Second Breakfast

I’m in a mostly-black church, and we’re starting to sing gospel hymns. I pick up the hymnal and I know it is going to be unfamiliar, and I can’t find the hymn I’m looking for, so I give up and just start singing along. We’re walking around the sanctuary singing, and I see a pile of little books of published sermons in the corner with ornate cover frontispieces that tell me that the church I’m in is in Ypsilanti, MI. Everyone is friendly and I feel welcome despite the fact that I’m in an unfamiliar place among strangers.

The song we’re singing is a 1-4-5-1 gospel number, and the leaders who are singing the verses are mostly white people, who are singing about the evils of racism. The chorus (I could still sing it when I woke up, but as the morning has progressed I’ve forgotten it), went either “A-li-bah-mah” or “A-li-ham-brah”. The former is of course a southern state, the latter is either a bluegrass band, a Moorish fortress in southern Spain, or a city in Northern California.

I awoke, singing.

I came across Nancy’s Apology, a great blog by a Quaker woman living in Canada. She has a wonderful post on the Christian underpinnings of Harry Potter which I found quite interesting. Go on, read it. I’ll wait.

She writes a little more recently on how wars end, and how there’s no end in sight for the one we’re in today.

As I commented on her post, this makes me a little sad and a little afraid. The drumbeat towards conflict with Iran is getting louder each day, a course that would be insane for our country and the entire Middle-east and South Asia.

We’ve been watching Ken Burns’ “The War” at home over the past few days (God bless TiVo), and I’m struck with the feeling about, even with the nuances that Burns provides on the “really, really bad parts” (and the terrible, brutal, and unnecessarily cruel things some American soldiers did), one cannot help but feel an enormous contrast between “the necessary War” that was WWII, and the utterly unnecessary conflicts we’re engaged in now.

Yet, as many have said “they declared war on us”.

Even six years later I lack the clarity to really parse what’s happening in the world. I feel a weird sense of nostalgia for “back then”, where America had a moral compass in the world. Now as I think about my country I feel more a sense of shame, confusion, sadness, and anxiety than any sense of pride or justification.

Does that make me a traitor? I’m sure Ann Coulter would say so.

Yes, muppets (well, Avenue Q I guess)…

I kid you not.

www.mormonsexposed.com

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