So, we've just watched the sun go down on another solstice. I've spent the day today out at a range with my unit cooking the back of my neck in the long sunlight. I happened to point out that it was the summer solstice, and that it was a good day.
Well, the fellow I was speaking to did not take kindly to that. He felt that by my mentioning the solstice, the longest day of the year to him, that I was somehow attacking him for being a Christian. "We don't pay attention to that sort of thing," he told me. 'Cause, you know, Christians are forbiden to notice the passing of the seasons.
He then went into a long explaination of how Christans, by which he meant Evangelicals, were a persecuted and hunted group in America.
It was a wake up call to me that I needed. A lot of Conservative, Evangelicals feel so victimized by the world that the very mention of a word that they in any way associate with other traditions(in the case of my story, I guess the fellow was afraid that I was a pagan or something) causes them to fall into a defensive fit of anger.
That anger, I guess, insulates them, and helps to protect them against that most terrible of all fates, the becoming aware of knowledge of the Other.
Shhh.
Don't tell him about St. John's Day. I'm not sure his wee, threatened self could handle it.
Posted by: Irene M. | June 22, 2009 at 11:52 AM