tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2655117911464232212024-03-13T19:07:58.558-07:00E m e r g i n g ...Q u a k e r i s m ..L i t e r a t u r e ..R e l i g i o n ... L i f e“Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman
Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.comBlogger520125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-76382091590928004282018-01-23T10:48:00.002-08:002018-01-23T10:54:03.949-08:00Olney Friends School: Survival at StakeIn Chekhov's <i>The Cherry Orchard, </i> a family's fortunes become more and more dire, and yet the family is unwilling to sell its valuable cherry orchard. It refuses to cut down even part of the orchard. At the end, the bankrupt family must sell their estate. The first act of the new owners is cutting down and selling the entire cherry orchard.<br />
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Olney Friends School needs $250,000 to stay open. This is a small amount in the grand scheme of things, but would make an enormous, a vital, difference in the life of the school. If the school closes, and is sold, this "cherry orchard" will be lost forever. Or to mix the metaphor, this Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again. Once gone, it's gone. It's really gone. The complexities and expenses of reopening would cost far more than $250,000.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Please don't let this happen.</td></tr>
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It almost goes without saying that Olney changes lives. My three children attended the school. It was a game changer for them. They met and made friends with students from around the world. Rooted in the local, their vision became global. They received a level of attention and had their intellects excited in a way that will be with them for a lifetime. They lived Quaker values.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A certified organic farm and a school that is an oasis of light.</td></tr>
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We've already lost one Friends' boarding school, the Meeting School in New Hampshire. Very few are left: Westtown and The George School in Philadelphia, Scattergood in Iowa, and Sandy Spring in Maryland, which is mostly day students.<br />
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If Olney closes, it will also be a huge blow to future students and to Stillwater Monthly Meeting. Though the school is no longer under the care of Ohio Yearly Meeting, Stillwater and Olney are tightly intertwined. They share spaces, and the staff and students of Olney provide vital blood and energy to the meeting. A dead, shuttered campus or a campus bought by interests antithetical to Quakerism would change the Meeting in incalculable ways. The Meeting would almost certainly no longer have the infrastructure to host Quaker wide events, such as QuakerSpring or the Conservative Friends gathering.<br />
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Moving back to <i>The Cherry Orchard </i>metaphor, what might--what almost certainly--would be the first move of the new property owners? Selling the valuable fracking rights--and with who knows what restrictions? Maybe next to none. Maybe the whole point of the investment would be to extract the gas below as lucratively as possible, no matter what the environmental damage. Stillwater Meeting could find itself next to 1000 watt neon lights and tall pumps working 24/7. Olney, now a certified organic farm could quickly become an industrial wasteland. This is not dystopic fantasy but a real scenario.<br />
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So far, the school, despite its financial issues, has resisted signing a fracking contract. However, that's an option, and one that, at least in the hands of the school, could be controlled and done with decency and restraint--and the school would survive. Nevertheless, it is an option the school is trying with all its heart and soul to avoid.<br />
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It feels that it would be a win for the corporatism and homogenization of world culture, the replacing of thousands of small independent visions with a single, totalizing worldview, if Olney folded. It is a place that has stayed true to itself over the decades. It remains a very down-to-earth place, though most of its graduates get into good colleges--and getting into college is a graduation requirement. It hasn't cut corners on what is important, such as making its own food and organic farming or being there one-on-one for every student. The entire staff has traded income, most living very simply so as to make the school as close to an ideal place as it can. The school provides a counterweight to a society in which profit, self and violence are proclaimed as the paths to success.<br />
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Olney Friends School has over the last century built layer upon layer of Quaker traditions. The traditions are tied to the location. As Wendell Berry and Native Americans would state, local roots are all important. There is a history here and a community that accretes over time and can't simply be manufactured like the latest MacDonalds. It can't just reopen somewhere else.<br />
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Olney operates on a shoestring: nobody is getting rich or even modestly upper middle class from this investment. Yet its thousands of students have enriched the world. As with the Sanders campaign, or the community that pulled together in <i>It's a Wonderful Life, </i>many small donations (and a few large) add up. If you donate, you will be helping to make the world a more humane place. To donate, you can send a check made payable to Olney Friends, 61830 Sandy Ridge Road, Barnesville, Ohio, 43713 or link to the donations page at http://olneyfriends.org/support-olney/. You could also phone in a contribution or call for more information at 740-425-3655.Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-73441058729244608112017-12-25T11:07:00.000-08:002017-12-25T11:07:04.477-08:00Dreams of Christmas<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: #fb5e53; color: #2198a6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; position: relative;">
Dreams of Christmas</h3>
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Ellen in a recent blog (https://austenreveries.wordpress.com/2017/12/25/doing-christmas-in-the-heartsomethingcathartic/) likened Christmas to a dream, and I believe that gets at the heart of what Christmas is: a dreamscape.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br />Christmas, as we know, has long become a domestic holiday. We spend it inside our homes. Whether it has snowed or if our area of the country never sees snow, a hush falls over the world as for one day most businesses close and commerce stills. We have, for a moment, the time to stop, reflect, and dream. </span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">In <i>The Poetics of Space, </i>Bachelard connects the dream to the house:</span><br /><div>
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">the house shelters day dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Christmas dreams of a better world, at least in the wisps and fragments of reverie. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">The consumerism at the heart of the modern Christmas is distorted, but it is the distortion of a dream--the dream of what the world could be if people acted with the material generosity to each other all the time.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Christmas may accentuate social isolation and family dysfunction, but central to it is a dream of community and family in shalom order and the home as haven. I did appreciate this Christmas card from friend Sherri Morgan:</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TlL6BT6A4Y8/WkEfgVUPG-I/AAAAAAAABuA/QpqHlXXucbc9Lb3S87ruX9MiSCbCEqGQwCEwYBhgL/s1600/IMG_4123.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="color: #4d469c; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="968" data-original-width="1296" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TlL6BT6A4Y8/WkEfgVUPG-I/AAAAAAAABuA/QpqHlXXucbc9Lb3S87ruX9MiSCbCEqGQwCEwYBhgL/s320/IMG_4123.JPG" style="border: none; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">Yet Christmas speaks as well to something deeper.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">I find myself drawn this year to stories that are not Christmas stories but seem like Christmas stories to me because they touch deeply on the Christmas dream. This year I have been revisiting <i>Peter Pan, </i>a story that opens with domestic whimsy and humor about the intrusion of the dreams of childhood into the intensely domestic space of the Edwardian London townhouse. Peter Pan is openly the symbol of imagination, imagination unfettered by rational adult constraints. This seems at the heart of Christmas.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1T6PSUnZgqE/WkEfqSfY2II/AAAAAAAABuQ/cf81H7DNSlQaN_UOdbUf6rFGqaIw_MclACEwYBhgL/s1600/peterpan%2Bbook%2Bover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #4d469c; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="168" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1T6PSUnZgqE/WkEfqSfY2II/AAAAAAAABuQ/cf81H7DNSlQaN_UOdbUf6rFGqaIw_MclACEwYBhgL/s1600/peterpan%2Bbook%2Bover.jpg" style="border: none; padding: 8px; position: relative;" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">I reread too part of <i>The Sign of the Twisted Candles, </i>a Nancy Drew mystery, but intensely a domestic drama of interiors and a dream of righting the wrong in a domestic space that has been invaded by evil. Protecting the innocent and vulnerable, the very elderly and the young, is at the heart of this children's mystery and the Christmas dream.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">At Christmas, we decorate the prosaic pine tree. We make the ordinary beautiful.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">I came across this in the <i>New York Times, </i>and it has helped guide my days recently and bring a touch of joy centrally to them:</span><br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Each morning I write the words “I Will Feel Great About Today If I …” on a notepad. This is NOT a “to do” list. It is purely about creating the “reward” you describe: feeling great.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;">George Eliot puts this a different way: “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif; font-size: medium;"><br />It helps me to think of Christmas as a dream and a choice. The dream imagines a world of peace and goodwill, of gift-giving, community, healing, harmony and generosity. This is both a secular and a Christian dream, the dream of all tears being wiped away. If it is not here, we can start to dream it into being. We also have the political choice: we could, if we wanted, make a better world much more of a reality than it is right now. </span></div>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-48497596774112508662017-12-13T14:30:00.000-08:002017-12-13T14:46:31.624-08:00For the first time on the web: Margaret Fell's "A Few Lines concerning Josiah Coale," 1671<div style="margin: 0in;">
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Thanks to fine sleuthing by John Jeremiah Edminster, we now have the entire text of Margaret Fell's only known poem to put on line, an elegy on her friend, Josiah Coale (circa 1632-68), who died at around age 36. I had previously found 11 lines of this 44-line poem, but the rest seemed to have disappeared. It deserves to be on the web in its entirety, so I have placed it below.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Coale, like many early Quakers, traveled far and wide to spread the word about Friends, visiting both Holland and the American colonies. He was beaten and jailed by the Dutch and the Puritans. He received a warmer welcome from the Susequehanna Indians, with whom he negotiated a land deal.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Isabel Ross's<i> Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism</i> depicts Fell as appreciating Josiah's vibrant personality and strong faith. Fell was 18 years older than him, and saddened by his death. Though not one to write poetry, perhaps it was Coale's own poem, <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">“A Song of the Judgments and Mercies of the Lord," written in 1662 that inspired her own verse. According to Quaker Artists's History, a facebook page (</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/quakerartisthistory/posts/1526146597680647"><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">https://www.facebook.com/quakerartisthistory/posts/1526146597680647</span></a>):</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">He said his poem was “written at the movings of the spirit of the Lord”. The piece concerned the new revelation brought by Christ as reported by John in the New Testament. An excerpt:</span><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">“Until Johns Ministry I came to see, which was the great’st of all, <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>The Prophets which had gone before: from the great’st unto the small, <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>For then the way was made so straight, the path was made so plain <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>That, th’ Coming of Gods Son I saw in his great power to raign; <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Whose kingdom now is Come with power, the Lamb is sets on’s throne.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Like Coale's work, Fell's 1671 poem uses rhyming couplets. The poem, not surprisingly, is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">religious, celebrating Coale's faith, discernment, vigilance, and sufferings as he traveled abroad. Interestingly, a variation of Mary's Magnificat--"My should doth magnify the Lord--" is put into Josiah's mouth as "Let God be magnified, that was his [Josiah's] Song." In the final couplet, Fell, now presumably speaking for herself, again uses the word "magnified" in praise of God, connecting both Josiah and herself to an extremely important female figure. Mary, as Fell argues in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Women's Speaking Vindicated,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>indeed preached in her Magnificat, a beautiful retelling of Hannah's speech about being a humble handmaiden of the Lord. This Lord notably takes cares of the poor and lowly, as Mary celebrates:</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.<b> </b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: black;">He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.</span><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span>The final couplet of Fell's poem sounds Shakespearean, but it's unclear how familiar Fell was with Shakespeare. Quakers shunned the theater, and Shakespeare had not yet secured the superstar status he would after 1700. She might, however, have read his sonnets.<br />
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I particularly like the intimate, personal nature of the opening stanza:<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>dear<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></i>Josiah, the repetition of "gone" emphasizing the sense of personal loss, and the gentle, domestic image of Josiah resting on God's bosom.</div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">There's also a poignance in the last verse, as Fell, who would have been 54 at the time, remembers that God, and implicitly Josiah lying in his bosom, "never waxeth old."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">A few lines concerning Josiah Coale<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Is dear Josiah gone? Yes he is gone;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">He’s gone from us, in the Eternal one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Where he from all his labor is at rest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">I’th Bosom of the Father, who is forever Blest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Ah Valiant Champion for God’s Truth, so pure,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Thy Name’s as precious Ointment, thy memory shall dure<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In upright Hearts, from them nothing can hide,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Thy worth, thy faithfulness, all shall abide,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">To their refreshment, though thy Body’s laid<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">I’th bowels of the Earth, yet as thou said,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>God’s Majesty was with thee, and the Crown</i><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Of Immortal Life is on thee; </i><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">and that will renown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Thy Name to Generations, yet unborn,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">When they shall hear, <i>Josiah </i> did adorn<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The Gospel of our Lord by Doctrines that was found,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Within his Native Land, yet he was found<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">In foreign Lands, spreading forth the fame<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Of his beloved Lord: and that his Name<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Might be Advanced, thought no Travel long<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i>Let God be Magnified, </i><span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">that was his Song:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">His Travels they were sore, within, and eke without:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">His Recompense was large; yes, there’s no doubt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Now he shines as a Star, of no small magnitude,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Who, by the Power of God, hath convinced a Multitude.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Many are the Children, he hath gathered<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">To the Knowledge of the Lord, and Christ their Head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">He rightly did divide the Word of God;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Gave Milk to Babes; but Fools are for the Rod;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">He sweetly comforted the Meek:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Ah, he was strength unto the Weak;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">But terrible he was to the Stout-hearted,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Who verily was smote before he parted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The Workers of Iniquity by him<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Were trampled under foot; the man of sin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Was sorely wounded by his powerful Hand<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">The hypocrites before him could not stand;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> But by the Power of God he did them flay:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">But now, alas, he’s gone, he’s gone away,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">And we who loved him, though our Loss is great;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Yet being fixed in God, we are compleat;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">There meet with his Spirit, who gathered is<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Into the Mansion of Eternal Bliss.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Praised be God, and Magnified be He<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;">Who never waxeth old, nor chang’d can be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-2025421515312984622017-05-30T07:44:00.001-07:002017-05-30T07:46:44.927-07:00Quakers and accumulation<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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In her biography, <i>Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism</i>, Isabel Ross traces an 1826 Quaker advice on Keeping Clear Accounts back to the frugality of Fell and her daughters: </div>
