Drugs

We've been lied to and refuse to hear the truth.

I met a middle aged woman who is wracked with pain due to fibromyalgia, back injuries and arthritis.  She takes seven medications for her ailments and for the ancillary side effects they each cause.  In other words, she takes drugs for the drugs she takes.  She takes one which keeps her awake and another to help her sleep.  It is pharmaceutical chaos in her blood stream.  I told her how a friend of mine has a back injury which rendered him disabled at the age of 43 and the only drug he can take for the pain is morphine but that knocks him out and makes him sick. He has since discovered marijuana as a control for his pain, sleeping and even staying awake.  When I recommended to this woman that marijuana might offer her relief from both the pain and the prescriptions' side effects, she replied, "I don't do drugs." 

HA!

This country has a weird and unhealthy fetish with what we define as drugs.  Although marijuana is legal in several states, even the monstrosity called FACEBOOK takes it upon itself to police the internet and take down legal pages about marijuana even in the states where the herb is legal.  Not only are they taking down legal pages but harming tax paying businesses and the states at the same time. 

In 2013, 47,055 people died from prescription drugs.  How many died from marijuana use?  Zero.  C'mon Facebook, get with the times and start increasing the quality of life for people suffering from addiction, pain, mental health illness and debilitating diseases rather than denying them a chance to live pain-free and otherwise productive lives. 

What is the difference between Oxycontin and Marijuana?  One is addictive and can cause chills, confusion, difficulty breathing, dizziness, fever, tightness in the chest, abdominal pain, blood in the urine, convulsions, increase in heart rate, muscle pain, rapid weight gain, severe constipation, blurred vision and death.  The other one causes the munchies.

Which would you choose to put into your body? 

Church Growth

I have had the privilege of speaking with several pastors recently about church growth or the lack of growth which many churches are experiencing across the country.  Some pastors are looking for gimmicks or programs to attract those who left and also looking for ways to welcome those who have never been.  Others are accepting of their size and diminishing membership and are desirous to settle for being in the service of those who remain.

A predominant reason people say they don't go to church is that they consider themselves spiritual and not religious and that the church is filled with hypocrites.  It is very easy to perceive the church as being filled with people who are "holier than thou."  It is also  very easy for the church to attract or foster people who "protest too much" in an effort to hide their own sinful nature.  It is easy for good people to be judgmental especially if they secretly recognize sinful desire in their own hearts.  On top of that, when some crime occurs in a church, we might discover that the perp was a pillar of the community, a lector, secretary, youth group leader, pastor or Eucharistic minister. 

It is not that the church attracts bad people.  The truth is everyone has the capacity to be a "bad" person.  There was a study by Wallerstein and Wylie where they asked 3,000 NY citizens who have never been arrested about all the things they had done in their lives.  100% of them have committed misdemeanors and were never caught and 97% had committed felonies but have never been caught.  So if you've never been caught, you must be a good person despite the bad things you've gotten away with.

About fifteen years ago I vacationed in Canada with a friend who illegally brought back Cuban cigars and prescription drugs which you couldn't buy in the US but they were available in Canada.  I thought it was very funny that I got flagged for a search and he, a Roman Catholic priest, waltzed right through. 

Today, churches often run background checks on its members in an effort to weed out the sinners.  It is good that they want to make safe sanctuaries but they need to keep in mind that most saints such as St. Paul and even Jesus, a convicted felon himself, would not be welcome in our churches for none of them would pass their background checks.  Part of the problem with organized religion is that it represents only a tiny part of the story and one that is often dangerously dysfunctional at that.

People of adversity find strength within themselves and they think that that has to do with finding meaning.  Instead of finding meaning we should call it forge for meaning for finding and searching are two different things.  Endurance is the entry way to forging meaning and, being accepted into a community is the only place that that can happen.  When we forge meaning we can incorporate that meaning into a new identity and that is what the church needs.  We need to take our faults and traumas and make them part of who we've come to be and we need to fold the worst events of our lives into a narrative of triumph as a response of things that hurt.  Instead the church tries hard to deny this.

