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Sunday, November 01, 2015

Transforming Evil and Suffering into Good



AllSaintsDayandSundayB, November 1, 2015, Sullivan Park Care Center, by Annette Fricke
            Today, in Christendom, is the Feast of All Saints proper.  This is not a moved feast, but the actual day.  All Saints Day is always the day after Halloween which has lost its original connection to All Saints.  I have great memories of Halloween as a child.  My usual costume was to go as a witch, something easily accomplished with my long dark hair; just rat it and go.  No use in spending time with elaborate things.  It was a time of immediate excitement and eagerness to go out on the town, to each and every door.  I didn’t care about the candy, although I did know kids who did.  I had one classmate who would put a costume on, trick or treat the entire town, then change into another costume and do it again!  Not for me.  The best part for me was trick or treating at the town librarian’s house to savor her scrumptious freshly baked cookies!  Yum!  It has a Celtic origin, in fact and was the end of the Celtic year.  The Celts believed the souls of the dead roamed the streets and villages at night. Since not all spirits were thought to be friendly, gifts and treats were left out to pacify the evil and ensure next year’s crops would be plentiful. This custom evolved into trick-or-treating.[1] Some have depicted Halloween in modern times as the time when children take revenge on their parents.  In my day, soap on the windows of businesses sometimes became wax.  Yes, children can become the embodiment of evil at times.  Although it is no longer with its association to a harvest festival, we now have a more and more American version of Oktoberfest for that purpose.  Observe the juxtaposition of both evil and good and how the evil has been transformed into a happy occasion that has nothing to do with evil unless our children are the perpetrators.  And it is not necessarily a lack of teaching and molding on the part of parents and grandparents as it is in the rebellion and differentiation of self from parent, teachers and others in authority.  I submit to you that this thought process and behavior continues well into adult hood, although likely perceived in a different way and performing a different function.  I know that my dad continued to tease in the same manner as always, but no longer was aware of context.  He needed the guidance of others to curb his teasing which took on the quality of being too rough with the little children.  Walkers and wheelchairs can be excellent forms of transportation, but also a means of either intentional or unintentional hazards to others travelling in the same path. Our judgments of right and wrong can become distorted to where we unknowingly do harm without realizing it.
            For those of you watching the presidential nomination debates, there is one comment that sticks out more than all the others and it was made by Donald Trump.  He said something to the effect that he never asks for forgiveness, just picks up where he left off and tries to do better.  He does not apologize for any mistakes he made in the past.  That kind of statement makes me wonder if he ever really thinks he made a mistake at all and how he raised his children and what his relationship was like with his estranged wife and current wife.  Did he ask for forgiveness for his affair while married to his first wife?
            I suppose that we can be on either side of the tangled mess of misguided behavior in our quest for dignity, integrity, security in life.  Sometimes it makes us ugly people, while at others, we shine with the brightest of the saints who now have passed from this life.  One of the big items in the news today is the story of a Maryland diocese bishop who texted on her phone while driving drunk, hit and killed a man a year ago.  She was sentenced to seven years in prison.  But the rest of the story, as told by a friend of mine who posts a picture of Jesus knocking at the door with a jack-o-lantern trick-or-treat container in his hand, is that she hid her alcohol addiction from the church committee when she was called to become bishop of the diocese. Yet despite this and a former charge in 2010, she also managed to grow a church so well, that new facilities had to be built to accommodate the parishioner increase.  Many are left wondering, myself included just how it is that such extreme opposites in behavior can reside in the same person.  Will she someday be named as a saint of this church, or will the drunk driving charges and sentencing overshadow the good that she did?  Will she receive treatment?  Will she follow it?  Will she ask for help when she needs it?  Those of us ‘would be clergy’ types are told from the very beginning of the process that we need a spiritual director, at the very least as the case presented before us dictates.  As much as the freshness of this case is in the news and brings up strong emotions, this is the world in which we live.  We are not perfect human beings as much as we might want to be and we do need the support of others on our spiritual journeys. 
            The story I just told you is true and she is no longer a priest; it remains very painful for all involved on this almost one year anniversary.  This situation is a witness for the entire world to see.  Many will see it and declare that Christians are simply a bunch of “wishful hopefuls” living in a fairy tale world who have fallen very short of their example in Jesus Christ, their supreme leader. Those outside the church will wag their fingers at this fallen bishop alongside the hatred displayed by the so-called Christian entity known as the Westboro Baptist Church.  Some will say that she deserves punishment; but mostly she does not need punishment for her crime as much as she really needs strong support in her journey into treatment.  In addition to that, she needs to sense a genuine remorse for her part in causing unnecessary pain for grieving family and friends of the man who died at her hand. The man’s wife and children now have to face life without him.
            Our strength in all tragedy is remembering that God walks with us through our roughest times, pulling us out of the mire that would hold us back and paint the canvas of our souls with darkness and despair.  God chooses to dwell with us mortals in all times.  God longs to draw us ever closer into a place where all that threatens to destroy our relationship with God will no longer be a factor in our thoughts, belief and behavior.  God promises that belief in Jesus will enable us to see the glory of God, to see resurrection, to see that with God, all things really are possible.  God loves us just as intensely as illustrated by Jesus’ love for Lazarus, which he fully demonstrated when Jesus, learning of Lazarus’ death, ran to the aid of his family, cried and sat with them. God will wipe away the tears from our eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more. 

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