ST. Gertrude’s Abbey – an at Home Monastic Practice

Tag: god

  • Buying a Condo in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

    By Sister Organza Pettingfield

    As humans living in the modern world, we are almost always unaware that we live our entire lives in the shadow of death. We are a delicate species. Easily killed. If we are exposed to too much heat or too much cold – we die. If we go too long without food or without water – we die. If we are struck too hard, or fall from too great a height – we die. If we eat the wrong food, or get stung or bitten by the wrong animal – we die. If we get sick with the wrong bacteria or virus – we die. If we take the wrong dosage or type of medication – we die. If our nation goes to war and we are called to serve or if we go to school with angry, vindictive schoolmates – we die. If we spend our lives in poverty and have inadequate access to the bare necessities for a decent, dignified life – we die. But we spend our lives entertaining ourselves with nonsense. Who’s in or who’s out. What’s in or what’s out. Gossip. Other people’s problems. Other people’s private lives. Other people. Anything to distract us from our own mortality. I am not without understanding, as I am as culpable as any other.

    In early October, my mother fell in her bathroom while brushing her teeth and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. I turned to my husband on the couch next to me and said simply, “This is it.”

    My mother has been sick for quite some time. First, shattering her shoulder after an unfortunate fall eleven years ago. Then being diagnosed with stage-2 lung cancer and undergoing a lobectomy and remedial chemotherapy nine years ago. We had been anticipating celebrating the “all-clear” from her oncologist indicating that they had successfully cured her cancer when she began experiencing unusual symptoms three years ago. It started with vision changes, then word-finding problems, and then finally personality changes. Having had years of untreated anxiety and depression, all of her doctors and her family thought that this was a mental health problem. But as she got worse, her oncologist sent her for a CT scan where they found a new tumor that had been growing in the left hemisphere of her brain. This was a return of her metastatic lung cancer. Her all-clear would have to wait.

    I never knew that. I never knew that when you have cancer of your lungs or your skin and it metastases in another part of your body, like your brain, you don’t have brain cancer, you have actual mutated lung cells growing in your brain. Yet another unique way life tries to kill us. My mother had lung cells growing in her brain and they did not belong there, so we had a world-class neurosurgeon remove the mass and a radio-oncologist treat the affected area with gamma-knife radiation. She came out of both in great shape and returned to her life with monthly MRIs to monitor any return of the cancer. She was stable for an entire year until a new mass was noted near the same place as her prior growth. So, the same treatment was recommended by all of her doctors and we proceeded with that treatment.

    But this time was different. This time something wasn’t right. When she came out of her anesthetic haze, she showed significant cognitive decline. She didn’t know where she was, or why she was there. She became confused, depressed and -rightfully so- more angry. We were told that this would get better over time and when it didn’t, I immediately arranged for neurocognitive rehabilitation. While this did not get her back completely, it got her back mostly. Yet, she still slowly continued to decline. Thanksgiving 2024 she wandered to the neighbor’s house after cutting her foot. And that Christmas, my brother woke up to find my mother smiling broadly, sitting in her favorite chair with her hair and make-up done but wearing nothing more than her bra and summer-weight pajama bottoms. She was rushed to the hospital with a legitimate fear that she had had a stroke. But her CT scans were all clear. Nothing was wrong.

    A psychiatrist sat down with us and suggested that she would likely need to be placed in a memory-care facility or another home that would be able to care for her. But I refused to believe that we were there yet. Her neuropsychologist agreed with me and she continued in neurocognitive rehab and she again improved. We still had a very nice Christmas. I wish I had known it was going to likely be the last normal holiday I would experience.

    She was able to spend another spring and summer out of a nursing home, gardening and drawing as she had always loved. Her yard was even slated to be on the city garden walk, something she was so excited about and had worked so hard to achieve. We had planned on coming into town in August to help her host the hundreds of people who would be touring her yard. But then she began complaining of increased fatigue and had to remove her yard from the tour. It broke her heart. In September, she began experiencing numbness and tingling in her right hand and again went to the hospital with no indication for the loss of function apparent. A month later she was in the hospital and a month after that, a resident of a nursing home where my family spent our first Thanksgiving with her as a patient.

