Eclectic Amateur

Compare this:

LOS ANGELES – The Bishop of the Epsicopal diocese of Los Angeles has issued an apology to Hindus worldwide for what he called “centuries-old acts of religious discrimination by Christians, including attempts to convert them” reports India Abroad. The apology was given in a statement read to over 100 Hindu spiritual leaders at a mass from Right Reverend J John Bruno. The ceremony started with a Hindu priestess blowing a conch shell three times and included sacred chants.

This meeting was the result of a dialogue, started three years ago, between Hindu leaders and Rev. Karen MacQueen, who was deeply influenced by Hindu Vedanta philosophy and opposes cultivating conversions. “There are enough Christians in the world,” she said.

With this:

Each Sunday morning, Kumar sits in a folding chair, waiting for the rock band to start up, and the preacher to give a seeker-sensitve sermon. The chairs are partly filled, in a school gymnasium, just outside Washington, D.C.

He’s a small man, from Chennai, India, and here, in the rows for the audience, he’s part of someone’s Big Vision. Like many others, the church start-up has a visionary, who hopes it becomes the next Willow Creek, even hoping to buy 40 acres in suburban D.C. (Anyone got a half-bil for that?)

And Kumar, who’s 36, drives each day to his office job at Sun Microsystems, where he spends a lot of time checking urgent email from very far away.

Friday night, I walked with Kumar, and our mutual friend, Woody, to a crowded Whole Foods Market in Alexandria. I made a salad about four times bigger than his, but when we got back to the hotel room, it took him a couple hours to finish. I kept asking questions. He kept answering.

————-

Kumar was on a crowded bus in Chennai, India. He heard God’s voice. “Unmistakably,” he says. I heard God say, twice, ‘Seek Me.’ That was it. Twice.”

Just “Seek Me”?

“Just ‘Seek Me’. And I knew it was God, but which God? I was Hindu. Was it Vishnu? Calli…? No idea. I just knew it was God. Somehow, I knew it. Unmistakable.”

And Kumar isn’t the gullible type. He has multiple advanced degrees in Aero Engineering and Physics, for starters, from the M.I.T.-equivalent in India.

He studied and researched, but just wasn’t satisfied that it was one of his familiar gods, and eventually found a friend with a Bible — a “good luck charm” — and traded a textbook for it. He started reading, got confused, but eventually was pointed to Jesus.

He became a Jesus-follower. Costly decision.

————-

His parents weren’t happy. They scheduled an arranged marriage. Kumar met his wife-to-be on Friday, told her and his parents on Saturday about his Jesus decision, and got married on Sunday. “They thought it would blow over,” he says. It didn’t.

Six months later, there was an intervention. Her family, his family, neighbors, friends — 150 people strong — all telling him to repudiate his faith. He refused. His parents, fearing for their reputation, said he should leave the area immediately. They would tell everyone that he was dead.

…

A few years later, he went back to India. Kumar took his vacation from Sun, and headed over with no plan. He just went door-to-door, and told people about Jesus.

The first day, 45 people decided to become Jesus-followers. How’d THAT happen?

“I don’t know. I just went door to door, and neighbors would introduce me to others, and I was amazed.”

————-

Kumar still takes his vacations, two weeks a year, and heads to India. But things have grown. From those first 45, and from his trips over the past seven years…

More than 100,000 conversions. 139 communities. More than 100 pastors. Model orphanages for children suffering from AIDS Schools for Dalit children, the lowest-of-the-low in India. Shelters for little girls, now rescued from prostitution. Food. Medicine. Jesus.

Read the whole thing. Seeing both of these stories on the same day, well …

“To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.” — Wendell Berry.

What could be more mad than to be a Christian who doesn’t want to tell people about Jesus?

And yet … in the grand scheme of things, I’m far more like +Bruno than like Kumar.

Mea culpa. Kyrie eleison.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; prayer therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

— Luke 10:2

No, this isn’t about “dialogue” within The Episcopal Church (although it could be).

This week, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg on the relationship between faith and reason, and the importance of and legitimate position of Greek philosophy within Church teaching.

Dry stuff, eh? Not when he quotes, in the first third of his talk, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos:

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The reactions have been, unfortunately, predictable:

Across the Islamic world Friday, Benedict’s remarks on Islam and jihad in a speech in Germany unleashed a torrent of rage that many fear could burst into violent protests like those that followed publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad….

Chancellor Merkel is not cowed, and still remembers how to use the word ‘dialogue’ in its non-debauched form:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the German-born pope, saying his message had been misunderstood.

“It is an invitation to dialogue between religions and the pope has explicitly urged this dialogue, which I also endorse and see as urgently necessary,” she said Friday. “What Benedict XVI makes clear is a decisive and uncompromising rejection of any use of violence in the name of religion.”

However, CAIR is busy using ‘dialogue’ in its debased form (meaning, “keep talking until you see things my way”):

“The proper response to the pope’s inaccurate and divisive remarks is for Muslims and Catholics worldwide to increase dialogue and outreach efforts aimed at building better relations between Christianity and Islam,” the group said.

