Saturday, May 05, 2007

What goes around, comes around

I mentioned one day in our RCIA class, on the topic of suffering, that our God is a God of seeming contradictions. The way to life is hard, the way to death easy. A seed cannot produce life but that it should die. The salvation of the world required the death of the Son. In a perfectly logical, "ones and zeros" kind of world those things don't make sense. But while God is pure logic, He also transcends logic. or at least our feeble attempts at understanding it. Thus, we wind up with nuggets like this, from CNA:

.- Protestors gathered outside the US Supreme Court building this week to demand that the judicial body reinstate the right to pray in public places. Among those present was William “Bill” Murray, son of the late Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the militant atheist who won a 1963 court battle to prohibit prayer in public schools.

Several years ago, William Murray converted to Christianity and today he leads the Coalition for Religious Freedom. He grew up under the shadow of his mother, who won the famous court battle that removed expressions of faith from the public school system in the United States.

The Rev. Rob Schenck, who participated in the protest, said the presence of Murray was emblematic. “Nobody knows this issue like he does. He was used, abused and indoctrinated to think that prayer violated the Constitution. Now he uses the genius that God gave him to return prayer to the schools and to all public life in America,” he said.

Murray became one of the most outspoken critics of the work of his mother, who was accused of manipulating her followers, robbing funds from her organization and tax fraud. Madelyn Murray O’Hare was killed in 1995 together with her son Jon and her granddaughter Robin, William’s daughter.
The son of the woman who perpetrated a great crime is given the opportunity, and grasps hold thereof, to right the wrongs and stand up for the rights transgressed by his mother. This is a far cry from visiting the sins of a man upon his descendants for seven generations. Just when it seems most terrible, God has a twist just waiting for you.