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“It is the
duty of all to arrange their expenditure with due regard to their income; and
clear and correct account-keeping is a means of avoiding reckless expenditure
on the one hand or<i> unjustifiable
accumulation of wealth on the other</i>.” (my italics)</blockquote>
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When I wondered, did we as a larger society in the United States and the West lose sight of the idea that too great an accumulation of wealth is unethical? We certainly know these days that it is a severe problem.</div>
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Often the idea that we should limit wealth is ridiculed on the basis of it being impossible to determine where the "line" should be drawn. Do we condemn someone who feels they need three cars instead of two? How do we decide what "unjustifiable accumulation" is? </div>
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These questions, in my experience, are raised to shut down conversation. They are rhetorical: implicitly the only answer is we must not engage in the question because we can't answer it. We have no choice but to leave the decision up to the individual, even if that person shows every sign of an uncontrolled money addiction.</div>
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But what if we took the 1826 query, which has its roots in early Quakerism, seriously? What if we tried to decided how much is too much: at least as a guideline? At what point can we no longer justify our accumulation? At what point do we start dispensing our material wealth outward? At what point do we internalize the dispersal of our wealth, so that it would seem as twisted and unnatural to hoard it when others were in need as it would to own a slave or watch someone in an arena torn apart by wild animals? What constitutes reckless expenditure?</div>
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These are questions to ponder, not to dismiss. What is a reasonable guideline? When we have our bills under control and a year's income in the bank (or two) do we then give away our excess savings? Are there other guidelines to use? If we have large sums of money do we hold on to the principal but give away the interest income? Clearly these guidelines would be meant to be just that and not clubs with which to beat people who don't adhere entirely to our ideas of reasonable expenditure and savings.</div>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-90898898831990875102017-05-08T14:48:00.004-07:002017-05-08T14:52:22.312-07:00Beyond Good and Evil ... the Quaker way<div class="td-author-by tr_bq" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: 'Roboto Slab', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.6px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: 'Roboto Slab', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.6px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="line-height: 30.6px;">“ Out beyond ideas</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 30.6px;">of wrongdoing and rightdoing,</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 30.6px;">there is a field.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 30.6px;">I’ll meet you there.” </span></div>
<span style="line-height: 30.6px;">Imbolo Mbue, </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30.6px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Behold the Dreamers</em></blockquote>
<br />
The quote above seems to capture exactly what Quakers, whether universalist or Christian or of whatever stripe are at core about--or what I dream they are about.<br />
<br />
Jesus and George Fox preached in fields (and both would have talked about wrongdoing and rightdoing) but I also imagine in both of them acceptance and love, a genuine listening, an encounter--and isn't forgiveness, reconciliation and love of your enemies on some level about meeting in a field?<br />
<br />
The quote moved me because it doesn't say their is no wrong or right doing--it acknowledges we all have our own ideas of what these are--but yet there is a place where we can meet each other deeply.<br />
<br />
We don't have to talk about right or wrong. We can just meet.<br />
<br />
I thought of Ken and Katharine's question about where love is calling us today. Maybe to a field where we'll meet a stranger.<br />
<br />
I saw this on my friend Elaine Pigeon's blog (https://pigeonfiles.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/city-of-refuge/) and immediately felt an emotional response to it, though I knew nothing of Mbue or <i>Behold the Dreamers. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
A quick tour of Amazon yields the following about Mbue's 2016 novel:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<b style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;">A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy</b><br />
<b style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.4px;"><b>Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award </b>• <b>A <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book</b> • Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award • An ALA Notable Book</b></blockquote>
The quote also reminded me of quote, written as grafitti on a wall in Havana: "We believe in dreams." I have long hung onto that--and feel the need more than ever to do so in these times.Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-24734513952508114642017-05-01T17:37:00.000-07:002017-05-02T03:52:36.329-07:00Katharine Jacobsen's Memorial: Love and GratitudeI was very grateful to have had the opportunity of attending the memorial service at Stillwater Meeting House in Barnesville this past Saturday for Katharine Jacobsen, who died in January.<br />
<br />
Ken wrote a poem two days before Katharine's death that captures my sense of their loving relationship:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Oh my love, as I sit by you, breathing with you<br />
as your body softly lays itself down like a prayer<br />
I'm feeling our ten thousand days--<br />
the gift of our ten thousand days<br />
of traveling together this blue planet among the stars,<br />
this living school for love called earth,<br />
traveling together to find out what love is about.<br />
I'm feeling our ten thousand days--<br />
ten thousand mornings of prayer time in the quiet,<br />
side by side, wherever we've found ourselves,<br />
like here, like now, drinking in the dawn,<br />
listening again, for what Love would have us do this day.<br />
I'm feeling our ten thousands days--<br />
ten thousand evenings of prayer time in the quiet,<br />
side by side, drinking in the darkness<br />
listening again, for what Love has taught us this day,<br />
as we lay ourselves down to sleep.<br />
Oh my love, I'm feeling in my grief<br />
the joy of our ten thousand days,<br />
how this school of love is just beginning,<br />
our school of love is just beginning,<br />
with you needing to leave your body now<br />
and I given to stay in mine,<br />
and we're just beginning to find out<br />
what Love is all about.<br />
Oh my love, I'm feeling in my grief<br />
the joy of our ten thousand days,<br />
on this sweet planet among stars,<br />
thank you, my love, thank you.</blockquote>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NNE2OlQyoeY/WQfTeWwjZvI/AAAAAAAABiQ/b4IBrLz5pYQmTm1g1L20u5WTmW6WxWhYACLcB/s1600/earth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NNE2OlQyoeY/WQfTeWwjZvI/AAAAAAAABiQ/b4IBrLz5pYQmTm1g1L20u5WTmW6WxWhYACLcB/s320/earth.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"this living school for love called earth"</td></tr>
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<br />
<br />
This poem moved me in its simplicity and sincerity. Roger and I recently celebrated 30 years or 10,000 days together, and if Ken feels as I do, it has all gone by in an eyeblink, and he feels he could step through a door back into 1986 as if no time has passed.<br />
<br />
My main acquaintance with Ken and Katharine has been on a Quaker committee, where instead of seeing me as "difficult," they were able to understand and respond to me as a human being trying to be heard. That was healing for me. The committee members, knowing each other so well, inadvertently and with no malice, had turned into a clique over the years, where despite the Quaker equality testimony, some were more equal than others. I flapped my wings to avoid being overlooked, felt roundly condemned as a troublemaker, was patronized, and felt increasingly both frustrated and determined to speak my truth--for if I couldn't do that, why I was in this spiritual community? There was and is no secular reason for me to be here. Fortunately, Ken and Katharine were able to hear me: I felt I was alive to them as a person, not just as a problem that had to be dealt with. They didn't have to do this, but they did. Naturally, once I was heard and responded to with understanding and respect, everything began to settle down. Naturally, I felt and feel a great outflow of love to both of them: being treated as fully human generates love, and as I felt grateful for their response and the time they took with me, I began to see them in return as more fully fleshed and particularized humans. And such is what I understand the healing power of the Holy Spirt to be, how I believe Jesus interacted with the people who crossed his path, and I know that by following that path we can all see each other in our true humanity--and then love grows.<br />
<br />
One other memory stays with me. At a Friends Center event, I was paired with Katharine and she told me about her childhood, when she would sail with her father on the lake at their summer home and how wonderful that was for her. Katharine radiated with joy at that memory, and so what stays with me is a mental image I have created of a teenaged Katharine on a sailboat.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QzOZLmcsSh4/WQfUkhAw1UI/AAAAAAAABic/OV_E5d8qzIkZDfbUZrxHMi6VmaGbgnaeACLcB/s1600/impressionist-sailboat-malia-zaidi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QzOZLmcsSh4/WQfUkhAw1UI/AAAAAAAABic/OV_E5d8qzIkZDfbUZrxHMi6VmaGbgnaeACLcB/s320/impressionist-sailboat-malia-zaidi.jpg" width="303" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I did not paint this but it corresponds to my imagination.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Further, with the state of public discourse as it, it is deeply solacing to know that there are people like Katharine in the world who are so formed--of such a character--that such words as we sometimes hear would never cross their lips.<br />
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Losing a loved one is the most painful experience ever, for no matter how assured we might be we will be reunited with them, our heart longs for them and them alone to be with us now. Ken wrote this poem after Katharine died:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the end, my love,<br />
in your final days with us,<br />
I found you were made of nothing<br />
but gratitude,<br />
all you could say was<br />
thank you, thank you, thank you.</blockquote>
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He also added to the program words from the Rule of St. Benedict:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When we rise from sleep<br />
Let us rise with the joy of the true Work<br />
we will be about this day,<br />
and considerately cheer one another on.<br />
Life will always provide matters for concern<br />
Each day, however, brings with it<br />
reasons for joy.<br />
Every day carries the potential<br />
to bring the experience of heaven;<br />
Have the courage to expect good from it.<br />
Be gentle with this life,<br />
and use the light of life<br />
to live fully in your time.</blockquote>
Those words struck me powerfully.<br />
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-77797457946239316022017-01-26T06:05:00.000-08:002017-01-26T06:10:39.708-08:00Towards Peace: Hannah Arendt<div class="p1">
Given how violence-saturated our culture continues to be and how wedded we are in the U.S. to thinking violence is the only viable form of power, it's refreshing--and important-- to read Arendt argue that violence is the antithesis of power. She and Audre Lorde think along similar lines: that power arises through community or the deep relationship building that Lorde called erotics. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Kelly also advocated the formation of strong, deep (in their cases, spiritual) community as the key to speaking truth to power. It's also notable that all but Lorde formed their convictions about community in response to the shattering ultra violence and worship of violence that characterized the Nazi regime (and is now characterizing many of those in political power in this country). Needless to say, Jesus also saw the value of deep community building (which he identified with love) as more powerful than violence. </div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p1">
It's important that we not accept, even if half consciously, the canard that violence is the only form or the best form of power, despite that message being dunned into our heads over and over through the propaganda machine, including the fictional culture (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Westworld, etc). People keep noting the peaceful nature of the women's marches last Saturday: that's obviously important. Any whiff of violence simply gives the other side the justification to respond with extremes of violence. We also have to keep noting that non-violence can bring significant change, despite the persistence of the belief in the popular culture, reinforced by TV fictions, that it never works and is a sign of weakness and ineffectuality. As with violence, sometimes nonviolence wins and sometimes it loses. The fact that war so often is a dead loss never seems to delegitimize it: we can't let the fact that non-violence sometimes doesn't work blind to us to the many times it does work. Of course, this is preaching to the choir. </div>
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<div class="p1">
From the <i>New York Times</i>:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Arendt draws a sharp distinction between power and violence as well as between liberty and necessity.<br />
What does this mean? In her lexicon, power and violence are antithetical. Initially this seems paradoxical — and it is paradoxical if we think of power in a traditional way where what we mean is who has power over whom or who rules and who are the ruled.<br />
Max Weber defined the state as the rule of men over men based on allegedly legitimate violence. If this is the way in which we think about power, then Arendt says that C. Wright Mills was dead right when he declares, “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.”<br />
Against this deeply entrenched understanding of power, Arendt opposes a concept of power that is closely linked to the way in which we think of empowerment. Power comes into being only if and when human beings join together for the purpose of deliberative action. This kind of power disappears when for whatever reason they abandon one another.<br />
This type of power was exemplified in the early civil rights movement in the United States and it was exemplified in those movements in Eastern Europe that helped bring about the fall of certain Communist regimes without resorting to violence. Violence can always destroy power, but it can never create this type of power.</blockquote>
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<div class="p1">
As Quakers, we have the important task of keeping non-violent protest front and center as shake up and turbulence increasingly characterize the political discourse.</div>
Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-24204171922157652702017-01-15T07:40:00.002-08:002017-01-15T07:40:50.709-08:00Eye of the TigerSo much of who we are is revealed in casual ways.<br />
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During a vacation, I saw a row of cards on display in a person's home.<br />
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Most of them showed pictures of tigers. I took them down and read them. Each one praised a person who had just graduated from college for hard work and dedication. Each one urged this person to be the "eye of the tiger."<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rvft3UNX2xU/WHuBTFW9jJI/AAAAAAAABfk/tToHgmLrqSsPuNIz3bG_S8kGBnslAS8lQCLcB/s1600/tiger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Rvft3UNX2xU/WHuBTFW9jJI/AAAAAAAABfk/tToHgmLrqSsPuNIz3bG_S8kGBnslAS8lQCLcB/s400/tiger.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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What does it mean, I wondered, to be the "eye of the tiger?"<br />
