A cupful of justice

By Steve Novotni 1/8/5

All I want is a cupful of justice.

That’s a mantra that’s been ringing (wringing?) through my skull for the past year. That’s what I told my wife, Becky, I wanted to find.

It’s something I think about when taking communion. If I have a choice between the Cup of Salvation and a cupful of justice, I’ll take the cupful of justice.

What sour wine that flows from God’s heart to my lips can be as important as a cup of justice in an unjust world. What would Jesus drink?

So, these house churches we have are as anti-ritual as it gets, right? They’re destructured, loose nets, community gardens we wander in and tend rather than an orchard we visit.

And eat from.

Yet, there is a ritual to these churches, too.

At their best they reinforce our walk in the world, give us resolve and warmth and peace. At worst they are circles of complacency, Christian support groups, obsessing over the food we share and inward focused in the extreme.

It’s the best I feel when I’m being held by this community’s arms

or when I see others supported by its strength.

When it’s real.

When it’s at its worst it is self-obsessed, trendy and worldly in the extreme, patting itself on the back and reassuring itself,

“It’s my relationship with God that’s important here and the other stuff – the poverty, the racism, sexism and classism – it’s all wrong, of course, but I can’t really do anything about that now. What’s important is my

personal

relationship

with Jesus”

Henry Miller’s mistress, Anias Nin said, “We see others not as they are, but as we are.”

So, keeping this in mind and trying to keep my self righteousness to a minimum, I’ll tell you that what I’m describing, most assuredly, is my struggle, not one I can rubber stamp on this community as a whole.

But maybe you’ll see yourself in this struggle too.

I feel too comfortable and it’s served me well to be suspicious of my patterns.

“(The job of the newspaper is to) Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”

Newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne said this about a hundred years ago. I have read that he believed that the media of the day too often comforted the comfortable and afflicted the afflicted through action and inaction. He considered this a breach of duty.

In media, Truth is god. In Christianity, God is truth. In either discipline, I have been told, I am only doing good works if I am in touch with God(or Truth. I agree, but think also that the pursuit of God or Truth can become an obsessive quest where one can live by the letter of the law, but not the (holy?) spirit.

In media it happens when the “Truth” becomes fetishized and an unrealistic standard of “Objectivity” becomes the goal. So called “Objectivity in Reporting” became standard only about 40 years ago when the ministers of the Truth at the New York Times and other institutions decided that the way a journalist could best serve Truth was by stripping away his beliefs, desires, opinions and humanity by becoming “Impartial.”

In Christianity it happens when we decide that “being saved” is enough. When that personal relationship with Jesus becomes a fetish and insulation against the outside world. I believe that our relationship with God comes through our relationships with
others, principally. That’s how I’ve experienced God’s love. I believe the Bible is a flawed, politically manipulated document that is less important to our relationship with the Divine than our intuitions – our psychic connections to God and others.

I believe God manifests himself in other religious disciplines and that we can find Him (or Her) as present in the good works of an atheist as in pages of the Word. Often more so.

I believe that Jesus is the Truth, but he isn’t the only one who’s spoken it. Buddha, Mohammed, Wiccans and Native American mystics have all known aspects of the Truth – this thing that I can’t really know as much as feel – and the names we call God and even the Resurrection itself are not as important as how we live, how we treat each other and our capacity for kindness and Mercy. (maybe mercy is a higher law than truth)

I told Becky this once and she asked me how it was that I could still consider myself a Christian with these beliefs. I said that Jesus was the person that I was trying to follow and that his teaching was the way I interfaced with the divine. It’s what has worked so far and I expect it will for the duration of my life.

So, if I’ve a choice between meditating on Christ’s suffering, death and Resurrection (in a comfortable church or in an air conditioned theater playing Gibson’s Passion) versus trying to help a friend, or a stranger or any other service, I’ll take the latter.

I’ll take a cupful of justice.