MindSpinner

As a person who finds no resemblance between the spirit of the gospels and the thrust of the conservative political agenda, I find Anne Lamott’s little essay, “God doesn’t take sides” to be considerable solace, a cup of cold water, a breath of fresh air in very smelly world. I really need that. But I need more than a cup of cold water; I need a bucketful dumped over my head to cool me off. I’m trying to figure out what it is that makes me so angry - that powerful people try to make God into a puppet, an oversized caricature of themselves, purportedly infallible? that they thereby obscure who God is in a world that needs the genuine article? that they miss the entire thrust of the gospel, which is love? that they play on peoples’ feelings about a couple of issues in order to manipulate behavior at the polls and thereby run the world? that they alienate and exclude rather than embrace? that they take words and make them mean what they want them to, carrying me ever farther from the language of my own faith, such that I now feel I have to define what I mean when I say I’m a Christian? Yes, Anne Lamott is definitely handling the matter more gracefully than I am. It’s just that I’m not sure it’s merely grace that’s called for.