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The internet offered some answers. According to the "Gratitude Guy,"* the eye of the tiger is the black spot behind each of a tiger's ears. When a tiger is about to move in for the kill, he flattens his ears forward, exposing these two black spots. These "eye spots" can confuse other animals as the tiger is about to attack.<br />
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In popular culture, the term means:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16.08px;">someone who is focused, confident, and has the look of being intense, somewhat cold but very fierce with a never say die attitude. ("Gratitude Guy)</span></blockquote>
It's also the popular song associated with Rocky movies. Rocky had to develop the "eye of the tiger," the hunger and motivation to win and become a champion.<br />
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So when the parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles urged this college grad to have the "eye of the tiger," they meant to be focused on goals. They also meant being fierce and never giving up ("never say die.")<br />
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Because it is associated with a predator, the phrase can't help but suggest "going in for the kill." After all, the second "eyes" don't show until the tiger is ready to attack (kill) its prey.<br />
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I wondered what kind of ethic this is to urge in a young person. On the other hand, it seems a very "normal" way to think in American culture. We want to "win."<br />
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But are we "tigers," solitary, predatory animals? Social science teaches that humans are, above all, communal creatures. We are built to live in groups, and we function best in groups. We are very alert to social cues and try to be liked by other people. Being alone is one of the biggest predictors of early death. We are not mighty tigers. Instead, we are a species that is weak while all alone. We are built to depend on each other.<br />
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I imagine that the relatives of the college graduate meant to encourage being hardworking and striving for success. But it is troubling that the phrase has such a "killer" aspect.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tbvZyKgo6j0/WHuBc7l3ntI/AAAAAAAABfo/VQxzHXwy0Pwe0I8fanKkZ0cKC-G6g_rrgCLcB/s1600/tiger%2Battacking%252C%2Bjpg.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tbvZyKgo6j0/WHuBc7l3ntI/AAAAAAAABfo/VQxzHXwy0Pwe0I8fanKkZ0cKC-G6g_rrgCLcB/s400/tiger%2Battacking%252C%2Bjpg.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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After all, tigers will soon be extinct in natural habitats, surviving only in zoos, where they are dependent on others to protect them.<br />
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Maybe being an aggressive predator is not the best path to success.<br />
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Maybe "kill or be killed" means you die.<br />
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People will tell me the phrase on the graduation cards is meant only in the most positive, encouraging way. It is meant only to build confidence.<br />
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All the same, I can't shake the idea that phrases like "eye of the tiger" promote a self-centered, aggressive attitude that is not realistic or helpful to society or the people in it in the long run. I wonder how much this kind of "off-hand" thinking, or unexamined habit of mind leads, with the even the best of intentions, to the coarsening of society. I don't need to mention that it jars against the Quaker ethics of community and caring.<br />
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What do you think? How do we push back?<br />
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*(https://www.facebook.com/thegratitudeguypage/posts/837445546370387)<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-30572761180542450352017-01-05T10:49:00.001-08:002017-01-05T10:49:33.525-08:00The Man in the High Castle: Spoiler blog: feminist and peace series<i>The Man in the High Castle</i>, based loosely on Phillip K Dick's novel of an alternate history in which the Axis wins World War II and occupies the United States, is extraordinary in look and feel, acting, complexity and theme. The plot can be murky in places, as it is complex--there were moments in the series I had no idea what was going on--and drags in places (this is to say it is an imperfect work of art.) But nonetheless, it is extraordinary and worth watching.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x3m0MdMlyDw/WG5yTaUF_tI/AAAAAAAABe4/ReHGS3pcxBUHQX86OKNCxQdKxRy-bhpUACLcB/s1600/man-in-the-high-castleNYC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x3m0MdMlyDw/WG5yTaUF_tI/AAAAAAAABe4/ReHGS3pcxBUHQX86OKNCxQdKxRy-bhpUACLcB/s400/man-in-the-high-castleNYC.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">New York in Nazi hands.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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I call it feminist because the plot hinges on the <i>actions </i>of a woman, Juliana Crain, who lives as an oppressed American in Japanese-controlled San Francisco. She is not a <i>catalyst </i>for a male hero to act and save the day: it is precisely <i>her own actions </i>and her humanity that are all important. How often do we see that? And while she loves and is loved, that isn't the pivot of her life or the plot. In fact, it is some of the men who are more obsessed with her than she is with them, again, an extraordinary, feminist stance that the series enacts quietly.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YBKTAOoNUBU/WG5yeaXwrnI/AAAAAAAABe8/qa-ZNl4nHsw53SXea7OZUcT0O7sLxq-uACLcB/s1600/julianacompassionate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YBKTAOoNUBU/WG5yeaXwrnI/AAAAAAAABe8/qa-ZNl4nHsw53SXea7OZUcT0O7sLxq-uACLcB/s400/julianacompassionate.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Juliana Crane. Her actions derive from her courage and compassion. Her moral center is not evil.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Juliana gets dragged into the action, into history so to speak, when her sister, a member of the anti-Japanese/Nazi resistance, is killed. Juliana decides to deliver a film (in place of her sister) to the neutral zone between the Japanese and Nazi territories. "The man in the high castle," as he is called, has a large cache of films showing an alternative history in which the Allies won the war. The Nazis are after these films--to destroy them.<br />
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Juliana is motivated throughout the series not by ideology but by personal relationship and basic human compassion and decency. She has a moral compass rare to see in a TV protagonist these days: she actually cares about other people because she is able to put herself in their shoes and empathize with them: she is not about using others as "tools" for achieving her own agenda (as is valorized (while disingenuously disavowed) in <i>Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, West World, Game of Thrones, </i>etc.) Thus, from the start, the <i>Man </i>series questions and problematizes blind adherence to ideology or groupthink or self above all else. The series is centrally <i>not </i>about selfish personal ambition but about the larger good. I can't tell you what a (moral/ethical) relief it was to watch this.<br />
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Juliana makes mistakes because this is a series not prone to black and white distinctions. A big error is to trust a young man called Joe Blake who she meets in the neutral zone. He is at heart a decent person and he does genuinely fall in love with her. She feels all this and decides to trust him. What she doesn't know is that he is working undercover for the Nazis to get films for them. Because she trusts him, he gets hold of an all-important film. But to complicate matters, Joe too has his heart in the right place. He is doing this, if I remember correctly, to get out from under the thumb of a prominent Nazi, John Smith and rebels against turning the film over to his Nazi overload. He, in fact, turns the film over to a group of insurgents, but is himself being played: once the film is on their boat, the Nazis blow it up, killing people. Joe looks like the Nazi traitor he is not: his intention was not to betray the resistance. Juliana also never meant for people to die, but they do.<br />
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In any case, Juliana doesn't lose her compassion and humanity: they are core to who she is and core to the survival of the human race in this series. She ends up having to flee and ask for asylum from the Nazis in New York: John Smith, to serve his own agenda, takes her under his wing. She doesn't want to have anything to do with him, but the Resistance insists she infiltrate his home and make friends with his wife and wife's friends (all married to prominent Nazis) or they will kill her for having given the film to Joe.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0tnWY4bK2Vs/WG5y4YUngFI/AAAAAAAABfA/A4eL33kW2pws2oq5FZbSvQC576WKYFUEwCLcB/s1600/Thomasman-in-the-high-castle-nazi.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0tnWY4bK2Vs/WG5y4YUngFI/AAAAAAAABfA/A4eL33kW2pws2oq5FZbSvQC576WKYFUEwCLcB/s400/Thomasman-in-the-high-castle-nazi.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Thomas, a devoted young Nazi, is condemned to death by Nazi ideology.</td></tr>
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She does infiltrate and to make a long story short, learns an important secret about John Smith's family: the son has muscular dystrophy. A doctor has come to euthanize the son, Thomas, because Nazi ideology dictates death to somebody carrying a hereditary illness. However, John loves son and like Juliana, put relationship above ideology: he stabs the doctor who has come to euthanize Thomas with the very needle filled with poison meant to kill Thomas. John is not going to sacrifice his beloved son to an ideology: here we have another complicated character, both a loathsome Nazi who is capable of cold-bloodedly killing enemies but also a loving father and a man who in the end works to prevent World War III at considerable risk to himself. (It's also clear that prior to the Nazi victory John and his wife were good Americans, and later Nazis: this seems a very real depiction of how people react to circumstances, as with the many die-hard Nazis who quickly became communists in East Germany after WWII.)<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G-1pO8z23mc/WG5zHxp36vI/AAAAAAAABfE/raGbARiqqYkzo8GymvHiOVjoa-SkjB1XgCLcB/s1600/johnsmith.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G-1pO8z23mc/WG5zHxp36vI/AAAAAAAABfE/raGbARiqqYkzo8GymvHiOVjoa-SkjB1XgCLcB/s400/johnsmith.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">John Smith, American turned Nazi. He is more evil than good, but complicated, not a stick figure.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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So as not to go on endlessly: the Nazis have the atom bomb, which the Japanese do not. When Hitler dies, his Nazi successor decides to immediately launch an all-out nuclear war against Japan, on the theory that this will usher in peace for all times (so absurd the series doesn't even have to comment on that as ridiculous). However, a wise, high-ranking Japanese (I am cutting out his story) delivers a film (actually an alternative history film) that shows the explosion of the hydrogen bomb on Bikini Island, in this world an island utterly in Japanese hands. John Smith is able to deliver this film showing (though falsely) that the Japanese have a superior weapon, causing the Nazis to cancel their nuclear strike. Peace prevails through ingenuity and courageous action rather than violence.<br />
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In this ever problematizing series, however, violence does play a role in preserving peace: the course of history does depend on Juliana, as mentioned before. She finds out the Resistance has a film that shows Thomas confiding in her that he has a serious illness. The Resistance plans to give this film to the media, which would ensure that the loathed John Smith would be arrested and executed for protecting his son. Juliana protests this, saying a young teenaged boy (who of course would be euthanized) shouldn't be sacrificed. After she successfully defends herself against the Resistance's coldblooded and pre-planned attempt to kill her now that they don't need her anymore (she's no longer a useful tool), she makes the decision (which she hates) to kill the man who has the tape, and then she destroys the tape to protect Thomas. Unbeknownst to her, this act is what allows John Smith (who otherwise would be in prison) to fly to Berlin with the film of the hydrogen bomb that averts war.<br />
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I call this a peace series because instead of valorizing ruthless slaughter of the "enemy" and pursuit of one's own self-aggrandizing agenda, the series valorizes compassionate empathy and caring for other human beings, even if that particular human being is on the "enemy" side. This is what saves the world. I contrast this to, for instance, a scene (largely gratuitous except to communicate a toxic ideological message) in <i>Game of Thrones </i>where a group of peace advocate who refuse to fight are slaughtered: the message is fight or die, kill or be killed, peace is for hopelessly naive pussies. However, getting back to <i>Man, </i>the narrative is problematized: Juliana protects a Nazi teenager who sincerely, if naively, believes wholly in Nazi ideology. Yet this is what makes the series interesting: if Juliana had been a Nazi who protects a Jew, we would not stop and think "What???": we would simply approve. Here, we do have to stop and think and realize that we are just as bloodthirsty and stupid as the Nazis if we kill others simply on the basis of ideology, rather than extending compassion to innocent, if misguided, people.<br />
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This is a peace series as well because it shows the ugliness of killing: in another but connected storyline, Frank Frick, a problematic character too, a resistance fighter who is too abrasive, self-absorbed and too willing to sacrifice friends to ideology, becomes the central player in a plot to blow up a Japanese military installation that is developing atomic weapons. The plot succeeds, but the series unflinchingly shows us dead, dismembered, people: it shows us the brutality and ugliness of this action. It isn't just a scene of the enemy factory blowing up in a spectacular but distant and heroic (let's all cheer!) explosion of fire and smoke: it is a scene in which innocent humans getting horribly killed.<br />
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It is difficult finding oneself at times sympathizing with Nazis and condemning US resistance fighters, but that is what makes the series extraordinary: it actually evokes thought rather than a black and white narrative in which one unreflectively "cheers" on the "good guys" killing the "bad guys," for here, as in life, everything is more complicated.<br />
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The series thus far (there will be a season three) has accomplished the followings:<br />
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A woman's <i>actions</i> and <i>compassion</i> are made central to the plot.<br />
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Women do not simply function as sex objects but have life and being apart from men.<br />
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Compassion, empathy and mercy are not denigrated, sneered at and spat upon as "weakness."<br />
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Compassion, in fact, is more powerful than violence. It is a genuine alternative to violence. It can work. It is not inherently weak.<br />
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Narrative is important: the existence of a counter-narrative in the form of the forbidden films gives people hope and changes the course of history. The Nazis understand the importance of narrative: do we?<br />
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The series drives home the point that what matters is what we <i>do</i>, not what our outer shell says we are as a role. Nazis can behave compassionately and Resistance fighters can behave as ruthless barbarians. If we want to defeat barbarism, we can't become barbarians.<br />
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A quick read of some of the response to season two (which admittedly, does have some murky, draggy episodes in the middle) tells me that some people are not "getting" the central message of this series. All the more reason to highlight it.<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-52537493931057797252017-01-04T06:48:00.000-08:002017-01-04T06:50:12.939-08:00Man in the High Castle: Extraordinary, feminist peace seriesI had been despairing about popular media's complicity in the rise of an ultra-violent society now headed by misogynist authoritarian who believes in muscular solutions to most problems, when I saw the extraordinary final episode of the series <i>The Man in the High Castle</i>. I don't want to provide spoilers, as I hope people will watch this program, but I am buoyed with hope. Creating peace narratives has been very much on my mind lately, as that is a necessary precondition to creating the more peaceful society we desperately need: "Without imagination, the people perish." But where, I have wondered, are these narratives?<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3_LsYzyNEVA/WGx7CuVlOUI/AAAAAAAABeQ/k5-ZIB4ohNIYYbNswo242XmHQx402pkMQCLcB/s1600/maninhigh%2Bcastle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3_LsYzyNEVA/WGx7CuVlOUI/AAAAAAAABeQ/k5-ZIB4ohNIYYbNswo242XmHQx402pkMQCLcB/s320/maninhigh%2Bcastle.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">In <i>Man in the High Castle, </i>the Axis has conquered America.</td></tr>
