#and he uses this rhetoric to remind parishioners not to be antisemitic

[donnerpartyofone]

ACK I almost stepped on Jesus on my way home from church! Good thing I missed! Actually if I were writing a movie about persecuted Christians where someone tries to make them trample the cross and stuff, I'd have them say "Sure man, I'll trample the cross, I'll shit on the Bible. You think my God is trapped in there? That I step on him like a bug and he dies? Let's try it and find out!" as per the great thing they discuss in STIGMATA. STIGMATA is the one where Patricia Arquette stars as a sexy raver chick who gets possessed and then sexy priest Gabriel Byrne has to solve a religious mystery with her that changes the world. It's the best movie and you should definitely watch it.

LOVE the tag line on poster #2. Anyway one of the priests who is a main reason I've been going to this great church for a year gave a homily this morning about a piece of scripture I'd heard before, but not in this way. Jesus encounters a cripple at a healing spring in Bethesda and asks him, "Do you want to be made well?", and instead of saying "OH MY GOD YES OF COURSE MAKE ME WELL IMMEDIATELY," the guy starts complaining evasively about how he can never get into the water because everyone else is faster than him. Jesus heals the guy anyway and says "Pick up your mat and walk," and then the guy instantly gets in trouble with the authorities for carrying his mat around on the sabbath, and by extension Jesus is in trouble for working on the sabbath. The Bible usually sounds pretty antique to put it mildly, and therefore kind of alien and artificial, but when I heard that story today suddenly it was like "Oh shit, people really act like this right now. All the time." Somebody asks you what you want and you don't know how to say "I WANT THIS EXACT THING AND I'M READY TO GET IT," you might not even know precisely what you want, or you're just so used to making excuses and being passive aggressive and protecting yourself from disappointment and trying not to be inappropriate that you have no ability to be direct or speak from a place of self-knowledge. And then on the part of the Pharisees, they're so concerned with the litigation of their religion that they can't even see the miraculous evidence of God appearing right before their eyes, they're too blinded by their obsession with technicalities and the pre-fabricated template for divinity to notice that what they would ultimately want is happening now. It doesn't appear in the way they expect it to, so they don't even see it. Modern people are exactly like this. You encounter all these behaviors on a daily basis if you interact with other people at all.

I love this priest and at least one other guy who is really surprising and inspired, enough that I've been going there for a year of my life. But I sometimes feel like I'm leading them on. I love gay people and abortions too much to formally convert, among other reasons. But I also realize that religion is about emotion. You're supposed to love God more even than you concern yourself with his factuality. For me religion is a bit too much of an intellectual exercise. I'm curious about the mechanics of belief, how it rewards people, what kinds of changes it manifests, what it is as a psychological phenomenon. And more abstractly I'm interested in how people seek encounters with the numinous, how they explore deeper meaning through the lens of symbol and allegory. I'm interested in the collective unconscious. Almost my whole life is more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, maybe I'm fundamentally not wired to be a religious person. But I do love this church and I love the people in it, and I think it's a net positive for us to get to know a kind of person/people who you don't normally encounter, and get the chance to be kind and curious toward them. Everyone is always welcoming to me even if it seems like they wouldn't like me personally and I find that moving, I embrace the chance to return the favor. I embrace them even though I know they will never watch STIGMATA with me.