Dear Boo and Bubble,
My Goodness! It’s
been eons since I wrote you last…..over two months….but, at least we’ve been
together during that time which is much more satisfactory than my letters to
you. So….. you might ask what has
awakened my literary Rumple Stiltskin after such a long slumber? It should come as no surprise that something
stirring in the world of current events is my dawn’s crowing rooster.
Right now, my sense is that the political landscape is just
whacko. We’ve certainly had an overdose
of devastating hurricanes this season, but there are figurative storms roiling
us on a daily basis made more threatening by Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram and
other social media outlets because of the ability to perpetuate, ad infinitum,
whatever controversy whirls away in the stratosphere. In other words…….the storms never pass. Consequently, many of us try to find shelter
from this barrage in some form of moderation of thought or reasonableness of
suggestion.
The other morning, I was watching an interview with John
Kasich, Republican governor of Ohio. I
listened intently to him discuss a wide range of issues and found myself
nodding in agreement with much of what he said on everything from Medicaid
expansion under the Affordable Care Act to gun control legislation to the
various protestations of professional athletes regarding the National
Anthem. This last topic naturally segued
into a broader conversation on Black Lives Matter and the problem (both real
and perceived) about the fair dispensation of justice in our minority
communities throughout the United States.
As a means to underscore one of his points, Kasich asked the
interviewers if they had seen the recent movie “Detroit,” based upon a true story of riots in that city during
1967. When none of them had seen it, he
highly recommended that they go. He
explained that he took his seventeen-year-old daughter and midway through, he
felt so uncomfortable that he suggested that they leave. She insisted that they stay until the end,
which they did.
There were only about ten other people in the theater, all
of them African Americans. As they
exited, Kasich felt compelled to say something.
“That was rough,” he remarked to one of the black men. “It sure was,” came the man’s reply.
Kasich then turned to one of the women and said, “Isn’t it
wonderful that Jesus will bring justice?”
She broke into tears and they embraced.
Even with the warmness of the recollection, I had a reaction
to the question. What was the
implication here? Is Jesus the only one
who can bring justice? Must we wait for
Him to do it? Are we not instruments of
His peace? Shouldn’t we be striving to
bring justice on His behalf? Doesn’t our
relationship with the Father, Son and especially the Holy Ghost demand that we
speak now and always, as loudly as possible, to bring the message of love,
inclusion and justice to the weary world?
As I often do when such perplexing questions rattle my
brain, I turn to your great, great, great, great grandfather’s
journals…..although I have to read it several times over to fully comprehend
his words, he never disappoints. (I have
highlighted what I think are specific supports for my premise.)
In a newspaper article published in 1873, he writes:
“The doctrine of the
Trinity, therefore, instead of being confounding, answers to a grand necessity
of the mind – for in the relations of the persons of the one God, there have
been from eternity in perfect, unobstructed play, all of that moral life so
variously denominated as its nice shadings and modulations are observed in
human character and conduct. These are but echoes of a word eternally
spoken; they are the varied colors of the pure white light in which God, in
perfect repose of ultimate action dwells, brought out by refraction through the
media of human relations.
This view exalts moral
philosophy to the highest heaven, as it gives us conception of moral truth as
subsisting, actively from all eternity in the relations of Father, Son and Holy
Ghost. It leads us to apprehend the sanctions of moral law, binding us one to
another and each and all to God as arising out of else more than mere abstract
will. Nothing of caprice or of
arbitrary placement possible here. And
what a sacredness in all covenant relations when we find them obliging us
according to just what have conserved always the beatitude God. The
nexus of the Divine with the human is just that which is constituted of justice
and benevolence.”
