The Gospel according to St.Macavity

Macavity and I are still talking all the time despite the distance - on the phone, online, voicemails, gtalk, yahoo - and before I continue, I should mention that Macavity is a good Christian (good maybe not in our conventional Mizo sense, but better than many of those conventionally 'good' ones).

So anyway, when we talk, one big topic that always reigns over others is God, faith, and being Christian. But we often stray from the main topic and suddenly develop profound interests in a character (one of the disciples, a soldier, a random man whose random act was recorded in the Bible), places, incidents, and we'd do lengthy researches, create pictures and images of these people in our heads and swap them - fun times.

Anyway, the topic of Palestine and Lebanon came up the other day. And I asked Macavity "Did Jesus ever go to Palestine?" to which she vehemently swore "No, never. He never stepped foot in Palestine!"

"Are you quire sure?"

"I don't see Jesus as setting foot in that land.."

"He was born there Macavity!"

"Ooooh yeah, right. Sorry, he was born in Palestine and they chased him out from there to Bethlehem, did they not?"

"They chased him out to Bethlehem - where he was then born.. **long pause** However, if he wasn't born, I don't think the chasing would have been much successful."

"Bethlehem is IN Palestine, they could not have chased him from Palestine to Bethlehem.."

"Oh"

So we finally got it down to Bethlehem, Palestine (which was called Judea), which we assumed was a part of Israel (I still don't know). This perplexed Macavity, how could Palestine have been a part of Israel when they have such history? What kind of history, I asked. All those fighting histories, she said. They fought? I asked. She answered yes, all the time, killed each other all the time.

She said - "You remember back in the day when the Palestinians fought the Israelites? Judea was a part of Israel then, wasn't it? Unless Judea was fighting against Israel and later came to be known as Palestine, which makes no sense. Because back in Genesis and Exodus or the good old books, it says that the 'Palestinians' fought them - written way before Judea was even called Palestine."

"David fought them, Jonathan died to them, so did Saul (not the one that became paul :P). Saul was sorely possesed by demons in the end, even threw something, some cooking utensil at young David, while he was blissfully playing the harmonica."

(Jonathan is her ultimate favorite Biblical character, and she will always find ways to bring his name up no matter what the discussion as long as it has something to do with the Bible).

Anyway, this discourse befuddled me greatly. I asked her who she meant by this 'them' that David fought, and killed Jonathan and Saul. Because it would be so weird for a great Israeli king like David to be killed by his own subjects.

"The Palestinians," she smugly answered.

Then, suddenly a titter, and then "Oooooh, I think I'm mixing up the Philistines with the Palestinians"

Whew!

Anyway, Lebanon and Palestine and Israel are our current obsessions, one day I asked Macavity to find out what the ancient Biblical cities of Tyre (are they modern day Lebanon?) and Sidon are now called. She researched, and her answer when I came back was this - In the modern world, Tyres are pneumatic ring-shaped parts. :-) Cute.

The reason she finds it so difficult to accept that Jesus was ever in Palestine is because of modern day Palestine and Palestinians - well, let's just say one Palestinian - Samir Kuntar. She just can't accept that our Lord ever walked on the same ground that this monster now treads on.

Because of this new found interest, we read up on Zionism, and downloaded and started reading The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I've never thought much about Lebanon and neither does Macavity, we've got a lot to learn, , but we are pretty sure now that it can't possibly be a great place. A place where they idolise murderers as heroes and role models...nahh, can't be good.

Macavity is still away, I'm never sure where exactly she is - when I think she's in Sydney, she'd call up from Melbourne, and you think she's in Melbourne, and she is in Thailand. I wish she'd come back soon because overseas calls are expensive, and the crazy time zone results in me waking the poor thing up at odd hours all the time.

And she needs to be taken to church and made to sit and listen to one good sermon.