This started as a response to a comment in one of the recent threads, but it hit me that what I was saying got to the core of something that's been bugging me for a while. Quite a while.
The "here" in my title refers strictly to Street Prophets, not the world in general. So, please click on the link to this picture, and contemplate it for a minute. Then follow me across the jump.
The picture is one of those representations where if you shift your focus a bit, the image changes from a young lady to an old woman. I've found this image helpful in thinking through the weirdnesses of having a strong sense of spirituality, of being someone for whom religion is extremely important, of being someone for whom God is the most helpful term for integrating diverse perspectives on things - of being all that with a mother who is an atheist, and who lives in a society that seems to me increasingly polarized between two mythic structures - one Evangelical Christian and another Enlightenment Rationalist.
And what seems to be happening here on Street Prophets of late is a lot of energy going into deciding whether the picture we're looking at is a picture of a young woman or an old woman. But that's not the purpose of this site. This is:
Street Prophets is the online forum that mobilizes progressive people of faith to name, discuss and take action on critical political and religious issues. An offspring of Daily Kos, the largest political blog on the Internet, Street Prophets seeks to change the "moral values" conversation by fostering community; promoting informed opinion and moving its members to action.
Because make no mistake: we are people who live and vote our values. We are believers in "justice, freedom, compassion and love," in the words of Rita Nakashima Brock. We are progressive, Democratic-leaning and vitally concerned with those whom Jesus called "the least of these." We are the faithful for whom the religious right emphatically does not speak.
To go back to the picture, whether the old woman or young woman is the image that we see more easily, we're all here - to extend the metaphor - as curators who have a job to take care of the picture itself.
So whether we believe in God or not, or whether we belive God is a metaphysical reality or a metaphor for all that is real, we're here to come together to figure out how we can more effectively
There are so many others who have contributed whom I'm overlooking in thanks at the moment - demand acknowledgment in the comments, please.
I don't think it's "wrong" to discuss the image in the picture, or how we see it, or how we feel when others who see the picture differently try to deny our experience. That's all valid, that's all good, that's all fun (for the most part). But the fact is, if we as a society keep up the way we're going, we might not have a picture to discuss.
And the fact is that I need to be pushed as much as everyone else does to look at the problems, horrors, and tragedies of this world. I feel overwhelmed with the sheer number of problems confronting us, but I feel a responsibility to do what I can to fix them. And I know that I can't do it by myself. I get tired of always seeing really great diaries that confront important, life and death issues scroll into oblivion while we argue about whether God exists or not. Why can't we as a community do both with equal amounts of passion? As Al Gore reminds us, paraphrasing an African proverb "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, quickly."
