Piety

How did a religion that began with a focus on kindness, service and gentleness -- unselfishness -- become so preoccupied with the most selfish of all actions: saving one's own soul and getting into heaven?

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,

et lux perpetua luceat eis!

Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,

quia pius es.

Give them eternal rest, Lord,

and shine eternal light upon them!

With thy saints forever,

for Thou art good.

quia pius es -- for thou art good.

pius  =  dutiful, conscientious; godly, holy; good, upright  (Collins Latin Dictionary).

pious  =  devoutly religious; making a hypocritical display of virtue; dutiful or loyal [archaic]  (New Oxford American Dictionary).

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It was, of course, Christ's own church that corrupted his message. By the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Catholic Church was telling its members that, if they didn't follow the church's dictates, they would burn in hell. They were damned by original sin, and the path to heaven lay through the Church:  prayer, ritual, and giving one's assets to the Church, rather than by service to one's fellow beings and giving directly to the poor. The Church accumulated land, gold and power. The poor and powerless sank into ignorance and misery, comforted with the promise of eternal life with all God's saints, if and only if the Church interceded with Him for them.

Then, flickers of light with Gutenberg and Luther. Literacy, the right to read God's word oneself, the right to pray directly to Him without earthly or saintly intermediaries. Renaissance.  Enlightenment. Intelligence seen as a gift from God, rather than a tool of Satan.

Progress, the end of slavery, the right of people to rule themselves -- eventually all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

And today?  What a wonderful and terrible world!  There are lots of people who are pious in the original way -- dutiful, good, kind, generous, loving. And there are a lot whose piety is no more than a hypocritical display of virtue. Churches that serve God by serving the poorest and weakest among us, and churches that serve only the powerful, and themselves.

If only all Christians would stop worrying about saving their own butts and getting into heaven ... and simply strive to be pius.

summer is a-cummin

End of the semester.  The only people happier than the students are the faculty.

I should face a string of days with plenty of time for writing.  I've got to make major progress on The Book, a couple of manuscripts need polishing and submitting, and I've got a couple of review articles to write.

But the first month is already gone -- finals were over and grades posted by the end of April, and the new students arrive before labor day -- and I've gotten far too little writing done. A week-long trip to the west coast was interesting (UCLA, Sandia Labs and a NASA meeting in Phoenix) and offered some fun (time with old Peace Corps friends in Albuquerque), but it added to the backlog of stuff on my desk, out from under which I'm just emerging.

To complicate matters, May has been mostly beautiful, when it wasn't raining.  I sit at our new big table in the recently closed in back porch / sunroom, listening to birds calling across the neighborhood and hearing music from downstairs, where Marie is working in her studio. I'm thinking that it's time to open the bar...