Samhain                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Coming home tonight from the city I encountered a traffic slow down.  It allowed me to get close to an older model GM car with a bumper sticker in letters too small for me to read from a distance.  The bumper sticker read:  Leave the Constitution and the Bible Alone.

The world of such a person, that is a person who would both buy and display such a message, must have a lot of fear leaking into it.  Not surprising.  Job losses.  Uncertain economics at the national level.  A black President.  The furor stoked by the Tea Party folks.

Think of it though.  A whole world bounded by two written documents, documents written by men, interpreted by men and now some women, too, but documents of humans nonetheless.  A world with absolute faith in those two written documents, a faith so necessary, so critical that if others tamper with them…  Well.  They’d better not.  Leave’em Alone.  This feels like such a lonely and fettered existence, cramped, perhaps like a one room apartment or a small economy car.

Any conversation with such a person must not start with the constitution and the bible, it must start with the aspects of their life they believe protected by them.  Their sense of identity.  Security.  Safety.  Morality.  Only as people feel safe can they begin to question, until then, too much is at stake.

So, for God’s sake, leave them alone.