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<i>The Man in the High Castle</i>, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, imagines a world in which the Nazis and Japanese have won World War II and the United States has been divided between them. The Japanese run the Pacific Coast, the Nazis the eastern seaboard into the midwest, and a no-man's land exists in between. The story, which is complex, follows interactions between Americans who are members of a resistance movement fighting both the Nazi and Japanese occupations and their interactions with high ranking individuals in both regimes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">The action pivots on the decisions of Julianna, a compassionate character who exhibits strength and agency.</td></tr>
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Without giving anything away, the series both shows the horrors (rather than the so-called glamor) of violence and refuses to draw sharp demarcations between good guys and bad guys, instead presenting complex characters. It teaches us not to judge by outward appearance, even if that outward appearance includes swastikas, iron crosses or emblems of a repressive Japanese regime: people are what they do, not the uniform they wear. No one--or any one nationality-- is purely good or purely evil--and a woman is the pivot of the action.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oYlAJeT1tQU/WGx6D5qptfI/AAAAAAAABeE/Fk0mNEk7_AM_G08tDt9BIbTSDD_TWGUWACLcB/s1600/john%2Bsmith.%2Bman%2Bhigh%2Bcastle.%2Bjpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oYlAJeT1tQU/WGx6D5qptfI/AAAAAAAABeE/Fk0mNEk7_AM_G08tDt9BIbTSDD_TWGUWACLcB/s400/john%2Bsmith.%2Bman%2Bhigh%2Bcastle.%2Bjpg.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">John Smith is a high ranking Nazi, but also a complex human being.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
After sitting through so many highly popular and in most cases very good (high production values, superb acting, strong scripts) series that are predicated on the story arc of the "man with the biggest weapons willing to behave in the most ruthless way wins," it was a relief to watch an intelligent, well produced series that called into question that narrative, and in fact, portrayed that particular story line as Nazism, problematizing it (as it should be) from the start.<br />
<br />
In <i>Man</i>, it is relationship, the humanizing of the Other, that averts lethal catastrophe. It illustrates Audre Lorde's theme in "The Uses of the Erotic" (and also the take-aways of both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Kelly after their encounters with Nazi Germany) that political change comes from entering into genuine empathic relationship. Rather than the typical story line that depicts compassion as "weak," empathy in <i>Man</i> ends up to be the greatest strength.<br />
<br />
I have to say I was dismayed when in <i>West World</i>, a prime example of a series valorizing "the most violent one wins," Delores, a gentle prairie woman in long dresses, has a pivotal moment in which she says (how cliched can we get?) having donned pants, "I'm not a damsel anymore" before blowing someone away to show her "empowerment." Aren't we tired of that yet? Really? Why do we continue to co-opt women as "tough grrls" into a male narrative of violence that never works, excepts to create ever more violence and dehumanization? It was heartening, almost exhilarating, to see here a story arc based on a different narrative (though with much violence along the way).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Zs8ggMJeSU4/WGx70wz0XAI/AAAAAAAABeY/A0KpFO1c_M4NpWTuqp9ZHyjUX3oFJ4RPgCLcB/s1600/delores-westworld.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Zs8ggMJeSU4/WGx70wz0XAI/AAAAAAAABeY/A0KpFO1c_M4NpWTuqp9ZHyjUX3oFJ4RPgCLcB/s320/delores-westworld.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Audiences are expected to applaud when <i>West World's </i>Delores embraces violence and murder as if this represents "strength" and an "advance." We really need to progress beyond this kind of thinking. That this is the "masculine" solution is made clear by Delores's adoption of male clothes. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Because <i>Man in the High Castle</i> has such a complicated story line and is predicated on moral complexity rather than black and white, good and evil characters, I fear that people won't "get" what the series is trying to convey. But hope springs eternal in the human breast.<br />
<br />
I am writing this hoping that the series follows the novel, as that would make it a fine novel indeed, at least thematically, but I don't know. I also haven't yet read anything about the series, as I haven't wanted to inadvertently stumble across spoilers. I will try to find out more.<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-64408022493735398032016-11-11T18:46:00.000-08:002016-11-11T18:46:06.814-08:00Wendell Berry: Solace<div class="p1">
As I move from numbed to grieved, this poem offers solace. The photos show the nature around my home:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
"Leavings"</div>
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by Wendell Berry</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Yes, though hope is our duty,</div>
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let us live a while without it</div>
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to show ourselves we can.</div>
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Let us see that, without hope,</div>
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we still are well. Let hopelessness</div>
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shrink us to our proper size.</div>
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Without it we are half as large</div>
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as yesterday, and the world </div>
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is twice as large. My small</div>
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place grows immense as I walk</div>
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upon it without hope.</div>
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Our springtime rue anemones</div>
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as I walk among them, hoping</div>
<div class="p1">
not even to live, are beautiful</div>
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as Eden, and I their kinsman</div>
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am immortal in their moment.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OjIJatI_zlo/WCYv26az0MI/AAAAAAAABcQ/MU4lUK7966YohxUr2a-UWCr4npCYjDHqgCLcB/s1600/hyacinths.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OjIJatI_zlo/WCYv26az0MI/AAAAAAAABcQ/MU4lUK7966YohxUr2a-UWCr4npCYjDHqgCLcB/s400/hyacinths.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">"as beautiful as Eden, and I their kinsman am immortal in their moment."</td></tr>
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<br /></div>
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Out of charity let us pray</div>
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for the great ones of politics</div>
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and war, the intellectuals,</div>
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scientists, and advisors,</div>
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the golden industrialists,</div>
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the CEOs, that they too</div>
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may wake to a day without hope</div>
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that in their smallness they</div>
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may know the greatness of Earth</div>
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and Heaven by which they so far</div>
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live, that they may see</div>
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themselves in their enemies,</div>
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and from their great wants fallen</div>
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know the small immortal</div>
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joys of beasts and birds."</div>
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<br /></div>
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HT: Elaine Pigeon</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OU6lAofltRg/WCYtpyrHTqI/AAAAAAAABcI/HRsmShR8ZnEnnG-aS-ZfQrupd-8JLJS9gCLcB/s1600/front%2Byard%2Bfall%2Bcows.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="472" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OU6lAofltRg/WCYtpyrHTqI/AAAAAAAABcI/HRsmShR8ZnEnnG-aS-ZfQrupd-8JLJS9gCLcB/s640/front%2Byard%2Bfall%2Bcows.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;"> "the small immortal joy of beasts"</td></tr>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-83933293711568869112016-11-07T18:58:00.001-08:002016-11-07T18:58:08.001-08:00Election tomorrowTomorrow is election day in the most stunning Presidential election in living memory and perhaps in the history of our country. The news of the first major-party nomination of a woman presidential candidate, remarkable in itself, has been utterly overshadowed by her opponent, the U.S.'s first brush with an unfettered demagogue contemptuous of U.S. democratic law and norms, mocker of the disabled, women, minorities, prisoners of war and fallen soldiers, coming within a hair's-breadth of power. Adding to the spectacle and the terror, Brexit occurred in the midst of this, harbinger of the real possibility that the unthinkable could occur here too in a world where the average citizen has been effectively disenfranchised for far too long and may lash out with the wrecking ball at hand.<br />
<br />
We face tomorrow hopeful but with the knowledge it could go either way. If the election goes the way I hope, in which a moderate, center-left lawyer, former senator and former Secretary of State wins the prize, I believe we should do the following:<br />
<br />
First, take a moment to celebrate. Instead of living in constant dread, we ought to have at least moment of rest before we get back to work. Yes, Clinton will be ruthlessly opposed, but yet she will have power: the power of executive appointments, the power of the Presidential pulpit, the power to set the tone in the executive branch, the power in hundreds of subtle way to influence federal departments to head in directions that are pro-people. She will have the power to propose a budget and a legislative agenda.<br />
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Second, we need to push back against the rhetoric that government is fundamentally bad, fundamentally evil, inherently some hybrid of the "beast" in Revelation and Stalinist "socialism." Every time I go past the Young Republican bulletin board at a college where I teach, I feel a rise of anger at the poster that reads "Taxation is Theft," (a "gotcha" variation on the old socialist slogan "property is theft") not simply because I disagree (I do disagree, but can tolerate disagreement) but because it seems to me an unchallenged lie: in fact, not paying taxes is theft of the worst sort, theft from your country. We need to fight back against the notion that "government is the problem." In fact, to sober minds, sound government is a good and a gift.<br />
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In that vein, I like a wording, that could become a slogan, that I have been hearing more: whenever basic government spending is attacked, such as on education, roads, libraries, health care, as "socialism," people are saying: "It's civilization, not socialism."<br />
<br />
Government spending long predates socialism.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Government spending is civilization not socialism."</blockquote>
It is what civilized nations do.<br />
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After celebrating an election (I hope) and standing up for government as civilization, the third step will be keeping our eyes open and, of course, working for peace, especially as Clinton is feared to be a warmonger.<br />
<br />
As we know, however, the crazed elements in this country will not stop their ruthless, relentless campaign to undermine all progress. Moreover, we know that probably about 40% of voters will vote for Trump. He may go away, but, sadly, we have to expect another demagogue to follow. The election has laid bare to what extent Trump is nothing new: he is a type well-known to Europeans, well understood by great writers. There's a surfeit of parallels, a huge body of literature to describe a person like him. We have been fortunate so far in this country not to have let his likes grab ultimate power, but his type is out there. The next one is likely to learn from Trump's mistakes and successes and thus be even more dangerous.<br />
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Of course, although this is a secular blog, we need to keep our spiritual houses in order and lean into that "ocean of light."<br />
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Perhaps in two days we will wake up and this blog will be so much dust in the wind. In the meantime, I remain optimistic.<br />
<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-43166121518454504382016-09-21T16:21:00.001-07:002016-09-21T16:21:28.082-07:00Le Carre: A Quaker writer? Bodies and violence<span style="font-size: large;">A friend mentioned John le Carre seeming to her to function as a woman's writer. I have been thinking about this while watching the mini-series <i>The Night Manager</i>, based on a le Carre novel of the same name. However, it was not until I watched the first episode in season four of the series <i>Luther</i> with my husband that I understood how le Carre reflects a woman's--and a Quaker's-- stance.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Luther</i>, a British series, focuses on the angst-ridden policeman Luther (Idris Elba), who investigates violent crimes. The season's opening episode involves a serial killer/cannibal of the most gruesome sort, who eats pieces of his victims' bodies. Although officially not working as a police officer, Luther is soon on the trail of this man.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">In <i>The Night Manager</i>, Jonathan Price (Tom Hiddleston), the British night manager of a Cairo hotel, fails to protect the life of an Egyptian woman he has fallen in love with, the mistress of a high-powered Egyptian criminal who murders her. Price is recruited by Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman), who runs a somewhat maverick British intelligence group, to infiltrate and bring down Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), a powerful illegal arms dealer associated with the Egyptian woman's death. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Jonathan and Jud, center, have bodies that are painfully vulnerable to abuse by alpha male Roper, on the left.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Night Manager</i> had me riveted with anxiety for the main character, Jonathan, because he is rubbing shoulders with a sociopath (Roper) who we know will brutally (and with torture) wipe him out if he suspects him of betrayal. To make matters worse, Jonathan falls in love with Jed (Elizabeth Debicki), Roper's highly off-limits American mistress, and she with him. They take what seem to be extreme risks to be with each other. We worry both that Roper will find out they are in love and that he will discover Jonathan is a government agent. Meanwhile we also know that corrupt intelligence officers high in the British secret service will protect Roper and throw Price under the bus if they find out about him. The strong, rather than protect the weak, side with the strong.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">It may be <i>The Night Manager</i> is more riveting and anxiety provoking than <i>Luther</i> because it is better directed (Susanne Bier, the director, won an Emmy for the series.) However, I think there's more to the story than good direction, and that the tension the le Carre evokes come from fundamentally reflecting a female point of view.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">As I watched<i> Luther</i>, not very anxious despite the machinations of a serial killer, I realized that I was comforted because of Luther's god-like (male) qualities. For all his various inner angsts, we know he is invincible. He is a crack cop, better than anyone: against him, what mere serial killer has a chance? He keeps London as safe as it can be kept.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3CdKJgair70/V-MMqLBO7cI/AAAAAAAABZ4/aQgETZdz6DE3eIU1l8L71UrKnT_z8nAJQCEw/s1600/luther.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3CdKJgair70/V-MMqLBO7cI/AAAAAAAABZ4/aQgETZdz6DE3eIU1l8L71UrKnT_z8nAJQCEw/s400/luther.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Luther's body is protected, not vulnerable and is aggressive rather than aggressed upon. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Jonathan, on the hand, exudes vulnerability. He's gentle, not tough, a hotel manager, not a trained, savvy police officer. He's sensitive, without (like Luther, who also is caring) being hardened. Watching his unprotected body as he walks beside Roper, one feels a primal fear for him: he has no real way to defend himself. He is in the position of the woman, his body at the mercy of a nearby male who claims aggressive ownership over it. Over and over we see him vulnerable. (This is problematized because he does kill a man, perhaps necessary to make him palatable, but the overall thrust of Jonathan is vulnerability.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Roper, of course, does not exert sexual ownership over Jonathan, but he does openly exert alpha male control. He renames Jonathan without thinking to ask him what name he would like, insists he participate in corporate crimes that make him vulnerable to arrest, and demands that he be absorbed into Roper's plans and organizations and that he adjust to them without question. Jonathan is there for one reason: to serve Roper. He is expected to have no agency outside of Roper's desires. He does (or is expected to do) whatever Roper tells him. All of this makes him like a woman. Like a woman, he smiles often and makes himself pleasant, agreeable and non-threatening to Roper through words and body language. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Price is supported by other vulnerable people who happen to be women: Angela Burr is visibly, heavily pregnant and also under attack by higher-ups in British intelligence for getting too close to Roper. Jed, Roper's girlfriend, is unhappy and has a body equally as vulnerable to assault as Jonathan's, as well as a young son her work as Roper's mistress supports. I may have some issues with using motherhood to buttress the moral worth of female characters, but it underlines their bodily vulnerability. As we see during an attack on Roper's young son, children's bodies, like women's, are easily assaulted.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">It's hard not to feel acute anxiety over the fate of these vulnerable people fighting Roper, especially Jonathan and Jed, who are so physically close so often to a ruthless man. We feel viscerally their bodily weakness, the risks they are taking and the courage they display.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I find it hard to feel as acutely over Luther, who blankets us in the sense that he is strong and invulnerable, that he will take care of the people in the series and hence of us, the viewer. This is the male stance, ultimately tough and impregnable. It argues, using an individual, that strong, violent males (and by extension groups of strong violent males, ie armies) are what keep us safe. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Le Carre's argument, that the strong alpha male ultimately threatens, rather than protects us, seems to me more far more realistic than the protective capabilities of the alpha male. As Le Carre shows, violent men inside and outside of legitimate organizations work together to oppress the rest of us: they aren't enemies to evil, they are its friends. And as the protagonists in the <i>The Night Manager</i> illustrate, women (and most men), instead of trying to emulate the violent alpha male, should be using their brains to defeat violence, rather than trying to hide behind the faux protection violence offers. Feminism took a very wrong turn when it decided that its role model would be the ruthless female CEO in spiked heels who outdoes that most ruthless male CEO. Instead, and more realistically, we should, like Le Carre, try to show the inherent problems with the accumulation of power/violence into too few hands-- and insist on other solutions. </span><br />
