[Oe List ...] UMC, Bill Cosby, and Me

[via OE]

UMC, Bill Cosby, andMe
 
I shifted from civil to canon law in '65 after I bumped intoBultmann, Bonheoffer, Chardin, Tillich, Rahner, Kuhn, and the Niebuhrs.  Though I grew up a pastor's kid, there was nopressure to follow father's footsteps.  Customaryto Pilipinos, one is sacrificed at the altar of sanctified poverty throughChurch ordination and my youngest brother had the honor.  He did not expect his elder brothers to segueinto pastoral theology, so by the time it was his turn, my mother said,"Enough."
 
I became an earthrise glocalwarrior (global in perspective, local in responsibility), a creature at theedge of my social time.  I hied back tothe Philippines to join the on-going UMC renewal so that we can reformulate theworld!
 
The idealism of youth was short lived.  Many in my denomination cared only to be a delegateto the US General Conference, or be an Episcopal Bishop.  Daily pastoring to the realities of thisworld was peripheral.  One-up-man-shipwas prevalent.
 
Pea Eye hosted US Air and Naval Bases sending uniformed personnelto Korea and Vietnam.  The UMCperfunctorily prayed for peace, but we were uppity American-led Protestants ina medieval Roman Catholic ocean, and as separated brethren in the faith, wetreated Catholics, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists as pests.  Chiang's Chinese did not count.  They were Mao's pagans and communists, belowthe human radar screen.  Koreans andJapanese who converted were missionaries' minions.
 
Colleagues polished and refurbished the image of Christ's universalreign, or oiled the promise of upward bliss in the by-and-by.  Inversely, my feet were grounded in mud,hands dirtied in the complex stew of human affairs, my gaze horizontal ratherthan heavenward.  Mission moved to theglobal network of structural revolution, a long concrete march in thehere-and-now attempted by of the Ecumenical Institute where I asked the UMC tohave me assigned.  EI's engagement seareddeep; we took turns on sabbatical.  
 
I went back to UMC in Guam on my sabbatical where thecommunity diplomatically told me that teaching at Seminary was where I was bestsuited.  That triggered my wandering intothe ecology rhetoric of PCV, aka US Peace Corps, USAID, World Bank and the ADBin Manila.
 
It was 1984, title of George Orwell's dystopian novel, whenBill Cosby's Show upped NBC's ratings.  Tounderstand how radical the show was, after two decades of the Civil Rights Act,Cliff and Claire Huxtable played by Bill Cosby and Philytia Rashad became athrowback to a wholesome family of well-off parents with relativelylevel-headed children, a Hollywood stereotype, save this was anAfrican-American family. 
 
The global mission of EI collapsed in 1986.  The center would not hold for 2500-some"volunteers".  The group held eachother accountable to their covenants, me on my marital fidelity.  Arriving in San Francisco on the height ofthe Haight-Asbury love-in just after my teens, I took to habit Robert Heinlein'sgrokking in his Sci-Fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.  Not wildly but frequent enough to be aberrantto the norm of religious clerics; it proved costly.  Covenants dissipated.
 
At a PCV orientation for Muslim Mindanao in Zamboanga in the80s, I was taken by one trainee graduate of prestigious Quaker Elon College, a walkaway from where I was previously a shade-of-color as Associate in Muir'sChapel, an all-white UMC in North Carolina. I took the lady trainee out to lunch. 
 
I was not innocently flirtatious.  But I was gallantly friendly to the oppositesex though I previously labored promoting horizontal social relations incommunity development; I did not pay close attention to trainer-traineerelations.  Being the training Director, Reagan'sPCV Country Director's feedback adjudged my taking a trainee out to lunch to constitute"abuse of power"!
 
Bill Cosby has contradictions.  Attractive to ladies and admired by men, hewas said to be thoughtful to those who warmed his bed (says bag man FrankScotti); he also indulged into chemical stimulants, like the rest of theentertainment industry in his time.  Ladiestoday, out of a more stringent standard of "abuse of power" a fewyears after the fact, accuse Cosby of having forcibly coerced them intosubmission to his will.  The emotionallyladen term is "rape".   The number of accusations and quality ofconfessions fall against Cosby's favor. The Temple U grad and poster boy just resigned his seat in the Board Room.
 
Goodbye Immanuel UMC in Saipan came in 2003 after Iself-defrocked.  Funny Cosby is no longerfunny, time for him to call it a night. (Joan Collins reveals that her first husband drugged and raped her whenshe was a 17-yr old virgin, married and divorced him 4 years later.  Must be a post-WWII syndrome!)  For those of us who still regard his fallenhumanity as par for the course, he might just let Roseanne Barr make him thebutt of her joke at her being bloodied after a tussle with Cosby. 
 
I write, inter alia, ofthe "sins of this father".  
 


j'aime la vie
pinoypanda2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20141202/ca5d9293/attachment-0001.htm>