Jesus Christ
"If your spirituality is a self-improvement plan, emptied of collective care and advocacy for the oppressed, you can rightfully be suspicious of it. We don't get free alone." (Cole Arthur Riley)
Micro Rage:
Dust. I see it and ignore it on a daily basis, but we are in the midst of moving and the amount of dust I am finding and sweeping and mopping and finding and sweeping and mopping and finding and sweeping and mopping seems to be on an incessant loop that only the downstairs staff of Downton Abbey is equipped to adequately manage.
Macro Rage:
“If you were recruiting for a white supremacist cause on a Sunday morning, you’d likely have more success hanging out in the parking lot of an average white Christian church—evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, or Catholic—than approaching whites sitting out services at the local coffee shop.” (Robert P. Jones, The New Yorker)
The hypocrisy of the Christian church is an ongoing frustration. I know I am not alone. Sometimes I wonder at how, for all of my indignation, I stick around, but quite frankly, I don’t think I should be the one to leave. I mean, I’m not the one taking the command to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and somehow weaponizing a religion that centers low key communism to rollback LGBTQ+ rights and defend the proliferation of guns.
However, there is nothing that makes my blood boil more than when we’re smack dab of a holiday season centered on a Middle Eastern unwed, refugee mother, and self-proclaimed Christians that hold political office make a woman flee the state to obtain a medically necessary abortion (NY Times gift link), pass a dangerous and racist “illegal entry law,” and refuse to sign a humanitarian ceasefire solution.
As we round the bend to Christmas, I think on the words of an older supervisor of mine after returning from an Ash Wednesday service. “Jesus put up with a lot of shit.”
Amen.
A Small Thing
The other day my husband accidentally paid the wrong person on Venmo. The wrong person then messaged/emailed my husband, and when my husband explained the reason for the mistake (he was chipping in for a gift for a coworker that’s retiring) the wrongly paid person not only sent him his money back, but added $5. “She sounds nice! This is for her.” I mean, is that a Christmas miracle or what?!
A Big(ger) Thing
Signal. IYKYK.
“State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol) keeps your conversations secure. We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time.”
Tis the season, eh? I hope you are well.