Truth - Kindness - Necessity - Missing Ingredients in the Present State of Public (non) Civility

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/01/13/824661/-Is-it-true-Is-it-kind-Is-it-necessary-

My best friend when I was small was a Friend. Her parents were birthright Quakers active in prison reform and nuclear disarmament. As a child I saw the homelier side of Quaker practice - the silent meetings, the delicious treats at the annual bazaar and an early introduction to the three-fold sieve.

THE THREE SIEVES 

A LITTLE boy one day ran indoors from school and called out eagerly: "Oh, mother, what do you think of Tom Jones? I have just heard that ——" 

"Wait a minute, my boy. Have you put what you have heard through the three sieves before you tell it to me?" 

"Sieves, mother! What do you mean?" 

"Well, the first sieve is called Truth. Is it true?" 

"Well, I don't really know, but Bob Brown said that Charlie told him that Tom ——" 

"That's very roundabout. What about the second sieve — Kindness. Is it kind?" 

"Kind! No, I can't say it is kind." 

"Now the third sieve — Necessity. Will it go through that? Must you tell this tale?" 

"No, mother, I need not repeat it." 

"Well, then, my boy, if it is not necessary, not kind, and perhaps not true, let the story die."

.

Thanksgiving - Tis a gift to be simple

"O grant us strength to fashion a table
   Where each of us has a name." -- Cyrus Cassells

Charles Chaput – I love FOX NEWS and Franco too?

Culture warrior Charles Chaput got into full Burkite (Ray Burke) cult propaganda mood and attacked the Media at the recent World Youth Day in Madrid – namely CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times as being “untrustworthy” in reporting religious stories.  (They are not as pure as FOX NEWS which is fair and balanced towards Tea-Vangelism and Fascism???)

God, what a hypocrite!  The Media gave the buggers in that church a free, don’t report it in the press, pass for decades until the media changed and it was no longer as simple as in the past to threaten to pull advertising from the press by businesses owned by Catholics, like in the long standing silence of the NYT and Cardinal Spellman’s openly gay life style and non-stop party with all the chorus boys on Broadway.  Christ, we heard about that all the way in Philly about Franny boy without any newspapers reporting it.

Charlie boy better get his attitude in check and his history facts in order before he takes over in the most historic city in the U.S., Philadelphia.

It is a good thing the cathedral there is built like a fortress, no windows on ground level and parapets along the roof to reflect the age in which it was built in the period of the “Know-Nothing” politics and riots of the 1840s.

I doubt that the builders ever imagined that somebody as hateful and ignorant as Archbishop Chaput would be defending the fort and defending Medieval superstition and ignorance over knowledge and tolerance in the twenty first century.

World Youth Day and Religious Freedom

I want to start by sharing a story. 

Once upon a time, a student at one of the world’s oldest universities took a break from her studies to visit the Catholic chapel on campus. As she sat there in silence—praying for a sick relative or trying to settle her nerves before a test—the chapel suddenly filled with noise. A mob of about seventy fellow students charged in chanting anti-Christian slogans. They shouted obscenities against the Church and insults about the Pope.

Two females in the mob climbed on top of the altar. Then, according to the student who was trying to pray, the women stripped off their shirts and boasted about their homosexual tendencies. The young Catholic student, and several others, left the chapel in fear.

People tend to think of Spain as a Catholic country. But this example of anti-Catholic bigotry happened right here, in this beautiful city, at the Complutense University of Madrid. And it didn’t happen in the 1930s, or even in the 1960s. It happened earlier this year—in March 2011. So today is a good time to talk about religious freedom. And Madrid is a good place to do it.

Once upon a time Spain had free elections and the right wing did not like freedom so they took power and ignited the Spanish Civil War to preserve the wealthy status quo and the church.  Half a million people died.  Small price to pay for "religious freedom" and fascist dictatorship bringing stability to the nation for another forty years. 

Complutense University in Madrid was on the front line of fighting for much of that civil war. In the end the Fascists under Franco and the Catholic Church won.  Priests were put back on the state payroll. Ain't nothing as sweet as Franco style, state sponsored, corporate welfare. 

