Last week I attended a memorial service for a very bright, generous and capable young woman. The friends who spoke at the service highlighted wonderful details about her which captured my own sense of her. We celebrated her life and how she managed to touch each one of us. The closing prayer changed that moment. The Reverand stood up and demand we come forward and be saved. We need to accept Jesus Christ as our savior and we needed to do it right then. He said it did not matter if we were Catholic or something else. Only Jesus, his Jesus would lead us to salvation. It was terrifying. I watch around 40 people clammer out of their seats and go forward. He kept calling and calling. Finally, he asked them if they accepted Jesus as their savior. They responded. He stood in front of all of us and said Jesus took these two young people so he could save 40 others.
The cost benefit discussion disturbed me. It frustrated me. This blog will heopfully serve as a means to communicate; to articulate for myself and for others. I turn to Melville and to Montaigne as my guides. Sounds pretentious doesn't it. But both men have served as mentors and as solace ---
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"In books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but at the bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want nature too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie."
My face actually drained when you got to the part about the demanding minister man yelling at you to be saved (curse your bedraggled soul). Even though I don't know you (do I?), I am sorry that you had to endure that at what should have been a thoughtful remembrance of a friend.
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