I once encouraged a church to start a prison ministry and the response was that they didn't want to attract or associate with those kind of people.  What they failed to realize was that those people were already in the parish as convicted arsonists, drug users, DWI perps, a sex offender and burglar.  A few years later one of their 20 year old boys was arrested for dealing drugs and it still didn't dawn on them that they had the capacity to heal and the healing needed to happen in their own back yard.

When it was found out that I answered a suicide hotline, a woman grabbed me after a church service, broke down in tears and told me that her brother was arrested for committing a sex crime with a teenager, then completed suicide while in jail.  We spoke for quite some time and afterward I told the pastor what had happened so that he could be aware of the situation.  Instead of being compassionate, he became angry that the woman would confide in me and not him.  Of course, this was in a parish who abandoned a former pastor who was arrested on a DWI charge. She never trusted anyone in the parish with her pain and she carried it silently for many years. 

A woman who was raped as a teenager seemingly had her life destroyed.  She dropped out of school, gave birth to the child of the rapist and never went to college or forged a career of her own.  At the age of fifty she was asked if she ever thought of the rapist and she said she did and she felt sorry for him because, he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren and he doesn't know that and she does.  As it turns out, she considers herself the lucky one.  She credits the support and love of her community for the blessings in her life. 

Some things we are born to; our race, a disability, our sexuality, our gender and some are things that happen to us; being a rape victim, a prisoner, a Katrina survivor, a 9/11 survivor.  Religious identity means being able to enter into a church community to draw strength from that community and to give strength there too.  A church community is not for someone to enter in and say "I am here and I hurt," but rather "I hurt and I am here."  But we are ashamed, judgmental and can't tell our stories to the "good people" but our stories are the foundation of identity.

Just as the stories we tell come from our life experiences, our lives can grow from the stories that we tell.  The bible is filled with such stories of healing, joy, forgiveness and com-passion (suffering with one another).  That is the key; one another and, you won't find that on a Facebook page.  Instead, the church looks for ways to attract the wrong people because the church is interested in numbers and money.  If the church's goal is to promote healing and acceptance through pain and struggle, numbers and money will be the symptom thereof.  Currently, that calling is being lived out through social services and other organizations and they are doing a better job than the church is.   So, who needs the church . . .

It isn't solely about changing ourselves but about changing the world.  It doesn't make what is wrong right but makes what is wrong precious and you won't learn that from social services.  The road less traveled is what makes all the difference and the church is abandoning that road.  We can not be ourselves without the misfortune that drives our search for meaning.  "I take pleasure in infirmities," St. Paul wrote, "for when I am weak, then I am strong."  The church is trying to be strong while denying its weakness and driving out people it thinks will make them weak.

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it and that is the cornerstone of identity.  However, you can't change the church if you don't belong to it.  If a church is full of hypocrites, leaving it doesn't change that.  I know a church whose organist was arrested and half the church supported him and half wanted to abandon him.  The church chose to abandon him and eventually all the supporters left and the haters won.  That church's attendance dropped and is currently in danger of closing because - hate begets hate.  If the church chose love and forgiviness, who knows where it would be today. 

Today's church does not know what oppression is because they are doing the oppressing.  If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes and we've always been attracted to the heroes in our society.  Satan doesn't have to fight the church because he has joined it.  When we shelter our children from adversity, we've failed as parents for it is adversity which trains and teaches children how to prepare and cope for what the real world may throw at them.  Someone once asked gay activist Harvey Milk what they could do to help the cause and Harvey told him to go out and tell someone.  There is always someone who wants to confiscate humanity and there are always stories to restore it but we need people to tell the story.  By banishing sinners the church is denying and forgetting its story and its calling.   Certainly every church will proclaim that it welcomes sinners but watch what happens if a registered sex offender or former murderer would like to join.  Ask Squeaky Fromme what church she is welcome in.

