I wish everyone a joyous Easter. I am writing this from my heart.
I went to announce the Cloud Quaker meeting on the facebook site, and. ended up with a desert road. No flowers, no bunnies, no green grass, no nothing. I realized that my heart had become angry, barren, spiteful toward the Christian Easter-hat spectacle. The death camps were the last straw.
I have a few friends who are pastors or are involved in churches. They've been asking lately, where are all the people? Rows of pews are sitting empty. It's fairly easy, I'd tell them. To the young, the churches are too closely associated with evil - the man, the fascism, the death camps, killing all the birds, the eagles and whales, hate, stripping people of rights, etc. In other words this man that they support is the exact opposite of what they believe in or are looking for. The young are not coming back. Those churches will only get emptier.
When it's all over they'll break into the death camps and notice that this is where all the killing happened. It may not be the six million that they counted in Auschwitz, Berkau, etc. but then again it could be that many or more. Brown people, gay people, dissident people, innocent people, citizens, they don't care. Why do powerful people just want to kill people? Because they can. They can use their power, and make people disappear, and that makes them feel powerful. It's evil, and we can see it, and it looks evil to the world. Years after they liberate the camps they ask how it was that people could know this was happening and do nothing. It's wrong and it's obviously wrong. And in this case the churches not only know and approve, they encouraged it from the start.
The pastors themselves may not have been to blame. They may have focused on Jesus and Redemption, and the union of the divine and the human spirit, much as what we should be thinking about on this holiday. They may have been so focused on their message that they didn't see that the church basement and all the social events had turned into a political battleground where gullible people were being convinced that Zelensky was just as bad as Putin, that all that matters is that abortion be made illegal. In fact many of them have an unclear idea of the difference between Putin and Zelensky anyway. Sell out the free world? They're just doing what they're told.
"Doing what they were told" is what the nazis said years later, when asked how anyone could participate in a system that systematically kills people because of their race, in spite of innocence and legal rights. It's pretty clear that those who support him would support him no matter what, no matter what they were told, no matter who died in the process. It could be that racism is the driving force. They see America becoming brown and they're afraid. He's the man who can clear the deck and make it white again. So if there are some photoshopped pictures of people in El Salvador, and somebody makes up some whitewashed story about them, people are perfectly willing to believe that they are being protected by a strong hand of a savior. I think they felt that way in Germany too. They didn't know what was happening in the camps, but they suspected it, and still they did nothing because basically they had racial discomfort anyway and just wanted to live among other pure Germans.
For that reason I've become a little alienated from my fellow neighbors - I live in a somewhat German area, though my town itself is diverse and more open-minded. Racism is a universal scourge. It seems there will be this problem as long as there are different races trying to live together.
But the church has a job in this situation, and it's not to divide, to raise suspicion, to pass along false information and photoshopped pictures, or to justify death camps. It's not to encourage boys to go fight in the invasion of Greenland or the annexation of Canada.
To get back to the problem of low attendance, yes there are churches that are doing the right thing; they are the minority but they are out there. People still need God, and community, and the connection between the divine and the human spirit. These things have to start over, start at the bottom, start free of political concerns to the point that maybe I ought to shut up on a site like this and stick to holier content. Rest in peace to the churches, we can't solve that problem.
Nevertheless it's Hitler's birthday, and Easter. He is risen indeed.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Sunday, April 13, 2025
Intro to Quakerism
The following arrived in an e-mail from Quaker Religious Education Collaborative. I assume it's ok with them if I simply copy it and put it here. We've been talking a lot about how to get the newcomers a better view of what Quakerism is. Needless to say, we do a bit of this in Cloud Quakers and I have a pamphlet myself (last post). It's useful to me to just collect all Quaker intro material and I'm interested in any comments or other info out there.
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