Render unto Caesar

My friends Anne-Laure and Eylem had their baby last night. Gabrielle was born at 11:15 pm Sunday night. I met her this afternoon. She's so cute it's hard to believe she's a newborn. I'm so happy for them! It's amazing to me that my friend is now responsible for another human life. While I have no doubt she will be great at it, I am floored that her whole world has changed and she seems to be handling it with such aplomb.

Okay, unrelated -- I read this in the Times this weekend -- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/opinion/09wills.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&incamp=article_popular. This op-ed kind of rocked my world because it basically verbalized a thought pattern that I forgot even existed. The point of it is that Christianity and politics cannot coexist not simply because of seperation of Church and State, but because they WERE NEVER MEANT TO COEXIST. Get it? Remember when Jesus (a tax paying citizen) said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's"? Meaning they are seperate entities. Being a taxpayer, a law abiding member of society, a politician even, has nothing to do with being a Christian.

The other quote from the Bible in this piece is one that was beaten into my thick skull throughout my years in parochial school. It's from Matthew 6:5-6 -- "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you." Meaning just because you make a big show out of being a Christian doesn't mean you know what it means, you big hypocrite. And see, what did I tell you? Christ doesn't want us to pray in school.

Lately, for completely unrelated reasons, I have been trying to keep some Christian thoughts at the forefront of my brain. I've been trying to remember the things I was taught as a child that did not thwart my development, the things that did not warp my judgement, the good stuff, you know? Sometimes God shows you something.

Saturday night a man came onto the 6 train that I was taking uptown to a reunion party that some girls from my high school were throwing (to which no one from my graduating class showed up, by the way.) This man came on the train. I kept listening to my MP3 player, wanting not to see him. He walked through the train asking for money. As he walked by me, I saw he had no shoes. His feet were dirty and gnarled and it was really cold out that night. And I started to cry. Not out loud or anything, just tears and I couldn't stop them. I couldn't look up because then he would see I was crying which would certainly make him feel worse about the fact that he has no shoes, that his clothes are stuffed with newspapers, that's he's asking for money on the subway, right? Even if he "put himself in that position" as some of my friends say to rationalize not giving money to homeless people, so what? The truth is he is standing in front of me with no shoes and not only do I have shoes but I have never known what it is like NOT to have shoes, not even when my mom was standing in line for government cheese back in the day.
I'm happy that I have lived in New York my entire life and the sight of someone with no shoes had an effect on me. I'm scared that I won't always see these people. I wonder if God puts these people in our way so that we will see them.

Anyway, it's interesting that this op-ed made it into the newspaper. I didn't imagine a lot of people would care about this but lots of blogs went out yesterday an today with people's reactions. I think a lot of these blogs missed the point but its cool that Christ is being discussed and NOT by the scary people -- meaning right wing, bigoted, using-Christ-as-a-shield-to-hide-their-own-discretions weirdos, people that I would be scared for little Gabrielle or my nephews or any of the other children I love to be exposed to. You know who you are.

Okey dokey, Christian rant OUT. Random Louise thoughts IN. Does anyone else liket the band Spoon? Amazing group. One of their songs has now made it into a car commercial, which disturbs me, but whatever.

In other interesting news, the V train just stopped running tonight because, according to our very well-informed conductor, "there's some problem with the tracks at... um... Grand Street... in Brooklyn... I mean in Queens." You wanna know what I think? I think there are gonna be LOTS of subway delays in the coming days because Roger Toussaint got jail time today. If ever a nimrod had something coming... Christian thoughts, Louise. Christian thoughts.