If the church lives out loud, we can trounce hatred and restore everyone's lives.  Then we can truly celebrate who we are and truly see ourselves in a healthy, life-giving, complimentary relationship with creation around us. Forge meaning and build identity then, invite the world to share your discovery and joy.  As the Hollywood axiom goes, "If you build it they will come."  Those who hear may even enter in for, they too have a story they'd like to share if they are brave enough and welcome to do it and then in the process, heal others too afraid to speak up.  The big question is though, does the church want to listen?

Explanation of the Terrorism Video

Americans think that terrorism started in this country on September 11th, it didn't.  It has existed for certain classes and groups of people since we first came to this hemisphere.

The first act of terrorism began with Christopher Columbus who sought to find a faster route from Spain to China.  Instead he landed on the shore of Hispaniola.  Today we call that island the Dominican Republic and Haiti.  Do they still teach in school that he landed on Plymouth Rock?  Your tax dollars at work.

The indigenous people of Hispaniola were the Arawaks whom Columbus and his men raped, murdered and took as slaves.  In his ship's log he thanked and praised God for the gift of human chattel.  He filled his ship's hulls with several hundred Arawak men and took them back to Spain as slaves.  Most did not survive.  Who knew you had to feed them?  He then lied to the Queen, telling her that there was so much gold there (there was none) that he needed dozens more ships. 

When he returned, the Arawaks poisoned their children and committed mass suicide so as not to be raped, murdered and taken as slaves by Columbus and his Christian men.  Hundreds of thousands of native Arawaks died at the hands of Christopher.  Happy Columbus Day.

When more Europeans began to colonize the entire east coast of the country, they encountered other Native American Nations such as the Iroquois, Mohawk, Algonquin, Seneca and many more.  After the white man launched political campaigns to take Native American land, displace the natives and murder them (because they fought back), we pushed westward because it was our God ordained destiny.  Today, the remnants of those aborigine nations live on reservations and we're trying to take those lands, too.  We are starting by creating insidious laws which they must abide by.

When the Puritans came to North America to escape religious persecution, what did they do?  They persecuted other people because of their religion.  They also created witch hunts.  These were successful campaigns because the general population was told that witches abducted, raped, murdered and ate small children.  This was the same tactic Adolph Hitler used to turn his followers against the Jews.  Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."   Most of our fairy tales and nursery rhymes were created around the myth of children being abducted such as Little Red Riding-hood, Hansel and Gretel, the Pied Piper, Snow White, etcetera.

Then there was the enslavement of the Africans.  After their emancipation, Lincoln's second phase was to repatriate all the blacks back to Africa or to off shore islands.  He first needed to set them free because he couldn't repatriate them if they were property.  He freed them but before he could sign the repatriation act to remove the newly freed from the country, he was assasinated and the African-Americans stayed.  African-Americans should celebrate Lincoln not because he set them free, but that he was assasinated before he could eradicate them.  If outright hate and prejudice wasn't bad enough, our entertainment, music and movie industry further perpetuated stereotypes and inequality.

After prohibition failed, many poor people turned to marijuana since they couldn't afford the illegal hooch.  Marijuana was found to be an excellent source of pain relief and even a cure for alcoholism.  Harry Anslinger made it his mission to eradicate marijuana by spreading lies about its efficacy.  Although the lies were disproved by the La Guardia Report, Anslinger used racism to convince society that marijuana was the devil's drug.  He said that when white girls smoke muggles, it results in them seeking sexual relations with black men and the result would be pregnancy and syphilis.  Marijuana causes sane people to go mad and commit murder.  All the lies must be true because Anslinger had the financial support of pharmaceutical companies, the lumber and paper industry, the tobacco industry, the brewery's and the Hearst empire which published Anslingers tales of rabid, foaming at the mouth hysteria in all their papers. 

