A few days ago, I went to a church service held in memory of good family friend who died horrifically, painfully for him and those who loved him, and what is more, he died unnecessarily! Were it not for the essentialy non-existing medical service and care on this island (not a-typical of what is happening in Greece generally), he would still be with us now! The attack on the Health Care System in this country, in order to save money to pay the debt that was accumulated by stolen public funds due to corruption and support of the big monopolies here is totally evil in any trully religious sense! It is being destroyed systematically by a bunch of criminal, cynical, callous, and rapacious sociopaths, who play the role of government, (i.e by subhuman meat puppets) in a process that is ripping off the people, and the country, increasingly driving them to despair.
The death of my friend is a testimony to this murderous policy... It literally kills people! And that is not the only one facet of a war against those who have next to nothing by those who have defrauded them, robbed them, in order to acquire vast fortunes of money and assets "by hook and by crook.".. And, "lo and behold"! This flock of greedy vultures fancy themselves as "Leftwing" government, adding insult to injury.. . They are "social democrats". No wonder people appear shocked, pathetic, and paralised, unable to fight back...
Anyway let me say something positive, albeit insignificant in the wider scheme of things:
Hearing with pleasure the music of the liturgy, a rare experience for an atheist (like myself) who seldom goes to church and only because his upbringing has left him remnants of a love for its rituals that bring people together, alas.. now vacant of its intended meaning..., I heard the song that I add to this post. And there is no intention for irony in my part, for I still have deep respect mixed with compassion for the ones driven by a belief that contains the hope of the hopeless and helpless...
It is a masterpiece, to my ears, of Byzantine music, which the Greeks consider part of their cultural heritage... As someone, who's name I forget, told me once: with such music in the service of religion (let alone the use of often superb iconography, sculpture, theatrical phantasmagoric show that dresses up beautifully as a sacrosanct prayer to our only «savier», inspired, great architecture for the poor, and poetry, etc, all forming a mystifying if not always passifying ritual... is it any wonder why religionwill attract «the thirsty cuttle to the spring of water»?...
I could hear it as a hymn to Virgin Mary, but also (suddenly dumbfounded) as a song of adoration of womanhood, of motherhood, by a man - or simply as a love song... And this , charged by the awareness that, at this moment in time, when the forces of destruction, typified by the clique of phalocratic male idiots and personified by threir chosen "ruller of the planet", are holding arms threatening to use them, bringing about more destruction on the heads of the destroyed, more devastation on the devastated by exploitation and greed...
It leads me to dare say that a person, to trully call himself "a man" he cannot fail but to see as a "goddess", or a "saint", the woman who carries, or who has given birth, to a child in this precarious word... Sanctified by virtue of her courage and natural capacity to bare it...
At a simple, basic level also, the antithesis between the exploited and their exploιτers today more than ever before perhaps, can be seen as an antithesis between Eros (love... the forgotten, repressed heart of Christianity) and Thanatos...
After all, isn't Revolution a technology of desire used against and forced upon those who systematically, violently oppress it?