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-19853007452105218482016-06-15T10:03:00.002-07:002016-06-18T18:09:02.505-07:00Quakers and literature, Game of Thrones and Virginia Woolf<span style="font-size: large;">Sadly, the recent shooting in Orlando makes an appropriate backdrop for my topic: the debut of new book on Quaker literature and the question of how we can move towards a more robust imagining of peace.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-obyWYCSsy3A/V2GIOK-qwUI/AAAAAAAABVs/g0YTWlMaGwwSGroOirEuQ2et0HmHdww2wCLcB/s1600/quakerbookcover.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="293" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-obyWYCSsy3A/V2GIOK-qwUI/AAAAAAAABVs/g0YTWlMaGwwSGroOirEuQ2et0HmHdww2wCLcB/s400/quakerbookcover.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Quakers and Literature </i>raises pertinent questions about the role of literature in society.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">The anthology, Quakers in Literature</span><i style="font-size: x-large;">,</i><span style="font-size: large;"> will be officially launched this month at the Friends Association for Higher Education Conference in Woodbrooke, England. I would like to praise this book and juxtapose it to my viewing of the series Game of Thrones</span><i style="font-size: x-large;">.</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8tOwP-sPcss/V2GINzX2p9I/AAAAAAAABVk/JLHOaPUwuyESI81DjWeORZUBizbrnqa_gCKgB/s1600/gameofthrones.beheading.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8tOwP-sPcss/V2GINzX2p9I/AAAAAAAABVk/JLHOaPUwuyESI81DjWeORZUBizbrnqa_gCKgB/s400/gameofthrones.beheading.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A beheading on <i>Game of Thrones.</i> It's not uncommon: this beheader ends up beheaded, but the take-away isn't that violence is bad: the take-away is win at all costs. </td></tr>
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<i style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></i><span style="font-size: large;">Game of Thrones, though not without its entertainment value,</span><i style="font-size: x-large;"> </i><span style="font-size: large;">is characterized by cartoonish characters, cartoonish violence and cartoonish plots. Violence and ritual humiliation substitute the sensation of shock for genuine feeling. In this series, a viewer can get a faux emotional jolt or pay-off (of sorts) without a real emotional investment.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-size: large;">The show is set is some other time period--it's fantasy--presumably very long ago. It's Roman European-esque in feel (and Middle-Eastern-esque)--pre-Christian certainly, but with a medieval overlay. The people are barbaric as a matter of course, and so are constantly chopping each other's heads off (or delving axes into people's brains) and perpetrating other acts of violence. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xArSqpJb83A/V2GIOfMySJI/AAAAAAAABV0/nwyVF8Q3PZoVQ4Naa4b0aOmWYcJsYG-3ACKgB/s1600/theHoundGame-of-Thrones-008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xArSqpJb83A/V2GIOfMySJI/AAAAAAAABV0/nwyVF8Q3PZoVQ4Naa4b0aOmWYcJsYG-3ACKgB/s400/theHoundGame-of-Thrones-008.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Hound learns that peacemaking is for losers. He goes out and kills a bunch of people to avenge the peacemakers.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Recently, a man named the Hound who was left for dead reemerged. He falls in with a wayward wandering group that has decided to renounce violence. Their leader even makes a strong statement about how more killing isn't going to stop they cycle of killing. Lest you think this might open an alternative path in the series, no ... all but the returned hero, who happens to be away when it happens, are slaughtered (not that there is the least question this will occur), and the man who made the speech about peace is found dangling, hanged. This is replayed in the next episode too, lest we missed the message: peacemaking leaves you dead. Peace is for losers. Losers, losers, losers. Kill or be killed. Strike first and hard or die. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The message dunned into the audience week after week --as was done in <i>The Sopranos</i> and <i>Breaking Bad</i> and who knows how many other series--demonstrates that the most violent man wins. All religion is a scam or evil, so don't look to that for help. Strong woman are routinely humiliated--for example, a queen, Cersei, is subjected to one of the most intense scenes of ritual humiliation I have ever witnessed --as a penance imposed by a priest of some cult, she must walk naked through the streets of her city while being pelted with rotten vegetables and jeered at. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-I97S6xcvx6g/V2GINsQizPI/AAAAAAAABVU/j7f7XssX1m4c5mimsoRdhZrhAr_9PiAawCKgB/s1600/game%2Bof%2Bthrones%2Bhumil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-I97S6xcvx6g/V2GINsQizPI/AAAAAAAABVU/j7f7XssX1m4c5mimsoRdhZrhAr_9PiAawCKgB/s400/game%2Bof%2Bthrones%2Bhumil.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cersei dared to be strong: men get to see her naked and humiliate her. Rape and threat of rape are common tools used to control women on his show.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As a Quaker and also as a sane person, I find this constant messaging advocating ultra violence disturbing. Of course, as with all these programs, the producers can coyly say they are depicting something outside of the societal norms of our world. Naturally, they say they</span><span style="font-size: large;"> don't condone this behavior. But, as with</span><span style="font-size: large;"> he Sopranos and Breaking Bad</span><span style="font-size: large;">, everything about the rhetoric of these programs DOES condone it. Real men are validated for being ruthlessly violent. Ruthless violence wins. Compassionate morality is baggage for weaklings and nonentities. Who needs the Nuremburg rallies to whip up the base when you have Game of Thrones</span><span style="font-size: large;">?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Therefore, it was refreshing to read an essay by J. Ashley Foster on Virginia Woolf's peace stance and the Spanish Civil War from the <i>Quakers and Literature</i> book--it's long but well worth reading. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WfT9zEA9Abc/V2GINgohBCI/AAAAAAAABVc/tnBD0LuIVkcJadVHtWY_tVgmDxWDiKnSQCKgB/s1600/VirginiaWoolf1939.pg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WfT9zEA9Abc/V2GINgohBCI/AAAAAAAABVc/tnBD0LuIVkcJadVHtWY_tVgmDxWDiKnSQCKgB/s400/VirginiaWoolf1939.pg.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woolf looking pensive in 1939, the year World War II began.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">According to this essay, Virginia Woolf was involved with Quakers, such as Kathleen Innes, who published through Hogarth Press, (Innes published four books on the League of Nations with Hogarth) and they all advocated for peace. This article cites, of course, Woolf's Three Guineas</span><span style="font-size: large;"> as a feminist peace essay, but argues that, more fundamentally, "pacifism is one of modernism's idioms." This pacifism is internationalist in nature (rejecting fascist nationalisms). Woolf herself envisioned a fictional "Outsider's Society" in</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"> Three Guineas made up of the daughters of educated men who would work for peace. Foster sees the corollary of this in peace efforts that emerged during the Spanish Civil War.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;">We remember there was a time when many non-Quaker women, and I think of Eleanor Roosevelt, believed that women had a particular role in promoting constructive peacemaking--building the conditions that would lead to peace that lasted through "justice and the rights of all." Woolf's aunt, Caroline Stephens, was a feminist Quaker whose pacifism informed Woolf's feminism, and Roger Fry's sister Margery was a Quaker. Quakers published through the same presses and belonged to many of the same political organizations as the Woolfs and other modernists, and the Woolfs sold manuscript pages of Three Guineas</span><span style="font-size: large;"> to raise money to aid Spanish Civil War refugees.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Spanish Civil War</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It was comforting to me to remember that Woolf, who I often think of primarily as a stylist, engaged in serious peace work and political work during the Spanish Civil War and to review her strong commitment to pacifism and her strong belief in the connection between peace and feminism. I remember too during this period (late 1933-early 1935) Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also in England, dedicated to pacifism and trying to build international coalitions to fight National Socialism, most notably at the Fano conference in 1934. I wonder if the Woolfs and Bonhoeffer ever brushed shoulders, but that's an aside--what I care about is that intelligent women speak out for peace--and I can't help but wish for our own Outsiders group to push back against shows like Games of Thrones</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I also can't help but think that the male producers of <i>Game of Thrones</i> (I looked up their bios and saw no sign of military experience) are advocating a warrior mentality and articulating a position that validates ruthless slaughter without having an actual experience of war themselves, which makes this program all the more dangerous. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This brings me back to <i>Quakers and Literature</i>. It's no wonder that a culture that leans relentlessly on violence as the only authentic form of power would produce a constant stream of individuals who try to express power through slaughter or that they would be attracted to ISIS as the most ruthless group of all. A question I raise in my essay in <i>Quakers and Literature,</i> called "Quaker Literature: Is there such a thing?" is why Quakers have been sidelined into homespun, nostalgic domesticating fictions when so many serious issues confront us. Is this really a time for escapism? Or do we need to be concentrating more effort on a literature--fiction and non-fictional--that imagines solutions to our problems through a Quaker lens? After all, without an imagination, the people perish. I would argue that a culture that pornographically repeats violent images over and over again has lost its imagination and its mooring. We who look at it outside a perspective of violence--we the Outsiders--perhaps have a responsibility to pick up the work Woolf started and advocate more imaginatively for peace. Where can we start?</span></div>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-24705934028966917712016-06-03T11:08:00.001-07:002016-06-05T16:44:48.991-07:00My new book<span style="font-size: large;">My book is out: <i>The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.</i> Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who resisted the Nazis and was executed for his complicity in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The focus of <i>The Doubled Life</i> is on reinserting women back into his life story, but possibly of more interest to readers at this site is Bonhoeffer's connection to Quakerism. My writing of the book was informed by my Quakerism, which raised issues of women's silencing and equality for me as I began to research Bonhoeffer. Another connection to Quakers is in Bonhoeffer's similarities to Thomas Kelly: http://martinkelley.tumblr.com/post/36663235589.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dietrich Bonhoeffer</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some theological similarities between Bonhoeffer and Quakers:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Pacificism (peace testimony)</i>: Although Bonhoeffer, no doubt with some anguish, got involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, he was, as mentioned above, a pacifist. He felt, however, that so many people were suffering and dying that he had to sacrifice his own desire for moral purity. Violating his conscience was less important than saving others. He thus rejected Kantian moral absolutes. We continue to debate this decision. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Living your beliefs in the here and now (integrity)</i>: Like the Quakers, Bonhoeffer didn't invest his faith in "airy notions" (though he was more overtly theological, probably, than the average Quaker) but strongly believed that Christianity was meant to be enacted now, today, in this world. For this reason, he embraced the Old Testament (what we now call the Hebrew Bible) because of its emphasis on finding God "in the center of the village." That was a radical move in Nazi Germany, which wanted to eradicate the Old Testament along with the Jews. Like the Quakers, for him faith was expressed in what you do, not in what you say. Despite his highly troubled relationship with his fiancee, Maria, he admired the many ways she lived out her beliefs in action. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Religionless Christianity</i>: Related to living in the here and now, Bonhoeffer, like the early Quakers, wanted a Christianity stripped of its cant. For him, Christianity came to be defined as prayer and action. The crisis in institutional Christianity he experienced is on going today. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Inner Light isn't your conscience</i>: Like the early Quakers, most notably Robert Barclay, Bonhoeffer rejected the notion of "let your conscience be your guide," understanding this as a way for people to set themselves up as God. Like the early Quakers, he was interested in the light (though he would not have used that term) as way of discerning and doing God's will in the world. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Community and Simplicity:</i> Bonhoeffer invested enormously in his believe in the power of community to shake off the Nazi yoke. He found his deepest fulfillment in the several dissident seminaries he founded. Life in these communities was lived very simply. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Equality</i>: Bonhoeffer might not meet the bar on the equality testimony as we understand it, as he was a product of a hierarchical and patriarchal culture. However, it's worth noting how profoundly he was influenced by the black church in Harlem in 1930-31 at a time when many Americans were blinded by racism. Further, near the end of his life, he embraced the idea of what might be called "the community of good people" that transcended notions of class. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some further Quaker/Bonhoeffer connections:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">During the course of a year in Manhattan at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer met Jean Lasserre, a fellow seminarian and French pacifist. Bonhoeffer was converted into a Sermon-on-the-Mount Christian pacifist by the encounter. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Bonhoeffer and Lasserre travelled to Mexico in 1931 and were asked to address a Quaker group there, as it was so unusual at that time for a German and a Frenchman to be friends, given the animosity World War I and its aftermath had bred between the two cultures. (I'd love to know more about the meeting these two had with Mexico Quakers.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">When Bonhoeffer decided to run a seminary, one of the models was Woodbrooke, in Birmingham, England. He imposed a period of silent worship on his his seminarians, with which they found difficult to cope. (Further, t</span><span style="font-size: large;">he Berlin Quaker meeting was active in helping Jews and others during the Nazi era. If Bonhoeffer had a connection with them, which is quite possible, it would necessarily be submerged.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Thomas Kelly's brother-in-law picked Bonhoeffer up in Manhattan when Bonhoeffer traveled there in June, 1939. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Bonhoeffer was friends with Quaker physicist and pacifist, Herbert Jehle, whose peace-loving ideas were considered quite strange in 1930s Germany. After the war, Jehle named his children Dietrich and Eberhard, after Bonhoeffer and his best friend, Eberhard Bethge. Jehle also helped Bonhoeffer's fiancee, Maria, come to the U.S. after the war, where she studied at Bryn Mawr. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Like many early Quakers, Bonhoeffer did jail time. Like a few Quakers, he was executed. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Herbert Jehle, Quaker</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I began the book at Earlham School of Religion. Without the Quakers and Brethren I met there, this book never would have gotten off the ground. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">For Bonhoeffer, at the end of the day, the personal was the theological and the theological was the personal. My book concentrates on the life, with all its flaws, as an expression of a lived theology during a period of war and totalitarianism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The book can be purchased through Amazon. A $9.99 kindle version is available. If you would like an actual copy, the best price ($30.40) is via Chris Graham at <cgraham wipfandstock.com="">.</cgraham></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I hope you will read the book. I know it's expensive (and I signed a contract that more or less insured I won't make any money on it) but I would love it to be read and discussed. Many of the issues Bonhoeffer faced remain eerily relevant to our own times. In addition, one of Bonhoeffer's best friend Bethge's biggest disappointment after the war was his sense that the Lutheran Church in Germany simply wanted to return to "the day before" Hitler took power: it seemed to Bethge not to want to learn from the experience of Nazism. Do religious institutions suffer because they haven't fully come to grips with the modern world or the aftermath of World War II? </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">More on the book at: </span><a href="https://www.wcwonline.org/Women-=-Books-Blog/bonhoeffer">https://www.wcwonline.org/Women-=-Books-Blog/bonhoeffer</a></i><br />