Despite none of the lies about this miracle herb being true, the fear and confusion about it continues to exist today.  Many prescription drugs come with horrible side effects including difficulty breathing, heart problems, lung problems, liver problems, blood disorders, thoughts of suicide and even death.  Many prescription drugs are also addictive and it is easy to overdose on them.  In case you overdose on Tylenol, Advil, Sudafed, Motrin, Codein or Aspirin, contact Poison Control immediately.  In case you overdose on marijuana, contact Domino's Pizza.  Unlike alcoholics, I've never seen a person who was high on marijuana beat his wife and children.  The only benefit from the marijuana scare Anslinger created is that it filled our jails and prisons which also employ hundreds of thousands of people in every state.

The hatred for homosexuality fueled by religion has been devastating to our country.  Homosexuality and masturbation were considered sinful because those acts did not produce offspring at a time when the Christian population needed to outnumber the Muslim population (Crusades).  Also, people died in their forties so it was imperative that we marry off our 13 year old children as soon as they hit puberty so they could pump out as many children as possible.  Population is no longer an issue so these "sins" are no longer threats to society, but we forgot why we made them sins.   We are still in conflict today  with the Muslim religion though.  Thanks Pope Urban II and the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  You made genocide holy and gave us wars to last for centuries.

I used to volunteer answering both a suicide hotline and the 211 line.  Far too many gay teenagers would call the suicide hotline not because of their sexuality but because of society's response to them.  I mean, even God hates them.   Now when our new Pope tried to get the message out that even homosexuals are welcome in the church, the Synod said no, they are not welcome.  How ironic, the Catholic church is a magnet to gay artists, musicians, sculptors, writers and clergy.  I guess the Vatican should purge its churches and museums of the works of Da Vinci and Michelangelo because they were gay. 

While answering the 211 line, I would get calls from women and kids who were being physically abused, homeless people without a place to go, hungry families without enough food, people without insurance and who couldn't afford medical care, people with insurance but were now addicted to prescription drugs and they often feel that suicide is their only escape.

I then went on to volunteer at a homeless shelter where I discovered that many of the men there have arrest records.  The reason they can't get jobs is that little box ubiquitous to all applications.  Once they check yes on that box, HR disqualifies them as a candidate.  Now, that is illegal in this country and if you were to ask an HR person if they acted out of prejudice  they would say - prove it.  Many will go so far as to drag an undesirable candidate through the process just to give the outward appearance that they don't discriminate.  Ultimately, that applicant won't be qualified or may fail the Meyers-Briggs test or some such excuse.

Now, I love the church but, before you go to church on Sunday, consider the words of St. Vincent de Paul.  He wrote: "If a needy person requires medicine or other help during your prayer time, do whatever has to be done with peace of mind. Offer that deed to God as your prayer. Do not become upset or feel guilty because you use your prayer time to serve the poor. God is not neglected if you leave him for real service. You should prefer the service of the poor to making your prayer. For, it is not enough to love God, if, your neighbor does not also love God."

Fold your hands in a praying position. These are the hands you use to touch the ones you love, hold the things you treasure, perform the constant countless motions of your living. For now, these hands do nothing, they are not useful held this way, kept by each other from all movement of living and serving. Pressed to each other, there is no space for holding anything or anyone. For the moment these hands are empty and still.  Jon Stewart once said, "Prayer is the least thing you can do for someone while still getting to grandstand like you are actually doing something."

So, vote this November.  Not to vote is to vote.  Then call the politicians and tell them why you did or did not vote for them.  GET OFF YOUR BUTT AND DO IT.  Then get out into your community and help people.  After you do that, go to church and pray over it.  If your social convictions don't align with your church institution's teachings or acts of terrorism, find another church and let them know why you are leaving.  Not to act is to act.  Keep in mind, no agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.   Has your church?  Government?  Have they made amends?