Paddy’s green

Kate Middleton, aka Princess Catherine Elizabeth, Duchess of Cambridge, wife to Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, and Colonel in the Irish Guards, was fashionably all green (down to eyeshadows) during the regimental ceremonies on St. Patrick’s Day (Lá Fheile Pádraig) where she handed sprigs of shamrock and a basket of the same to officers who in turn handed sprigs to their men.
OK. For my fellow “pedestrians,” Patrick was an English lad in the 5th century when Irish marauders kidnapped him in England and brought him to the Emerald Isle to serve as a slave to his captors. He escaped, returned to England, trained in the priesthood, and returned to his pagan captors in Ireland, converting them to Christianity. That’s how he made it to the pantheon of western saints.

Now, what’s with the “pedestrians?” Paddy was in New York. He was patiently waiting and watching the traffic cop on a busy street crossing. The cop stopped the flow of traffic and shouted, “Okay, pedestrians.” Then he’d allow the traffic to pass. He’d done this several times, and Paddy still stood on the sidewalk. After the cop had shouted, “Pedestrians!” for the 10th time, Paddy went over to him and said, “Is it not about time ye let the Catholics across?” (With apologies to the Irish folks in this readership, but the foregoing tends to be the tenor of Irish jokes. There probably were not too many floating around Saipan anyway, save over promoting the bitters at the bar zones in Garapan.)

Paddy’s Day has, of course, become more contemporaneous in the issues it deals with beyond the Catholic and Protestant divide. Boston’s Mayor refused to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade because the organizers refused the participation of gays and lesbians. Ditto for the vaunted New York City parade usually seen around the world.

The issue of LGBT’s legal right is advancing faster in state legislatures and the courts of law than in sanctified solemn assemblies. The United Methodist Church that brought me up wore its social conscience in neon lights on its forehead; now finds itself behind the curve as its Good News Evangelicals have made Paul of Tarsus’ homophobia and subservient female prejudice in the service of American political conservatism.

With the UMC, this is actually an anomaly. A good 60 percent of mainstream Methodists tend to be more progressive than what is reflected in the wordings of its Book of Discipline: “Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches.”

The 38 percent foreign contingent voting in the last General Conference of the UMC for “participatory” types like me would be an occasion for delight save that they were those who remained subservient to the New York or Nashville offices and their budgetary support, towing essentially the missionary lines. Saving souls from hellfire damnation in the by-and-by remained the mission, along with an ingrained idolatry of Jesus, and polishing the altar cross for do-goodism, straight out of downtown Main Street, South of the Mason-Dixon line, U.S.A., 1930s and thereafter. Ergo, a majority of the delegates from Asia and Africa are mirror images of the missionaries that “groomed” them.

Homophobia and its related prejudices are learned, not homegrown. I ran into it in 1965 when I went to a conservative American Seminary in the former slave state of Kentucky. My former church suffers deeply and widely from the debilitating disease.

On the other hand, the denomination is experiencing a case of widespread ecclesiastical disobedience (“biblical obedience” according to Bishop Melvin Talbert, formerly of the SF Area, now facing a trial himself) as members of the clergy ignore the provision. Retired Methodist clergy 80-year-old Thomas Ogletree, former Yale Divinity School Dean, was going to face Church trial for officiating on the same-sex marriage of his son. The Presiding Bishop of New York area Martin McLee threw out the case declaring an unconditional dismissal of the charges, unprecedented in the Methodist Church. The language of Bishop McLee in the “just resolution” is even more momentous: I call for and commit to a cessation of church trials for conducting ceremonies which celebrate homosexual unions or performing same-gender wedding ceremonies …

This is rearguard action to me but someone has to clean the horse manure off those Kentucky horse farms!

Green has become the color of my mission of late, though the mission itself is deeply embedded in the Christian faith. “For God so loved the world …” begins the oft-quoted scriptural verse, but we’ve had a tendency to skip the first phrase and move on to the next one, creating a redemption by substitution notion not unlike the knights of the roundtable and their virtue of self-sacrifice.

It has now become clear that we consume a good half more than the restorative and carrying capacity of the planet, so the question of how one does love the world, deep in the Christian tradition, is existentially appropriate.

I’ll go with Kate. I go green!

Jaime Vergara previously taught at SVES in the CNMI. A peripatetic pedagogue, he last taught in China but makes Honolulu, Shenyang, and Saipan home. He can be reached at pinoypanda2031@aol.com.