I BELIEVE, I THINK I BELIEVE

I believe it was Martin Luther who said "Lord I believe. Help my unbelief."

I tap dance on the line. Back and forth. The Methodist who reads Catholic authors. Especially Merton and West. Who believes Pelagius had the right idea. Tries to understand the Quakers.

Prefers the Celtic path to the Roman or Orthodox. And there were and are big differences.

I believe. At least part of the time.

FROM MY ARCHIVES WITH COMMENTARY

With commentary. See the bolded notes. 

This weekend is the fiftieth anniversary of death of a president. If you were in grade school or older on November 22 you’ll know who I’m talking about. If you weren’t you’re probably wondering what all the hub bub is about. I’ve never really thought of myself as part of a declining generation before, but that death in Dallas marked the beginning of a series of events that almost defined a generation. (fifty five years now, but who's counting)

Montgomery, Dallas, Birmingham, Selma, Memphis, Kent State, Watts, Los Angeles, Vietnam. History landed in our living rooms every time we turned on the evening news. The Summer of Love turned into decades of destruction that haunt us like hungry ghosts. Good laws had unintended consequences. The voting rights act allows minorities to vote. Gerrymandering state houses work to make sure they get to vote for as few candidates as possible. (of course now the voting rights act has been gutted and gerrymandering and out right fraud is still rampant)

Integrating the suburbs meant that those with money and mobility could leave the cities with their crowded streets and poverty behind. The city became the place where you worked, played, bought drugs and headed home to the house, minivan and 2.5 kids. Safe in gated communities we could ignore the blasted neighborhoods with too few jobs, crumbling schools and damn few local role models. Public spaces are turned into “free speech” zones or strip malls where there’s no “public” space at all. (and the free speech zones are usually blocks from the action)

Vietnam taught the military and the elected hired help two important lessons. Pay somebody else to do the dirty work and keep the media as far away from the action as possible. The mid seventies to the early nineties were years of death, torture and displacement for hundreds of thousands of people living in Central and South America as the US channeled aid, equipment and millions of tax dollars into the pockets of brutal dictators who claimed they were fighting “subversives” and our war on drugs. Turns out the war on drugs was a great way to channel off the books military aid into those countries. (and now drugs come in via container ships)

The Great Communicator challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin while our proxies were blowing up fields, shanties, tenements and refugees in El Salvador and Guatamala; it almost never made the evening news. It sure as hell didn’t make it into the local papers. (And now the refugees from those failed countries are fleeing gangs and drug lords trying for asylum in the country that blasted them. There's a lesson in there somewhere. If they were blond, white Protestants there probably would not be a problem.)

When we finally chose to do our own dirty work in the Middle East the military made damn sure that the correspondents weren’t allowed to go nosing around on their own. And some of the ones who did try ended up being murdered by the extremists on the other side. Now technology makes it possible for a technician in a control room in the continental US to push a button and kill without ever seeing the ones who die. No more Ed Murrows hitching rides on British bombers and filing reports on the missions.

Voters put a Black man in the White House in 2008 and we pretended that this proved we were living in a post racial society while every new day proves that the divides are deeper and deadlier than ever.

Who knows. Maybe this generation has to pass before we can finally heal the divisions and finally make at least part of the dream Jack Kennedy described for us when he took office half a century ago.

THE THIRD WORLD IN THE UNITED STATES?

Singer and activist Jackson Brown wrote this back in the eighties at the height of the US interventions in Central and South America. This is not the whole subject of this entry but it is a part of it.

SOLDIER OF PLENTY

God is great, God is good
He guards your neighborhood
Though it’s generally understood
Not quite the way you would
You try to take the slack
Stay awake and watch his back
But something happens every now and then
And someone breaks into the promised land
Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is long on hunger
This world is short on joy

A-e-i-o
You speak as if you know
What’s good for everyone
What’s good in what you’ve done?
What’s good about a world in which
War rages at a fever pitch
And people die for the little things
A little corn, a little beans

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

You measure peace with guns
Progress in mega-tons
Who's left when the war is won?
Soldier of misfortune--
Soldier of an angry call
Soldier on foreign soil
I’m not here to fight your war
I know what you're fighting for

Ah boy boy
This world is not your toy
This world is, this world is
Long on hunger
Short on joy
How much longer
You gonna keep the world hungry boy?

