Some sort of credo

I just watched "Jesus Camp." Yes, yes, I knew exactly what I was getting into. I knew it would be upsetting, confusion and anger-inducing. And yes, I watched it anyway. Much of it is what you'd expect. Much of it reminded me of the several Evangelicals I've met throughout my life. I was prepared for the intensity of belief, the anti-rationalist viewpoints, the genuineness of feeling. What I wasn't prepared for was the emotional manipulation of young children. It's one thing to teach children what you believe, what you want them to believe, but it's totally different to tell them they are inherently bad people and that everything they want is wrong. All those shots of the kids weeping during sermons just about broke my heart. I'd be interested to see where those kids end up in 20 years. Some will probably be preaching or having babies to preach to, but maybe some will find other ways to live. It's a veritable children's crusade with as many psyches damaged as lives lost in the first one.

At one point in the film, a child declares that America is sick and only Jesus can cure it. I say, we are all sick! Always, every single one of us. We all make do, we all find things with which to console ourselves. But leave me my options! Maybe Jesus will cure you, but I require Bach, and perhaps Marais too. My sickness requires fresh vegetables, and good books to read. We all have the same malady but every individual requires a different treatment!

Half of me wants to run away to Europe and never look back and the other half insists that America is not "God's nation," it's my nation. Maybe I'm too much my mother's daughter (she wrote a whole book about sense of place) but I'm attached to this land, to the fruit trees, the lakes, the crazy weather, the winding highways, even sometimes the stubborn insistence on excess. I'm not sure I'm cut out to spend my life fighting the Evangelicals (nor do I think that stooping to their mercurial metaphors is a good idea) but I can be evangelical about what I believe. It may not be written in a inconsistently-translated tome in dire need of some editing nor is it necessarily articulatible (especially without neologizing!) but I'll try. At this moment, I believe in beauty, in happiness, in the large and the minute, in individuality, in love, in the logical and the inane, in laughter and tears, in change and whimsy and in loyalty, and perhaps most importantly, in contradiction, in the gray area in between everything. I believe in "I don't know."

This instant, I believe in eating more baby carrots.

End of sermon.