On the devastated land in the middle of campus, Franco did some rebuilding…


Complutense University of Madrid

… It was eventually decided, however, that the area should be restored and rehabilitated as a symbol of the new regime, albeit with some alterations - chief amongst them the new plans for a monumental main building with a Sistine Chapel-type interior, and a large church. While those two particular plans never came to fruition, the direct involvement of Franco in the rebuilding of the University meant that, though the original plans were largely followed, chapels were now incorporated into each of the buildings. Today, this creates a curiously contradictory situation, whereby one has certain buildings, such as the School of Philosophy, with streamlined architecture that epitomizes the liberal spirit of the 1920s and borrows heavily from Weimar Germany, and yet features a first-floor chapel which, fitted into a highly art-deco setting, seems implausible as a place of serious spiritual reflection.

Franco's influence on-campus was not limited to the imposition of his Catholic ideals. As a result of the war, as could be expected, the staff was purged of all liberals and Republican sympathizers, and replaced with members of the Falangist movement. What's more, the University charters were altered to compel all students to reside either in government-sanctioned dormitories or personal family homes. The dormitories staffed with members of the falangist movement, the regime aspired to be able to oversee all aspects of the student's lives, hoping to mold them into devotees of the "nationalist movement".

If a bunch of secular students in a supposedly secular university want to protest injustices generated by the RC church in one of General Franco’s personally ordered five state chapels on campus, built on blood soaked land,  maybe these symbols of fascism are a good place to start.

Charles talks about “Religious Freedom” but it always seems to come down to being free to impose Catholic Sharia Law aka Humanae Vitae etc. on the subjugated population.  Can’t you keep your members in line?  Can’t they refuse to have an abortion without outlawing abortion for everybody else on the planet – oh fan of Franco?

Was it disrespectful what these protestors did in this state chapel?  Yes.

Anti-Christian?  Absolutely not!     


(The protest in one of Franco's Blood Chapels, Capillas de Sangre, "Stasi" HQ on campus was the result of a recent attack on students and faculty on campus by ultra-catholic thugs who seem to have disappeared into the woodwork afterwards.  The university and the civil authorities did not investigate or seem to care.  They, the civil authorities, pressed charges against four protesters for violation of sacred territory, a strange concept to me in America where secular universities are just that and not privileged remnants of dictator regimes and their largess to the RC church.)

But Charles seems more concerned with tits being exposed in public and lesbians’ natural right to exist than he is really concerned with just another chapel, paid for by the state.  If the RC church had to pay rent and electricity on campus, that space would have been turned in a Starbucks a long time ago.

Philadelphia is a Quaker city and can remember when one of a few legal  Roman catholic churches in the whole English speaking world existed down a dark alley in the colonial town and only on the say so of the Quaker founders and by their charter and mega capacity of tolerance.

Archbishop Chaput, you are coming to Philadelphia with the wrong mindset and attitude.  That your worldview is 1957 Kansas when you entered the junior seminary at age 13 is perhaps not a worldview needed in this desperately needing humanity over dogma global culture.

I give you eighteen months before you become such an embarrassment to even the Vatican with your unproductive zeal and empty sound bites (tinkling cymbal, sounding brass) that they are forced to hand out a "promotion" to Rome and hide you appoint you as Cardinal Burke’s assistant.

Have a nice day. 

Baptized in the Oneness of Feeling

I ran into the above quote and was taken by the poetry of the words -"baptized in the oneness of feeling", a Friend’s description of the atmosphere at Abington Pa. regarding a meeting with Nicolas Waln as speaker, 1797

Apparently after this guy gave a very inspirational sermon, the assembly did not want to leave the building and it continued for a short time trying to come down from a spiritual high.

Funny how the use of words like “baptized in” is used as metaphor in that Quakers don’t do baptism.

I was doing some historic research using old maps of Philadelphia on the Internet.  I was looking up spaces I grew up in sections of Philly that might be labeled as Tacony or Frankford.

I did some further research after I realized that a lot of colonial mansions and summer homes had once existed, and disappeared, long before I came along and co-existed with factories and national trucking firms on massive lots. 

