One thing I wonder about a lot is, why the meek shall inherit the Earth. I mean, obviously they'll be the last ones standing, but do they have any integrity, so I suppose what I'm asking is, why should they inherit the Earth?Here's the thing. I don't think people really get what it means to be a peacemaker. Blessed are the peacemakers, right?
But that doesn't mean that we should all back off all the time. In fact really, if you back off instead of challenging what needs to be challenged, you're just being pathetic, you're enabling the wicked, allowing a bad status quo to continue, and god knows they had some bad tracks. Or...they had A bad track and just played it many times.
I know, a red herring of my own creation.
But think of this. Sometimes, some people say stuff they know will wind you up...just to wind you up. Now the smug and terminally lazy will say, 'oh, they know how to push your buttons,' ok, but then, still, you can't let it pass, because otherwise you give the message that it doesn't matter. And it always does. And if you think about it, people who deliberately wind other people up - well, that's kind of, at best, insanity, at worst, anti-social behaviour, and yes, I do see it that way round, because in general, people can't help their insanity.
This past week or so, I have heard of some amazing examples of women challenging things that were wrong. If they hadn't challenged those things, they would still be wrong. It goes from the personal to the global.
And Peace cannot be made until wrongs have been righted.
Last week, a friend sent me a piece of writing by a woman who was questioning something in her life, and asking why she let it continue. She draws a beautiful analogy,
"...an oyster is an organism that defends itself by excreting a substance to protect itself against the sand of its spawning bed. The more sand in the oyster, the more chemical the oyster produces until finally, after layer upon layer of gel, the sand turns into a pearl. And the oyster itself becomes for valuable in the process."
An oyster can never produce a pearl without responding to the challenge of the sand, the irritation.
8 comments:
Not to be pushing buttons, but you do have the artificial pearls, where people put things in there to exploit the predictable response of the oyster for their own ends.
Ooh, interesting point ! They are a lot cheaper though aren't they? That is an interesting analogy though:)
ATM used to tell me, 'Just ignore him' when I'd react to some random bigotry of my Grandfather's.
The reply was always the same, "I can't because he is FUCKING WRONG!"
I would then have to retire to the garden and smoke myself sane.
Yeah, you see, imo you were right to react, because if you don't, they go on telling themselves that it doesn't matter because no-one really cares, and then the bigotry in general continues.
There were a few times I was led away before I set about him with his own walking stick!
I've never thought that being a peacemaker meant doing nothing, quite the opposite actually. Jesus was a peacemaker and he did a whole bunch o stuff. Ditto Martin Luther King Jr. the Berrigan brothers, Dorothy Day, Ghandi, Oscar Romero, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rosa Parks, Tank Man of Tiananmen, Rachel Corrie and the list goes on and on of course.I've never thought that Jesus meant the meek as we would interpret the word today. I'm particularly impressed by the Berrigan brothers - Phil is dead now but Daniel, well into his 80s, carries on.
A bit off topic perhaps, but I've always liked Jesus talking about removing the blank from your own eye before removing the speck in others.
- Karen
ha! Freudian slip - the plank, not the blank!
- Karen
And now I've thought about the artificial irritation and I just can't think what the point would be for an activist to do that, or even how. How could a feminist challenge something that wasn't a real problem? A feminist is the irritant that challenges the oyster's system, or to follow the analogy, THE system, and the result of the constant challenge is the pearl. I can't think of an example where we could challenge the system about something that wasn't an actual problem. Hmmm...
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