May Day - This ship is going down.

Yesterday was May Day or International Workers Day. In recognition of this, I went to a socialist May Day gathering in T.O. As John had foreseen, it ended up being mostly a bunch of "old" people talking about "the good old times". Even though John was bored out of his mind, there were some highlights for me. A Palestinean refugee woman, about my age -mid twenties- read some of her poetry. It was really interesting to hear her speak her mind. To be honest, I've been feeling sheltered as of late and am really missing the urban scene, so maybe just getting out hightened the experience for me. Anyway, her poetry was eye opening. She wanted to talk to this "god" that had promised her land away; with a plea for his cellphone number or email- some way to communicate with him- full of "just anger", she deemed my God unjust. Her passion was unfailing. She also talked about her womb baring the rebels to come; A daughter with rock and riffle in hand. Sparking strength from her womb; the idea of offspring came across as more powerful than I had ever thought it before. An offspring that would stand thier ground and take back thier land. And what do we say to her Christians? How can we respond? We've been misrepresented by war and death and under the label of "Christian" we spread more fear than anything else. That's what her reaction was. A reaction to fear. She was fighting back. She was strong and I envy her for that.

My question is: how do we clean ourselves of the misrepresentations? How can we show that Christ is not an opportunist, not an imperialist, not a "happy God" that will make you feel good? Christ has been/is misrepresented and twisted into what we want him to be to serve our own purposes and it's so hard to sort it out, let alone show others, who have no clue, what He's really about.

I would suggest sticking to the Biblical metaphors but then questions of contextualization come into play. Not everyone can relate to father roles and I'm sure the image of a shephard is not in it's right cultural/historic context anymore. God is Love is almost uncomprehensible because love is one of those concepts that just can't be truly captured by metaphore. There's a million different metaphors used to discribe God and really all of them are needed to gain a slight knowledge of Him, to show others what He truly is. Maybe language falls short here.

"From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecxtasy and death - all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence." -Aldous Huxley-