If I am wheat in God's field
but am treated like a weed
by the other green stalks around me
is this a good thing or a bad thing
in the bigger picture?
(A nudge from The CEO: "Welcome to the club.")
Cradling Wheat by Thomas Hart Benton
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Wheat or Weed?
My gloomy meditation, based on this online discussion :
(A nudge from The CEO: "Welcome to the club.")
Cradling Wheat by Thomas Hart Benton
(A nudge from The CEO: "Welcome to the club.")
Cradling Wheat by Thomas Hart Benton
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14 comments:
Off topic, but your picture reminded me:
When I was in college, I earned pocket money working as a handyman on Martha's Vineyard during the summers. One of my projects was replacing the steps on Thomas Hart Benton's porch. I saw a lot of cool artwork during my lemonade breaks. Don't remember if I saw that one.
(Now I'm trying to think of gags like "carpenter in the Vineyard" to match your "wheat in God's field", but they aren't coming.)
Hi, IR, and welcome to blogdom! I checked out your weblog -- congrats on your inaugural effort. (I find myself becoming righteously indignant too, sometimes, and sometimes just indignant;-)...I'd prefer not being indignant, because it's tiring, but whatcha gonna do.)
I agree with your point, and think that there's a good reason Matthew includes the landowner's rationale for keeping the weeds with the wheat. And I think historically and experientially, whenever the Church has taken upon itself to root out "weeds," it gets in big trouble and winds up acting in a manner the opposite of Christ's own model.
Fausto: I'm a late-blooming Thomas Hart Benton fan; used to hate that whole genre of painting. I got over it.;-)
Well, it's a bummer. Probably much worse for you than me, because I'm not attached to a lifelong commitment.
The Church is insane, let's face it - and not only in this area. I guess we just have to grin and bear it for now. In another hundred years, we'll be laughing about all this. (Well, maybe not. But you know what I mean.)
Anyway: it's not you.
I love T.H. Benton, BTW. He's one of my favorite artists. I love that WPA propaganda look....
From one "weed" to another: in the parable, the wheat never was the one to decide who was what (if that makes any sense, let me know).
(Believe me, though, that there is more than meets the eye running through all of this. One "side" says this on Tuesday, and the other "side" says that on Wednesday.
Neither is right, neither has the full picture, and nobody knows what's actually going to happen. Everybody's arguing from conviction and from hope.
I've also run into some really nasty, nasty people since all this began in ECUSA; I've been shocked how mean some people have been about the whole thing. Worse than anybody outside the Church has ever acted, IMO.
It's a bummer. But then, we're not satisfied with the Church, either, in other ways. And we're doing whatever we can to change it for the better, too - by our own lights.
All shall be well, in the end. None of this really matters, even at the same time as it matters a lot. "Teach us to care and not to care."
Really. All shall be well. We don't even the Church, in the end; if it changes out of all recognition, we still have everything we need. All manner of thing shall be well.)
Bag Lady: True...I thought the wheat's job was to grow and bear fruit. As it is, some days my wheaten comrades make me want to switch to a gluten-free lifestyle.;-) (Except that I tried that once and it didn't work.)
Bls: Wasn't it the Cheshire Cat who said, "We're all mad here"?;-) I once met a schizophrenic person -- medication compliant but still liable to occasionally fall off the trolley -- who was acutely aware of her condition and how it confused/alarmed people, and who would catch herself in mid-rant and apologize: "I'm sorry. Sometimes when I'm excited I act crazy." Maybe that's a quality of honesty we need to encourage within Christianity.;-)
Re art...it's funny how one's preferences run in cycles. I used to really love Art Nouveau -- the real deal and the 60's knockoff poster art -- I still enjoy some of it, but not so much...too much of a muchness sometimes. And the other day I was scrolling through this blog and realized that I have quite a lot of modern art on here, and there was a time in my life when I would never have chosen the images that I have.
Ah, Julian...you know, we Lutherans aren't much for the intercession of the saints, but she is on my short list of saints I'd chat with...you can just feel that mixture of warmth and spiritual ecstasy and common sense in "Revelations of Divine Love." No wonder she was like the spiritual Dear Abby of Norwich.;-)
Off of Benton and on to the bigger picture -- it doesn't matter what the other green stalks think. As the old hymn says:
All the world is God’s own field,
Fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown,
Unto joy or sorrow grown.
