strapped dad forcing me to wear black framed GI glasses that had "loser" written all over them. Because I was not allowed to go to the local Saturday night dances at the Methodist church (for some reason, Southern Baptists thought it was sinful to dance), I was already marked with the stigma of PK and no one thought I was cool. Once I no longer had wire-rimmed glasses, it seemed to me that the only "white" kids that would be friends with me in eighth grade (and it did not even occur to me to try to befriend "black" kids) were those nice nonathletic kids with bad pimples like me who talked about intellectual things I did not understand and played chess during lunch time while sitting outside on the grass--"looooooosers."
I thought Ray and his family were a breath of fresh air because they were a connection to a broader world but did not challenge my stupidity. They, like me, were Southern Baptist and started attending my dad's growing little (needless to say segregated) church. I immediately began going over to Ray's house, which was a few blocks from "the parsonage" where we lived, a lot. They were salt of the earth people and for fundamentalists, worldly, raucous, and fun. We would sit around their kitchen table, drink pitchers of free limeade (Ray's dad brought home free frozen cardboard canisters; I still remember them teaching me the 1:4 1/3 limeade concentrate:water ratio) and play poker, Ray, Ray's mom, his younger sister Tammy, and me. We played penny poker using the same pennies from an empty coffee can over and over. They taught me how to shuffle most excellently.
Ray did not have the healthiest lifestyle. He would steal his dad's cigarettes, and we began to smoke them before catching the school bus to superficially integrated Leesburg Junior High School. It was probably a bad sign that Ray got busted for shoplifting at Disney World during our end-of-the-year eighth grade field trip, but it was neat to have a secret sinful life far from my rigid world as the oldest son of the preacher.
The summer before ninth grade, the youth of the church took a trip to Tampa for a "Christian" youth conference. By then, I was pretty good at five card draw but did not know that playing small stakes poker was a sin. After a day of hearing endless preaching, the boys of our church crowded into a single hotel room and played a monster late night game of poker until I emerged with nearly every one else's spare change. The next day, on the way back home, our red-white-and-blue church bus stopped to let everyone use the bathroom and purchase junk food at a convenience store. I did not realize it, but one of the kids did not have any money to buy a coke and snacks during the stop because I held all of his money in my bulging tinkling pockets. He sadly remained on the bus during the stop, presumably not having to go to the bathroom.
The bus started going again, and all of us kids were slurping our drinks and munching happily, except for this kid. He was crying, and my dad asked him why he was crying and he said because he didn't have any money to buy anything "because [our able reporter] won all my money playing poker." Dad promptly, and furiously, came to the back of the bus where I as sitting and with no warning pulled me by the shirt up to the front of the bus and asked me if I had been "gambling," as if I was supposed to know that what I had been doing was sinful when I had been playing a card game called "War" with his own Cuban American mother since I was little with no bad consequences. I told him about the small stakes poker, and he in no uncertain terms told me that I was never to play cards again and that cards would never be allowed in our house again. Seed planted, I was made to feel that I was extremely lucky I was not getting the stuffing beat out of me in front of everyone. All cards on the bus were confiscated, my coins were socialistically redistributed, and I sat in a segregated section of the bus directly behind my father for the rest of the trip, praise Jesus.
Summer merrily ended, and I somewhat got over the card/church trip incident, with a little help from my friends. I had already gotten high a couple times with a less cool friend, but Ray seemingly had serious connections to the Central Florida youth "drug scene." I remember him lecturing me, in a serious manner, about all of the different pills and hallucinogens that I would one day get to try. I was fearful and not certain that I would go down that path. Nonetheless, Ray and I would smoke pot and, in Ray's case, dream of even more adventuresome days ahead.
But fate was to intervene. A very large, strong, handsome, and openly labeled "bad" kid from Hawaii had moved to our area right before school started and began attending our church. My assigned job as the good PK was to set a good example. He had already flunked out of ninth grade once and, in desperation, his family had shipped him off to boring central Florida to live with his country mouse relatives and hopefully "settle down." He was wild, even wilder than Ray. And, within days of Ray and me being in high school for the first time, in our bell bottom jeans with smiley faces and peace signs sewn on the back pockets, Ray and this wilder kid started skipping school big time. This scared me. I was not ready to go that full into rebellion. I surely didn't want trouble that would result in harsh physical punishment. But, although I did not know it, the cards had already been dealt.
