more this and that

I'm sure you're right for the reason for our different reactions, that you identify with the state, and I don't. I have, I think, the same hurt though, only it comes from a slightly different direction. My hurt that things aren't going right doesn't come from a sense of a state having let me down or not following a right path, but a terrible grief that we humans are so cruel to each other, that humanity as a whole has let itself so down. I just don't know sometimes how we - humanity - will ever answer the Almighty when he asks us why we have not been our brothers' keepers and why we weren't kinder to each other.

In the story of creation, God specifically assigns humanity the task of being the keepers of the Garden and all we ever do is blow it. Around Easter time there was an interesting thing on the Discovery Channel on Cain and Abel, and the point was made that the word "blood," as in "thy brother's blood cries out to me from the ground" - the word in Hebrew would actually translate to the plural - "thy brother's bloods cries out to me from the ground."

In other words, what the person was saying, was all the generations that would have come from Abel cried out to God from the ground. That has been haunting my dreams lately. All the generations that cry out from our bloody ground.

My thoughts aren't as organized as I would like, due in part to what I am doing on the side, but the thought occurred to me yesterday, that was I was trying to say about Jeremiah Wright's speech is that the essence, to me, of what he said, of what I heard that he said is that the rich countries, like the US, or like Canada, whatever charitable things we do, we are like the rich men in the Temple, pouring our coins with great pomp and circumstance as an offering. There are others who give little, like the widow's mites, but that what they give is all that they have.

I don't speak simply of money, but of the spirit of our giving.

Well, you certainly ask an interesting and hard question at the end of your post about searching for common ground with other faiths. Paul searched for common ground too, as in when he told the Ephesians, I believe, that he was there to preach the "Unknown God" to which they had set up altars, to them.

However, the difference is that he used what there was in their culture to preach Christ not to water down Christ. Far too often when people search for common ground, what that means is that they deny Christ the place at the right hand of the Father in their effort to find common ground. They become unequally yoked.

Layla