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-42008955832904081072016-05-17T08:28:00.002-07:002016-05-17T08:37:44.291-07:00Communal Discernment and Radical IndividualismI can count on most of my students arriving in the college classroom with an unexamined ideology of radical individualism. When we discuss food issues--how much power, say, should the government exercise over food--the response I hear usually is "none. Leave it up to the individual." We begin to parse that: what about alcohol: should people then be allowed to drink and drive? That, they tell me, is different. What about food labels? When I was a child, I tell them, we didn't know how much sugar, salt, calories, etc food contained. Should the government continue to mandate that? Well, yes, that's useful. And on it goes. We cling to an ideology that has swung to an extreme. As we examine it, we begin to realize that curbing radical individualism can be a gift rather than a curse.<br />
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I have internalized much of that individualism: it's part of the air I breathe. I don't want anyone to tell me what to do, in part because the people with the most proclivity to tell others the "truth" often have the least grasp of it themselves.<br />
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Individualism is a strong part of our meetings. In fact, Quakerism could be argued as the perfect religion for individualistic society: everyone in their own bubble, worshipping whatever God they want or none at all, practicing the mantra, "you go your way and I'll go mine and if our paths cross, it's beautiful."<br />
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Of course, we know that in reality indivdualism is not what Quakerism is about. In fact, it's a truism that Quakerism is more aligned with Catholicism in its notion of a corporate body than with Protestantism's focus on individual conscience (though we have that too). But how do we get to community and more particularly, the communal discernment we might crave, through the desert of radical individualism?<br />
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I spent a weekend with eleven other Quakers at the Friend's Center in Barnesville exploring that question. I found it a fruitful event for several reasons.<br />
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First, Herb Lape, the facilitator, invited everyone the first evening to talk about themselves. We got to know each other and were encouraged to share about often taboo topics, such as our political orientation. I felt from the start seen and heard and appreciated, as I believe others did as well. One of my chief illuminations confirmed that we can't do corporate discernment successfully if we are not seen and heard as who we are as individuals--and loved. Trust and intimacy is foundational and something we shouldn't skip over, or worse, gloss over by not seeing differences.<br />
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Second, if Herb seemed to be going off topic and people brought that up, he was responsive, truly listened and changed course or explained himself more clearly. I thought he was a wonderful facilitator, modeling both authority, humility in the strongest and best sense, and willingness to learn.<br />
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As we entered into our study, we looked at John Woolman, a good model for communal discernment as he represents the turn in Quakerism to what I call modern acceptable discourse. While Fox and his cohort were fully willing to mix it up, naming their enemies Antichrists and whores of Babylon, Woolman witnessed to loving empathy towards the other. He believed firmly that slavery was a great evil that must be abolished, but he was willing to listen to and love the slaveowner and to bow to the corporate discernment of the Meeting. If the Meeting told him to wait before acting, he waited. He was able to move Quakerism towards unity on abolishing slavery by his willingness to respect the community as a body.<br />
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We discussed or the pitfalls of corporate discernment: it shouldn't become group think. People at odds with the group may be the prophetic voices the group needs to hear. Also, there are no rules about timing: unity can come very quickly or can take years and either is OK.<br />
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Other "takeaways" from the weekend include the following, from John Bensons' notes:<br />
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Trust in speaking to that of God in everyone. Acknowledge gifts, and</div>
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bring them into community.</div>
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<b>Value individual discernment in community</b>:</div>
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Be willing to hear the lone voice in a community.</div>
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Have the courage to speak up and be the lone voice.</div>
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Do these concerns point toward being a prophet?</div>
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<b>Community authority doesn't necessarily undermine individual freedom:</b></div>
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What is freedom in the spiritual sense? Doing whatever we want whenever we want? Or being free to say no to our urges and appetites? How can surrendering ourselves to God make us free?</div>
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<b>Understanding communal discernment as a Quaker “distinctive”</b> – other</div>
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religions don’t do it:</div>
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It is a horizontal process, not hierarchical. There is one vertical</div>
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connection: the one that links the community to God.</div>
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The consequences of this method can be awesome.</div>
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<b>A process of sorting it out could look like this:</b></div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>what I want</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>what the community wants</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>what God wants for me and the community</div>
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-<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>what God wants from me and the community</div>
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<b>We need to know that God is alive and active among us.</b></div>
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Believe in God AND believe that we can hear God (from experience and practice)</div>
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We need help. So we join a community.</div>
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Notice the spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist.</div>
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<b>We need the cloud of witnesses who went before us, ie, a tradition.</b></div>
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Tradition is just democracy/consensus/unity spread over the centuries</div>
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before us.</div>
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<b>For corporate discernment:</b></div>
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Use the Scriptures.</div>
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Test any new revelation that affects the community.</div>
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Practice humility, the discipline of not having all the answers.</div>
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Ask what is the most loving thing to do?<br />
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Some of this will not be appealing to non-theists, but nevertheless reflects the wisdom we gleaned. What do others think: what is the place of corporate discernment in our meetings and, if we think it is important, how do we get there?</div>
Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-27258970263489712122016-04-12T13:07:00.000-07:002016-04-12T13:10:51.557-07:00 Serendipities<span style="font-size: large;">Today I participated in a poetry reading at Ohio University Eastern, where I teach.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">I had been wondering what poem to read. My brother just died in December, and I had been finding solace in Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" which I had recently blogged about, but felt strongly I shouldn't read. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daffodils are the subject of "I Wander Lonely as a Cloud." The daffodils dance joyfully in the breeze in that poem.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">What then can I read, I wondered? I had chosen a stanza from a poem called "The Jazz of Pussycats," but needed more. Several hours before the reading a poem called "What is Death?" showed up in my mailbox, sent out by Friend Susannah Rose. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Not only was the timing of the poem's arrival and its theme perfect, the poem was written by Henry Scott Holland, the same name as a mentor who encouraged me strongly on my Bonhoeffer book</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">OK, thought I. I will read the poem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Not only was the poem perfect for the occasion, but another person, Tom Flynn, read "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Tom not only read it, but said almost exactly what I would have said about it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I tend to be suspicious of "connect the dots" serendipites, but yet I wonder. Is this all coincidence? The uncanny timing of the poem's arrival, the poem itself, the author, Tom reading Wordsworth? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Perhaps I construct all this. And yet. I suppose the most important take away is that we never know who we will touch when we send a poem or a word out into the world. Susan Rose could not have suspected that I needed just that poem for a poetry reading just that day. As I worry about this post, I am trying to trust that maybe it too will speak. </span></div>
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-89422311581302164122016-04-01T08:29:00.000-07:002016-04-07T20:45:49.573-07:00Past into Future?<span style="font-size: large;">I became part of a Quaker discernment group last year and have been trying, as far as possible, to be responsive to the promptings of the Spirit. This has been a struggle--I want to schedule the Spirit for when I "have time." But do any of "have time?" Is time ours to possess and slice and dice as we find convenient?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">So I am stopping today to blog, though I have many other more important things to do. What if I had blogged here every time in the past year the Spirit prompted me? Would I have failed to get done what was so important to do? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">I have begun to notice the slippage lately between me and my college students, who are mostly teenagers. I become more acutely aware that their world is not my world. This came home to me forcefully a few years ago when I showed them an ad featuring Grace Kelly. None of them had heard of her. When we studied art forgery, they had no idea who Greta Garbo was. I felt it too this year, as my students, for a song analysis paper, shared groups I had never heard of before. They love Linkin Park. They don't know the classic Beatle songs. Some of them love Tupac, who at least I've heard of (and whose music I want to hear--but haven't yet.) Pink Floyd is not part of their context. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">It has occurred to me too that the world most of them, at this point, have grown up in--what they remember, these students born after 1996--is the post 9/11 world. Most of them don't even remember the day 9/11/01. What they've grown up with, what is "normal" to them is what I think of as a grim, gray world of wars, terrorism, shrunken job opportunities, impossibly high college tuitions. I find myself--heaven help me!--wanting to share how it "used to be."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">As a member of an older Meeting, I encounter many older Quakers who tell stories about the past. I have been wondering why that impulse is so strong, in me and in them, and I think it is because, as we experience the slippage between how things are versus how they were, we want to preserve and pass on the memory we have of how things were, especially what has changed. Yet the past is so fragile-- a piling up of ephemera, mood, feeling, texture--that I have more and more come to believe we have to listen carefully to that something behind--or more accurately, within-- all that content we pour out.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">I don't worry about subjectivity at all--ie, whether we remember the past through rose-colored glasses--because that doesn't seem important: of course we are remembering subjectively. The subjectivity, in fact, seems to me the most important part of the content: why have we chosen these details? Why? What do they represent and how is that valuable?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">I have been thinking about all this, because sometimes, perhaps when my students ask me, outraged, yearning for the answer, why, say, college costs so much, why they have to take out so many loans, my first response has been to describe how it didn't use to be that way--to explain "what it was like in my day--" and yet they don't respond to that. I have found that when I talk about what it was like in The Day--trying to convey a zeitgeist--younger people glaze over. So I have stopped. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">A realization I have had, as alluded to above, is that it isn't so much facts and information I hope to communicate, as the <i>feeling </i>of a certain time, what it <i>felt like </i>to be <i>alive</i> in a certain moment. For while in a true sense things never change, they also <i>do</i> change all the time. One of the shocks of getting older is realizing that what had seemed completely normal and permanent, literally unchangeable, is completely transient and impermanent. It's a cliche that those clothes and hair-dos--so <i>normal--</i> become as old, out-dated and faded in the photos as the clothes in our grandmother's album. Police officers don't wear the same uniforms anymore. Children can no longer run free and unsupervised around the neighborhood. The technology changes. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">I remember going for the first time into the atmospheric St. Clairsville Library, a store front building on St. Clairsville's Main Street, tall and narrow, through a lobby, up an open, airy, narrow, winding staircase to a second floor, and having my heart twist in my chest as I came across a set of wooden card catalogues. Card catalogues! This library had card catalogues! Tears almost sprang into my eyes. When had I last seen a card catalogue?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">The catalogues were for the rare books collection. I have no particular partiality for card catalogues per se, but seeing them there broke (I won't change that typo) back a flood of memories and emotions. I felt a huge desire to tell someone who wouldn't know what they were all about them: how very long they were, what it felt like to pull them out and go through them, how the book listings were typed on hard paper stock the size of notecards and how you brought you own notecards to jot down information, then went to the stacks to find the books. How you hoped the books you found lived up to expectations!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">Yet none of that is important. It's boring really. Who cares? How different is it to look something up on the computer? Who would want to do it that old way? Thank God we have the Internet! What are you <i>talking about </i>with card catalogues!?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">Of course, it's <i>not </i>the card catalogues that are important, but what they represent--a way of thinking and being and even moving through the world that we don't have (much) anymore. It's spatial--how we relate to the world--and sensory--weight and smell, sight and touch. How we experience knowledge and information is different now. Is this important? I don't know. But something in me has an impulse to preserve the memory. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span> <span style="font-size: large;">So when I listen to older Quakers talk--and I love history--I try to--or need to try harder to--listen through and behind and within the stories, because the stories often aren't the most important thing. But they are the vehicle.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">What I am struggling with is how to tell the stories--and to capture the texture of a time you need to tell a story--but how to tell them so that they are not tedious and irrelevant. How do we capture the details they convey a zeitgeist, a texture, a surround of what it was like in a past moment in a way that still matters? This seems important, in Quakerism, in our world, in our personal lives, because the only way to pass on the feeling of a time is through this compilation of story upon story. Yet so often I fear we do it in a way that loses the forest for the trees instead of conveying how the trees made up this particular, ephemeral forest. How can we do it better, as a Society, as Selves?</span><br />
