This is an alternative column for this week - I did not get time to write it and get it published before my due date... so... for your consideration....
The news this week had a disturbing story for those of us who call ourselves Christian.
It seems there is a pastor in Florida who has convinced his church that it is a good idea to hold a book burning on September 11th of this year. There is one book in particular which has been targeted: the Quran, the holy Bible of the Islamic Faith, passed down word for word to the prophet Mohammed in a vision.
The guy’s name is Terry Jones; and he and his church were unknown until this pronouncement. Now there are 11,600 news stories about him according to the Google news search. Oh, 11601 because I just gave him another one.
What would I have to do to up my Google count from 1400 to 14,000? Maybe convince my followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with arsenic? Perhaps I should lead everyone down to the rain forest and start sending out mysteriously ominous twitter messages? Or how about stockpile automatic rifles and get a few more wives?
I bet those things would get me in the news.
You know what won’t get me in the news? This week in church I will use, at the suggestion of another minister on Facebook, the first Surah of the Quran; the opening prayer of the Muslim faith, as the opening prayer for my congregation.
This week I will give a loonie to someone on the street who asks for it.
This week I will listen when someone tells me why they are having a bad day.
This week I will quietly sit in my office and pray for Terry Jones.
It is not simply that it is a publicity stunt; it is that it works. We eat this stuff up; and what we forget is that “news,” by definition, is anything out of the ordinary. It only makes headlines if it almost never happens. A plane crashes, a politician has an affair, an innocent bystander is murdered, quintuplets are born, and Santa Claus goes on strike... this is news, simply because it almost never happens, or happens so infrequently that it surprises us.
Our minds play tricks on us. We read news and categorize it as universal. A rogue wave hits a cruise ship and we will never, ever, go on a cruise. A plane is flown into the World Trade Centre and all Muslims are terrorists. A crazy nobody in a small town church says God told him to burn the Quran and all Christians are hate mongering lunatics.
It makes me want to resign. It makes me think I could do a heck of a lot more good separating myself from a fold that is broad enough to include Mr. Jones. But then.... But then... he wins.
As the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote almost two centuries ago, "Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.” The theatre piece for which he wrote those words, called "Almansor," was addressing the Inquisition's burning of the Quran. In 1933, university students in Heine's own beloved homeland burned his books, along with many others. They burned people soon after.
But then, we are talking about a couple of crazy national socialists who formed a political party during a time when Germany was reeling from defeat in a World War. They played up nationalism, and hid a lot of what they were truly doing.
75 years later we still talk about “The Germans” as if any but a chosen few actually knew what the work camps were all about.
This is always my fear. This is why I want to scream when I hear about some crazy Christian proclamation which is racism wrapped up in religious language.... we are not like that. The spiritual wisdom we all received by our connection to the divine, whether we wrote it down in the Quran, I Ching, Baghavad Ghita, or Bible all says the same thing – Love will save the day.
Anyone who says anything different is lying. So say we all.
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