Try to remember...

Music: Harvey Schmidt
Lyrics: Tom Jones
Book: Tom Jones
Premiere: Tuesday, May 3, 1960

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.

Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it's nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.

Deep in December, our hearts should remember

And follow.

Last night my wife and I watched the movie "The Vow" which was loosely inspired by the true story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter whose relationship suffered after she lost her memory of their marriage following a brain injury. The movie characters actually ended their marriage after the girl lost any memory of the man she married a short time before, and returned to the very different life she led a few years before she met and married her husband. By the end of the movie the woman with memory loss had returned to many of the things she enjoyed even though her memory never returned, and the reason she returned to her life before memory loss is because her personality did not change. There is a debate as to how permanent personality is, but is wondered what would happen to me if I lost my memory of the last thirteen years supposing that our personality doesn't change after a brain injury. This seems like an academic question, but it really is practical because it can be assumed that I began this process of losing God because of some events or ideas that traumatized my sense of God's being. So I am going to try to remember.

This Need Not Apply

There is a promise in the Christian Bible that forces discomfort for many Bible believers. The verse 

reads "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6) I know that the verse is not true, you know this too, for without a mpment's hesitation you can think of at least one situation when the parents did a good job and kid went way off the deep end. I have heard several explanations for why this promise is in the Scripture, all of them trying to excuse good parents from bad results. The problem is that this is a clearly-worded promise. The idea is good, that parenting is important, but the exceptions to the rule have caused much heartbreak as good parents blame themselves for their child's wrong choices. I have heard preachers suggest that hidden sin in the lives of the parents caused the failure, or that the statement is the description of a general rule. I have even heard that the book of Proverbs is not really a part of the canon of Scripture after the realization of several of these statements in Proverbs that really aren't consistently true. 

Today I heard another explanation- not any statement in Proverbs can be taken as true without comparing it to other statements in Scripture and personal experience. I like this- "thou shalt not kill" unless it is politically expedient (Judges 18:27-29), socially necessary, (Judges 20:48) a response to being insulted (2 Kings 2:23-24), or religiously motivated (Numbers 25:1-9). I could literally take any clear statement in the Bible and twist it using other ideas and events in the Bible to whatever purpose I have. The craziest version of this is those Christians who insist that the Bible holds that American capitalism is more Biblical than socialism or communism. What drives our economy but the desire to have what others have and working hard to earn it? Well that goes against the command to not covet. So much for being a Christian nation built on the Ten Commandments. 

The interesting thing is how these moral understandings of the Bible have changed over the centuries. Genocide by Christians was supported by scripture and then condemned by Christians using the same book. Slavery was also supported among Christians by verses from the Bible and the later condemned by it. Racism has been supported for the Church by bible verses and also now condemned by most Churches using other Bible verses. These same Bible believers tell me that only if I use the Bible will I have an unchanged moral standard, but that if I believe in evolution my moral values will change over time. To me it seems that today's Christianity is just as much a product of evolution as anything else. 

When I hear Christians condemn gay marriage I now know that the way they read the Bible will change. Those commandments need not apply.