The Glass Ele-phant
By © Anton
Vendamencsh, 2017
Chapter 6/Smothering The Rose 4
I have previously noted that the definition of
self-sacrifice in none of the dictionaries (that I have viewed) recognizes that
it may include the sacrifice of life. Instead, ‘self-sacrifice’ has been
replaced by the words ‘suicide’ or ‘donate’. The latter is a word that for the
most part refers to donation of money to a charity, but may also refer to a
donation of blood to a victim of a catastrophic accident. In my native language
of Latvijan, to donate reads ‘ziedot’, a word that has been derived from ‘to
bloom’ in the sense of, both, for a bloom to open and to wilt (noziedēt). Therefore,
it may be said that a soldier donated/ bloomed/ ziedoja his life to help cause
his-her community to live.
If we follow the official, academic, and sanitized
versions of what self-sacrifice means, we arrive at the conclusion that Jesus
Christ donated his life to the cause that
our sins be forgiven. Jesus’s donation is not referred to as an act of
creation (remember the parable that
unless a seed fall unto the ground and die, it does not bear fruit) and to maintain
our community.
The New Testament presents Jesus as if He does not have a
mind of his own, but is killed at the family dinner tabele by ‘bad men’ for mysterious reasons of their
own. Though the donation of Jesus may include a donation of blood, the attempt
is made not to refer to it in words, but is referred to it mutely (make of it
what you will) by a sip of unfermented and artificially sweetened grape juice
at the Eucharist. To
borrow a scene from The Godfather, when Michael, son of Don Carleone
(Godfather) kills Solozzo, he
reenacts Peter, who at the Last Supper draws his sword against the would be
killer of his father. From this perspective Solozzo is
Jesus—but only to his family. Solozzo dies for sins of his own and lives (by
selling opiates) so his family may live. While the New Testament has been
rewritten many times, the story of Jesus retains enough truth for a perceptive
reader to realize that He did not live only for the sake of Magdalena and the
apostles. Moreover, He did not ride in a Popemobile, but on a donkey as a King who
has dedicated his life to his community.
Why does the Christian Church avoid mentioning that
Jesus’s death was an act of self-sacfice of life and that self-sacrifice of
life is part of Jesus’s predestined fate? Obiously, because it would then have
to recognize that either Jesus is an ordinary man who was murdered or one who
committs suicide. It would then also have to acknowledge that so-called suicide
by common man-woman is not suicide, but a self-sacrificial act. This raises a vulgar
question: Is an alcoholic who hangs himself a self-sacrifice? Most people would
call it a suicide. Even so, one may argue that the ‘suicide’ is protesting 1) self-enrichment
of government by selling alcohol; and 2) the removal by that government of the
man’s born right to live in the wood and not
be turned into a slave. As we know, slaves are not allowed to work for
themselves (as Nature intended), but must work for profit from
which government extracts taxes on the presumption that it, government, represents
the better half of humankind and has the right to presume for itself life in
perpetuity.
The link (live in the wood), which shows
the dispossession of people from the wood by the government of Kenya is an example
of what happened in Latvija after its old kingdom of Jersika (thought of as a
curiosity by today’s Latvijan government and historians) was invaded by
Catholic Christianity with its doctrine of taxation as the 11th
Commandment: gradually the land was deforested and the people who lived there
were turned into farmers or driven into cities where they were overtaxed and
under the supervision of the police.
After my
Moravian forebears convinced the natives of what the Germans called Livland to
leave (about 1737) the wood, the natives recovered their sense of identity and
discovered themselves to be Estonians
and Latvijans. Having reoccupied and survived in the wood, they also had gained
a new sense of the freedoms that the wood had offered their forebears. It was not
long before the natives began to attempt to evict the German barons from the
land.
The barons
soon realized what their former serfs were up to and did what they could to
destroy their new found identify and narrative. My greatgreatgreatgrandfather Gusts
(b. 1766) was married to Anna, my greatgreatgreatgrandmother (b. 1770), was
born to a man who called himself Liberts, i.e, Free Man. The latter is
mentioned as attending a Moravian meeting in 1743. The Catholic thelogians (reformed
Lutherans by then) realizing the challenge that the Moravian Brothers offered
the subservient Christianity they preached, sprang into action and persuaded
the Russian tsarina Elizabeth to squelch the movement. Forced to go
underground, the Moravian Church movement experienced more downs than ups, and
gradually transformed itself into a secular movement, which 150 years later reemerged
as “the New Current” (Jaunā strāva). This was an early
(and mild) version of later uncompromising Bolsheviks. Being a secular
movement, the New Current developed a narrative that denied its origins in the
Moravian Brotherhood.
Most
commentators on the Moravians in Latvija are sparse in their comments and
circumscribed in their conclusions about the long-term effects of the movement,
which resulted, after all, in the creation of a nation. Most commentators place
emphasis on the emphasis the Moravian Church placed on one’s personal connection
with God, pietism, which they hastened to interpret in
a negative sense. Thus, a once popular Herrnhuter meeting place in Riga is now
called the Coo Coo Hill. While acknowledging choral singing
as a community binding activity, comentators avoid mentioning the pietist practice
of leading by example, which in Latvija manifested itself by the German
Brothers joining the Latvian and Estonsian peasants in the field and working with
them. They also learned to speak Latvian and sang in church* in the same choir.
Unfortunately, the negativity continues to this day and creates a bias in a government
that is focused on city dwellers. Since all labor is evaluated in terms of money,
leadership by example has become corrupted and leads by example of self-serving
gutless by politicians.
*Grandfather
started his career as a teacher and choir director. He took for his wife one of
the choir singers. In later life, the pressure of the Lutheran Church against
these activities broke him, and he left the countryside (and family) for the
city and a career as a newspaper editor.
The
parable http://biblehub.com/john/12-24.htm
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