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Purple Lipstick and a Cudgel
Last updated on: August 15, 2017 at 9:00 am by Anne Kennedy
Purple Lipstick and a Cudgel 2017-08-15T09:00:03-04:00 Anne Kennedy
Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.
So many directions in which to turn this morning. The internet is addled with specious reasoning and charming fatuousness. But I think I will stick with my first thought, which is to place this funny video alongside this other funny video. Of course, this skewering of the first wins the day and I can’t top it. It’s so wonderful I’ve read it three times, willingly forgiving decadently fading feminist assumptions in relishment of the cutting wit. But still, after you have read the article and been as jealous about the writing as I was, watch the video. It’s a real gem. And then watch the other one, which is also precious.
So, the real note of hope is that ordinary left of left people are raising their eyebrows and having trouble ‘keeping up’ with the astounding Uptalk Logic that now characterizes our modern way. This is entirely a good thing. The more people who find the corners of their mouths twitching in the face of the well meaning trying to explain their way out of the vacuousness of their own feels, the better.
Still, we haven’t come into the way of peaches and sunshine. Just because you can see that something is wrong doesn’t mean you know what to do about it. Doubling down on the complete otherization of all people, a la GDM, propping up your cultural superiority by blaspheming the name of Jesus is not a good option. Nor is just going back to where we were ten minutes ago before transgenderism became the fanciest thing.
Surely it would be useful to notice that if you’re going to institutionalize the destruction of one kind of person–the wrong color person perhaps, or the baby, and along with him the moral ensouled body of the woman who, by believing the lie that if she kills the body of her infant, her own self will suffer no consequences, that there won’t be a great unraveling of her mind, her spirit, her eternal future–the whole body of a nation will drink out of the cup of that destruction. Death can’t be at the center of the system if you want sanity.
Which is what be-lipsticked ‘non-binary’ bright young things are groping along in the dark looking for. Which is what that ‘philosophy professor’ is wandering in her ever tighter ‘logical’ circle to find. A sane mind, an ordered heart, a way of being that isn’t strewn with the broken shards of contradiction.
The great god Choice turns out to be a decrepit donkey wearing a mangy, dead lion’s head. You thought you would get to be free, but the way is ever narrower as your mind becomes darker and your soul tethered to it’s irrational and broken thinking. It turns out to be an anxious prison. You can’t leave your room or your mind. You have no way of speaking to any other person. Your isolation holds you, keeps you, strangles you.
The way out isn’t more of the same, nor going backwards, nor just finding new words, nor more medicine* and permission for you to do you. No, the only way out is to lift up the spiritual gaze, come to the long lost, out of fashion repentant ‘self,’ and to go into the arms of the rational Father who made the sane narrow way that of the Son, the only person who can heal body, soul, and mind. To say it more plainly–the gospel. Jesus.
Truly, there is a solution. It is the incredible truth that Jesus took the brokenness of our bodies and minds into his own body and made a way of healing in his own blood. You don’t need purple lipstick, an abortion, a cudgel, Thor, or to go to Princeton. You need Jesus–the way, the truth, and the life. And if you have him already, you might want to go tell everybody you know about him and his forgotten but perfect hope.
*not knocking meds here…please don’t stop taking your meds
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