The most deciding factor that changed everything, from rural to inner city and industrial was with the railroads starting about 1860 and or the Civil War era.  War does make jobs and progress of sorts somewhere, sometimes or it used to.

Looking for a defunct borough of White Hall led to a White Hall mansion on old maps across the street from the old Frankford Arsenal where my grandfather had once worked as a “millwright” whatever that is.  Have to look that one up.  Oral family history said he was a “rigger”.   Whatever.

The White Hall mansion led me to the Waln family, one of the founding Quaker families of the Philadelphia area.  Starting with a thousand acre grant from William Penn as incentive to uproot form England and religious persecution. 

One of the reasons another Quaker in England spent seven years in jail there was because he refused to pay a tax or assessment for the rebuilding of the local COE church’s steeple.  Thank God for separation of church and state here these days.  Small favors.  Buy me a ticket to the new world – fast.

Well anyway, I did not want to do too much research on this Quaker family.  I was curious to a point but not obsessed. Not much material on the Net in any case.  No doubt a lot of papers and diaries exist at Quakers colleges, libraries and archives but are not as yet digitalized etc.  

You can see and or wonder how in less than a hundred years, a virgin forest got chopped up, turned into farms and or plantations, mills, roads and in time to give all four foot eleven inches (150 cm) of George III a pain in his royal ass. 

Amazing stuff.  Some of these Quakers built small ships, brigantines, out of their forests.  Farming, trading, mills, foundries, and all in just a few generations.

From this background came Nicolas Waln, itinerate Quaker preacher.

Nicholas Waln 

"...He was a lawyer of some repute… He also had a dry wit. For instance:

"One time Nicholas Waln was visiting one of his sick friends who said to him, ‘Nicholas, I am very sick, I think I am about to die.'

Nicholas was a great joker and, no doubt to distract his friend's attention, replied, ”Yes, I think though wilt and when thou gets to heaven, please ask the Apostle Paul to return to earth and explain some of the hard things in his letters."..."

Waln - 254 S. Second St.

"Waln began his career as a lawyer, but as the following antidote illustrates he soon became disillusioned with the profession. When traveling home from trying a case in Bucks County, Waln stopped by his friend's country home and is reported to have said, "I did the best that I could for my client, gained the case for him, and thereby defrauded an honest man out of his just due. " After this he never practiced law again and instead became a Quaker minister..."

Apparently some of that old fashioned Quaker religion rubbed off on him.  A victim of conscience – pangs of it – walking away from a profession at the top of his form but one which he suddenly lost his passion for.  “What does it profit a man…”

Further research sees that the name of Waln has disappeared locally in the phone book. The name Waln still exists, as a minor historic footnote, on a small stretch of a back street in Frankford near a still existing Quaker meeting house.

The idea of following your conscience might explain why there are fewer Quakers these days than might be expected given their head start from Billy Penn.   Apparently the Quaker push for the abolition of slavery took its toll internally and nationally. Their ranks were thinned in border states like Maryland as an example where many Quakers joined mainstream Protestant sects.  This, in order to keep their property and still go to church on Sunday without hearing anything favoring the abolition of property. 

And so it goes.  Or went. 

Prayer for a New Day and a New Year

Prayer for a New Day and a New Year


Heavenly Mother, heavenly Father,

Holy and blessed is your true name.

We pray for your reign of peace to come,

We pray that your good will be done,

Let heaven and earth become one.

Give us this day the bread we need,

Give it to those who have none.

Let forgiveness flow like a river through us,

From each one to each one to each one.

Lead us to holy innocence

Beyond the evil of our days,

Come swiftly Mother, Father, come!

For yours is the power and the glory and the mercy---

Forever your Name is All in One.


(Parker Palmer, Quaker writer and teacher, Wisconsin)

John Linton – Universalist Friend - Obituary

”John Linton did not believe that any single religion had a monopoly on truth.”

John Linton

For my friend John Linton, who has died aged 99, India – and especially Mahatma Gandhi – was a major influence. In 1978, convinced that no one religion has a monopoly of truth, and inspired by his experience in India of meetings in which Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians worshipped together in Quaker silence, he founded the Quaker Universalist Group.

