The Holiday Season
"Poverty is the worst form of violence." -- Gandhi
I'd like to share a holiday story. Many years ago, in the era of the Reagan/Bush violence in Central America, some friends and I made a one-page hand-out. It had the lyrics to John Lennon's "Merry Xmas (War is Over) at the top, and a paragraph that said if people think Jesus was serious, than those wars were immoral. That if Jesus was to come back then, it would most likely be as the child of Central America.
On Christmas Eve, we went to a town that was home to a defense industry. When various churches ended their mass, we would politely hand the fliers out. This seemed to go very well, until the end of a "midnight mass" at the catholic church. The priest freaked out, yelling that we were not allowed to do that. He was furious and demanded that a village police officer arrest us. The officer pointed out that what we were doing was perfectly legal, and he could not arrest us. This made the priest double-furious.
A small group of the older ladies approached their priest and told him that he was wrong, and needed to read the message we were spreading. This, of course, made him triple-furious. He finally walked away, and I thought that was the end of it.
But it wasn't. In the week following Christmas, I got a series of phone calls from him. He let me know that he thought I was evil. I told him I thought he was. He told me to never come on church property again. I said that I hadn't been there in decades, but suggested we could do an Easter play with me riding up on a donkey, and him explaining that my message that killing children was wrong met his definition of evil.
In the final phone call he screamed a question at me: "How would you like it if I came and handed out pornography on your porch?" Perhaps as a result of smoking a gift I got at Christmas, I said, "Well, maybe we should compare our collections, to see if we wanted to make any trades." He hung up on me, and I never did hear from him again. That might have been a good thing, because the only thing I could have traded him was a copy of Playboy that featured an article I wrote that compared the teachings of Jesus to the economic systems of capitalism, socialism, and communism. (I was, and am, influenced by Erich Fromm's 1963 "The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture," and Daniel and Phillip Berrigan.)
Have a happy and safe holiday season, and be sure to listen to John's song!
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