Matters of faith: September 2007 Archives

It turns out that the San Francisco "leather" festival that's running the ad that mocks Jesus isn't just funded by Miller beer. The city of San Fran is kicking in taxpayer money, too. Natch.

And to think, when the City of Los Angeles got involved with a fund-raiser at Hooters, people went ballistic.

Miller Beer has pulled its logo -- but apparently not its money -- from the San Francisco S&M fair ad mocking Christ's last-supper.

If this poster were mocking Mohammad ...

... it would be an international incident. Muslim clerics would be issuing fatwas. Western leaders would be offering countless apologies. The media would be obsessively reporting every detail with a suitable air of shock and disgust.

But organizers of San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair -- "the world's largest leather event" -- have instead smartly chosen to mock Christ, depicting the Last Supper as some sort of kinky gay-sadomasochist fete complete with sex toys. And so press coverage -- and thus protest -- have been all but nonexistent. A Google News search finds only two news stories, one from a conservative news site, another from a Christian one. The MSM is seemingly not interested. Neither, apparently, are San Francisco city officials, or Miller beer, which is sponsoring the event.

Maybe the folks at Miller need to hear about this. Let's drop them a note.

* UPDATE: Miller Beer has pulled its logo -- but apparently not its money -- from the fair ad.

I was sitting in my temple during this High Holy Day service of Rosh Hashanah and thinking about Mother Teresa. Strange? Maybe not. The Jewish New Year and the 10 Days of Awe leading up to Yom Kippur, give us an opportunity to think about our lives, our values and commitments and the lives and value of all our sisters and brothers both near and afar.

As I examined my own heart, certainties and doubts, it is not surprising that the honest and agonizing introspection of Mother Teresa should swim into my meditations. There is a current controversy about Mother Teresa. Did her doubts, her loneliness and despair, and the painful absence of, what she understood as God’s presence, make her life a fraud and her piety a lie?

Let me break the rules of essay writing and give away my conclusion. She was not a fraud. Just the opposite. Her painful doubts honored her faithfulness. Faith without questioning is a lie. Everyone falls into despair. Our doubts are a compliment to faith. Faith is not belief or even certainty. It is involvement, relationship and engagement with the great and often terrible question of meaning and the Source of Meaning.

My Rabbi, and friend of over 35 years, Rabbi Michael Roth, spoke of the Rebbe of Lublin and how his particular Hasidic group celebrated life with singing and dancing. Yes, they studied the Law but were yet more interested in the direct experience of the divine, that feeling of connection which transcends mere belief and manifests in experience and ecstasy—ecstasy understood as being out of the static and moving to the music of the spirit. The Hasidic emphasis was on music, dance and joy.

Although, the Jewish world in Lublin in Poland was seldom overly joyous, the Rebbe believed we should find and celebrate such joys as were available. Don’t miss the wedding because there is a funeral. Don’t give up on a life of meaning, which is not so much about conventional faith, as faithfulness to life. In other words, despite the pogroms, the deprivation and the suffering, we can still shout L'Chaim! To Life!

My favorite headline of the day comes via the Catholic EWTN website: No One Likes Taxes, Says Benedict XVI.

Hard to argue with that one! Hooray for Il Papa!

As the piece goes on to explain, B16 was making a historical joke:

The Pope jokingly made this comment Wednesday during his reflection at the general audience focused on St. John Chrysostom. Referring to the saint's homilies written during the so-called statue revolt, a third-century protest over the emperor's taxes, the Holy Father said with a smile, "You can see that some things never change throughout history."

At least the emperor had the good sense not to try to impose an anti-gang parcel tax ...

How can we keep life in perspective? I don’t really know how, because the world changes far too fast for me to find a very stable center.

Today a fine finish carpenter came to install the drawer pulls for the beautiful new desk and bookshelves my wife had made. He seemed to have brought the wrong pulls. It turned out that they were right but he only had half the number needed. Now whether to put in half, or wait for the rest to come in, or go with single pull larger handles seemed, given the cost of the furniture, important. We were discussing, as if it were important, whether they should be exactly 5 inches apart.

Then the phone rang, and a dear friend told me that her daughter, whom I’ve known from her pre-teens years, just died. Cancer. Six weeks from diagnosis to death. Nothing to do but attend her funeral. Kind of puts the drawer pulls in perspective. Right?

Minutes later I’m laughing hysterically if ruefully. I Googled the cemetery, and this being Los Angeles, (even in the Valley) the site gave a list of all the famous stars who are buried there! There is even an interactive map to get to the graves of the rich and famous, the once envied and formerly glamorous.

Laugh, cry, eat, dance and love. Sic transit gloria mundi and sic transit trivia mundi