God's people
Autor: Jackson Lima | Publicado: 2012-02-27T13:17:00-08:00

    I have never seen a Catholic priest or nun in Miranda. Where are they? I  have got to tell the pope. They should be doing something to stop this.  There are so many new gospel churches materializing in the little town  that I think something is wrong. My neighbors are good example of what  is happening. The situation is weird and is similar to a collective  brain washing operation.These people live in Miranda – an old  town (over 200 years, old for Brazil) existing on top of a fantastically  beautiful land. These people know nothing about this land. In the  meantime they spend their days and whole nights singing about Jerusalem,  Israel, Hebron and Mount Zion. Why don’t they sing instead to the  Bodoquena Mountains, the Miranda and Salobra Rivers, the Cerrado, the  Carandá Palms and the flowering Paratudo forests?Aren’t these  also part of the creation of God? How can a people live on a land so  long and konw so little or care to know so little about it? Not care  about how to protect the locally available nature that God supposedely  created? – The animals, the birds, the hyacinth macaws? How can they  talk of the Lion of Judah when they know nothing about, kill or don’t  care to kill the Jaguar of Miranda? That is why I tell you: there is no  way the discipline of ecology can prosper and survive among these God’s  People.The message is that man is not part of nature – he  (preferrably “he”) is a master over it; everything was made by God with  man in mind. The fish, made for him to eat. Water was made for him to  drink, wash himself, swim in, and in the case of rivers, for man to  throw and dump garbage in them, sewer in them. The flowers of the earth  were made for him to smell, for man to see and give glory to Him – God;  mountains and valleys and rivers and seas were made for Him to entertain  his eyes, to produce food for him. All the animals are food to man –  only man matters. Animals like the jaguar can be killed if they are  thought to be a threat for the chickens of man – since they are man’s  food supply. A pentecostal, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon, an  Evangelical, a Lutheran, a Catholic can so easily talk – in these  latitudes – of how he killed a jaguar, an opossum, all for the same  reason – opening up new spaces for man, his faith anmd his food supply.  How many animals of Brazil are condemned because of man’s domesticate  animals for food supply!Besides living on the land without  knowing anything about it or caring to – they spend days – like my  landlady, dreaming of and singing about getting the hell out of here as  quick as possible. “A hora está chegando para o povo de Deus ir embora”   says the song I hear 30 times a day and which means “the time is coming  for God’s Peope to go away”. Yes they are waiting and awaiting for the  glorious day when they will go. Where to? They don’t know. It may be  Jerusalem, not the real Jerusalem where all these mess began and where,  even today, people are burned aboard buses when they thought they were  going to work. There is another Jerusalem and they are going there. They  just have to keep on singing praises to the Lord.He, the Lord,  made everything there is. He finished his work and is now resting. He  does nothing else because all is done. His most important business is to  listen to the praises of his People left in Miranda, Aquidauana, the  Bodoquena Mountais, the Maracaju and Piraputanga Ranges. That is the  mission of God's People in the Pantanal.I have known dictators  like Alfredo Stroessner (Paraguay), Idi Amin Dada (Uganda) who not only  welcomed praises but also rewarded those who sang praises to them with  jobs, political positions, money, land and millions of poor people to  serve them. Should I be led to think that God is something like a  dictator from Uganda, Paraguay, or any of thousands of Brazilian mayors  who love puxa-sacos (ass kissers) and who reward them accordingly? Are  all these people trying to say that God is a corrupt leader who loves to  be praised and rewards the blind praisers while boycotting the neutrals  and shooting down opponents?God, I would hope, has got to be  bigger than that. Must be so big as to live so high up that must not  care whether you sing praises, curses or scorn him. He, God, must even  laugh – like I do, when he hears people  saying or suggesting that he is  a psychopath that feeds on praises, needs ego massages, every  nanosecond through eons and eons forever and ever. What a pitiful  situation for us – I mean, God and us! Amen!Miranda, Feb,1993