There is poverty in this country. There is a widening of the gap between the richest and poorest. The rich who will never spend all they have and the poor running like marathoners just to stay in place. The disappearing middle class. Yes there are cities with more and more homeless. And yes we have an individual at the center of power who scares the living daylights out of many of us. This hemisphere has seen leaders who seemed to be insane before. This is a first for this country however. Yes we have a border patrol that seems more out of control than reasonable. 

But I have been seeing some links to news feeds that trouble me. That much of this country is now experiencing third world conditions. I have to wonder if this or those reporters have actually traveled in truly third world countries. 

Countries where women walk for miles in search of drinkable water and fuel for their cooking fires. Where children have little access to schools. Where the rich own most of the land and poor are forced into stining slums on the edges of shining cities. To countries like Guatamala or El Salvador where being a church worker, labor organizer, community organizer, literacy worker, outspoken reporter, supporter of land reform, in the wrong place at the wrong time during a sweep for so called subversives or even being a member of an Indian community could get you tortured or murdered or both. Countries where some citizens try to get by on a couple of dollars a day and their children dig through garbage dumps. 

We have problems in this country. Big ones. But we need to be careful when labels such as third world are used. If we have third world conditions in much of this country where does that leave much of the rest of the world? Fourth world? Fifth world? 

MERRY CHRISTMAS

From a Christmas card I made several years ago. The image is titled Polar Peace. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good day. To the ones with fur. To the ones with feathers, To the ones with fins and all the rest.

THE STAR

Back in the early fifties Robert Clarke of classic SF fame wrote a short story. The Star. The astrophysicist aboard a long range earth expedition to the Pegasus Nebula has made a discovery that has shaken his faith. The scientist is a Jesuit by the way. Something that causes no end of humor from some of his fellow crew members. A Jesuit astronomer isn't too crazy an idea. The current Vatican astronomer is a Jesuit. And while that is sinking in consider this. The Vatican has had an astronomer for well over a century. And they have their very own telescope. On top of a mountain in Arizona.

Now I don't know what faith, if any, Robert Clarke followed. But my interpretation is one hundred eighty degrees from the finale of the story. And my own faith has taken so many twists and turns that I'm never quite sure where I'm standing half the time. Heck perhaps it's a case of the glass being half full, but here goes.

What if, just if, knowing that the star is going to go nova God didn't destroy a civilization to provide that star over Bethlehem but timed that birth so that some little good would come from tragedy? After all the birth of the messiah was supposedly prophesied for SOME time in the future. It's not like Isaiah and his brethren said OK the kid will be born on such and such a day, at such and such a time in such and such a year after all.

And SF was a lot more fun when we didn't know so much. Now we know that a star likely to nova probably won't have planets with higher forms of life. It takes a long time to cook life resembling ours. Or probably will. About five billion years for earth. The giants stars and the super giants burn fast and hot. Their lives are measured in millions of years, not billions. But they seeded the universe with the building blocks of planets and life.

LIBERTY TO STARVE

Warning. One week before Christmas, AKA  shop until you drop, rant ahead.

Another  waste of skin and oxygen elected on the Tea Party wave of 2010 has chimed in on so called liberty. Doesn't seem to occur to nitwits like him that it is really hard to care about liberty when you are hungry, sick and half naked. Either that or you copy the folks from the old Shay's rebellion and you do your best to remind your new rulers just what you had been fighting for all those hungry years. The colonies issued paper money for their costs but when it was time for the taxes to be paid it was cold, hard gold and silver. In other words the new states did want their nearly worthless paper back. No thank you very much. In fact it was risings line the Shay's rebellion that led to that constitutional convention.

Read the prologue life, liberty and pursuit of happiness got changed to life, liberty and property. Notice how the declaration gets quoted, but it was a letter explaining why the colonies were rebelling. It has no legal standing.

Face it. When your kids are starving cold you are likely to follow anyone who promises at least one meal a day and some fuel to keep them warm.

BTW. The politician in question made his career in plastics. Has a degree in business and accounting. Frankly I believe we should close every business school in the country. Send accounting to the math departments and information technology to whoever is working with the computers. I have had so called business classes and found them to be pretty much worthless.

And frankly this shot makes him look like he's a couple of sandwiches shot of a picnic.

IN THE TIME OF NO ROOM

Thomas Merton died in 1968. Has it really been half a century. As the years roll by he reads more and more like an Old Testament prophet.

