Prayer Guidlines in a Tex-Mex Restaurant

I recently had the pleasure of eating at Chuy's in Austin, one of my favorite restaurants. One thing they have always done, as far as I know, is to set their tables with flatware in little wax paper bags. People love to take the colorful sticker off and put it somewhere fun on their bodies, part of the festive atmosphere; but I digress. This last time, I took out my silverware and looked at the back of the bag. On it were three prayers, marked Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. There were no instructions as to what to do with these little quotes, but reading each one seemed like a little unconscious insight into each group. Here they are, in order of appearance on the little wrapper (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, the classic Western order):

Protestant "Bless, O Lord, this food to our use, and us to thy service, and make us ever mindful of the needs of others, in Jesus Name. Amen"

Catholic "Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy Bounty. Through Christ our Lord. Amen."

Jewish "Lift up your hands toward the sanctuary and bless the LORD. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth. Amen."

Now, in way of full disclosure, let me say that when I give thanks before eating, something I often forget to do, it takes a form like this: "Thank-you Father for bringing us together and providing us this food, and bless the many hands that worked to bring it to us to enjoy."

Well. I guess I fall into the Protestant camp in asking God to bless the food, which indeed I do in many other ways. And I can maybe take some credit for thinking of others too. So we have a utilitarian sort of prayer here, bless the food.
The Catholic one makes the food secondary and says bless ME and all that nice bounty that we Catholics have been in control of for a thousand years. Okay, I don't mean to be so bitchy about it - I've come a long way in my attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church in these forty some years of following Jesus, and now they've got themselves a real live Christian for a pope, judging by the things he says. Cool.
But the one that blows me away is the Jewish one. Their request is not to God, at first, but to each other. This is an occasion for worship and they take it, the occasion of remembering that He brings forth food from the earth. It's all about HIM. To me it looks like good evidence that the Jews think Jesus was right in saying the greatest commandment is that you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength. I have harped on this before, but I think it worth saying again. The more you follow the Lord Jesus, the Son of the Living God of Israel, the more you come to love Him. And the more you love Him, the easier it is to follow Him. Talk to Him and listen. Hear and obey. Read the scriptures and meditate on what they say. Learn to know His voice. Loving Him is the source of all power and dominion in the Kingdom of Heaven.

God may not be as patient as I thought

I have been on a road trip for two months, going to a number of geologically significant national parks and monuments in the north western US and Canada. I accept the time frames Geology gives for things that have happened here, and for a long time, I have had the idea that God has been very patient, as He set things into motion and kicked off various evolutionary processes, until it was time for Him to jump back in and top it all off by creating Adam. Four billion years is a long time to wait, even if a thousand years is like a day.

But seeing some of the exquisitely balanced phenomena, in Yellowstone, Glacier, Bryce, and more, I have come to a different vision. God carefully set things in motion, not only for the earth, but for all the physical universe, and He watched with great joy as his work of performance art played out - He may have intervened now and then as He still does, being actively, lovingly involved with his creation. But it's not as if He just sat around waiting for the time to be right to make Adam, that is a human-chauvinistic idea. No, I think God had great joy every step of the way, watching as the most basic parameters of this universe worked together to create the vast array of beautiful effects that we are only beginning to discover and appreciate.

Now, it is theologically important, in my opinion, for God to have personally and especially created Adam, a self-portrait set in a larger self-portrait. In that sense Adam could be viewed as the high-point of Creation - but lets not get too proud of ourselves, shall we? The Bible doesn't rule out life on other planets, and besides: Adam screwed up. After four billion years of the beautiful interplay of forces on earth, after thirteen or fourteen billion years of similar interaction in the greater world of the physical universe, imagine His grief and disappointment when sin and unrighteousness entered this world. He has known every galaxy, every planet, every sparrow, every molecule, every photon, every quark, by name. He has seen every event occur.
The vandalizing of this work of art must have seemed like a huge defeat - but not, as it turns out, to God himself. Without sin turning it sour, He would never have had the opportunity to show forth the incredible depths of his loving nature by providing gracious redemption.
So now, having provided it, the tares continue to grow up with the good seed, and the works of redemption go on. That, as Jesus told us, is the nature of the Kingdom of Heaven. The restoration has already been provided, and some time when the Father decides that the harvest time has come, the Creation will groan no more.