I thought I would pass this along. It would seem that the Guardian Obit is the only one printed for this man. Other obits are copies or excerpts of that one obituary.

Not much detail. Devil in the detail you know. I saw it and sent it to a friend into Universalism. I knew of Quakerism and I knew of Universalism. I did not know that the chocolate got mixed with the peanut butter so to speak in the form of John Linton.

The creation of one more tangent religion merits little or no news these days. The most profound religion of the last four hundred years, Quakerism/Friends, saw the need in the form of John Linton to merge into the Universal religion of the future. A belief, one that truly includes if not dogma, the spirit of man, in the spirit of the moment and sharing in silence the spirit of the Universe with out and with in.

Rest in peace John Linton.

I – My – U, Looking for a new definition of God in a Modern Age

Had a minor epiphany of sorts yesterday whereby a lot of things fell into a new place.

Above, I have written a descriptive using three words including a texting word “U”. I will explain shortly.

I am going back to my quest for a new definition of God in this modern age. I am dusting off something from Junior year in high school and the Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. Indeed the picture of him in my religion textbook reminded me of Walt Whitman with the long beard and hat. Buber's I and Thou (Ich und Du) was publish in 1923. A similar idea, Freud’s The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es lit. "The I and the It”) was published the same year.

I for many years had merged a lot of the idea of I-it with the word Id and would often describe my job as a back office computer paper pusher as basically having an Id relationship with my PC. I also mixed in the concept of Zen in terms of getting a feel or a pleasure from the flow of the daily grind of that work. I am on a tangent here. Back to Buber.

Refreshing the high points of I-it and I-thou separates the reality of “I” from its surroundings or empirical from the analysis of the surroundings or abstract. You therefore have life broken down philosophically into the everyday real and everyday potential for the abstract.

I and Thou

What does it mean when a person experiences the world? Man goes around the world hauling out knowledge from the world. These experiences present man with only words of It, He, She and It with contrast to I-Thou. What this means is that the experiences are all physical and do involve a great deal of spirituality. Previously I mentioned that the world is twofold. What this means is that our experience of the world has two aspects: the aspect of experience, which is perceived by I-It, and the aspect of relation, which is perceived by I-Thou.

There is the I-thou into which the perception or concept or analysis and category regarding the concept of God falls.

Freud’s secular analysis of the world is one thing. Buber’s aspiration toward the divine is less known to the general world.

Thinking about this I-it and I-thou thing, I am adding a bridge word “my”. I say bridge word because the I-it and I-thou was a great concept in 1923 but it is almost a century later and I do not see much I-it or I-thou thinking in religious writing and theology or everyday religion practice. All I hear is the I-it when people pound their fist on the good book (It) in the pulpit. I do not feel much I-thou coming through there to comfort me.

Getting back to my bridge word “My”, I use it to describe intentional focus or attention to the empirical or the abstract. In other words, it the “my” focusing or touching the everyday world or by focusing on the meaning of it all – abstract – that places me in the universe in connection by a bridge from “I” to “It” or from “I” to “Thou”.

I – My – Thou. “Thou” is such an archaic word. I translate it modern into “U”.

Taking the idea one level above the empirical and into the spiritual, thou not necessarily divine, I am adding something of a holistic approach by combining all as I-My-U.

If I go a little further with the Quaker Idea of the spark of the divine in all living creatures, man in particular, then something merges here, has an energy of its own, that I recognized as such when I saw it happening. I thought of the four Hebrew letters or symbols that make up the sacred name of God. I have “Imyu” as a potential new name for God and everything (the universe).

Going back to the individual spark within every human being concept, perhaps if God in a Deist concept is a distant Creator, perhaps we each have the potential of being a surrogate of that distant Deist God in everyday life.

Adding more concept and or poetic license with Saint Paul's “looking into a mirror darkly”, perhaps, just perhaps, on occasion, you and I can look into the mirror of our souls and on a subconscious, if not conscious level, look into the mirror and see, quite briefly, God, in some abstract and or miraculous manner. In which case, the possible name of God “Imyu” becomes “Im- yu”.

I’m You.

Think about it.