First the blade and then the ear,
Then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we
Wholesome grain and pure may be.
For the Lord our God shall come,
And shall take His harvest home;
From His field shall in that day
All offenses purge away,
Giving angels charge at last
In the fire the tares to cast;
But the fruitful ears to store
In His garner evermore.
Now, a Universalist-leaning ear such as myself would quibble that in the purging process the tares won't be cast into the fire, but crossed (no pun intended) and re-bred until they bear good fruit too, but that's not the main point.
The thing is, what they're saying is probably exactly what people said at women's ordination - which is clearly not permitted if you adhere to "Scriptural Authority," in the New Testament. The Church permits divorce and remarriage, also - cleverly dressed up in the Catholic Church as "annulment." i.e., the full-out denial of reality. Charging interest on loans is a commonplace that nobody would question today. And let's not even get into the polyester question.
Yet in this instance, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Because it's about sex, and it's about something that most of these people have been raised to believe is the abomination. "The love that dare not speak its name." (Amazing, isn't it, that love between people could ever have been thought of in this way?)
The "reparative therapy" guru tells people that suicide is preferable to a happy gay life. It's lunacy.
It's superstition. They think of Sodom and Gomorrah, and believe God will smite us. They think the world's coming to an - cats and dogs sleeping together! Utter madness and insanity.
If they knew the reality - that it's about commuting and doing the laundry and taking care of your mother - they'd probably be hugely disappointed. They just can't see it, for whatever reason; I'm still trying to figure out why....
(And yet, as you say yourself, we agree with them in many ways; we reject pop Christianity and adhere to the Creeds - even as we make room for people who question and challenge them. We think Christianity is robust, strong enough to handle challenges, but beautiful in its formulations.
Notice that there's nothing about this issue in the Creeds, too. For good reason, I suspect.
Homosexuality does bring up some interesting questions, I admit. But that's the adventure, really. We need to figure out how new realities can be absorbed into the ancient faith. We are being given a rare gift in fact: we're at the threshhold of new thought. The world wasn't exactly as we had thought it was, and now we have to see the world - and understand Scripture - in a new way. That's amazing.
(See this post for an interesting take on who, exactly, is the "post-modernist" when it come to reading Scripture, BTW.)
Bls: I think, in the final analysis, it has absolutely nothing to do with theology, not to mention rationality, and everything to do with the "ick" factor. (Which -- ahem -- goes both ways. Nothing personal, straight folks. And I'm quite willing to live, work and worship next to you while devoting the least amount of time possible to pondering the intimate details of your private lives. Just treat one another with honor and respect, take care of any kids you bring into the world, and don't frighten the horses.)
And here's the real corker...a lot of the cultural conservatives advocate celibacy as the only moral choice for a gay person...but many of them despise celibacy as well. I was recently reading some fundmentalist evangelical rant about Roman Catholicism, and the individual was going on and on about how the Catholic Church's sex scandals are the result of its celibacy rule for priests and religious, because not being fruitful and multiplying is "going against God's word." So, in their world, if I'm gay but not sexually active -- if I'm living the life they claim they want me to live -- I'm still fucked, so to speak, because that's not acceptable behavior either. So I guess our nonexistence is what they're really after. Well, good luck with that.
And one more thing (I promise, because I'm actually in a cheery, rant-free mood today) -- for people so supposedly concerned about my salvation and wellbeing, the actual friendship and concern -- real, unconditional friendship and concern, real desire for relationship -- I have experienced at the hands of most cultural conservatives isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. And you can quote me.
And you're absolutely right about the Enlightenment mindset of the fundamentalists. They're the mirror images of the worst deconstructionists on the other side. But they just don't get that.
Which was why it was such a pleasure to take a class with a rabbi and do theology from the perspective of a tradition that's largely bypassed this mindset.
I just finished reading a collection of sayings of the desert fathers. I've been meditating on this one and planning to blog some thoughts:
"A certain brother had sinned, and the priest commanded him to go out from the church. But Bessarion rose up and went out with him, syaing, 'I too am a sinful man.'"
Not that I'm conceding anything is sin in the present question, but the attitude is one that is all but lost in the Church.
Mel: It would be interesting (not that I'm in the mood to do it) to post that quote on a forum frequented by the cultural Pharisees and watch their responses.
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