Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision declaring that under the First Amendment Coach Kennedy could hold prayers on the 50-yard line brought to mind Roxanna, my fifth grade classmate in Bladensburg, Maryland. Back in the 1950s – yes, there was such a time – school mornings began with the Lord’s Prayer and the pledge to the flag.
I had noticed that Roxanna who sat next to me did not say the Lord’s Prayer, so at recess I asked her why. “He’s not my Lord,” she responded. “I’m Jewish.” When I said that Jesus had been a Jew, she said, “Yes, but you made him into something else,” and proceeded to give me a 10-minute lesson on religious toleration.
Had the coach been of another faith, I had to wonder whether the freedom to impose a prayer on a football team would have been accepted, just as whether non-Christian religious schools in Maine would have been given tuition. There’s a reason we must uphold the separation of church and state. Religious fervor too often in the past has led to terrible violence against religious minorities.
Prayer for the Day
John’s Gospel tells us your house has many rooms, O God,
Let us remember that our is not the most important one;
You, O God, manifest yourself in a variety of ways,
Many beyond our experience and comprehension.
Just as Jesus healed the Samaritan despised by his own people,
Let us be voices of healing among those of different faiths.
In the name of the One who shows us your infinitude,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
'In religion itself there is nothing mysterious to its author,' Madison wrote in 1792. 'The mystery lies in the dimness of the human sight.' If it is ultimately impossible for mortals to know God's mind, the history of persecution becomes cosmically tragic - two thousand years of dogmatic men burning one another over religious ideas whose veracity only God can know.”
- Steven Waldman, from Founding Faith: the birth of religious freedom in America
Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.
Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Why do you see the speck in our neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own?
Jesus, from Matthew 7:3