    So this Christmas, I got the wonderful gift of making the decision of how to proceed with treatment. Do I opt for more surgery, radiation and chemo that could leave her sicker and subtract from whatever time she has left with her family, or do I seek mercy and bring in hospice so that her final months can be as happy and fulfilled as possible? Life is a cruel master. I live 300-miles away and cannot rush to her bedside to have these difficult conversations with her. When I have brought the issue up, as a hypothetical, she shut down and refused to speak about what she would want when her treatment options have run out. How would I respond? I would any of us respond if our loved one came to us and said, “By the way, if you should happen to find yourself dying, how would you like us to manage your care? And what do you think of cherry wood for your casket?”

    Yet living in the valley of the shadow of death during the season of light has been less difficult than one might imagine. I have discovered that most people are terrified of death and even more terrified to discuss it, like ignoring the subject somehow prolongs one’s life. I have determined that I cannot approach death that way – not my own and not my mother’s. Death is not something we should fear, at least not in the way that we do. Death is as necessary and as miraculous and -dare I say it – as wonderful as birth. For births, we hold gender reveal parties, showers, and annual birthday parties filled with cake, and presents and a bizarre song that nobody likes yet we all continue to sing. For deaths, we try and ignore them. We speak in hushed tones. We avoid the topic. There is no cake. No creepy songs. No discounts at Texas Roadhouse. The difference, between birth and death is a negligible one. Death is the required antecedent to birth. One cannot be born unless somewhere, someone else dies. Death is life’s fuel. Nothing in existence today could be there without the death of something else. Trees depend on death and decay to nourish enormous root systems. Mushrooms thrive on death. Even a mountain range is there because what had been a flat continent had to give way for an out of control plate ramming into the side of it.

    Our own lives begin with death. Two totally independent, living cells, combine, die and become something else entirely – namely – you…or your kid, or a niece. But what of death? What does it mean to die? What exactly is that process and what happens when that process is over? Science, for all that it can explain, cannot precisely explain what happens when we die. I’m not talking about the failing of our heart, or the dying of our brain. I mean what truly happens to us, the real us. The fact is that science does not know. Faith has moved in with what it believes is an answer. But even this, I think, falls desperately short of what truly is to come. We live in what appears to be a limitless universe. We are human and perceive very little of what there actually is. Do you think a universe as enormous, unfathomable and mysterious as the one that we inhabit, would just snuff out its own consciousness? As human-centric as this might sound, we ARE the reason that the universe exists. For without a created consciousness, the universe would be unaware of its own existence.

    I am a Catholic, albeit a heretical one, but a Catholic nonetheless. When Moses asks God what His name is, God responds with “I Am that I Am.” Most people view the Bible as complete fiction, and frankly, a lot of it is. But that answer is beguiling. “I Am that I Am.” God then is what it means “to be.” God is existence and the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. So for me, as a Catholic, the mystery of the incarnation, which we only just celebrated, is not a mystery at all. Fr. Richard Rohr said that God becomes things that he loves. And this means humans as much as a star or an atom of helium, or a redwood.

    I am not afraid of death. If I am right, and we, in some manner or effect, go on into whatever comes next, and the process of physical death is merely a transformation, like the shedding of a chrysalis, then what an exciting time that will be. But if I am wrong, it won’t matter. I will become a part of the limitless and rejoin the earth, and all of creation as an indistinct part of it all. In one instance, I am still aware of my contribution to the miraculous, and in the other, I simply am not. When my mother dies, and she will, like us all, she will either be released from her shell into what comes next or will become a part of the world she so dearly loved. Either way, she wins. Either way, we do too.  

  • Reclaiming Christianity

    By The Abbott

    Christians and Christianity have gotten a bad reputation in the last several…thousand years. And with good reason! From the frightening Crusades of the Middle Ages that brought with them pestilence and death (and apparently cinnamon and pepper…how gay were the Crusades?) to the most recent walking Christian carbuncle, Kim Davis the four-time married, hillbilly hooker from Kentucky who is now bringing a challenge to gay marriage because her legal fees have forced her to sell off her entire Beanie baby collection and her momma’s Elvis memorabilia. Christians deserve their bad rap. The fact is that there are among the Christian world those of us who think and feel differently…about all of it.