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-90582396087210862742015-08-08T11:37:00.006-07:002015-08-08T11:41:30.750-07:00Through the Ocean of Light: On Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative, 2015Every year, the members of Ohio Yearly Meeting descend on Barnesville like a flock of exotic--if plain--birds, a sudden migration of shin-length shirtwaist skirts, bonnets, straw hats, whites shirts with black suspenders, beards. Even after seven years, the descent never ceases to startle me.<br />
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Last year, for the first time, I fully attended the Yearly Meeting sessions. Others years, Earlham School of Religion, vacations, and our first year here, the intense shock of arrival, kept me away. This year, balancing teaching and the other demands of life, I did what I could.<br />
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I sometimes wonder at my membership in this body. To say I am not a rural person, despite living in a rural area in a house surrounded by open fields, woods and lake, would be a complete understatement. When I first moved here, my brother used to to sing me the <i>Green Acres</i> theme song and wonder that I was living in "Petticoat Junction." Often then--and now--theses lyrics from the <i>Green Acres</i> song float through my mind: "Keep the country, just give me Park Avenue." Seven years into the rural experiment, I can definitely say I am not likely, barring a famine, to be gardening, baking, canning, sewing or in any other way performing rural femininity. The chances of my adopting plain dress also equal zero: I hate wearing skirts, and while the idea of simply stuffing my hair under a cap is appealing, I don't know that the look would go with makeup and hair color, quaffing a glass of swine or watching <i>Orphan Black</i>.<br />
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So, here I am, What could I possibly have in common with these people? I don't share a rural ethos, and I have not a drop of the ancestral blood of Smiths, Guindons, Rockwells, Tabers or other old Quaker families. <br />
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And yet. As with Fanny Price in Jane Austen's <i>Mansfield Park</i>, who suffered the pains of tyranny, ridicule and neglect, I also, beyond the former, encounter "something consolatory." This year, for example, compared to last, I felt more at home in my difference and more convinced the yearly meeting needs the difference I represent. I am very clear too that at this point my meeting role is a quiet one: to pray, to be present, to support. This is all to the good: the Quakers have a surfeit of chiefs.<br />
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Beyond the superficial differences, however--and in the end, who cares if our ethos is rural or urban?, -- I experienced the deeper kinship that unites us. Most of us are products of a transformed worldview, marked deeply by living in that "infinite ocean of light and love" that flows over the world's ocean of darkness and death. In Ohio Yearly Meeting, we are not "of the world," at least not entirely.<br />
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One manifestation, for example, appeared during our discussion of a policy to screen for sex offenders and require criminal backgrounds checks for anyone working with children. Quakers are the only group I have ever known not to roll over and play dead, acquiesce in complete abjection, the moment the word "litigation" is used. We know there is something more important than whether we are sued. (Really? Can that be in US society? Can there be a group that doesn't immediately cave in as soon as the word lawsu ... starts to be articulated?)<br />
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Therefore, although we decided to go ahead and screen for sex offenders and do criminal backgrounds checks on caretakers of youth, we made that decision based on love for our children, not fear of being sued. We did it because, as Quakers eloquently expressed it, predators look for easy prey, and our tendency to trust makes us vulnerable. We did this because we also know we can stand up for our principles against the threat of lawsuits if we need to do, because even were we to lose all our money and property, we would still exist. I felt deeply grateful to be part of a group that understands that its being roots in something deeper than the material and does not live in fear of losing its goods.<br />
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So I am in unity with this understanding of the universe that doesn't put its faith in chariots, in budgets, in programs, in worldly wealth. This gift of perception is so great, and in such short supply, that it calls out to be nurtured and spread. I am glad, as older meetings perhaps fade, to see all the new growth witnessed to during the yearly meeting, small shoots of life growing up in England, Italy and Pennsylvania, new groupings arising.<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-11887631470528190482015-07-27T06:58:00.001-07:002015-07-29T10:27:47.861-07:00On Quaker community: A dose of humility?Micah Bales recently posted a blog on the Quaker tendency to turn inward and focus on our own communities.<br />
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I agree that it can't stop there. The problem may be that we have confused the beginning with the end. We don't exist to be nurturing communities. But it helps to nurture people. People need love intrinsically. Love is the glue that holds the universe together.<br />
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That being said, Quakers need to keep examining the following:<br />
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Is the nurture we offer one another leading us back out to change the world?<br />
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Or does it cause us, especially the people in leadership, to have a false view of themselves?<br />
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Especially if we are leaders or insiders, how are we judging the people who want to enter our group? On the basis of how they fit in or, assuming they are not quite "right," on how "fixable" they are? Too often, Quakers are quick to TEACH but unwilling to learn. We are a tribe of chiefs. We want people to follow us. But what if we tried to learn from <b>others</b>? What would it take to actually listen and <i>hear</i> what another person said--not just use what they are saying as a a prelude to correcting them or as an echo chamber confirming what we already know? Or become completely defensive?<br />
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Who wants to be fixed? Very few people: we crave love and acceptance. Yet often our unconscious thought towards others seems to be, "if only we could fix that person to be more like us, we could accept him." Thus we lose the opportunity to be transformed--and often the ability to transform other lives when people flee us.<br />
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Sometimes I have been literally jaw-droppingly astonished that people, often leaders, have sometimes become so insular, cosseted and protected, that, although by the standards of the larger society they lack social skills, looks, etc (though often wonderful people!) they only want to be around the "beautiful people:" those highly socially adept and attractive. Sometimes I can only say to myself: Really? Really? Listen to yourself. Look in the mirror. Guess what? You (me) are not so great. Not as individuals. Not by ourselves.<br />
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On a like note, coming from Lutheranism, I have never been able to get over the pride people often have in being Quaker. It's good to be proud of your tribe, but often this goes over the top, into what I will call the "we are the cat's pajamas--we are QUAKERS" mentality. Often, it seems, we expect people to be impressed, if not bowled over into speechless, rapt wonder, if not to swoon and possibly have a near death experience, just because we are QUAKERS. In reality, the rest of the world doesn't care. How long do we have to wait for the masses NOT to come storming the gates, panting to be QUAKERS, before we get the memo?<br />
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Much of this, I would argue, roots in having lost our Christ center [and rather than start a firestorm, I ask you to interpret that as you will] rooted in the values Jesus espoused. Liberal Friends have often become a politically progressive action group and conservative Friends sometimes act like a plain- dressing antiquarian society, more interested in projecting an old-fashioned ethos than looking outward and walking humbly with the Lord.<br />
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That beings said, Quakerism retains so much behavior, so much action, so many people, so much, dare I say, theology, that is loving, kind, and also Christlike, that we have a great gift to offer the world--if only we could get over ourselves.Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-66317599911430810672015-07-18T12:25:00.001-07:002015-07-18T12:39:26.493-07:00"Heaven is for real:" but maybe not a little boy's vision of it This falls under the auspices of a Quaker post: Stillwater Friends Meeting, of which I am a member, hosted a showing of the movie "Heaven is for Real." I was interested in seeing the film both as part of the committee that sponsors "movie night" and because it was outside of my comfort zone. To my surprise, I found it fit Roland Barthes's notion of a "writerly text:" open-ended and ambiguous--far more than I would have expected. It really was not quite what I expected.<br />
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The plot goes as follows: a little boy named Colby, aged four, needs an emergency appendectomy, and at some point in is in danger of death. According to the movie, he never actually stops breathing, his heart never stops, his brain function never flatlines--he never actually dies, even for a moment.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Little Colby fortunately survives his operation, but it does cost a bundle. While under anesthesia, he has a vision, a dream or literal experience of heaven. </td></tr>
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After the operation, the boy tells his father, Todd, a pastor, bits and pieces of what the youngster understands as a visit to heaven: He sat in Jesus' lap, Jesus rode a rainbow colored horse, a choir of angels sang. The father, not naive, is intrigued but at first interprets the boy as describing a dream or vision based on fragments of stories he has heard about Jesus, the Bible and heaven. When the little boy announces that Jesus has blue-green eyes, the father is convinced his son has imagined heaven: the parents have blue and green eyes and, of course, the parents think, the child is projecting mom and dad as Jesus. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dad, actor Greg Kinnear, comes to believe--or almost believe--his son has been to heaven. Anyway, it gets him thinking hard about belief. </td></tr>
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And yet. Some residue of the boy's story strikes the father as real. The story nags him, and he starts talking about it in the pulpit, to the alarm of the church's lay council. The father becomes so obsessed with the story that he starts having fights with his wife, Sonja, who will have none of it, and he goes to see a psychologist. This woman, clearly the classic castrating, dark haired, over-educated career woman and definitely not a "believer," pooh-poohs the pastor's thought that the heaven experience could be real.</div>
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Meanwhile, a local paper gets wind of the "boy who went to heaven" and sends out a reporter. The church council becomes even more alarmed after the story runs. Though previously a banker on the council had offered to take care of the pastor's high medical bills--more than $50,000 (apparently the church did not provide him with health insurance or anything near adequate health insurance, though this is never said, and the pastor refuses the offer of help), now the banker is part of the group that turns on the pastor and announces that he has only one more week in the pulpit. (His wife at one point wants to get a job to pay the bills, but the husband informs her that her job is to be a mother.)</div>
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So far the wife has been a doubter, just like the female psychologist and the woman on the church council leading the charge against the him. However, when the four year old tells her he has seen his dead sister in heaven, the wife breaks down: she did lose a baby to a miscarriage, even though she never knew it was a girl. The child, she reasoned, could not possibly have heard about that, so his story must be true. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mom becomes a believer after Colby tells her about meeting the sister Mom lost in a miscarriage. Kelly Reilly, the mom, plays another devoted wife to much more twisted man in the current season of <i>True Detective.</i></td></tr>
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In the climatic scene of the film, the pastor, in his final sermon, gives an impassioned sermon in which he states that God is love and that what we believe is important. Heaven means different things to different people, he says. It may not be Jesus on a rainbow horse to everyone, but if we truly believed in sone sort of heaven, wouldn't it change how we lived, make us more loving and secure? Isn't the point to really<i> act</i> as if heaven is real? What he <i>doesn't </i>say is that his son's vision of heaven is literally real--the title of the book and movie are <i>not </i>My Son's Vision of Heaven is Real, but Heaven is for Real. What the pastor really wants people to think about is NOT the 4 year old's story of riding a rainbow horse with Jesus, but what it might mean if the concept of heaven--explicitly open ended as "whatever that means to you"--is real. Could it inspire us to behave less cruelly to one another in the here and now and instead (this is my interpretation) to build a better world.</div>
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In other words, this is Barthes's open-ended, ambiguous "writerly" narrative being mis-interpreted as a closed "readerly" narrative locating a literal heaven in a little boy's experience, devoid of ambiguity. </div>
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The parishioners, led by the wife, are so moved that they come on stage in a group hug. Later, the pastor watches a show about a girl in Asia who paints her vision of heaven, and when his son sees her painting of Jesus on TV, amazingly a blue-green eyed man, he confirms it is the same Jesus he saw.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rfrLKr2ELgw/VaqkACknc7I/AAAAAAAAA_Y/1iyeaRVfvvc/s1600/jesus-heaven%2Bis%2Breal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rfrLKr2ELgw/VaqkACknc7I/AAAAAAAAA_Y/1iyeaRVfvvc/s320/jesus-heaven%2Bis%2Breal.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is what Jesus looks like to little Colby during his trip to heaven.</td></tr>
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The movie closes with the wife announcing she is pregnant. We never see the pastor write the best-selling book, but clearly the wheels are turning--and he does have a huge debt load hanging over him. We might question him exploiting the naive statements of a four-year to make money, but we can also understand him needing to get bills paid--and it's not his fault he lives in a country that allows grossly inflated medical costs to be normal. Of course, it could be that Todd actually literally believed his son's story, but the tenor of the story suggests he does not. To give him his due, he seems to have sincerely wanted to get people thinking about their faith lives.</div>
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The movie is set in Nebraska, and the pastor lives in a big white frame house, apparently built very recently (not a 19th-century farmhouse) surrounding by open fields, reminiscent of <i>Field of Dreams</i>. The cast is almost all white, but I caught at least a glimpse of a black parishioner, and a black parishioner calls 9/11 at some point. The black-skinned person who calls 9/11 presents as extremely culturally white--very short hair, clean, crisp conservative clothes, an ultra-clean-cut look that does not threaten white sensibilities in any way. The real blacks, I would say, are a Latino couple with a baby to whom the pastor's wife gives a beautiful baby dress. When the Latino woman (who looks safely legal and as if she probably heads to a night job working at the Holiday Inn) exclaims it's too nice a gift to accept, the pastor's wife assures her: "Not for YOUR baby." This is apparently meant to exhibit lack of racial prejudice, but it comes across as very condescending: even a brown baby deserves a pretty dress! I am going with the idea that the movie makers meant well. </div>
