Guilty! I sit guilty, Lord. Guilty of blocking the light you’ve given me. Guilty of straying from the path you’ve paved for me. Guilty of desiring more the favor of friends and the comforts of culture than pressing forth the principles you’ve implanted within me. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
Guilty! Guilty of failing to figure out a way to reconcile Dale Carnegie with Gandhi. Our political leaders persist in gross hypocrisy, hiding behind You while changing money for favors, selling out the least of us and acting with all means of hate, selfishness and greed. Yet my defiance makes the voters of them, the supporters of their party, upset with me, draws a line between us, makes Your love impossible, or at least most difficult. How do I smile with family and friends, how do I keep from offending or afflicting them as I stay true to the mission of justice and truth that is me? How Lord, how?
Guilty! Guilty of shielding my mind to war abroad and poverty at home with the distractions of plenty and pleasure. Guilty of soothing my conscious with trifling donations, exchanges of peace at church, prayers and tsk-tsks at daily headlines—“34 killed in roadside bomb in Baghdad.”
Guilty of deadening my senses, of rationalizing my paradise while murder and mayhem I condone by my friendly-faced silence. Guilty of the chaos and corruption I support with my taxes and “let’s get along and go along” pleasantries instead of round-the-clock Canary in the mineshaft cries of “LOOK WHAT WE’RE DOING, LET’S STOP IT NOW!” But canaries die. Jesus died.
Guilty! Oh woe, don’t want to die, Lord. Just let me lie, lie in peace with my pleasing luxuries and remain, safely, guilty…
...And then the Jesusian refrain: “Whosoever will save his life will lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake will save it.” And what is “Jesus’ sake” if not the Beatitudes—to live peace, live justice, live charity, live mercy, wish well for friend and enemy alike, turn over the moneychangers’ tables, tear down the walls of hate and intolerance, tear them down!
Not for one minute more should we tolerate theft from within by those in Washington. Not for one minute more should we engage in pre-emptive war sold on lies, continued on more lies. Not for one minute more should we sing “God bless America” while not also wishing that God Bless THE WORLD!
If I offend thee, I am sorry. If thou wouldst silence me, then deaf to ye shall I be. For I shan’t longer tarry with the work given me, so that from now evermore my guilt be set free.
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