Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom? There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped. The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew. At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
. . . and a Happy New Year!
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Garrison Keillor seemed to be specifically sharing his concerns (as it were) about the U*U propensity to remove reference to God and Jesus from Christian hymns in a manner that is not all *that* far removed from Stalinistic purging of persona non grata from historical records and similar "memory holing" in George Orwell's 1984. Or at least that is how I read his saying -
ReplyDeleteI discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God. . .
That is why he went on to say -
it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough.
I happen to think that those concerns are quite legitimate having seen no shortage of U*U hymns that have been subject to the UUA's Stalinist "pogrom" against God. How many "churches" do you know of where a "pastor" can dogmatically preach from the pulpit that God is "a non-existent being" and that belief in God "seems primitive"? Heck I well recall Rev. Charles Eddis of the Unitarian Church of Montreal somewhat gratuitously concluding a Sunday sermon in which he spoke about witnessing bush fires in Australia by declaring -
"God can be a son of a bitch."
Not that God *can't* be a bit of an S.O.B. every now and then. . . but this is hardly the kind of public pronouncement that one expects to hear from the minister of any "church" during a Sunday service.
So it would *appear* that when Unitarians aren't busy purging any mention of God or Jesus from their hymnaqls they are busy publicly denying the very existence of God or even calling God an S.O.B. in front of a "captive audience".
Thanks, Robin. I don't draw the same conclusions you do and have never witnessed a UU minister with a "captive audience."
ReplyDeletePeople sitting at *any* Sunday service are something of a "captive audience" in that they cannot easily walk out if the sermon, or indeed other parts of the service, take a turn for the worse. . . Peer pressure and other social constraints almost always win out and the "victims" endure the whole service. How many times have you seen someone walk out of a Sunday service? Sure it happens every now and then but it is very rare. ALL U*U ministers, and ALL other clergy, have "captive audiences" in that sense which fits well with the standard definition of the phrase "captive audience" even if I was using the term somewhat loosely as the "scare quotes" should have indicated.
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