Kirkepiscatoid

That it may please thee to grant that, in the fellowship of
[__________ and] all the saints, we may attain to thy
heavenly kingdom,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Hmm. "Attain."

I dunno. I don't think there's any attaining. I think it's just there, if you know what I mean.

At the risk of sounding like a universalist, sometimes I wonder if the "evil within us" dies when we die. I mean, first of all, we're all human. We have all done some degree of evil. We all fall short of the glory of God. None of us are going to attain salvation on our own merit.

The other problem, of course, is that matter of corporate guilt. It took me a long time to even acknowledge the possibility of "corporate guilt." But then if I believe in corporate guilt, then the converse would be corporate salvation, now wouldn't it? Maybe I think along the lines of Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov, when he says, "Hate not atheists, the teachers of evil, materialists, even the most wicked of them, let alone the good ones among them...Remember them in your prayers, thus: "Save, O Lord, all who have no one to pray for them, and save those, too, who do not want to pray to Thee."

Judgment is kind of a problem for me. There are plenty of things I dislike, people I dislike, people whom I think are "evil." There is much about the world I loathe. I really loathe our culture of conformity, of artificial, of eternal youth, of "appearances." I am bumfuzzled at how the homely, the obese, the dorky, and the nerdy are so easily discounted when it has been my experience that a lot of very sweet souls live within these people.

I have a hard time grading "evil." Sure, we can all point to the Joseph Mengeles and the Saddam Husseins and such, and come to a consensus on some forms of evil. But what about all the silent evils that occur right under our noses? I think about a friend from my past, who years later I discovered that her ex-husband liked for her to go out dressed up in whorish clothing so men would look at her and he could pick fights with them, then go home and get her to agree to sexual acts that she found fairly degrading. Or I think about mothers whose sole subconscious aim for their children is to grow up to feed their narcissistic egos and to raise them in an environment where "nothing is ever good enough", to hell with their children's own personal growth.

I am certainly not immune to participation in such forms of evil. My hot temper is a willing participant in such events. I have dressed down trainees till their ass was on fire. I have "cut off my own nose to spite my face" at times not to let someone else that I really disliked have something. There are a few people in this world (mostly people who have not done ME dirty, but did my friends dirty) that I really, probably, lie in wait for the first chance they ever cross me in the sole hope of verbally "letting them have it with both barrels." Well, hell, and then there's that line in the Reconciliation of a Penitent, all those "other sins which I cannot now remember." Hell, the ones I do remember include lust and greed and pride and hoarding (I guess that is either a form of coveting or gluttony, or both).

So, you know, I'm just not the person who can evaluate someone else's salvation. I'm not going to let my personal feelings about some people get in the way. I am saved by grace, not because I wandered down a church aisle and said a magic sentence, not because I was baptized or confirmed, not because I jumped through a bunch of denominational hoops in a certain way. That means people I don't like get the same deal. Some of the things I've done, some other person might not think I'm worthy of grace.

Yet I think it pleases God if we all show up to his party, sins and all. That is really an impossible one for me to figure out, but I think it is the one thing that drives me wanting to not just be a better person, but to continue to let go of some things and "put them under my Christ."