True Prayer

There are two things that I admire in the human spirit: fortitude and patience. I don’t have fortitude, which definitely challenges my patience. My partner has fortitude but depends on me for the patience. I guess that’s how we make it through the day and years.
Recently an editor expressed a comment about a politician offering prayers at a public meeting. Subsequent letters to this editor, which were freely printed, really lambasted her. As the former leader of the Dignity [GLBT Catholics organization] chapter in Sarasota, I totally agree with this editor and her position. Religion and prayer have no place in the public forum. Politicians have made prayer a cliché. If you want to or need to pray, you should do it in silence, and for those Christians who would challenge this, I refer them to Matthew 6:5-8. Politicians on both sides are diminishing the importance of the human spiritual experience. Government in the United States should be oblivious to religion and take no particular religious stand. Most of all, politicians should not be judged based on their religious upbringing. On the other hand, religion, at least Christian religion as I understand it, should be about securing the dignity of all of God’s creations, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the veterans of war, our natural environment, the creatures that are struggling for existence as a result of human greed. Honest Christians should not allow the “professional Christians” the scum who use Jesus to acquire wealth and avoid the laws of this land to diminish their faith and most of all, should never allow those so called leaders to impose guilt, shame and fear on innocent people.
The people of Christian Faith, who have been led astray by those who seek to control them and in turn set this Nation back two thousand years, need to re-evaluate the message of Jesus; His message of Love, Peace and tolerance.
Jesus said “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites” Matthew 6.5. Amen.

ANWR

One would think that a man who is about to leave the Presidency of the United States with the lowest favorability rating, ever, would make some attempt to redeem himself and act responsibly. Instead George Bush, after having been told a few weeks ago, and to his surprise, that gasoline prices were approaching $4.00 a gallon repeated the mantra of his oil cronies and insisted that we begin drilling for more oil in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). The following facts can be found on the Energy Information Administration’s website; If drilling were to be approved no oil would come out of ANWR for at least ten years, that’s 2018; The biggest field in ANWR would produce, at the maximum, 1.4 billion bbls (barrels), total, secondary fields would produce another 2.8 billion bbls., which is maximum total of 4.2 billion bbls. In 2007 the U.S. imported approximately 4.9 billion barrels of oil, 2.2 billion bbls came from OPEC nations and of that 800 million bbls were imported from the Persian Gulf and the rest from various supplier nations. Considering these production and consumption figures, the most we can expect by drilling in ANWR is to sustain our economy’s thirst for oil for less than one year, ten years from now, but the potential environmental damage is immeasurable. My opinion is that the President should not be promoting the continuation of oil dependence; instead he should, for once, be a trail blazer and initiate a project to promote alternative energy and energy conservation. We’ve been through this before, back in the early 1970s. Had the President and Congress acted responsibly by creating an energy task force we probably would not be in the position we are today.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/methodology.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

Catholic Marriage

There is a conflict when the Catholic Church demands that “Marriage” should only be between a man and a woman. In the twelfth century Pope Alexander III gave the doge of Venice a ring and told him “Receive this ring as the symbol of your empire over the sea…You and your successors be married to her each year, so that succeeding generations may know that the sea is yours and belongeth to you as a spouse to a husband”. And so each year afterwards the succeeding Doge’s of Venice, Italy, dropped a wedding ring into the sea to renew his vow to Venice’s wife, the sea.
After the newly professed nun receives a blessing from a priest, she receives a blessed profession ring, a wedding ring. This ring is to symbolize her contract of virginity and perpetual chastity. The ring is the seal of the Holy Spirit. Through the reception of this ring, she is espoused forever to Jesus Christ. In other words, she is married to Christ.
These things are good things, both examples talk about love. In the case of Venice it is the love of the sea and the great wealth, material and knowledge that the mariners of Venice were able to achieve. Their exploits and the exploits of mariners all over the world gave us the beginnings of good science.
In the case of the good nuns married to Christ, despite all the funny Broadway shows, I personally will always be grateful for their love, their sacrifice and their marriage to Christ. I am not sure where I would be without them.
So there you are, two examples of marriage in the Catholic Church that is not between a “man and a women” but have produced great things, myself excluded my life relationship included.