Davison's Doodle

Too Busy to Blog, but still . . .

Too busy to write.  Well, yes and no.  Writing, blogging, is a hobby that I’ve moved down the “do it” list for several months now.  I can feel the angst beginning to well up.  I’ve been away from it, but I’ve been doing my best to model “I want to, but I cannot right now.”  Super busy does not equal, nor translate to successful or meaningful living.  It just means busy.  Sometimes it is of one’s own making, as I have been, and often because there are too many things one cannot say ‘not now,” though it was you, me, that made those commitments.  Thus has been my pace of living.  I’m not trying to be indespenseb

There are items for reflection right now and will be items for reflection during and after my denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has our General Assembly, next month.  I will most likely reflect on some of the resolutions in this space.  One, in particular, has been battered about for 15 years now.  It has been the constant cuca burr as congregations, clergy, lay leaders, and denominational representatives try to determine how to remain at table with differing opinions about how persons are formed or created in God’s image.  When you peal back the layers of exegesis and eisegesis, cultural arguments, and world views I think that becomes the question.  Could God create a non-heterosexual being?  Said another way, are homosexuals or transgendered persons created in God’s image too?  Many base their answer to that question, and their image of God’s creativity, on ancient stories and understandings of the world not meant to provide such direction.  Many cannot determine how to hold the biblical witness in juxtaposition with the science that has cured diseases once caused by God.  Science and technology that has sent people to the moon orbiting our little slice of heaven.  Science that today provides humanity with the ability to end all life, as we know it, but not end creation.  Science and technology that can help us end hunger, poverty, and disease rather than be defined by ancient understandings of society and culture.

I don’t read the bible literally.  The creation stories in the Christian bible describe a deity, a power, with the capability of creating by simply speaking something into being.  How is it that a power beyond our understanding, a claim that all brands of Christendom affirm, can be limited in what it could create?  If one believes that the deity, God, created everything, what one calls good and evil, then even what humanity calls “evil” has the residue of the deity.  Are heterosexuals that discriminate against homosexuals claiming to have more of the imago dei, the residue of God, within them?  This would certainly follow the pattern of what humans do to one another.  This was certainly part of the argument when slaves, black people, were 2/3 rds a person.  This is why I am puzzled that persons who have experienced and continue to experience real discrimination in our culture, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, are the very persons with leaders in our denomination openly limiting the imago dei of God that was used, and still used to discriminate against their race in the human species.

The proof of diversity in creation and within the human species is powerful testimony, to use a religious word, about the creative power of the deity that I call God.  Yes, there will be items for reflection as similar branches of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism continue to parse the image of God to reign over community rather than live peaceably within community.  Does that analysis and commentary make me a humanists?

The Humanists Vocation
by David Brooks | The New York Times | June 20, 2013

Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.