cross & gallows (mdmd(4) - Commentary)

[Doug Millison]

At 5:39 PM 7/17/97, Brian D. McCary wrote:
>mdmd(4) - Commentary
>Chapter 11:
>     My favorite passage in this whole chapter is "A Visitor may lounge
>in the Evening upon the Platform behind the Lines, and, as a Visitor to
>London might gaze at St. Paul's....(cut)....(108-22..29)  In this
>Veritable Broadside shot at western civ, he manages to liken St. Paul's
>to a place of execution, and at the same time, suggest all commercial
>enterprises, including modern ones, involve slavery.

Not knowing London, I assume St. Paul's is a church. Linking the cross and
the gallows, thinking of execution while looking at a church -- that seems
to me quite natural, given the nature of Christianity's genesis in Jesus'
crucifixion (the cross or crucifix on the wall commemorates that execution,
after all), and given the involvement of the Church, as an institution and
on the part of individual members, in bloodshed and commerce and slavery in
the centuries since that bloody beginning. The Apostle Paul, in his New
Testament writings beginning with the book of Romans, loops in and out and
around  "slavery" and "freedom", ringing changes on slavery to sin, slavery
to obedience, slavery to holiness, eventually transmuting this  "slavery"
to the freedom he says is to be found in the becoming a member of Christ's
body, the Church.


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