a newsworthy week

First off, my uncle died last Sunday, 2/21. He was 87, and had been in a nursing home situation since July when he had fallen and broken his back. My parents saw him in November and reported that he was alert and responsive, but my aunt and cousin have both said that he had significant mental losses and although he could recognize voices on the phone, he just "wasn't totally there."

(Heartbreaking: when I greeted my aunt this morning in church and murmured my condolences, she said, "Don't be sorry. I'm SOOO jealous of him: now he is with P. in heaven and can talk to her" (my cousin, who died of cancer about 2 years ago).)

Well, B and I sat through an aggressively activist mass and then we deconstructed the texts afterwards. (Foucault would be proud.) This church (which my grandparents helped to found in the 1950s) has always been socially responsive at all scales - to the homeless in Cambridge; to the sick and dying of the members; to responsible eating (there was to be a CSA session at the social hour following) to the current crises in Haiti and Chile. I am sort of ok with that - active involvement in the world rather than spiritual navel-gazing. But the texts du jour were so militant that it was shocking. The covenant with Abraham: Israel "should extend" from the Nile to the Euphrates (look it up: Genesis, I think ch 15); all the battles and fighting and killing.

We were appalled. I began the day thinking that I believed in God (although organized religion mostly pisses me off) and shortly thereafter that I could not believe in any deity whose "might" would intentionally kill thousands through "natural" disasters. Oh, it was just a rhetorical horror-show. Much more thinking about this is needed....