OK he is working from a Christian point of view. More realistically as a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastic. This is a fairly long, alright it's four pages, essay. It will probably take a bit to get through but I believe it just might be worth it. I don't know what that curmudgeonly Trappist hermit would have made of social media. But as we've watched the herd mentality on Facebook, Twitter and the rest he probably would have kept it at arms' length. Talk about your mass man and Christ at the borders.

Note: I have run across more than one essay or blog entry with the subject of Mary and Joseph not being THAT poor. Folks there were two classes of people back then those with money and power and those that didn't. They were definitely in the didn't class and from Galilee, AKA the back of Judean Beyond, to boot.

Actually now that I've copied from the word document it doesn't seem that long, but it is a little on the technical side. Shekinah BTW way can be translated as light or great light.

AN ESSAY FOR THE ADVENT SEASON

By Thomas Merton

So there was no room at the inn? True! But that is simply mentioned in passing, in a matter of fact sort of way, as the Evangelist point to what he really means us to see-the picture of pure peace, pure joy: “She wrapped her firstborn Son in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.” (Luke 2:7). By now we know it well, and yet we might still be questioning it-except that a reason was given for an act that might otherwise have seemed strange: there was no room for them in the inn.” Well, then, they obviously found some other place!

But when we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize that there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place, In fact, the inn was the last place in the world for the birth of the Lord.

The Evangelists, preparing us for the announcement of the birth of the Lord, remind us that the fullness of time has come. Now is the time of final decision, the time of mercy, “the acceptable time,” the time of settlement, the time of the end. It is the time for repentance, the fulfillment of all promises, for the Promised One has come. But with the coming of the end, a great bustle and business begins to shake the nations of the world. The time of the end is the time of massed armies, “wars and rumors of wars,” of huge crowds moving this way and that, of men “withering away for fear,” of flaming cities and sinking fleets, of smoking lands laid waste, of technicians planning grandiose acts of destruction.

The time of the end is the time of the Crowd: and the eschatological message is spoken in a world where, precisely because of the vast indefinite roar of armies on the move and the restlessness of turbulent mobs, the message can be heard only with difficulty. Yet it is heard by those who are aware that the display of power, hubris (power) and destruction is part of the kerygma (message). That which is to be judged announces itself, introduces itself by its sinister and arrogant claim to absolute power. Thus it is identified, and those who decide in favor of this claim are numbered, marked with the sign of power, aligned with power, and destroyed with it.

Why then was the inn crowded? Because of the census, the eschatological massing of the “whole world” in centers of registration, to be numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census: to discover those who were to be taxed. To find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the empire.

The Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was ruler of Israel (2 Samuel 24). The numbering of the people of God by an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet judgment with repentance. After all, in the Apocalyptic literature of the Bible, this “summoning together” or convocation of the powers of the earth to do battle is the great sign of “the end.”

Ti was therefore impossible that the Word should lose himself by being born into shapeless and passive mass. He had indeed emptied himself, taken the form of God’s servant, man. But he did not empty himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. It was therefore right that there should be no room for him in a crowd that had been called together as an eschatological sign. His being born outside that crowd is even more of a sign. That there is no room for him is a sign of the end.

Nor are the tiding of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the massed crowd there are always new tiding of joy and disaster. Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every day’s disaster is beyond compare, every day’s danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero. News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the “Good News,” the Great Joy.

Hence the Great Joy is announced, after all, in silence, loneliness and darkness, to shepherds “living in the fields” or “living in the countryside” and apparently unmoved by the rumors or massed crowds. These are the remnant of the desert dwellers, e nomads, the true Israel.

Even though “the whole world” is ordered to be inscribed, they do not seem to be affected. Doubtless they have registered, as Joseph and Mary will register, but they remain outside the agitation, and untouched by the vast movement, the massing of hundreds and thousand of people everywhere in the towns and cities.

They are therefore quite otherwise signed. They are designated, surrounded by a great light, they receive the message of the Great Joy, and they believe it with joy. They see the Shekinah over them, recognize themselves for what they are. They are the remnant, the people of no account, who are therefore chosen-the anawim, And they obey the light. Nor was anything else asked of them.

They to and see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the Flesh in which the glory of the Lord will be revealed and by which all men will be delivered from the power that is in the world, the power that seeks to destroy the world because the world is god’s creation, the power that mimics creation, and in doing so, pillages and exhausts the resources of a bounteous God given earth.

We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.

The primordial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshaled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet, There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.

