<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">PADDY’S GREEN</span><br>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Kate Middleton, <i>aka</i> Princess
Catherine Elizabeth, Duchess of Cambridge, wife to Prince William, the Duke of
Cambridge, and Colonel in the Irish Guards, was fashionably all green (down to
eyeshadows) during the regimental ceremonies on St. Patrick’s Day <i>(Lá
Fheile Pádraig) </i>where she handed sprigs of shamrock and a basket of
the same to officers who in turn handed sprigs to their men. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">OK. For my fellow
“pedestrians”, Patrick was an English lad in the 5rd century when Irish marauders
kidnapped him in England and brought him to the Emerald Isle to serve as a
slave to his captors. He escaped,
returned to England, trained in the priesthood, and returned to his pagan
captors in Ireland, converting them to Christianity. That’s how he made it to the pantheon of
western saints.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Now, what’s with the “pedestrians”? </span><font color="black">Paddy was in <u></u><u></u>New York<u></u><u></u>. He was patiently waiting and watching the traffic cop on a busy street crossing. The cop stopped the flow of traffic and shouted, "Okay, pedestrians." </font><font color="black">Then he'd allow the traffic to pass. He'd done this several times, and Paddy still stood on the sidewalk. After the cop had shouted, "Pedestrians!" for the tenth time, Paddy went over to him and said, "Is it not about time ye let the Catholics across?" </font>(With
apologies to the Irish folks in this readership, but the foregoing tends to be
the tenor of Irish jokes. There probably
were not too many floating around Saipan anyway, save over promoting the
bitters at the bar zones in Garapan.)</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Paddy’s Day has, of course, become more contemporaneous in the issues
it deals with beyond the Catholic and Protestant divide. Boston’s Mayor refused to march in the St.
Patrick’s Day parade because the organizers refused the participation of gays
and lesbians. Ditto for the vaunted New
York City parade usually seen around the world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">The issue of LGBT’s legal right is advancing faster in State
Legislatures and the courts of law than in sanctified solemn assemblies. The United Methodist Church that brought me
up, traditionally wore its social conscience in neon lights on its forehead; now
finds itself behind the curve as its Good News Evangelicals have made Paul of
Tarsus’ homophobia and subservient female prejudice in the service of American
political conservatism.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family:">With the UMC, this is actually an anomaly. A good 60 percent of mainstream Methodists
tend to be more progressive than what is reflected in the wordings of its Book
of Discipline: <i><span style="color:#434343">“Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual
unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in
our churches.”</span></i></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">The 38 percent foreign contingent voting in the last General
Conference of the UMC for “participatory” types like me would be an occasion
for delight save that they were those who remained subservient to the New York
or Nashville offices and their budgetary support, towing essentially the
missionary lines. Saving souls from
hellfire damnation in the by-and-by remained the mission, along with an
ingrained idolatry of Jesus, and polishing the altar cross for do-goodism, straight
out of downtown Main Street, South of the Mason-Dixon line, U.S.A., 1930s and
thereafter. Ergo, a majority of the
delegates from Asia and Africa are mirror images of the missionaries that
“groomed” them. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Homophobia and its related prejudices are learned, not homegrown. I
ran into it in 1965 when I went to a conservative American Seminary in the
former slave State of Kentucky. My former Church suffers deeply and widely from
the debilitating disease.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 15pt;"><span style="font-family:">On the other hand, the denomination is experiencing a case
of widespread ecclesiastical disobedience as members of the clergy ignore
provisions that prohibit their presiding over L & B unions. Retired Methodist clergy 80-yr. old Thomas
Ogletree, former Yale Divinity School Dean, was going to face Church trial for
officiating on the same-sex marriage of his son. The Presiding Bishop of New York area Martin
McLee threw out the case declaring</span><span style="color: rgb(67, 67, 67);"> </span><span style="font-family:">an
unconditional dismissal of the charges, unprecedented in the Methodist Church. The language of Bishop McLee in the “just
resolution” is even more momentous: <i>I call for and commit to a cessation of
church trials for conducting ceremonies which celebrate homosexual unions or
performing same-gender wedding ceremonies …</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">This is rearguard action to me but someone has to clean the horse
manure off those Kentucky horse farms!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">Green has become the color of my mission of late, though the mission
itself is deeply embedded in the Christian faith. “For God so loved the world …” begins the
oft-quoted scriptural verse, but we’ve had a tendency to skip the first phrase
and move on to the next one, creating a redemption by substitution notion not
unlike the knights of the roundtable and their virtue of self-sacrifice.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">It has now become clear that we consume a good half more than the restorative
and carrying capacity of the planet, so the question of how one does love the
world, deep in the Christian tradition, is existentially appropriate. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:">I’ll go with Kate. I go green!</span></div>
<br>
<div style="clear: both;"><i>j'aime la vie</i><br>
<a href="mailto:pinoypanda2031@aol.com">pinoypanda2031@aol.com</a><br>
<div><i>yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!</i></div>
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