    I am a gay Catholic. Openly. Without apologies to the gays or to the Catholics. Despite my faith, I am also not what one might call traditional or conservative. Some might call me a “cafeteria Catholic” – one who likes to pick and choose from a buffet of beliefs which ones they will follow and which they will pass on. I don’t see that as an insult. If that means that I choose to use the good sense God gave me as a reasoning and logical creature rather than blindly follow a group of fussy old men in dresses and custom millinery over the precipice? Fine. However, I do choose to follow those teachings that: 1) make at least a little sense to me, and 2) do not negate, in any way, the Jesus of the Gospels. Some might even call me a heretic. I like that word. It’s not one heard much anymore. (Like “facts” or “hypocrite” or “Nazi sympathizer”)

    Conservative Christians have polluted the faith in a way that should, to a sensible person, shock them. They have taken a brown man from the Middle East who taught as his central teaching to love your neighbor as you would love yourself and turned him into a fusion of WWE wrestling, a monster truck rally, a 4th of July fireworks display and a gun show. And these people have no shame in it. They produce men like Pete Hegseth who do not bat an eye when they use religion as a club to beat down gay people or, as of lately, women. Or J.D. Vance who twists the words of Christ to fit the putrid narrative emanating from America’s Hitler. Then there is the cowardice of the supposed Christian Right. They would rather pander to a power hungry, megalomaniac in a full diaper than put the breaks on it all and stand up for real Christian principles. These include compassion, kindness, understanding, generosity and hospitality. You cannot go to your megachurch’s bake sale and praise Jesus on Sunday and then send your fellow humans to a concentration camp or take away their basic rights the next and still call yourself a Christian. There is nothing Christian or divine about cruelty, or oppression.

    I am, like every human born before and after me, a sinner. Sin is a word that has become synonymous with judgment and condemnation. Like nobody ever has made a mistake before. Sin is used in a strange way by Christians who I believe may have forgotten what that word really entails. It is not saying “shit, or fuck or damn.” It is not drinking too much at a party. It isn’t being gay. It isn’t baking a cake for a lesbian wedding. To sin is to ignore our relationship with creation. When we imprison someone for being gay, or discriminate against them for being trans, or black or Puerto Rican or judge someone…for any reason…that is sinning. To sin is to clear cut a forest for cattle grazing, or cause a wildfire in order to have a gender reveal party, or to pollute the air and water for profit. Sin is to cause offense to God and to others by forgetting them and doing whatever we want. At its root, sin is selfishness, cowardice and hubris all rolled into one.  

    Sin is a wound. But if we know anything at all about the Jesus from the Gospels, he really enjoyed healing people. Those wounds only drew him closer to the people. When we call to mind our shortcomings and our moments of failure, even our moments of darkness, it does not need to be shameful or painful. It is when we bring these dark gifts to God that he delights the most. Recognizing our failure and endeavoring to do better is at the root of what real Christianity is all about. Redemption is not some end times ticket to heaven. It happens right now. When we say we’re sorry for doing something thoughtless and then make up for it, that is redemption. When we make billions of dollars from the poor but then seek to give it all back in ways that augment their lives, that is redemption. I ask God not just for forgiveness, because he gives that willingly and at all times and for all things. I ask him for the strength to bear it all. I ask for wisdom. Sometimes I ask to just keep my head above water.

    Noticing that you are in the presence of God should be something one constantly tries to do because whether you take note of it or not, you are always in his presence. Churches. Temples. The Holy Land, Mecca. Bodh Gaya. Varanasi. Rome. All holy places. All places where God’s presence dwells. But none of these places have more or less presence than where you are right now. Your shower. Your bed. Your favorite chair. Your least favorite chair. The bus stop. Your doctor’s waiting room. On the toilet. In a park. In your office. Each of these places also hold within them the entirety of God’s presence. The difference between St. Peter’s Basilica and your bathroom-aside from several billion dollars worth of priceless art and architecture and the fact that you can’t roam around St. Peters naked- is the perception that it is holier. But God is not more or less present in either place. While a beautiful church, temple, synagogue, or mosque might more easily invite prayer and meditation, they are not more full of God. To deny that is to negate the very nature of God.

    The seasons are reminders of the awesomeness of God. Not awesome like in an old Keanu Reeves’ movie but rather “full of awe.” The wisdom present and on full display for anyone to witness during these times of year truly reminds me that existence itself is the greatest miracle. Trees during springtime know precisely when to flower and bud. Birds know the right day to start their migration. Bees know when to stretch their little wings, do some dusting in the hive and get back to work. Animals know when to come out of hibernation. No one reminds them. They don’t get a text alert. In the summer, these creatures all continue in the vein of the miraculous. Just glance at any leaf- really, any leaf. And the workings of just that one leaf should silence you in amazement and gratitude. And that’s just the one leaf.

