Monthly Archives: August 2015

Maya Angelou, the Castle, and the Moat

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Urgent partisan e-mail messages from “The War Room” arrive regularly, rallying me against the enemy.

Interesting choice of words in a democratic republic.

Playing MahJong on my iPad, ads featuring a seductive woman in a white dress pop up coaxing me to play Medieval “War Games” complete with castles, knights, spears, and armor. Lately the ad has turned to entice me to “Come conquer the world with me“.

Allusions to war, military images that prey on fear with the illusion of conquering whatever we’re afraid of are increasingly prevalent. So are subliminal messages that liken the United States to a walled Medieval castle, like Donald Trump’s southern border wall and maybe, a northern wall, as well, which Scott Walker called “a legitimate issue for us to look at” yesterday on Meet the Press. Just think of it – a country completely secure with an impenetrable wall, just like a medieval castle.

Next comes the moat outside the castle wall.

Meanwhile, inside the castle, our citizens rush to the gun shows while we kill each other at an alarming rate.  A 90 year-old homebound man on oxygen sits all day in his Barco-Lounger allowing nothing else on his television than old Westerns and World War II documentaries. In other homes children play “War Games”on their Wii, iPhones and iPads while the parents play soldier in their partisan War Rooms.

“You dwell in whitened castles with deep and poisoned moats and cannot hear the curses that fill you children’s throats.” – Maya Angelou

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, August  31, 2015

 

The Mason of God (Dennis Aubrey)

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Dennis Aubrey's avatar

In a world where what passes for news are articles about the megalomaniac Donald Trump, the Kardashians, and the Jenners, we occasionally find something worth consideration.

On August 25 a funeral mass was celebrated in the Italian town of Montefortino at the chiesa della Madonna dell’Ambro. The recipient of the mass was a Capuchin friar, Padre Pietro Lavini who lived as a hermit in the Sibylline Mountains near Rubbiano Montefortino and along the Gola dell’Infernaccio, the Gorge of Hell. A thousand people attended the service of the man who died two weeks prior, on August 9, 2015.

Why did they come to this mass? What did Padre Pietro accomplish with his life as a hermit?

Padre Pietro Lavini, photo from Santuario Madonna dell'Ambro Padre Pietro Lavini, photo from Santuario Madonna dell’Ambro

In 1971, Padre Pietro discovered the ruins of the Eremo di Santo Leonardo, an abandoned 12th century Benedictine monastery in the wilds of the Sibyllines. All…

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Verse – ?

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Question Mrk

Question Mrk

Sending a son or daughter off to college is hard for a parent.

Steve captured the sentiment in this piece “written in 1988 when my son, Daniel, left home to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.”

 

 

 

To choose a title first is such an act
of pride (as if one knows just where a thought
will go.) Is “Saying Goodbye to Our Son”
a better choice than “Letting Go?” And when
is specificity superior
to breadth? Do only parents know the fear
of being left behind when children leave?
Is every parting death, a tiny grave?

A title should invite…entice…alert
the reader to the text. But what comes next?
That is the question. Eyes will open wide
and see new truth. Will truth lead to the good?
We hug and hope and wave goodbye. The path
twists back and then away (“A Brand New Birth?)

  • Steve Shoemaker [Published in Presbyterian Outlook]

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Verse – Clandestine Communication

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We used to pass notes while in school,
The teachers said “No! There’s a rule!”
But students today
Will have their own say:
A smart phone helps them play the fool!

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 29, 2015

Political Humor

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We hope these lines,  shared by a friend, bring a chuckle.

“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.” – Clarence Darrow

“If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.” – Jay Leno

“The problem with political jokes is they get elected.” -Henry Cate, VII

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” -Aesop

“If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these State of the Union Speeches, there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.” -Will Rogers

“Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” –John Quinton

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” -Oscar Ameringer

“I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.” -Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952

“A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.” -Tex Guinan

“I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.” -Charles de Gaulle

“Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.” -Doug Larson

“If you want a real friend that you can trust in Washington – get a dog.” -Harry Truman

Verse – Old Friends

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Old Friends

New information
From impeccable sources
Has twisted our memories
Lowered our esteem
Even given us a taste of disgust
But what have they heard about us

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 26, 2015

Verse – after a 7-day party

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the torah says the world was made
in 6 days then g_d rested our
big family gave gifts of food
& drink & games & laughs & more
for 7 days without a break
because for 5 decades my wife
& i were too stubborn to make
a split of course there had been strife
im often selfish or a jerk
so get a spouse who will not talk
& have 2 kids who always look
at the best side of what they see
give thanks for generosity
& for the worlds best family

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 24, 2015

NOTE: Happy 50th Anniversary, Steve and Nadja.

Verse – Pre-Disastered

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Pre-Disastered

The term from the insurance industry
is based on mathematics I do not
know at all: such as probability
analysis. When Garp said, “We should not
have fear to buy the house because a plane
crashed in to it, it’s pre-disastered–not
very likely to happen twice…”–the plain
truth he ignored is that a coin is not
more or less likely to be “heads” because
the time before it came up “tails.” Do not
believe your lung cancer can halt the cause
of heart disease. Even a prayer cannot
insure long life: we say, “Insha’Allah…

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 22,2015

Blameless and Exasperating

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“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”– Mary Ann Evans [pen name, George Eliot], Middlemarch,  A Study of Provincial Life, 1871.

Blamelessness and exasperation have characterized both sides of a recent conversation on Views from the Edge. Not blamelessness exactly, but certainty, positions that seem to each party to be apparent and true beyond a doubt. Each of us has become exasperated with  the other.

Jesus’ word to the harsh critic of others – “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye”- is forgotten or ignored. Claims to righteousness and suspicion of the other replace self-criticism and magnanimity.

We live increasingly trapped in separate bubbles of survival in the war of ideas, convictions, platforms, moralities, religions, and ideologies in the search for security.

Instead of bubbles, Dennis Aubrey’s A Patron for Prisoners uses the metaphor of prison, quoting a sage from the 5th Century C.E., Saint Léonard of Noblat, the patron saint of prisoners, whose “Song” (based on Psalm 107) describes a hope for liberation from the prison cell whose doors we have locked from the inside.

“A Patron for Prisoners” opens with The Song of Saint Léonard of Noblat (5th Century):

He has liberated those sitting in darkness and shadow of death and chained in beggary and irons,
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them out of their distresses,
He brought them out of the path of iniquity,
For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder,
He hath liberated those in bindings and many nobles in iron manacles.

– Song of Saint Léonard, quoted by Aymeri Picaud, translated by Richard Hogarth

Saint Léonard’s Song ends with the release of the nobles, the only class of people named among the liberated throng.  It is no mistake that he includes them among those to be blessed by release from iron manacles. We are all bound in the prison cells of logs and specks, blameless and exasperated, fearful of our survival on the other side of the release.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, August 19, 2015.

Limerick – From Illinois

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From Illinois to Topsail Island

The sea has been calm and the wind has been light,
The beach house is perfect, the families all right.
We saw dolphins swimming,
The Cubs have been winning,
But the kids all keep asking, “Just where is your kite?”

  • Steve Shoemaker, on extended-family vacation, Topsail Island, NC, August 19, 2015
Steve's kite on Topsail Island

Steve’s kite on Topsail Island