Those that lament the fact that there is no room for God must also be called to account for this. Have they perhaps added to the general crush by preaching a solid marble God that makes man alien to himself, a god that settles himself grimly like an implacable object in the inner of heart of man and drives man out of himself in despair?

The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart, not because it is full, but because it is void. If only he knew that the void itself, when hovered over by the Spirit, is an abyss of creativity…yet he cannot believe it. There is no room for belief.

In the time of the end there is no longer room for the desire to go on living. The time of the end is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them. Because they wish they did not exist.

Why? Because they are part of a proliferation of life that is not fully alive, it is programmed for death. A life that has not been chosen, and can hardly be accepted, has no more room for hope. Yet it must pretend to go on hoping, It is haunted by the demon of emptiness. And out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs, the concentration camps, the race riots, the racist murders, and all the other crimes of mass society.

Is this pessimism? Is this the unforgivable sin of admitting what everybody really feels? Is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer? Or should one simply go on pretending that everything is getting better every day, because the time of the end is also-for some at any rate-the time of great prosperity? “The kings of the earth have joined in her idolatry, and the traders of the earth have grown rich from her excessive luxury” (Revelation 18:3).

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has com uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it-because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it-his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak’ and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status or persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the bright, self directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine.

For those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in the eschatological wilderness of space-while on earth the bombs make room!

But the others: they remain imprisoned in other hopes, and in more pedestrian despairs, despairs and hopes which are held down to earth, down to street level, and to the pavement only: desire to be at least half human, to taste a little human joy, to do a fairly decent job of productive work. To come home to the family…desires for which there is no room. It is in these that He hids himself, for whom there is no room. The time of the end? All right: when? That is not the question.

To say that this is the time of the end is to answer all the questions, for if it is the time of the end, and of great tribulation, then it is certainly and above all the time of the Great Joy. It is the time to “lift up you heads for your redemption is at hand.” It is the time when the promise will be manifestly fulfilled, and no longer kept secret from anyone. It is the time for the joy that is given not as the world gives, and that no man can take away.

WHO DO WE SEE?

I discovered Oscar Romero quite by accident. He was a Savadoran. He was a priest. He became an archbishop who totally surprised those who elected him and thought they knew him. He became a martyr and the church finally decided to recognize him as a saint. He was speaking of the poor in his own country, but they are the poor in any country. Just change the job descriptions. 

A seven year old girl from Guatemala died in custody. I don't know all the details. He family came looking for life and found death. Hell they can find plenty of that in her own country. Especially if the family is Amerindian. 

Who do we see?

Each time we look upon the poor, on the farm workers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton, or the farmer who joins the caravan of workers looking to earn their savings for the year…remember there is the face of Christ.

The face of Christ is among the sacks and baskets of the farm worker; the face of Christ is among those who are tortured and mistreated in the prisons; the face of Christ is dying of hunger in the children who have nothing to eat; the face of Christ is in the poor who ask the church for their voices to be heard. How can the church deny this request when it is Christ who is telling us to speak for Him?

…..A church that tries to keep itself pure and uncontaminated would not be a church of God’s service to people. The authentic church is one that does not mind conversing with prostitutes, publicans and sinners as Christ did-and with Marxists and those of various political movements in order to bring them salvation’s true message.

Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador martyred in 1980.

I’d love to get the chance to read this in the presence of our God fearing Republican candidates and that sorry excuse for a current occupant and ask them what they were doing to fulfill Romero’s words. Did this child belong to a gang? Was she a "terrorist?"

JUST GOOD ENOUGH IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

I ran across a quote from Sam Walton, the founder of WalMart, regarding the wages they pay their employees. “We pay them just as much as we can get by with.” In other words the pay is just good enough to get someone desperate for a job to work for you.

The Portland Oregonian ran a series on WalMart several years ago. It described the process suppliers of items like clothing go through to get their items accepted. If the buyer figures that one item of trim is enough that’s all that is ordered. If you can get by with no trim that’s even better. In other words, the garment is just good enough to get a customer to buy it.

I’ve run across this attitude in a lot of letters to the editor. Especially when the schools or public works departments are trying to get adequate funding. Sam Walton didn’t invent the attitude. WalMart is just the most blatant example.

