Does your Christian Cross decal mean you're Republican?

After 25 yrs of practicing Tibetan Buddhism, I've returned to my Christian/Catholic roots. Both Paths are good. For me, being a liberal Catholic is more meaningful and is becoming a deep, mystical experience.

As I was driving over the Bay Bridge this morning I followed a new, red, Ford pickup truck. There was a white decal on the back window of a person kneeling before a Cross. The same type of decals that often show young males pissing on the object of their distaste (the wrong make of car or motorcycle, or --recently, Osama bin Laden--even in the Bay Area...). It struck odd that the decal made me feel slightly uncomfortable. Was this the decal of a republican evangelist? Or was the driver like me, a non-republican who loves Jesus and His message of peace and love of one's neighbor?

Had the decal been of a Buddha, sitting peacefully in meditation posture, I would have immediately felt a kinship with it and its driver. No emotional charge. But because of the damaging messages put out by the Bush administration over the past 4 yrs, being a Christian/Catholic is no longer what it used to be. The religion has been claimed by the fundamentalists who use its banner to foist their own messages of non-inclusion, classism, militarism and the "Our way or no way" morality/mentality.

The US used to be a truly great country. I think we've lost our moral compass. Probably the same feelings that the guy in the truck has... God help us.

Christianity: Left, Right or Center?

I am troubled by the Bush administration co-opting Christianity to further their not-very-Christian agenda. I see the political cartoons showing Bush in some self-compromised stance, while in the background, there's a flag-waving, self-righteous guy, who's also waving the Bible at some Godless democrats who favor abortion or who are against the war in Iraq.

My country has, twice in a row, elected a man who speaks English worse than any of my recent immigrant 6th graders (I'm trying to be kind here...), and who struts around with a proud smirk while he eliminates our personal freedoms.

Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, says that pride is the basic flaw in the human system and that humility is its corrective.

--Sr. Joan Chittister, who further says: "Humility is not an American virtue."

Where are the true (read: virtuous) heros today to whom our young people can look up to?

Creating arrogant and self-centered bullies in the name of self-reliance is just as bad as creating simpering and insecure adults in the name of religion.

--Chittester

I work with (29) 11 and 12 year olds whose only view of the world outside their limited exposure to the Bay Area in which we live is the television. God help them. And us. Violence creeps into their verbal and physical communication with each other. The 'heros' they're given daily are anyone from our weight-lifting governor to the smirky guy in the White House. In between are all of the misogynist rappers.

I'm trying to teach these kids that humility can be liberating. That they don't need to project that they're something that they're not. And I realize that they're at the exact age, especially the boys, when they feel it's necessary to wear the toughest armor they can come up with. And again, where are their mentors? Certainly not in the media.

The goal of the twenty-first century is to cure all diseases, rectify all inefficiency, topple all obstacles, end all stress. We wait for nothing, put up with little, and abide less, reacting with fury at irritations. We do not tolerate process. We want power, and we want to exercise it now...in the end, raw power cannot prevail. Ambition is bondage.

--Chittister

I want the best for my students, my country and my religion. I'm not sure if Bush's plan to Christianize and democratize the world is how Jesus, the most democratic human to have lived, would go about it. Would He use the the same collection of "The 25 most infuential Evangelicals", that Time magazine just featured? I don't think so.