Brian’s Reflection: Monday, Nov 9, 2009

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.

- Anne Sexton, poet, born on this date, 1928


God how I love poets! How grateful I am for them! Especially when one speaks of “God”. I get SO sick of all the talk of “God” by theologians and clergy, and especially by the religious nuts of our weird land. The religious atmosphere of America is getting more and more toxic as the weeks go by. I literally wept when I heard that the House vote on Health Care required an agreement on an abortion clause which clearly relegates women, as far as the government is concerned, to the status of slavery to men and to less than second-class inferiority. It made me sick to my stomach. So much for Government constitutionally not partnering with any particular religious tradition.

This is shameful. Utterly shameful. That people in this land can only get the right of health care by agreeing to the subjugation and inequality of women and to the denial of their equal rights! My mind reels at what feels like the political and theological Fascism of this country. As much as I want health care justice, I hope that if this issue comes to the President with that abortion clause attached, he vetoes it. And I shall urge him to. He won’t, of course. I sense that even Barack Obama – whom I SO hoped was different - is willing to sell his soul “to gain the world” for corrupt political prestige. As the Biblical writer pointed out: “what shall it gain a man” – and it is always men and politically seduced wo-men like Kay Bailey Hutchison and Margaret Thatcher who choose the acquisition of corrupt power over Just Compassion.

Out of the mouth of Anne Sexton’s brown-voiced, soft, “full of beer God” revealed in Jesus the Christ, lies the revelation of True God, to my sense, as poet Anne sexton rightly has experienced “God”. This is the God who would never make such a bargain with the Devil.

May the God of the soft brown and beery voice prevail.

Brian+