Easter

It's Easter Sunday today, and I attended an excellent service this morning at my church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent, which included our choir singing a breathtakingly beautiful rendering of Bach's "Alleluia" from "Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden" as our opening music of the service. The title of the sermon was "Christ Redeemed, Christianity Reclaimed". Naturally, I was curious about what the sermon this morning would be about, since most UU's are utterly ambivalent about anything even remotely resembling Christianity, because so many UU's come to our church as "damaged goods" from their former Christian faiths, feeling bitter and cynical about their old churches and what they were asked to believe. Many are former Catholics or Pentacostals, making for an interesting experience. They don't even want to hear the words "Jesus" or "God" mentioned because of their old religious associations, and it seems a bit sad that so many people don't seem to realize that Unitarians and Universalists were originally Christian faiths, albeit very liberal ones at that. The point of the sermon was that to deny that aspect of our heritage and to neglect the central message of Christianity is to lose something very crucial to our faith as UU's. What most folks think of when they hear "Christian" is the version we've been forced to digest for the past 8 or so years, the extremely Religious Right wing types who see Christianity more in terms of Christ dying for our sins instead of what he lived for and taught. The central message of the Gospels has been lost to Pauline dogma and it's a shame that so many people eschew our Christian heritage because of their personal associations with what they perceive Christianity as being. Christianity isn't about policitization of hot button issues like abortion and birth control. It's about caring for the less fortunate. Heaven isn't some mystical place in the sky, it can be created in this life and in this world we live in when we do right by others. The so-called "Kingdom of God" that Jesus spoke of in the Gospels is right here in front of our noses, if we want to make it happen. I could never believe all that mystical, magical, miraculous stuff we were taught about in school when I was a little girl, and I certainly didn't buy the bit about the Resurrection, either, but I did understand the basic idea of caring for others and creating a world of love and peace instead of hate and war. Hell does exist as well, but not in some otherworld of fire and eternal suffering. Hell exists for those who live a horrible life each and every day, whether it's due to alcohol and drug addiction, slavery, extreme poverty, disease, warfare or whatever. It is our mission to make a better world and to try to eliminate as much suffering as we can while we live. And that is the central message of Easter. May you all have a blessed holiday, whether it is Passover to our Jewish friends or Easter to our Christian friends, wherever you are.

TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE!

Why do people seem to feel compelled to walk around with their cell phones glued to their ears or texting non-stop 24/7 as if their entire world depended on it? I even see people texting while driving, which by any measure should be illegal as hell to do. And whenever I go to church or to a concert, the first thing people are asked to do is to turn off their cell phones, which some folks willingly comply with and others do not, and nothing's ruder than being interrupted by a chirp or an obnoxious ring tone emanating from someone's cell phone. The least people can do if they refuse to turn the damned things off is to set it to vibrate so that they can at least know when a call is coming in, as if they are so important that they cannot miss a call. I mean, I can see parents who have left the kids in care of a babysitter wanting to know if something has happened that requires their immediate attention, but other than that, I can't see why people will not turn off their bloody cell phones when asked to do so! I hate going into a restaurant and standing around waiting to order while someone yacks on their cell phone and thus slowing things down while their order waits to be taken. Most places now ask patrons not to talk on their cell phones while standing in line waiting to have their order taken (I'm thinking more of fast food type places rather than sit-down restaurants, but honestly, do I really want to overhear someone's private conversation while trying to have dinner with friends or family in a nice sit down restaurant? Could I care less about their lives and what's going on in them?). I also get weirded out walking down the street or in a mall or someplace and seeing someone seemingly talking to themselves when in fact, they are using a BlueTooth device that is in their ear. My question - why? Why would you walk around with a BlueTooth device hooked to your ear all day like that? Do you really need to be able to talk to people so much that you need to stay in constant touch with some thing stuck in your ear like that? I know, maybe I'm sounding a tad curmudgeonly, but still, people are becoming so addicted to their little electronic devices, which are no longer just phones, but radios, .mp3 players, televisions, Internet connected devices, GPS's and more, that there has developed a social disconnect as people get sucked into those things and can't turn 'em off or put 'em down for one second to connect to the real world around them. What kind of world are we becoming, anyway, when people would rather live and die by their electronic devices instead of interacting with the Real World around them? No wonder things are so screwed up these days all over the world. We no longer speak face to face to people and instead rely on electronic technology to entertain us.