Sunday, March 05, 2006
so home was good...saturday was spent in awe of the massive amount of stuff that still remains in my mother's house...i limited the things i brought back with me to a shoe box...i am torn between being the packrat that i know is in my genes and the rational person who sees what being a packrat gets you after 50 years...in one box i found, not one, but two vienna sausage can wrappers that looked like they were from the 60s or 70s and judging by the other contents of the box they probably were...
yet among the mass of yellowed obituaries of people i have never known and heloise column cut-outs, i found an excerpt from a study written by john mcclanahan...i'm sure this name means nothing to anyone outside of pine bluff and maybe most of the people in it...i only know the man because after he retired from preaching he would substitute teach at pine bluff high school where i'm sure he was needlessly harrassed in his old age...i personally hated the days he substituted because he not only made us do work, he tried to teach us (which as well all know is a cardinal sin...substitutes are supposed to easy-work-lecture-free-days)...yet on this random newspaper clipping, john mcclanahan made a statement that i imagine was quite radical for his day (again probably 60s or 70s)...and it made me quite proud to have known the man...and i decided to share:
"Many of us have seen only in one way Jesus Christ and the life of discipleship to which he calls. Thus, he is the meek Gailiean, loving little children, healing the sick, and generally going about doing good...
"Those who see Jesus only in this way expect of his followers gentle lives of easygoing, pew-cushioned piety. Christian people are expected to be decent, clean, respectable, bland individuals who are more adept in planning receptions that in queling riots. Christianity thus becomes essentially a harmless, irrelevant religion for polite, respectable society; and the church becomes only a good club, nothing more...
"Jesus so countered the power structure of his day that eventually he was executed. He was killed not because he was too religious but because he was too revolutionary."
to which i say "wow" and can say no more because it would seem pale
yet among the mass of yellowed obituaries of people i have never known and heloise column cut-outs, i found an excerpt from a study written by john mcclanahan...i'm sure this name means nothing to anyone outside of pine bluff and maybe most of the people in it...i only know the man because after he retired from preaching he would substitute teach at pine bluff high school where i'm sure he was needlessly harrassed in his old age...i personally hated the days he substituted because he not only made us do work, he tried to teach us (which as well all know is a cardinal sin...substitutes are supposed to easy-work-lecture-free-days)...yet on this random newspaper clipping, john mcclanahan made a statement that i imagine was quite radical for his day (again probably 60s or 70s)...and it made me quite proud to have known the man...and i decided to share:
"Many of us have seen only in one way Jesus Christ and the life of discipleship to which he calls. Thus, he is the meek Gailiean, loving little children, healing the sick, and generally going about doing good...
"Those who see Jesus only in this way expect of his followers gentle lives of easygoing, pew-cushioned piety. Christian people are expected to be decent, clean, respectable, bland individuals who are more adept in planning receptions that in queling riots. Christianity thus becomes essentially a harmless, irrelevant religion for polite, respectable society; and the church becomes only a good club, nothing more...
"Jesus so countered the power structure of his day that eventually he was executed. He was killed not because he was too religious but because he was too revolutionary."
to which i say "wow" and can say no more because it would seem pale
// posted by ruth @ 10:36 PM 