Just good enough. Imagine if a surgeon does a job that’s just good enough. How about the people who clean up after the operation is over. Do you want to trust your life to just good enough? Do you want the mechanic who works on your brakes to do a job that is just good enough? How about the architect who designed the skyscraper you might be working in and the metal workers who drove the rivets that hold it together-do you want them to do a job that’s just good enough? When it’s time to dump treated wastewater into our rivers, do you want the job to be just good enough? There are a million examples and I know that any of you could come up with a great list of your own. That so many do such a fantastic job with so little is a testament to our shared pride in creation.

If we truly are made in the image of the Creator, and I believe that we are, then there has to be so much more. We share that urge to create and to look at what we create and to see that “it is good.” The ones whose hands and minds and hearts create the clothing, make the cars, build the houses, grow the food, clean our streets, teach our children, and care for ourelders deserve the greatest respect. And the way our economy is run right now doesn’t support that drive to create, it tears it down.

What they are doing is creating our world. They are the eyes, the ears, the hands, and the voice of Creation. That is worthy of the highest praise. And JUST GOOD ENOUGH doesn’t cut it.

Just good enough not only does not cut it, it is an insult to Creation and the Creator whoever or whatever you believe in. Reread the first Creation story in Genesis. At each step God pronounces the work as "good" and in the end the results are "very good."

And then we were created. In the image of God, male and and female. IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. Our fellow humans are worth more than "just good enough." And how are we treating the rest of Creation? Far below Just Good Enough. 

STILL A VERY SCARY STORY

I originally posted this several years ago. I don't believe we are any closer to robot soldiers but we do have drones controlled from this country dropping bombs half way across the world. And we have techies joyously rubbing their hands over artificial intelligence having increasing control over our lives. After you check out Star Trek try a viewing of The Forbin Project to see how THAT might work out.

Over the years I realized that the scariest story I’ve every watched on TV or the movies was an old Star Trek episode. The Enterprise is transporting a diplomatic party to an area where the Federation would like to open diplomatic relations and hopefully establish a base. An attempt had been made a generation before. The last message from the original party stated that the planet in question was at war with a colony world. When the Enterprise arrives they find the war is still going on. In fact, the war has been going on for nearly five hundred years.

The capital city is attacked while the landing party is on the ground. Funny thing is-no booms, no tremors, no radiation. Turns out, the whole war is being handled by computers. Since you can’t have a war without casualties, the citizens in the affected areas have a day to report to suicide stations. The planetary leaders state they finally realized their society was hopelessly warlike anyway so they figured they might as well make the process as “civilized” as possible. Since the story is no fun without threatening the ship and her crew, the Enterprise is declared a casualty and the crew ordered down. Of course the captain takes extreme exception to the idea and throws a large monkey wrench in the works. He and Spock blow up the war computer. In answer to the council leaders’ accusations that the Federation is just as warlike as his people so get off your high horse all ready. Kirk answer that yes, maybe they are, but they finally realized that while humans may be killers with generations of wars in their history, we “don’t have to kill anybody, today.” That’s the first step, “We don’t have to kill anybody-TODAY.” The story ends there. You never find out how the war ends, just on the note that maybe, just maybe both sides will be so terrified of the idea of fighting a war with real weapons that they might actually try to make peace.

This little summary was prompted by stories in both papers about the attempts to develop robot soldiers. The idea is to field automated troops that don’t get scared, don’t worry about getting killed, don’t care if their buddies get killed, don’t get hot tired, don’t get hungry, don’t get thirsty, and aren’t entitled to pensions twenty or thirty years down the road. I find this very, very scary.

You see, I think war is supposed to be terrible. It’s supposed to be horrifying. The idea of fighting one is supposed to scare the living daylights out of you. That’s so we don’t fight them unless we absolutely have to. I believe that aren’t face with the realization of the human costs of a war, it will remove a very important obstacle to starting one. Personally I think we should go back to swords and clubs. When you’re trying to take another’s life you should have to look that person in the eye.

There is a wonderful scene at the end of the D-Day episode in Band of Brothers. It’s nighttime and Easy Company has an hour or so to grab some grub and catch their breath before they have to move out again. The new company commander, a lieutenant Winters (the old one is missing presumed dead, along with everybody else on his plane)  is looking at the flames in the sky with that “thousand yard stare’ and promising himself that if he gets out of this alive he’s going to find a nice quiet little cornor and never fight again. He did and he did. 

TEARS FOR THE LAND

This is a repost of an early, very early blog entry. Read it and weep for the land. We are destroying what we absolutely have to preserve to live. The techies love to tell us that the future is in high tech and living in the city. Sounds like death to me. And Lisa is a very old friend.

