When the "cold war" was raging, the interference into church pronouncements from various "covert ops" groups - state or commercial - was explained by reference to the potential "communist-bloc" fellow travellers smear. Despite the fact that what such people as Romero were saying was very much the gist of those "remember the poor" teachings, after his murder the western response was, shall we say, somewhat muted. As he said - "when I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why they are hungry, they call me a communist". A key phrase from what was called "liberation theology" in South America was the phrase "bias to the poor" - last year, the pope - despite his reputation - was using that phrase again. Good thing too.
But the three "hot button" distraction themes allowed most prominence in the media recently - unfortunately picked up by a few spokespeople too - ignore these factors of peace or war, the stewardship of the world, the economy, etc - to focus around things that werent pronounced upon in the gospels at all - halloween, marriage, the time - in the womb - that we see a "person". When we watch TV to see kids starve slow, or die through lack of clean water, or get sold as slaves - if we havent questioned EVERYTHING about how we exist as a world, we have forgotten to see THEM as people. There isnt debate about what they go through - it is what OUR kids might go through in their situation. That misrepresentation of what was said to the women putting the ointment over somebody who was going to go through a key weekend in a campaign - that "the poor are always there" ( then the way a few people twist it to pretend that was excuse to shrug ) - was a snappy putdown to somebody saying "why spend the cash on leaflets for the campaign against poverty or a cover for the stall when you could buy that tramp a doughnut". The interesting thing of these times is that all types of spiritual traditions are - in little steps - crossing back to the full on campaigning attitude that their founders or "crucial people" might recognise, from the tokenistic "charity" approach of cold war or perceived dependence upon donations from aristocrats, industrial barons, etc, or the tolerations of warlordkings.
(Perhaps the fourth "attack the churches" factor is allowed such prominence for these reasons too. Secularism - or Atheism - ISNT always "society with the ethics washed out" - but to some it is seen as a tool of those that might prefer society that way. The good traveller from samaria that stopped to look after the wounds of the mugged - to update the tale - wasnt of the same spiritual tradition as the audience for the tale, was perhaps atheistic, in fact, but the inclusion of that tale in the gospels shows THAT churches "fundamentalist" attitudes - to hear certain people talk these days is almost to hear all churchgoers etc get damned by media columnists to excommunication! Or - perhaps worse - partial communication - as if people are turning the mic up when they are sorting out the peripheral details but off when they commence the actual speech. Good to have pressure from society on certain things, of course, but all too often the "debate" is framed with almost deliberately inadequate information that seems to try to present people to each other in their worst possible light - or to blind people to the straightforward reminders of the past that all too often puts ACTUAL fundamentalism in its original "bias to progress" - or reveals the odd hundred years or so of cul-de-sac or detour! Women priests - see the addresses of pauls letters - often the local "pastors" of these early communities-under-the-empire were women, in fact as late as the 700s, when there was a twinning of mens/womens communities the person in charge was often the abbess, as it happens. The churches involvement in marriage, except for the celebration after, is quite recent - a couple of hundred years or so - but if Paul had had the bigotry of the person that inserted words into his texts in such a clunky way afterwards, his preaching in Greece might have mentioned it, you'd have thought.
The "ploughmens lunches" bought as the Traditional Dish in pubs are as old as 960 AD. Wait a minute, I shall type that again. The "ploughmens lunches" sold in pubs were thought up in the 1960s to sell loads of cheese. As traps go, its easy to fall into.
The Halloween holiday is about the night that leads up to the day of "all hallows" . . . . in gaelic "end of summer" - yes, a very old "do", but marking the same sort of time of year that they mark in America with turkey. Harvests in, stocks of food for the winter put by, night sooner, turn of the year, time to light the lamps - lets have a bonfire, barbecue, etc, get all the neighbours around, remember all the people we miss, do a bit of celebrating of them . . . . unlike the Emperors attempts to play people off against each other by shifting the single day-a-week of "sabbath" from saturday to sunday, or screwing about the date of easter, the shifting of the equivalents in their calendar by two different popes, later, was to REalign them with other spiritual traditions, more in the way the good attitudes recognise each other across "boundaries" these days, in local ways most often, but also across the world. Happy halloween, happy "all saints", happy all souls, happy duvali, happy bonfire night, happy ALL HALLOWS time of year.
(typically, the gaels extended the celebration for weeks - so that "samhain" is this entire bit of the year. . . . a good practise often picked up by others. . . . good thing too)
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