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This movie interested me in particular because I am fascinated by the way people misread texts. I don't know how many times even top scholars in a field don't see what is right in front of them. I am even surprised at myself: as I go back to familiar texts I can come away with completely different takes at different times. (This is why I always tell my students to head back to primary sources.) I am thus more and more in accord with Nietzsche's thought that people read or see what they have already decided is there, not what is really in front of them. </div>
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So I am interested that people seem to misread this movie as primarily about a boy's literal trip to heaven rather than as exploration of the power of belief. Why is the boy's story so important? Why are we all so prone to misread?</div>
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-56032893062252451162015-06-02T16:37:00.000-07:002015-06-03T07:03:07.325-07:00Back to the Zombies!<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> I completely missed this comment about the Zombies post from March, as I so seldom get comments anymore that I stopped looking. In any case, I was delighted to hear from Hystery, who I have missed. Since the original blog post is so old, I decided simply to make this into its own post. Hystery is responding to a blog (that I try to push back against) saying the Zombie craze is really about younger people's dread of aging Boomers. I am in agreement with Hystery and wonder if others feel this same vague dread of Exploitation, Apathy and Despair? I also see that our story is not yet written, and am haunted by Germans who committed suicide during World War II because they became too hopeless, and yet a new, better time was coming soon. I too am an adjunct these days, love the work, but am not crazy about the conditions ... :) I also wonder if the intergenerational family will become the new norm--or the new old norm, as it once </span><i>was</i> the norm. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> From Hystery:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 18.1999988555908px;">It is an interesting idea, though I hardly think it is consciously held by most of us Gen-Xers, that you Boomers are like Zombies. I think you are right that this attitude, conscious or not, is born of a divide and conquer propaganda that tells us there is not enough for all and that we must fight each other for the scraps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I do live with my mother and father and 98 year old grandmother as well as with my husband and children. It is what it is- usually good. Sometimes quite difficult. And I work as an adjunct (dreadfully exploited if I'm being honest) and share an office with my Baby Boomer father. We're both history faculty. He holds the only full time history job at the college and when he retires (which will be soon) they will likely decide to replace his full time position with more adjunct faculty without insurance, without a union, without job security. Until then, he does his best to protect us with all the pull and power his years, experience, and union membership afford him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But there is a strong sense that there is some shuffling undead monster tracking us- feeding off brains and drawing us into a living death. I think it is not our parents but Exploitation and Apathy and Despair that mindlessly lurches toward us. We are not, perhaps, a generation well-known for our capacity for hope. But we shall see. Our story is not yet fully written.</span></div>
Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-8232573388928583702015-05-30T14:36:00.003-07:002015-05-30T14:40:29.462-07:00Patience not passivityI recently read a children's book from 1946 called <i>The Little White Horse</i> by Elizabeth Goudge. I am interested in children's literature, among other reasons, because of its influence on adults. In any case, in this story, a 13-year-old named Maria goes with her governess, Miss Heliotrope, to live with her uncle on his estate in the West Country. Early on, the village parson and several wise animals, a dog (who turns out to be a lion--several years before Lewis wrote <i>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</i>) and a cat, advise Maria to be patient and curb her troubling "feminine curiosity." This involves sitting and waiting quietly to be asked, for instance, to tour the estate's kitchens and other areas. Maria obeys, virtue is rewarded and Maria's curiosity satisfied--without annoying anyone in the process.<br />
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The book, which relies on the page-turning curiosity of its mostly female readers, and on Maria having the pluck to follow where her questions lead, soon drops the theme of cultivating passivity. However, I continued to ponder it, and the way passivity is often confused with patience.<br />
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Patience is not one of the fruits of the spirit contemporary Quakers emphasize. Our "p" is primarily for peace--more precisely peace-making, and we celebrate active virtues: cultivating simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality in how we live. Sitting patiently and waiting for other people to initiate change has not been part of our tradition.<br />
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It's important, however, I think, not to confuse patience with passivity. It seems to me Biblical patience has little to do with sitting quietly. The patience of Job had everything to do with enduring suffering, not basking in beatific stillness as he laid on the dung heap, covered in sores. Job actively cursed God, and God told the people criticizing Job for doing that that Job was right, that nobody deserved the kind of suffering he'd endured.<br />
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Early Quakers like Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, who were imprisoned in Malta by the Inquisition for preaching up the Quaker word in a Catholic region, also don't fit a model of serene and saintly acceptance that we tend to associate with patience. They endured imprisonment--but they also fought back against it. Evans and Cheevers mounted a hunger strike in prison, complained vocally and resentfully about their abusive treatment and argued vigorously to refute both the theology and the threats of priests--but had the patience to resist trading freedom for, say, kissing the crucifix or recanting their Quaker testimony.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Malta cell of Evans and Cheevers</td></tr>
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They had Biblical patience, a willingness to endure the consequences of following leadings, leadings that brought them into clashes with worldly authorities. Their patience was a fruit of activity, not passivity, and it was active in itself.<br />
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One of the earlier, lost meanings of being a "plain" people that the Quakers adopted as a label was "plaint" or complaint. The early Quakers were not simply plain because they had leveled their religion from the "airy" heights of the Anglicans or because they lived simply, but because they were people of the plaint--people with complaints--people who had suffered. They were patient but they weren't complaisant. Their patience in suffering was active and vocal, an incessant cry against the way they were treated. Their patience was accompanied by calls, again and again, for social justice.<br />
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This kind of patience, a robust and even defiant willingness to endure the suffering brought on by following leadings, is a supernatural fruit of the spirit. The flesh shrinks from imprisonment, torture and want, the soul from the shame and censure that defying authority elicits in other people. This patience emerges not through passivity but through active immersion in the life of prayer and attention to spirit. Why does it well up during some periods and not others? Why do we seem to have so little of it today?<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-35345618007253364722015-05-25T11:00:00.001-07:002015-05-25T11:00:17.314-07:00Eating violets: the Olney poetry slam<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A month ago Olney had its poetry slam, and that might as well be an eon past in a wider culture structured to rush ceaselessly onward. We live in torrenting rapids, which threaten to smash to bits anything that can't keep pace. We hurtle into the latest event, temporal proximity lending to whatever is newest a heightened, if false importance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I say this as a way to note I am very late in writing about this slam. I recognize, however, that endless haste is the world speaking and will chose to live in the eternal Now, in which a poetry reading at a Quaker boarding school outweighs events much closer to us in time and (seeming) importance.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Olney students enjoy the poetry slam. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the poetry slam, I was impressed by Lee Tran's recitation of Brenna Twohy's "In which I do not fear Harvey Dent." </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lee Tran performs <span style="text-align: start;">Brenna Twohy's "In which I do not fear Harvey Dent" in the girl's dorm parlor.</span></span><span style="font-size: large; text-align: start;"> </span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lines from that poem, which likens coping with mental illness to being a superhero, still leap out at me: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;">you have never seen me out of costume,</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-size: large;">would not even recognize me outside of this armor</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-size: large;"> ...</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;">When you have mental illness, society tells you</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; line-height: 20px;"> </span>your only power is your invisibility.<br />Tells you that they would save you if only they could see you,<br />but of course they cannot see you,<br />of course they will not save you, no matter how bright you sew your cape.<br />Invisibility is not a superpower,<br />it is the best weapon of a broken system<br />desperate to make their streets look clean<br />...<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I know what it is to fight monsters.</span><span style="font-size: large;">I know how strong an ordinary human has to be." </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">Senior Noah Howells wrote a moving original poem about his four years at Olney, friendship, community and "mango cakes at midnight." Senior Joe Kingery read a poem called </span><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">"</span><span style="background-color: transparent;">A New Addiction Please" by John Brehm, which spoke eloquently to how upside-down our society is, asking why, instead of oil, we can't become addicted to the sun and the wind. </span><span style="background-color: transparent;">Lichen Yang recited William Blake's "To See a World," </span><span style="background-color: transparent;"> going beyond the often quoted opening: </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To see a World in a Grain of Sand</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And a Heaven in a Wild Flower </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And Eternity in an hour</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">to the darker condemnation of human cruelty:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A dog starvd at his Masters Gate</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Predicts the ruin of the State </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A Horse misusd upon the Road</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Calls to Heaven for Human blood </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">to the observation</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Joy & Woe are woven fine </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A Clothing for the soul divine </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Under every grief & pine</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Runs a joy with silken twine </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">to</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Some to Misery are Born </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Every Morn and every Night</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Some are Born to sweet delight </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Some are Born to sweet delight </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Some are Born to Endless Night </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">to a Quakerly use of imagery:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">God Appears & God is Light</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To those poor Souls who dwell in Night </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But does a Human Form Display</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To those who Dwell in Realms of day</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"> Concerns over language in prior slams led to a more decorous </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">approach this year, and the running monologue of the facilitators,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> seniors Amihan Tindongan and Joe Kingery, spoofed propriety.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> Joe and Amihan kept the audience laughing with mock British </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">accents, pinkies in the air and lessons in proper manners </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> inflection. The British-themed intermission included </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">homemade scones and the hanging gauzy drape was a mannerly </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">white sprinkled with purple flowers. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">At the slam, facilitators Amihan Tindongan and Joe Kingery spoofed propriety.</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Discouraging the f-word, the s-word and other transgressive expressions can't, however, suppress poetry's ability to speak truth to power. As I listened, I was moved by the poems the students chose, and I sank into poetry's spiritual power, which we experience in our bodies as well as our minds. Even the early Quakers, frown as they might on romances (early novels) and drama, couldn't resist the allure of poetry: I think of Elizabeth Bathhurst bursting seemingly spontaneously into ecstatic couplets to express her vision of heaven. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">"An infinite ocean of light and love."</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I learned at almost the same time as the poetry slam that humans can eat violets and that the leaves are high in vitamins A and C. For weeks, the violets were interspersed with the grass, and I added the bright flowers to salads. They tasted mild, faintly sweet, and seemed a metaphor for the Kingdom of God: it's all around us but we don't always know we can have it, not just watch it from afar but let it become a part of us. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Violets bloomed all over Barnesville for awhile: <span style="text-align: start;">"Eat and drink, this is my body given for you."</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Eating violets also seemed like a metaphor for the poetry slam. With the seemingly fragile and ephemeral, we are touched and fed by the eternal Now.</span><br />
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Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-265511791146423221.post-8680097582278940352015-03-14T15:48:00.000-07:002015-05-24T18:38:53.153-07:00March 14th BarnesvilleHyacinths will bloom soon. The weather is warming. Most of the snow is melted, though the lake is still covered in ice.<br />
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I have a terrible cold. Hoping it will pass. I feel a little like Gandalf in the caves of Moria, when he thinks he has escaped the monster, only to be felled by a last whip of light. I thought I had gotten through the winter without a cold ... and now this. The only redeeming quality to a cold is it reminds me how much more vigorous I usually am.<br />
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It is late for the hyacinths to bloom but it has been a very cold winter. It seems to me in Maryland we would see them in February.<br />
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My father, if alive, would have turned 91 today, Pi Day. We never used to call it that. He died a few weeks shy of his 80th birthday, during a nap. Not a bad way to go, at home, in peace. Eighty good years are fine. I still remember the sense of peace that emanated from the bedroom after my brother called me and we got there. His father died the same way, just shy of 80, in his case simply not waking up one morning. I would not be sorry to have such an end. Of course, with spring coming, new life is on my mind as well.<br />
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I am also almost done with my Bonhoeffer MS and could be done if I would just get well. And I believe I will. :)<br />
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Roger is very kind to me in my fallen, miserable state. I sometimes think kindness is all the world needs more of.<br />
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<br />Dianehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12396312339372162866noreply@blogger.com2