Lisa tagged me to do an entry about my love (passion) for reading. While I’m working on that, here is the opening passage from one of my favorite books, Cry the Beloved Country. It was written in the late forties by an English South African, Alan Paton. If you have a love of the land this may be one the saddest things you’ll ever read.

A note some of the words. Ixopo is the name of a village. The x is pronounced with a ck sound. The veld is an open plain. The pronunciation is almost like fvelt. A kloof is a steep sided gully or small valley. The tithoya is a small bird like a plover and the name sounds like the birds’ call. Ingeli, Umzimkulu and Griqueland are pronounced pretty much as they are spelled.  The style in this novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s almost as if someone is writing down a spoken story. It probably breaks half the rules of conventional writing and that may be why I love it so much. The book is about people, the land, love, loss, forgiveness and acceptance.

So, here goes.

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is not mist, you can look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the tithoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea: and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqueland.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires haveburned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lighting flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away; the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.

Alan Paton, 1948

SINGING SILENCE

Koosah Falls on the McKenzie River about forty five minutes from Springfield, Oregon.
I didn't grow up in the shadows of oaks,maples, or beeches. Outside of a few trees in the yards 
around Oakridge, and the two dwarf apple trees in our yard I grew up surrounded by evergreens.

And a single evergreen just won't do as an image for a world tree.

Is there such a thing as a world forest? There used to be a belt of evergreens that stretched

across Europe, Asia and into North America. In Siberia they call it the Taiga and say that

only the birds know where the Taiga ends. A world forest? Perhaps.Once upon a time. 

But a single evergreen simply won't survive by itself. Where an oak or maple has a low

lying single trunk that branches and branches and branches an evergreen spikes straight up.

I've seen a few cedars with a double trunk, maybe a triple but that's it. The branches tend
to slope downwards to survive heavy snowfalls and the root system is usually
shallower. Apparently only in the Pacific belt that runs through Oregon, Washington 

and British Columbia do you find the great trees that took multiple trucks to bring one

tree out. In most other places the trunks are thinner The trees shorter. This makes 

evergreens vulnerable in ice storms or severe windstorms. The best defense?

Grow in huge groves so that each tree is protected by the others. So a world forest 

as a symbol of the world we would love to see isn't too far off. Each tree protects

the others and any damage to one tree threatens the rest. So instead of one great 

tree, I find myself picturing a world with a great forest in every part of the globe with 

the roots reaching for the center.

So, where did this come from? As I read a guided imagery exercise my
little avatar didn't go looking for an oak or a maple. It made tracks for
the tall timber. Some place with tall trees, ferns, deep moss, some deadfall
for the mushrooms and lichens to grow on, and some berry bushes. If a
waterfall makes an appearance that is a definite bonus

If I can't have a waterfall then a drippy, misty, coastal forest will do very nicely.

So if my little spirit self doesn't head for the Cascades it heads for the coast.

Not to the beach, to the great basalt headlands graced with low-lying evergreens shaped
by the winds. To that Pacific Ocean that William Clark called the Great
Western Ocean. When he made the entry he said he wasn't about to call it the
Pacific. He hadn't had one pacific (peaceful) day since he laid eyes on it.

And silence. Not the scary, wake up in the middle of the night, where is
everybody silence. But the root deep silence of the world before the first
word was spoken. A silence that hums just below what you can hear. Bird song, wind song
and water song are part of that silence. A silence with a background hum. A
silence that begins to sing. To speak. 

SILENCING THE SONG

Sorry I've been out for awhile. Trying to find my voice. And this is what I'm starting to find. Look out amateur philosopher at work. Things may be a little disjointed while I get semi grounded again.

I was rereading Morgan Llewyllen's novel Druids when an idea started to slip into my consciousness. The idea of the Source as the foundation of All. It hit me. One Source. One God. The beginning of all. Life, love, music, poetry, law, healing. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. In the beginning was the Singer, the Singer sang and it all began.

What does it matter. There is one belief in common. As long as the Speaker speaks, the Singer sings, Creation continues. Silence the Speaker, Silence the Singer and Creation ends.

But happens when our machines, our guns, our shouting, our greed, drown out the Speaker. Drown out the Singer. Reduce the voices in the Song of Creation? The song continues but with fewer and fewer voices.What will be left when the only voice heard is our hate?