Left wing religion

I have been doing a lot of comfort eating in the last few days, which is not my usual pattern, but it seems right. I walked to Kieran's over the lunch hour and gorged on their pot roast sandwich and bread pudding with whiskey sauce. I will doubtless fall asleep at my desk this afternoon.

As some of you know because I've been commenting in various people's journals, I have been brooding with a great deal of pain over this last election, and especially the set back to gay rights, which feels like a blow to the core of my Christian faith. I had taken along a copy of Lavender Magazine because I was hoping that Jacob Reitan's column might offer some comfort (Reitan writes about matters of faith for the gay community). The column was written before the election, but it was amazingly prescient. As I ate, I read the column, and Reitan's words were exactly what I needed. Talking about one of my greatest personal heroes, Paul Wellstone, Reitan wrote:

Wellstone’s faith focused on action. One need look only as far as his conception of the Almighty to understand why.

“I think the prophetic tradition of our faith is that to love God is to love justice. And, hey, I don’t meet that goal, but I try to do everything I can to live by it,” Wellstone once said to the Rabbi Laureate of Temple Aaron Synagogue in St. Paul.

That theistic understanding is the root of the religious left. Unlike the religious right, which focuses on what particular theistic tradition to believe in, and what citizens should not do, the religious left embraces different beliefs in the name and cause of justice.

The religious left is neither pious nor exclusionary. It does not damn or spread fear. Rather, it evokes hope and compassion.

Primarily, the religious left calls individuals to personal accountability, and criticizes persons only when they do not share the load of society’s burdens. It understands that all members of society are God’s children, and all deserve to experience and live out the glories of Her world.

That's the kind of faith I can believe in, that I can get behind. I want to find other believers who think the same way. Where are they, and what can we do together?

(no subject)

From jhetley, misia and others, post a bit from your work in progress.

[Note: There's a garden store near my home in South Minneapolis which has a giant steel sculpture of a fish in front of it, I'm guessing, oh fifteen feet long or so, and eight feet tall. How perfect for my book. The cows are a metal sculpture in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood, made of oil storage tanks and upside down steel milk tins]

"I want us to drive past the fish. And past the metal cows."

"No cows today. I have to stop at the bank machine."

"All right," Ingrid said reluctantly, with the air of someone driving a hard bargain.

Ingrid had her seat belt off and her door open before Solvieg turned off the ignition. The fish, supported by two steel pipes, arched above the fountain of gray-green grasses, its gaping mouth pointed up toward the gun-metal gray sky. Ingrid reached up to pat a fin, and her blond hair against the fish's steely side looked like a reflection of golden sunlight caught in a ripple, playing across the flank of a fish underwater. Solveig stared. So bright against that cold gray metal. If she were to close her eyes, the memory of that gold would shine against the inside of her eyelids, like the glow of a candle in the darkness. She's six now. I see her in this instant, just as I saw her in those instants when she was four, when she was five. She is always just-now, but when she was four I couldn't imagine her as anything else. But when I look at pictures of how she was then, I think, oh yes, look how much younger she looks. Her hands are plumper and more babyish, her nose more snub. But when I look at her, she’s the Ingrid I’ve always known, just as she is today. How does that happen, that I don't see the changes she’s going through?

Edited to add: Here's the website of that garden store. Load it up and just stay there at the intro screen without entering the site, and a photograph of the outside of the store with the giant fish in front will appear after their logo.