Entsorgung

Wenn eine der "Grandes Dames des literarischen Feminismus"(taz) am Palmsonntag auf der Kanzel predigt, wird es interessant.

Fay Weldon, vor einigen Jahren getauft und seitdem bekennende Anglikanerin, hat es in ihrer Kirche nicht leicht, wie viele andere, "die sich Gott durch unser aesthetisches Empfindungsvermögen nähern".

"In our local church they are taking down the Victorian oak boards on which the Ten Commandments are engraved because they depress people and looked gloomy, and they like a bright and cheerful church. Apparently they were seen as forbidding. Well, what else? Thou shalt not. She said her congregation – who were all over seventy she said, and she was about 40 – had come to her and asked her not to read those certain epistles in which they’re told not to fornicate and commit adultery and get drunk because they weren’t really likely to, were they. So she was picking the bits of the Bible she felt were appropriate. She liked to be in charge. But it was rather a facer: hard to find a rationale.

I thought fast and said but surely, those were written when people seldom lived beyond fornication age: what the congregation had to do was to consider their own inclination to cheat and betray, even though it no longer took physical form. Don’t change the liturgy to suit the audience, change the audience to suit the liturgy. Isn’t that the general idea? But it was easier not to try and she’s busy: she really is, about her pastoral duties which she fulfills very well. All our clergy are overworked and underpaid. She said that the churches which used the old language – which she seemed to actively dislike – were emptying fast and the ones which used the new were filling up, and I said but that’s because you’re delivering feel-good sessions and a singsong on a Sunday: you have removed the terror and awe of God from the service.

You are worshipping a false God, I wanted to say, one made in your own image. A nice, touchy-feely social worker and I suspect very female God."(Quelle)