    I once had an astronomy professor who told our class that, “There is no way to know how many universes have existed before this one and no way to know how many more will come after it.” The miracle of this universe unfolds before us in every moment of our lives. “The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth yet people do not see it.” (The Gospel of Thomas). Instead, we see commodities. We see money. We see opportunities to sell crap. We see QVC and Facebook Marketplace. When we have re-learned the sacredness of all things, maybe then we might feel and witness the presence of God everywhere again and not constantly demand signs and wonders.

    As a gay Catholic, the reclamation of Christianity for the sacred, for the contemplative, for the meditative, for compassion, for Christ, is an endeavor that is possibly a losing one. But God takes great delight in his little ones and it is in the underdog, the true David’s of this world, where the glory of God is made manifest. The Beatitudes, Christ’s message to the exhausted people of the 1st century begin with happy are the poor and continue with a litany of weakness as the dwelling place of true blessedness. Christ is not present in the rich. He is not present in the powerful. He is not present in the oppressor. He is not present in the bigot. He is not present in the violent. Christ is present in the smallest of people and in the tiniest of spaces. And always where one least expects him.

  • God’s Will

    by Sr. Organza

    You hear it often from some on the right – it’s God’s will. The right like to use the term like an old kitchen chair. Today it’s a seat – tomorrow a ladder. They invoked God’s will when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans claiming that hosting Southern Decadence was the reason God did not spare the city. Ironically enough, the neighborhood where the festival was held was virtually untouched. They also use it whenever an inexplicable national tragedy occurs to explain the pain away as divinely ordained. Like using a controversial image of white Jesus welcoming freshly drowned little girls from Camp Mystic into heaven. The most prominent use of the phrase occurred last year at this time while Donald Trump was on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania and he survived an assassination attempt miraculously without any scars or damage to his ear. The bold claim was made that God wanted Trump to survive the attack to save America from the dastardly deeds of the liberals who wanted to destroy America by making it freer.

    Whenever someone invokes “the will of God” I laugh a little. It is one thing if you are religious and acknowledge divine providence. However, it does not suggest in any way what God’s endgame might be. It is incredibly arrogant and just this side of blasphemous to claim to know what God’s will is, especially for a human being. Trump did survive a shoddy attempt at his life. But saying that God’s reason for this happening was so that Trump could save us from trans drag queen story hour is another level of heretical stupidity. The truth, the undeniable truth, is that we do not know why things happen – good or bad. God is eternal, so time and space mean very little to him. The Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years in Egypt and it took Moses several more decades to get it together and help out. If God took his merry old time in saving his chosen people from indescribable toil and abuse why would he suddenly peek over at America and immediately want to intervene in our political structure? He’s a big fan of baseball? He like hot dogs? He cannot resist the smell of apple pie cooling?

    It is one thing to say it was God’s will that it rained today. It is an entirely different ball of wax to say that it was God’s will that it rained today to flood a lesbian’s basement. How the hell would anyone know that? This is no different from claiming that Trump getting shot and surviving to save America is God’s will. We cannot possibly know his goals in doing the things that he does. We know this to be true because it happened before with another dictator of unusually small endowment and bad hair.

    On November 8, 1939, a German carpenter planted a bomb at the venue where Adolf Hitler was to give a speech. The assassin timed his mechanism perfectly so the bomb would detonate moments before he ended his speech. But, by some act of God, Hitler, a normally pompous windbag known for ranting and roving speeches that eventually made no sense left that venue earlier than anticipated due to his travel schedule.

    Only minutes after Hitler had left the building, the bomb exploded killing 8 people and injuring 62. There is no way Hitler would have survived that attack and World War II would likely have been over much more quickly. This is a perfectly analogous situation. Beloved leader narrowly escapes an attempt on his life by what appears to be a miracle. The propaganda machine then billed it as God’s will that Hitler should live so he could make Germany great again and lead his people on to victory in war. We obviously know NOW that this was not the outcome. Adolf Hitler slowly devolved into madness bringing the countries of Germany and Austria into calamitous ruin before finally killing himself and his bride and then having their bodies set on fire.

    But in 1939 when the Nazi spin machine said that it was God’s will that Hitler survived, nobody knew that Germany was headed for disaster. Ultimately, we know the results of the war. Germany was not made great. Millions of people around the world died. Hitler was not the savior of the Aryan race. Hitler was not saved to make Germany great again. He was kept alive so that eventually all of humanity would recall the depraved depths to which we as a species were capable of sinking and how close we came to our self-annihilation. As an added bonus, Hitler’s death also showed us what becomes of those who would proclaim themselves tyrants.

