Politics and Faith

I have "enjoyed" politics since at least 1968 when I started the first grade. I remember the day after the Presidential vote walking to (I think) lunch and hearing our Principal announce that Richard Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey. Four years later, I wanted to write the Governor of Tennessee to urge that he pass a law so that ten year olds (which just happened to be my age) could vote for President. I have lost more than won, but usually felt energized enough to recover in time for the enxt round of campaigns, issues and elections.
Not that I am swearing off politics or the causes in which I believe: far from it. Where I feel the most passion currently, however, stands squarely on issues of faith and, loosely understood, "theology." I realized those feelings during my research, writing and discussion of my class papers this summer, both concerning Shakesperean characters and in each of whom I found appropriately theological lenses through which to interpret their lives and actions (Falstaff and Iago). During my process, I found myself, in essence, almost "tuning out" the various twists and turns coming out of Washington, even for the most part the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts (although I e-mailed my Senators urging them to oppose his nomination) . My Memphis friends have "blogged" like mad over the recent County Democratic Party elections, which has been interesting to follow, but not something in which I invested much energy, despite my considering myself to be a Memphian.
When faith and theology become involved, however, I "focus like a laser beam." When a member of my church (who has a Ph.D) mouthed that Islam is "an evil religion," I wanted (and should have) blasted his ass out of the water. His disgusting comment indicates a stupidity that I find incomprehensible in a world when thousands of Moslems use almost the exact phrase about Christianity and we Christians, putting their faith into action by flying planes into buildings. What makes Christianity better than Islam? What gives we who are Christians the obscene right to condemn a worldwide faith whose very name means "peace?" What makes our "Bible" better than their "Koran?" I am a Christian, as I have told my friends and at least some of my former parishioners, as I can be nothing else after having tried to be "something else." For me to limit the Creator of all that is to one particular faith "system" (just happening to be mine) I find both impossible and ridiculous (although I make an exception for my Mother who insists that Christianity is "the most refined" of the world's faiths). If God is beyond our ability to understand, then why does any faith group (including died in the wool secularists who have just as much of a faith as we who profess a particular series of "words about God") proclaim itself as superior or legitimate or the only "path to salvation?" In the words of John Shelby Spong (whose work I find almost always overwhelmingly refreshing and invigorating), God cannot finally be understood, but experienced, which is the clear implication of the story of Moses "seeing" God's back after it has passed by him on Sinai. If experience "after the fact" is the best we mere mortals can expect, why do we turn around and suggest that we somehow have come to possess the truth, to the point of calling a different faith system "evil?"
Those issues energize me and, I suspect, will do so throughout the rest of my life. I understand God through Christian symbols rooted in our glorious Judaic heritage. I experience that God in a variety of means, often having something to do with music, but sometimes through stories or even, as John's Gospel puts it, "incarnated" moments. I am grateful for others in my life who have alternative experiences. Thank God for them all--