Thursday, October 12, 2017

                _____________Psalm 133:1 

O,

how 

good 

and 

pleasant it is when 
brothers & sisters live together in unity.

                                ***  

The translation said “brethren,”  but that linguistically  leaves  out out half of humanity.

One said “God’s people” and that also is too exclusive, implying a tribal God (a kind of "mine's bigger than yours"attitude) rather than the One Creator God (an impulse that still surivives in a virulent form in funadmanetlaism of every stripe.) I think what Jesus, he whom we Christians  believe to be God made vsisble  & who came came to “break down the dividing walls of hostility between us,” would say "brothers and sisters." For that is what we are.  (The children's hymn I sang at St Matthew's Day School "Black and yellow, red, white, they are precious in his sight" was teaching a child-acccessible inclusivity that is foundational to our understabnding of others, and all the more critical since all I saw day in and day out was the latter.....  Our  1979 BCP   still trnalates the word as brethren. (But 'you know what we mean' not longer suffices, and I am no gender neutral Nazi….  Yikes! That has a new and revolting relevance in America today!)  But a tenacious  disbelief in the  the eqiuality of the sexes - amd deeper than that, quite apart from gender and sexuality itself,  he dignity of perosnahohod - is still alive and well even in our own country, when women can be (and are) grabbed by any body part and sexually used by those in positions of power.