    God abhors any unnatural or selfishly imposed limitation on the potential of humankind. His answer to making any nation great is not a demented, bloated, megalomanic with terrible hair and makeup to lead America into some kind of weird golden age. But I don’t know God’s will either. That’s the point. We just do not know nor can we know what his purpose for something happening might be. God’s creative work can span weeks, months, decades, eons, ages. Earth has been undergoing constant renovation since it was created billions of years ago. I am sure it came as a big surprise to the dinosaurs when an asteroid wiped them all out. Up until that point, it had been God’s will that they should dominate earth – until it wasn’t. God’s brush strokes are broad and long.

    It is prideful and greedy indeed to claim that God saved one person for whatever purpose is invoked. Aside from knowing that Trump did in fact survive the attempt on his life, we know nothing more. It is just as plausible, especially knowing what we know about Hitler, that Trump was spared for reasons probably not as savory to his supporters. Perhaps he was kept alive as a grand example of the downfall of humans when greed and ignorance combine. One more example of the folly of invoking God’s will – the Civil War. Both the North and the South said that they were instruments of God in God’s holy purpose. Oddly enough they were both right just not in the way they thought.

    Faith is trusting that all things that happen do so for some purpose and that whatever that is, it will ultimately be good for us. But that’s where it ends. It is not possible to know what that future will look like. When God saved the Jewish nation, and led them out of Egypt, could they have possibly known what was going to happen to them? They had faith and followed. They wandered for 40 years in a barely hospitable desert and finally reached their goal. But the Jewish people still have no idea where it is they are being led- only that they ARE being led.

    When we live in a world of spiritual certainty we breed violence, hatred, and oppression. We live out lives in an obnoxious circus, pretending to be our own ringmasters. Yet much to our surprise, humans are just the clowns. The so-called Christians in this country have abandoned faith and replaced it with a perverted idolatry of personality.

    Our futures are not a promise. Your next breath is not a guarantee. The moment you are living in is an immeasurable gift. So, the question is, how did we spend this divine gift? Did we honor our creator and his creation by protecting it and responsibly partaking in the wonder of life? Did you maybe repay that gift and do something kind for someone? Did you remember the miracle that is your next moment and be merciful and generous as a mirror to what you yourself have been given? Or did you spend that moment devouring the earth’s resources? Bullying someone you do not know and who has done nothing to you because you disagree with their gender or sexuality? Your displeasure at another’s existence is only YOUR displeasure – not God’s. God willed that every gay, lesbian, trans and queer kid should be born and live just as much as he willed it that some orange asshole should be born and live.

    It is the height of hypocrisy to claim to know God’s will when you can barely figure out your own damn life. Maybe spend some time thinking about that instead of peeping into someone else’s bedroom window and making their lives hell.

  • Conservative Christians are Idiots

    by Sr. Organza Pettingfield

    As a woman of the cloth, I am well aware that the title seems provocative. Why do I think that Conservative Christians are idiots? Let’s start with the impossibly small minds of most conservative Christians, particularly in regards to the allegedly limitless power of God as they see him. These same people become apoplectic about transpeople because…well, honestly it doesn’t matter why they think it- it’s dumb. These same people can read about an unnaturally old man who is told by a disembodied voice to build a giant boat because it’s going to rain a bunch and as a punishment for wicked men and apparently wicked hippos or elephants, the world will be flooded. So he needs to take two of every living thing on the planet, put it on the boat and hope to fuck it floats. This is not just the cutesie animals we see in children’s wallpaper borders (I’ve never known a time when genocide was made so adorable). These are the lizards and snakes and those ugly dogs that look like they have mange. All of ’em. If you can sit there with your pious, smug face Luanne and tell me that you believe this story as it’s told and then even after a catastrophic worldwide flood, this same giant boat piloted by the only perfect man and his obnoxious family lands on a mountain top in Turkey and every single one of these animals not only safely leaves the confines of the ark without devouring one another but somehow make it from Turkey…in Asia Minor…ALL the way to say China, without food, yet you cannot wrap your little mind around the concept of a transperson? Then I think the god in whom you believe is a limited, weak and feeble god indeed. And just as an aside, can someone tell me how a whole class of animals like kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas and koalas made it from Turkey to Australia? Did they build little rafts and float from Indonesia? Did they fly Quantas? How? And if you even think of saying a miracle, don’t fucking look me in the eye and tell me transpeople can’t exist. If god can float a kangaroo 6000 miles from Istanbul to Sydney, he can make a transperson.

