Just a thought about the Town Halls

Went to mass tonight.

This was included in one of the readings (Ephesians 4:30 - 5:2):

All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling
must be removed from you, along with all malice.
And be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.

I immediately thought of the Town Hall meetings, and the yelling and the screaming. The intimidation. Even the veiled (and sometimes not so veiled) threats of violence.

Of course they will tell you that they are just "exercising their constitutional rights." They certainly don't have any consideration for the constitutional rights of those who don't hold their positions, and their only reason for being there is to disrupt the meeting. That upsets me quite a bit, but I understand, and have for some time that civil political discourse in this country has become a pathetic joke.

Hearing Saint Paul's words in Ephesians, I'm thinking of something not on a political level.

Now, if you polled most of those people doing the yelling and screaming - are you a Christian?, or do you attend a Christian church? what do you think the answer would be?

My guess is that most of the attendees are "professing" Christians. After all, isn't the mantra "We are a Christian Nation"?

So how can they reconcile their ugly, screeching behavior at a Town Hall Meeting with Saint Paul's writing here? It says ALL bitterness, ALL fury, ALL anger, ALL shouting, etc.

I'm one of those who has the crazy notion that, to the best of your ability and with God's help, this should be part of how you live your life and deal with others 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

It seems to me that if you go there with the INTENTION of doing this, that makes it all the worse.

It doesn't say to remove those things only when you feel like it, or when you are doing something like this that has to do with "non-church" stuff. It says to remove ALL.

If you are one who professes themselves to be a Christian, your WHOLE life should indicate it.

Shouldn't it?