So far, this is all SOP. Here, however, is something deserves a bit more highlighting:

“The pope and Vatican proved to be Zionists and that they are far from Christianity, which does not differ from Islam. Both religions call for forgiveness, love and brotherhood,” Shiite cleric Sheik Abdul-Kareem al-Ghazi said during a sermon in Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra.

(Side note: “Zionists”? I think al-Ghazi’s anti-Semitism is showing.)

Get that? The pope isn’t a “real” Christian, because he’s critical of Islam. Real Christianity does not differ from Islam, according to al-Ghazi. (I’m sure his Chaldean neighbors will be surprised to hear this…)

So. A Shi’ite cleric takes it upon himself to declare what “real” Christianity is — and it turns out to be just like Islam! Those “Christians” who do not accept this vision are therefore not “real” Christians, but rather “Zionists”.

An … interesting approach to inter-religious dialogue, to be sure. One that I think will be rather unproductive with non-dhimmi Christians.

It might have a chance of working at the National Cathedral, however. I hear they go in for that sort of thing.

God have mercy.

Over on Mark’s blog a few weeks ago, there was some fun when a fundamentalist atheist troll by the name of “Jon Peters” came flaming along.   (Conversation rescued from Haloscan)

The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, if it were true, would violate numerous scientific laws and principles.
— Jon Peters

Jon,

Reality trumps “numerous scientific laws and principles.” If it happened, it happened — regardless of whether there’s a scientific model for it. Data precedes theory, at least in good (and rational) science.

Mark is entirely correct — the ancients did not have to have derived relativity and be versed in double-blind experiments to know fundamentally that dead men do not walk again. (Any more than they needed knowledge of microbiology to know that virgins do not, in the general course of events, conceive — at least while remaining virgins.)

G. K. Chesterton says it better than I would:

But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism — the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is — that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Jon, undaunted, continued on, ignoring my wit (and worse, GKC’s) but lecturing one and all on rationality and science. This counted as a bad move, especially because a number of readers actually are familiar with the findings of modern science — unlike Jon himself, who let loose with this howler:

Thomas:

Prove that there is a privileged frame of reference using modern science,

I just did. The masses of the two bodies are not equal. Thus, their relative motion is not equal. Thus, the earth orbits the sun. The sun does not orbit the earth.

Jon Peters

And my amused (and probably less than charitable) reply:

I am stunned.

I was already amazed to see such a prime specimen of 19th-century Scientific Triumphalism™ in full plumage here at the beginning of the post-post-modern 21st century.

But now, I find that Jon actually believes in ether!

A rare find! Someone call H. G. Wells, his time machine has been stolen!

Hint: Try googling for Michelson Morley. It’s pretty cutting edge stuff, the data was only collected in 1887. Kind of fringe too, it only got Michelson the first Nobel in science to be awarded to an American.

For extra credit, try reading up on “photoelectic effect” and “special relativity” — especially the part about “no priviledged frame of reference.”

(I always knew freshman chemistry would be good for something. I just didn’t it would be this …)

Sheesh.

Now you and I have, I hope, this advantage over all those clever new philosophers, that we happen not to be mad.

— Philosophy for the Schoolroom

… is my basic thought in listening to the EWTN coverage. With the exception of a few glimmers of light struggling to break out here and there, it seemed depressingly political and non-spiritual. (Yes, I know, everything should be done “decently and in good order”, but one would hope that the successors to the Apostles ought to know that parliamentary procedure is a servant, not a master.)

Most inspiring moment: the bishop (Abp. Flores?) who rose up and called the entire body of bishops to remember that this is not just a matter of poorly-coordinated policies, but that this is sin that has offended and pained Jesus greatly, like unto his Passion. And called the bishops to enter a nine-month period of pennance, with holy hours and fasting and prayers, to begin to make things right.

Most depressing moment: Although this proposal received an immediate second, it was not part of the approved agenda, and was therefore tabled. Discussion then turned immediately to the utterly mundane and administrative matter of the division of once province into two.

(OK, so the justification of this is that they needed to get the provinces in administrative order so that some lay oversight board with representation by province could then be filled ASAP. Still. It shouts to the world, to anyone with ears to hear, that most of the bishops Just Don’t Get It™.)

You know, you’d think that after seven years of fatherhood (and four children!) that I’d have understood this a little bit before now.

But it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggles, that you forget what a gift your children are. And just how much grace we can receive through them.

But today: I am, face it, a grump. I am tired, I am feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders from what I haven’t gotten done at work and at home, and I have more self-pity about this than I know what to do with.

And Andrew, bless him, knows nothing of this. He just knows that Daddy is home. And he laughs, a pure bubbling laugh to cure what ails ya. And smiles at me with his million-dollar smile that says I am full of joy and I love you, Daddy even though it comes out more like “HA-ha! A goo ga ga SQUEAK! HA-ha!”

(After that, how can I mind cleaning the baby food off of his face?)

This is what Grace looks like, transmitted through a 12-month old.