    While I am on the subject of gender and sexuality let’s rap about the Virgin Mary. Here is this person, basically a teenager just before she would have gotten her donkey cart learners permit, who becomes pregnant all on her own- parthenogenesis, big bang bong and presto baby Jesus. When Mary, in her naivety asks how the hell that’s possible without having sex, the angel explains that “nothing is impossible with God” and she’s just going to be pregnant. So, if it is indeed true that nothing is impossible with God, how is it that conservative Christians still think anyone in the LGBTQ community is somehow an impossibility? It is utter bullshit. God is so powerful that he can get a human woman pregnant all by herself but can’t make someone gay? It seems to me that making a person gay, which is just a bit of a flip of a genetic switch is far simpler a matter than bending the laws of mammalian biology. And on the subject of power, how powerful can god be if he can’t stop a gay person from existing? If gay people are such an abomination, why are they there? Again, your god is weak.

    This is a perfect segway into the subject of science. We live in an age where suddenly science is not only a matter of opinion, but it has also become a matter of belief. Is it because when you apply the scientific method to your overfed, overconsuming, over fossil fuel burning asses you seem that much more sinful and ridiculous? This has to be it because I have noticed that in some cases science is alright with your subset. In my spare time, I do enjoy a good true crime show. In these shows, almost always set in some dumpy little town riddled with meth and focused on Friday night high school football, y’all have no problem with DNA evidence. This science that brought us the discovery of DNA that clears your hillbilly family from a heinous crime suddenly becomes evil if it says that climate change is real, or that fossils were not randomly scattered around the globe by the devil for confusion (Yes, some Christians really believe this. Which makes me give a brava to Satan for being amazingly crafty in his spare time. Apparently busy hands are also the devil’s workshop.) Or when science confirms that COVID is a real virus or that vaccines, shown to work in billions of cases all over the world against a host of diseases, now you suddenly you have an issue with science? Science, which is inherently nonpartisan, has now grown liberal wings and is peppering the landscape with propaganda because liberals have nothing better to do that to torment imbeciles with truth. (A side note on the anti-vaccine crowd, especially those of you who were wearing “Jesus is my vaccine” or that “Jesus was never vaccinated.” Of course he was never vaccinated, he died in 30 AD. Not only did no one own a microscope but they hadn’t been invented yet. And people already had a hard enough time as it was believing Jesus’ story. Do you think it would have been any easier for him had he also added in, “By the way- when you get sick, it’s not Satan or sin, but tiny, virtually invisible creatures that live in your blood that do.”? Had he ever said such a thing, they probably would have just stoned him straight away.)

    As a nun, I can appreciate religious belief. I think healthy religious belief can be good for the soul and I know quite a few whores who need Jesus…and likely penicillin. However, when one ignores logic because faith somehow contradicts it, I start to wonder are these people religious for the right reasons? I’m not even sure many so-called Christians practice their faith completely. Let’s take this recent fiasco in Los Angeles. What I don’t understand is how an evangelical Christian can quote at great length and with gusto half of the Book of Samuel yet when you hint at Matthew 25, they call you a radical liberal. I don’t mean to be a nitpicky old nun, but when Jesus says we are to welcome strangers because these least of his little ones are synonymous with him and you don’t do that, I want to know why.

    One last thing, because the more I write, the angrier I get, but judgmental Christians. These people shouldn’t even exist yet we are inundated with Christians carrying all kinds of signs condemning any one of a thousand different problems they take with the modern world. If only Jesus had given us an example of say a judgmental man, pointing out a splinter in his brother’s eye but somehow missed the giant beam in his own eye. If only he had said that to someone! I am also fairly certain that somewhere in the Gospels, he expressly forbade his followers from ever judging or condemning other people. I really just want one Christian who can go to church and have that read to them on Sunday can turn around and protest transpeople or put immigrants in concentration camps on Monday, to explain it to me like I am an idiot. Because if you have the audacity to call yourself a Christian and claim you are saved even when you are a total asshole to every other person you meet, then I think perhaps one is not fully aware of what is being asked of you. Maybe what we need is a remedial Christian school so that these judgmental cruel fucks who love nothing more than to wear their giant diamond crosses and toss out racist, xenophobic bullshit can finally learn what a Christian truly is.