About two weeks into ninth grade, tragedy struck in my young life. Ray and this other kid "ran away." I found out after school that they had up and hitchhiked away and no one knew if they would ever be seen again. As the pastor of the church where Ray's family attended, my dad rode in on a white horse to rescue the situation. After dinner, he went over to their house. Back at the parsonage, I crowded into the small den with my mother and three younger siblings, and we settled in to watch television. I loved TV and was just starting to relax and not worry about Ray when the front door slammed, I tensed up, and the next thing I knew, I was being grabbed from behind by the deranged Southern Baptist preacher whom I knew as dad--this time by the hair into my parent's bed room.
My dad confronted me with the fact that, when he had gone over to Ray's family's house and discussed the situation, and asked if Ray had been smoking pot, Tammy admitted that yes, he had been smoking pot, "BUT SO HAS [YOUR SON]." Also, dad was going to have to be questioned about this by the deacons of the church who controlled his paycheck and who expected his family to be without moral blemish. I seriously thought my dad might kill me. He took off his belt and began swinging it wildly at me. It was stinging, but the worst part was not knowing how it would end. Catching his breath, my dad asked me, "Have you smoked marijuana too?" Wanting to live, I said "No, I haven't smoked pot." He then said, "Did you know Ray was smoking pot?" I answered, "Yes, I knew he was, but I was trying to get him to stop," kind of like one of those missionaries to the drug culture I had learned about at the youth conference. This got the desired response, in that my dad stopped whipping me, but he said that I would have to go with him over to Ray's house and tell their family "the truth." So dad drove me over to Ray's house in silence, and, presumably to save my life, I had to look Ray's parents and sister in the eye and say "I never smoked pot" and "I tried to get Ray to stop," and similar such lies. Tammy knew I was lying and seethed at me. I had become a liar, called her a liar, and, worse still, become something of "a narc" even though she had more or less narced me out.
Dreams of high school coolness dashed almost before they had begun, I got really depressed for the rest of that year and into the Spring semester when we moved again, for the third time in three years. I stopped trying to keep up in class. The black framed glasses matched my mood. I was in hell and reconciliation with life was nowhere in my nearsighted perspective.
Over time, power dynamics in families can naturally shift. In societies, by design, power dynamics remain rigid. Decades later, Dad and I are completely reconciled. Sincere deep tearful apologies were followed by concrete acts of reconciliation. We got beyond the fundamentalism and the symbiotic right wing politics. I went on to be who I am today, just as I am. I did not tell him everything about who that is, but I told him enough.
I have learned that equality among ethnicities/races, genders, sexual orientations, and other variations on the human saga has been denied in ways the good Jesus I somehow learned about in all the craziness of my childhood and youth would find blasphemous. I have learned that Christian reconciliation means those who would call themselves Christians being part of achieving reconciliation, not division, among the human family. And I have learned that reconciliation means actively forcing economic equality against the wishes of the rich and powerful who set up our societies. Reconciliation is not the passive acceptance of oppressive power structures and unjust economic arrangements in order to make some of our individual mercenary lives more comfortable.
"Christians" come in all shapes and sizes and appearances. But they need to be authentically human and willing to risk everything to promote reconciliation, not division, among the human family. Christian domination, or any other kind of domination, is for mercenary dummies. Reconciliation is divine.
6:02 PM PT: I have been able to express myself to the full at Daily Kos and my website, gardenvarietydemocraticsocialist.com. I have cast out my message recklessly, hoping that good will come of it. Now I am going into hibernation for a while. I will be working on major projects for the rest of the year, arising in support of the groups I am in at Daily Kos with frequent reading and comments but only generating new diaries when someone requests me to do so, primarily in my writing at Anti-Capitalist Meetup, where I am a frequent pinch hitter when a diary is needed and primarily focused on international rights.
For now, I know I've done my best as a species being to promote deep human reconciliation, which gives me peace! Better to make a fool of one's self than to not try.
My comrades and other interested persons should feel free to contact me at my email address: francisconejdanovsolomin@yahoo.com. I won't be checking my Daily Kos account as often for a while, so messaging me at Daily Kos will not be the quickest and most reliable way to reach me.
Peace, love, AND JUSTICE DAMMIT,
Brother Francisco
Fri Sep 12, 2014 at 4:35 AM PT: This diary became part of a teaching moment for me in my socialism. :) Please go to this link if you would like more information: http://gardenvarietydemocraticsocialist.com/...