MountainMornings

“The other interesting thing that’s happened [in contemporary Christianity] is this splitting of church into two types of services: the smaller devotional congregations and then the arena entertainment-based congregations, which are much more outgoing and communal, like Abundant Life. And I would not presume to say that one is better than the other because I’m sure there’s good Christians in both, but my preference is certainly for the devotional side. If I’m going to go to a Taylor Swift concert or see a football game, I’ll do that. I won’t go to church.”

If you want to get anywhere fast in the South, travel on Sunday morning. That’s because most people go to church and the roads are empty mid-morning, unless you’re trying to cross the Cumberland River where a huge TV mega-church is located and traffic can back up for miles. As a full-fledged lapsed Catholic, I could never understand the pull of a church service over say breakfast in bed with a Bloody Mary on the side. I figure Sacred Heart School and St Joseph’s Camp for Girls just squeezed the religious life out of me for good!

Now that Great Grandma Ada has moved to Nashville, she’s met FIVE ministers! Imagine that, in the course of one week she has managed to get right with God because we know that she married a reformed minister herself. And I mean “reformed” as in an ex-Baptist Missionary Minister who spread the good word and built wells and hospitals in Ghana – that is, until he saw the light and recreated himself as a pastoral counselor back home. Then he mostly just married people and tried fixing their marriages later; when he wasn’t carving totem poles.

When I asked Great Grandpa Hudson what religion he wanted to be affiliated with, he said, “Orthodox Judaism!”

Well we all burst out laughing! Anyone who knows Hudson knows he was kidding. Orthodoxy, fanaticism of any kind is abhorrent to him. And just as modern Christians have split themselves into two camps – one being the extreme-Trump-show where anything goes, including separating families at our borders while quoting Bible verses, and the other being more reasonable, ie “devotional,” we Americans are splitting apart too. While Mr T dismantles and disrupts democracy from within, God-fearing Christians make excuses because all the while he’s appointing federal judges to advance their agenda. You know the drill:

You don’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because hey, it’s your religious right!

You want that tiny embryo to be declared a person, and criminalize abortion.

You love your AR 15s and want to buy as many as you possibly can, just because.

If you are a fanatical Christian, an evangelical holier-than-thou holy roller, let’s face it, you’re probably not reading this post. You’re watching Fox Entertainment “News” or listening to one of its subsidiaries. The one time I got into social media trouble was after posting an article calling out Mr T as a faux Christian…because when someone is “born again” everything can be forgiven. Everything.

And the Irish in me can’t always forgive. I was all ready to applaud our current First Lady for visiting a detention center for separated refugee children in Texas, until I saw her cheap jacket emblazoned with “I really don’t care. Do U?” graffiti on her back. I had an ounce of pity for her before, because I saw her hasty hand-swipe, and understood that she didn’t ask for all this attention. But she has become a fashion icon and would never don a piece of clothing like that, evah!

Her “Let them eat cake” moment was supposed to show us her softer side. And I must admit, I HATE it when the news cycle picks up on her clothing and not her words – did she really think these children could call, let alone find their parents? I can’t wait to see who will portray her on a future Netflix docu-drama. Meanwhile, a film you don’t want to miss is:

“First Reformed,” Paul Schrader’s austere, intense portrait of a Protestant minister coming undone in upstate New York. The movie, starring Ethan Hawke as the Rev. Ernst Toller, explores themes that viewers versed in Mr. Schrader’s more than four-decade body of work — which includes “American Gigolo” and “Light Sleeper” (as director) and “Taxi Driver” (as screenwriter) and the critical study “Transcendental Style in Film” — will surely recognize. This is not the first time he has delved into the existential torment of a man’s soul… https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/movies/first-reformed-paul-schrader.

Tonight we’ll escort Great Grandma Ada to the Temple for some Jewish levity, or irony, or sanity in the South. We’ll re-introduce her to her tribe in the Reform Jewish tradition, which means I never had to promise to keep Kosher. Thank God! From one snowflake, an avalanche.