Maundy Thursday on Tactical Friday
- Mike Dickey
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions; they have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen oracles for you that are false and misleading.
All who pass along the way clap their hands at you; they hiss and wag their heads at daughter Jerusalem; ‘Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth?’
All your enemies open their mouths against you; they hiss, they gnash their teeth, they cry: ‘We have devoured her! Ah, this is the day we longed for; at last we have seen it!’
The Lord has done what he purposed, he has carried out his threat; as he ordained long ago, he has demolished without pity; he has made the enemy rejoice over you, and exalted the might of your foes.
Cry aloud* to the Lord! O wall of daughter Zion! Let tears stream down like a torrent day and night! Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite!
-Lamentations 2: 14-18
A true Jeremiad, that one, if the tradition of its provenance is to be believed. And the very verse denoted for today, Maundy Thursday, the point on the calendar where Holy Week becomes more intense, more real, seems to point a prophetic finger at us as a country this morning.
The false prophets in verse 18 were all on hand yesterday at the White House Easter Lunch, where one compared Trump to Jesus and suggested that our serial-rapist-in-chief shared with the Agnes Dei the fact that both were falsely accused.
For those of you blissfully living your lives outside the canons of the Mother Church, this is straight-up blasphemy from a person claiming what should be the most humbling mantle of all, to serve as a shepherd for God's people in a broken world. But there's no humility here, no shame. A third of our lost and fallen citizens believe this bullshit.
Meanwhile, the MAGA Darius continues to spout nonsense that a huge black immigrant community is "low IQ" and comprised of fraudsters, and its representative actually engaged in incest by marrying her brother.
I can't get the clip to work, so here's the link to the blog that's linked to the clip.
And now he's careening between trying to find a way to surrender to Iran while making it appear to be a W, and threatening to bomb them into the stone age. The markets are not amused (All in the same link, above). I suppose there must be some schools left to bomb.
To start a needless war as he has, then lose interest and wander to the next distraction from the Epstein files, is not only a catastrophe for this country, transformed in a very short time into a pariah state, but also a stunning moral failure.
And a third of you good neighbors still think it's okay, because your Bible college educated strip mall pastor spends too much time in onanistic concentration over the crackly smudged pages of his Hebrew Bible (ahem, I mean "Old Testament", a reference to the nonsense I heard in an Episcopal Sunday School class about the Christian martyrs who predeceased Jesus. The only value of the experience of Israel and Judea to that point was as a prequel to the Gospel, just as these numb nuts fawn over the current Israeli apartheid state not out of love of Jews--far from it--but because they need all this for their eschatological narrative. How can people this addled govern themselves?), and a selected compendium of pseudo--Paul, omitting the Gospel message that's the whole point. Heralding the end times is better for the collection plate than calling on your flock to repent and bring the Good News into the world through action.
Oooweee. Dial it back a little, Donk. One jeremiad per page is enough.
It's a drizzly one out there this morning--glad I had the foresight to invest in an umbrella yesterday.
Thursday always marks the end of my school week, and the sort of beginning of the weekend. Tonight, inshallah, I'll be back with P in Corning for a couple days, then back here alone again to lean into the last month before finals. Peg's interested in another evening of opera when she gets back here in nine days. I'd hoped for Tristan and Isolde, having always had a soft spot for Wagner, but alas the last night of its brief run is tonight. We discussed La Traviata, still a good choice, but in looking for tickets I saw Eugene Onegin begins its run in a couple days. I've always wanted to see Pushkin's Russian epic performed as an opera--if there's any evidence that there's a sentimental soul and heart to Russian culture, it's Eugene Onegin. Most Americans have never heard of the work, but to a Russian Pushkin stands in a place sort of like Walt Whitman to us.
Anyway, I'm not sure P would be too excited about it. I'll listen to Tchaikovsky's piece on Spotify driving home tonight and decide whether it's worth making the sales pitch to her. Maybe we'll just go see both. It's New York, after all.
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