All in a Friday afternoon...

As Advent season is clearly upon us, I am just going to muse a bit of a smorgasbord of things that I was thinking about the other day. I had been listening to the CBC (of course), as they ran a few monologues of people talking about faith. Mainly about losing faith, really. It was particularly poignant in listening to one young man, who, being raised in a very conservative, very rigid, very legalistic Christian family (ahem, reminding me of my own church Family), was eventually driven from it for not conforming to their ideals. Labelled heretic and someone who had lost the way. Which was a bunch of bullshit. He did eventually make it to Bible college, and had many divine encounters with people who did show him there were other ways of worshipping, that he didn't have to wear a straitjacket to reach the divine. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough; he ended his segment by revealing that he simply could not believe the Christian message at the end of the day.
This kind of thing makes me angry; I think it's because I am bull-headed enough to stay with the Family that I've been given, but I know for many, it's a Family that would send them to the funny farm. And that, I find, is incredibly sad. And what's more, I find sometimes that my Family doesn't even realize how it alienates and isolates others; sure, they love people like crazy, and they do their very best, but I can imagine this young man would not have fared much better with us.
This followed me having to kill an hour in a mall, and watching the parade of children going to visit Santa at his castle. As sweet as it was to watch all the excitement of the little ones wanting to meet Santa, you could see that his elves were trying to be as efficient as possible. Loading the children onto Santa, snapping the photos, having a basket for Santa to put letter requests into - all these trappings of consumerism and our 'service' industry all conglomerated together at one time. Big styrofoam castles surrounded by artificial pine trees, candy being given out to the children, indoctrinating our children to ask for more, and more and more... sigh...
This all compounded with a friend of mine who is 'working' overseas, talking about their work with someone from my Family, who basically said that their work was invalid, as they were not pointing to the one and only way to understand Good News. This Family member, I think, probably doesn't understand how, or, more likely, refuses to acknowledge, that Good News changes in different time periods, and different cultures, and different worldviews. But no, I'm afraid that many people in my Family believe that the Good News is completely immutable, that practice and belief must be absolutely uniform, spanning all time and space. If so, I must say, we are already hypocrites, as we fall far short of the original Family's pattern of life together. (Trying to bring this up, however, has always resulted in my being told that I was "wrong"). Suffice it to say, my friend was taken aback, which embarrassed me greatly.
Sigh. All for a King that came to earth and changed history, power, humanity, intimacy, hope, everything...