RFRA and Corporations as Persons

The recent Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has advanced alarmingly the personhood of corporations, even commercial for-profit ones, specifically identifying them as a person for the purpose of the act, which is to give persons with religious beliefs relief from burdensome government acts. The federal RFRA did not specifically define what it meant by a person, and so when the Supreme Court heard the Hobby-Lobby case, it decided to rely on the Dictionary Act, which states that unless the context indicates otherwise, a corporation will be considered a person.

This is preposterous. As Kathleen Sibelius so cogently argued, a corporation exists to provide a separation in law and in fact from its owners. It is treated as a person only for the purposes of shielding its owners from personal liability for its actions. If a corporation is a person, it is a souless person undeserving of most of the rights and protections the US Constitution accords natural persons. This is a slippery slope. If we do not take legislative action, we could see the day when Goldman Sachs or Walmart runs for President of the United States.

At a bare minimum, we can begin to redress this by amending the federal RFRA to specifically state that no corporation, limited liability company, or stock company can be considered a person for the purposes of this statute, and I would like to see a more general law passed, though it may need to be (shudder!) a constitutional amendment, that states that no such entity can be construed to exercise religion or hold religious beliefs.

Someone Like You - New Lyrics for Van Morrison

I was listening to Van Morrison sing that song the other day, and it just stayed in my head, the music is so beautiful. It seemed to capture something that just wasn't in the actual lyrics, soooo, this morning I decided to try my hand at improving them. Now you all can criticize me back for suggesting the original lyrics were lame :-) I didn't really get everything in there that I wanted to; maybe I need to put double verses in between the chorus...

I've been searching a long time
For someone exactly like you.
I've been all alone in this wide world,
Waiting for you to come through.
    Someone like you makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you keeps me satisfied,
    Someone exactly like you.

We were doing some soul searching
Wondering what it all meant.
Suddenly the heavens were opened.
You said follow me and off we went.
    Someone like you makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you keeps me satisfied.
    Someone exactly like you.

I've been following you all through this life,
Leaving behind those old ways.
But I know now as I hear you calling,
Just who I'm becoming at the end of days:
    Someone like you who makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you, completely satisfied
    Someone exactly like you.

UPDATE:

Okay, I have modified the above to have five verses, as follows. I hope you enjoy one version or another, and maybe like some of the old folk tunes, you can come up with your own. An open source approach to music with is really a traditional practice. If you come up with something, please share it as a comment :-)

I've been searching a long time
For someone exactly like you.
I've been all alone in this wide world,
Waiting for you to come through.

The first time I saw you
I just forgot where I was
I knew I needed to hold your hand
And walk with you, because

    Someone like you makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you keeps me satisfied,
    Someone exactly like you.

We were doing some soul searching
Wondering what it all meant.
Suddenly the heavens were opened.
You said follow me and off we went.

 (instrumental verse here)

    Someone like you makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you keeps me satisfied.
    Someone exactly like you.

We've been following you all through this life,
Learning so much about love.
Sure, we stumbled here and there,
But there was always light from above.

And so I've learned a lot about you,
Leaving behind those old ways.
And I know now as I hear you calling,
Just who I'm becoming at the end of days:

    Someone like you who makes it all worthwhile,
    Someone like you, completely satisfied
    Someone exactly like you.

Some Parameters of a One-State Palestinian-Israeli Nation

I have always used this space to focus much more on theology, but here is an issue where the rubber meets the road.
In an NPR article, Ahmad Aweidah, a Palestinian man who heads the Palestinian Exchange, a stock market, has joined right-wing Israelis in stating that the two-state solution is unworkable. Unlike the conservative Israelis, he advocates for a single-state, a "rainbow state. A state for all of its citizens. A new South Africa."
This is something I have been advocating for years. Of course, there is no reason to listen to me, a nobody third-generation Palestinian American and a Christian to boot. Still, just in case the apparent lostness in the article, as to what such a state would look like, is real, here are my ideas on how this state should look:

The first big hairy question was what to name it. I have two possibilities. My favorite is The Children of Abraham. That best sums up the situation, I think, but the alternative is The Land of Abraham. I thought about the Land of Promise, but probably that would be too contentious. So let's stick with children, shall we? Nations are made of the dust of the earth, but also the people that inhabit it, and it is on the people that we must focus if we are to be successful.
Now in keeping with that idea, I propose to constitute a strong but limited government, one whose legal framework allows both Jews and Muslims to practice their religions. Not sure how to express that in a legal document, but the idea is to explicitly state freedom of religion so that, for example, Jewish people can close their shops on the Sabbath and Muslim people can ignore this practice without any recrimination. It may be that the language goes further and allows any religious practice, so long as it does not hurt people, but it might be smart to specifically focus on Judaism and Islam.
A thought along these lines is to call for everyone to declare his or her religious affiliation, and thus be bound voluntarily by an applicable subset of religious laws and special courts that adjudicate them. I don't know if that would help or hurt, as even within Judaism and Islam there are significant differences in practice and doctrine, and one must have the freedom to change affiliations, including choosing no affiliation. The proliferation of special religious affiliations could become unmanageable. Perhaps these religious courts and other organizations must remain outside of the government and have no power to compel compliance. If one has no affiliation, then one would not be able to bring a complaint under any religious subset of the law. The object is to recognize religious expression and provide a free choice, but not irresponsible license to do whatever you please. No society can provide that.
Beyond the legal framework, as part of that religious freedom, there must be a declaration of tolerance, so that anyone who is a citizen of this country is presumed to agree to tolerate religious practices that they actually disagree with. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated the best concept for this issue when he said that we must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools. I'm not saying it's easy: I'm saying it is necessary. Neither persons nor institutions can be allowed to oppress people for their religious practices.
Next, there must be equality of property rights and the right to travel within the country. Anyone must be able to live anywhere and be secure in their houses and persons, as the sixth amendment of the U.S. Constitution states. Property rights have been a big issue in this place for a long time, and a special temporary court should be set up to sort out the vast numbers of conflicts. This "temporary" court could take a hundred years to resolve all the issues, but it's better than not resolving them at all.

There, that didn't take long - the rest is standard democratic government stuff. I'm sure there's an app for that :-)

Loving Your Neighbor

In an article posted 26 february in the Huffington Post, Dr. Michael Laitman makes a very interesting argument about the cause and cure for anti-semitism:

Today we define ourselves as Jews in many ways: by common heritage, observance of Jewish laws, lineage, or by a combination of all or some of the above. But many years back, before the ruin of the Temple, Jews were defined first and foremost by their spirit -- the spirit of camaraderie and mutual responsibility. "Love your neighbor as yourself" was the great klal ("rule," but also "sum total") by which we lived. It was a rule that included within it every other precept, the pinnacle of human spiritual achievement. This is why we, Jews, became a nation only when we pledged to be "as one man with one heart" at the foot of Mt. Sinai. This is also what allowed us to develop the humane society that we had cultivated for centuries, and which has given the world so many of its cultural and moral assets.
In my encounters with anti-Semites, they keep returning to that point in time and to those values. Their words echo that need, and the demand that we finish what we started, and share these morals with the rest of the world.

Today it is so common to say that if we only love each other all will be well, that if you say it people dismiss you as being trite. These days even science supports it. ...  The problem is that we don't know how to connect in a positive way because this type of connection means that we implement the motto, "love your neighbor as yourself," and we cannot bring ourselves to do it. If we knew the benefits of such relationships, and knew how to establish them among us, the world would not be treading its current, self-destructive trajectory.

 Now here is where I must point out that Jesus showed us, and indeed, provided us, with the way to do exactly what Dr. Laitman is talking about. When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus answered "love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength". He directly connected it with loving your neighbor as yourself, saying that on these two klals hang all the Law and the Prophets.
So, first things first, Dr. Laitman. The key to gaining the power to love your neighbor as yourself is to love the LORD, the God of Israel, with all your heart. Love Him, not the idol of your choice, not your pet idea of who God must be and what he must be like: Him, I AM, the one who really exists, the Living God.
It is not as if this god-person has ego problems: he actually is worthy of all that love that he is demanding. See, it isn't for his good that he commands this: it is for our good. Loving Him is what empowers us imperfect mortals to do what we cannot otherwise do: love our neighbors, and maybe even love ourselves.
In Jesus, the Annointed One, we gentiles have access to being a part of this, as Dr. Laitman said, "ancient prophecy that through us the nations of the earth will be blessed -- with unity and brotherly love."

So, Israel, love the LORD your God. Not only does He empower the Jews, his chosen people, to do so, but the rest of the world as well.

[I have reposted this on Steemit]