A blonde was driving down the street, in a panic because she had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking space. Looking up toward heaven, she said, "Oh Lord, please take pity on me. If you find me a parking space, I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life and give up sex and tequila." Miraculously, an empty spot appeared. She looked up again and said, "Never mind, found one."
Charismatics cannot differentiate between faith and superstition. To them, God is a genie waiting to serve their whims. I am not sure what is worse, praying for a parking space or attributing it to Holy Spirit! After all, it is a prayer of tedium, a prayer of luxury for the few who are able to drive a car to the shopping center. Most people don’t have enough to eat, let alone own a car. In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus tells us that when we pray for ourselves, we are to pray for our daily bread. Yet we keep on pestering God for conveniences, all sorts of advantages, even for luxuries. I don't know who Bobby Conner is, but he was correct when he said "We have become overly familiar with a God we hardly know".
Charismatics perceive a highly personalized relationship with Christ, an attitude that often overrides their Catholic faith. Christ comes to them in Holy Communion in a perfectly personal way, yet having their prayers “answered” with a convenient parking space often times becomes more relevant. There are endless testimonies at prayer meetings about how the Lord touched them individually during the previous week, and one wonders at times if the stories were meant to have a point. It is true, we do not all have the same priorities, nor do we perceive the world the same way, but charismatics trivialize God with the most mundane of occurrences. There are folklores as well, wondrous events that happened to someone else. The common denominator between these two genres is the explanation of human events with divine intervention.
Occasionally one finds an atheist who knows blasphemy when she sees it.
Networking with Jesus:
Barbara Ehrenreich, pseudo-Marxist social critic, writes in her latest book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream about attending "undercover" a Christian ministry for job-seekers in Georgia. She writes of the charismatic speaker encouraging the unemployed seekers to learn how to network. "And who should be our first networking target?" the motivational speaker queries. "The Lord."
Now we've all seen this kind of trivialization of the apostolic faith. But what struck me was the way in which this atheist feminist materialist took special offense at blasphemy against a God she doesn't even believe exists. Writes Ehrenreich:
I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I endured the Norcross Fellowship Lunch as an atheist, but now, at the Mt. Paran Church of God, I discover that I am a believer, and what I believe is this: if the Lord exists, if there is some conscious being whose thought the universe is, some great spinner of galaxies, hurler of meteors, creator and extinguisher of species, if some such being should manifest itself, you do not 'network' with it any more than you would light a cigarette on the burning bush.
I hope Ms. Ehrenreich will not be offended if I say "Amen."
From Touchstone Journal, December 26, 2005
