Why I Am Not a Laestadian, Exhibit #203

Because stuff like this makes me happy.

A Bond Beyond Ideas

The last two comments on the last post are so timely for my life that I want to highlight them here:

"Jesus's strongest message was to love one another and he did not specify that we all had to believe the same things! So I cut my fellow travelers some slack and try to love them as I love myself." SISU

"When you take a look at the history of the the Laestadian movement and all the different splits, and all the people hurt in the process, I believe the majority of this would have been prevented if they put their focus on loving others, instead of judging someone else's faith and beliefs." EXFALC

Heck yes, I said upon reading that. But I asked myself, as I have many times recently: how have I shown love to my Laestadian relatives? How have I cut them slack? 

As a young woman, I distanced myself from family for very good reasons. (When you are told "you have the devil in you," leaving is self-preservation.) In leaving, however, I lost all the myriad and priceless things that come with the support of an extended family: the advice and stories, the shared adventures, lawnmowers, business contacts, childcare, celebrations, and memories. The hugs. The mementos. (The only tokens of my history I possess are a faded blanket and a baby rattle.)

Was it worth it? 

Fighting Words

Page from a Gutenberg Bible (1454)

This week I stopped at the downtown public library and saw an exhibition of rare religious texts. With permission, I photographed some of the treasures they had on display. The images you see here are presented in the order of the document’s dating, oldest first.

Witness to the Generations

I meditated on these centuries-old relics for quite a while, considering the many human lifetimes that have passed since the words were pressed and penned onto their pages. Even back then, the sources of those words were already ancient. Most of the books were Bibles, their text copied or translated from a succession of painstakingly hand-copied manuscripts whose original sources have been almost entirely lost in antiquity.

Two columns of clean, bold type stared out at me from the page of a Gutenberg Bible, 558 years after the ink went dry. So much history has passed since then, so many generations born into lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 1651). The black and red of the letters seemed not to have faded at all, unlike the colors of whoever pressed the type onto the page in Mainz, Germany–and his child, and that child, and so on. At least twenty generations of lives blooming and fading: a succession of pink-faced infancy transforming into the gray of old age and death, or worse, a dark red death on the endless battlefields of crusade and conquest.

The Power of "I'm Sorry"

As election year heats up and divisive politics rule the day, I hope you are as touched by this story as I was. Even though I can't, as an "ex," speak on behalf of Laestadians, let me say that I am so sorry for the pain the church has caused our gay sisters and brothers. So sorry.

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Free2bme

The Truth Shall Make You Free

“The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going.” —Proverbs 14:15

According to John 18:37-38, Jesus told Pilate that the reason he came into the world was to “bear witness unto the truth.” As the story goes, Pilate replied dismissively with the rhetorical question, “What is truth?” Such evasions aside, truth is simply this: the inescapable reality that is established by a certain framework of indisputable facts. Whether Pilate liked it or not–whether you or your preachers like it or not–there is such a thing as truth, and you cannot exempt yourself from its rules.

If the facts are inconsistent with a claim I am making, then that claim is not true. If the claim is not true, then it is false, and so is every other claim that depends on it. It’s really that simple.

“For the living know that they shall die: but the dead
know not any thing, neither have they any more a
reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”
—Eccl. 9:5

Buyer Beware

If I am trying to sell you a used car, it had better start when you turn the key. My statement that it “runs fine” will be proved false otherwise, and you will have little patience with my excuses. That spectacular failure of my claim to conform with the facts will make you inclined to distrust everything else I try to tell you about the car. There is no way for me to get around this problem. A protest that your “carnal understanding” cannot comprehend the qualities of the car would make me look just plain crazy. So would the assertion that it is only your “wrongful pride” that keeps you from truly considering the qualities of my non-functioning car. Your money would remain in your purse or back pocket, as you move slowly away.

“God shall send them strong delusion, that they
should believe a lie” —2 Thess. 2:11

It is a testament to the power of religion in the human psyche that it can exempt itself from the evidentiary standards of even a used car salesman. The same question you would be a fool for not asking–Is it true?–in the one case is considered downright offensive in the other. When you give the analogy just a little space to play out, you quickly realize how sad the whole spectacle really is: The car does not only fail to start, but by any objective indication seems not to exist at all. The salesman cannot get his story straight about what kind of car it is, claims it is the only car you could ever possibly own, and threatens you with sadistic tortures if you decide not to buy it. And if you walk down the street, you will find hundreds of equally impassioned salespeople selling their own invisible cars, all claiming to have the only one that actually exists.