Truth-teller
The ticket seller at today’s church fund-raiser said, “Obama’s trying to take all the guns away!”
“No, he’s not. No one’s proposing taking guns away. Nonsense. Nobody is arguing that. Where’d you hear that?”
“FOX!”
“FOX is not news. It’s right-wing propaganda.They’re the 10 Commandment station.
“Remind them of the Ninth Commandment. ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’.”
Maggie and Morning Love
Magnanimous mellifluence,
Attentive, affectionate, alert,
Good dog, as good as any
God could ever send to such as
I, the aging friend she trusted
Even at the end.
– The day after Maggie left us, April 23, 2013
Maggie waiting to play
Maggie and Sebastian romping in the snow
The day after Sebastian died on Saturday, Maggie’s tumor broke through the skin. She’s always been a brave trooper. The vet said that Westies are the toughest in bearing pain. But she was not herself. She was in pain. She couldn’t walk. She was grieving. She was bleeding. There was no way back. No way to make it better. There was no joy. I loved this dog so much. Maggie’s been my companion for all these years. They say Westies are the most human of dogs. It was true of her. She was all love and all play. I wept like a baby yesterday, as I had on Saturday, when we “put her down,” as they say.
The house is empty of Maggie and Sebastian. But it is not empty of love. Kay, who is more in touch with her feelings than I, expressed them well this morning in an email to her friend Mary.
Empty…..that’s exactly it. Empty….rattling around in a cage that used to have a wheel for multiple animals, moving, squeaking, flying high, deliriously fun and noisy noisy noisy…… And now dead silence, nothing. They left the cage for whatever eternal freedom awaits us all…..there had better be an assemblance of a heaven full of love and resurrection of all the bodies of those we love or I won’t go.
It was the right time, completely worn out caring for two pups that needed carrying everywhere all day and even “up” to get a drink in the night, or outside to pee in the dark of 2:00 am…..we’re too old for this…..but we had no need for NOTHING, no lovely, characterized soft dazzlingly sweet creatures, instead.
We went to bed last night, finally getting to hold each other without the crowding of legs and the sooo familiar and comforting creaturely bodies nestled together…but we were left without a “pack” and we had no “fam”……something that filled every crevice of our lives so completely. We cried together and held each other, but there was no real consolation, since right now it is ALL LOSS. This place will be filled in with new energy or new peace, we will get to be tranquil…..but we have less spunk and personality and affection, oh so much less of everything precious.
I hold the “rubber band of my ambivalence” in high tension. Here it is 4:45 am and I am having a quiet time by the fire with my morning coffee…..a week ago I would have to hope and pray that one or both (not simultaneously) would not have to be brought down to pee……so I would break into my warmth serenity to put on shoes, coat, ear band, get a little sack, a leash, different shoes, go out in the cold, wait endlessly for them to find just the right smell, or the right place that hadn’t been used before, and they never wanted to come in, because frozen smells from other dogs were infinitely more wonderful than house smells….so I would have to practically drag them inside again….then feed them, and put them on the couch on the soft blanket across from my chair, get them all settled…go back to my chair, get settled, my coffee, my ipad……and, you know what would happen next…..they both would come off the couch and want to sit with me on my chair (half the size). They were always undeniable, however much I tried, I would say no, ignore, plead, but if a Westie wants something, there is no denying her, however much you try to command that breed, why would I ever even try, after 15 years, I should know….so up goes the coffee cup to the table, the ipad to the table…..I reach down to scoop her up (and sometimes him too, all 3 of us on this little chair)…. I am scrunched sideways, contorted to get them to settle down so they will sleep again….and, again grab my coffee, my ipad, start reading or writing (which presented an even more contorted arrangement above their lounging bodies because I would have no lap then)……… And then….and then…..they eventually, 3 minutes, 5 minutes……they would want down again.
The sadness I hold in my heart – the desire, the physical ache for their return – is a study in ambivalence. I am nuts with sorrow for something I have been waited for for a long long time.
Love conquers all, I tell you. Even high maintenance love. Their 13-14+ years of collective memories will permeate my soul with sadness that will eventually lift to the highest level of sweet sweet melancholy……….but you and I will know the bottom line. The tension is now resolved, and with grave sadness I walk forward into my freedom unencumbered.
Thanks for hearing my 5:00 am confession, my soiled sadness. I know you understand. You spent years in the same condition with many of your dogs before they died. You would have similar tales to tell. I guess dog people are just special souls.
“Lord, help me be half the man/woman my dog thinks I am.”
Chief Albert Naquin
Yesterday Chief Albert Naquin of the Isle de Jean Charles tribe of coastal Louisiana and Kristina Peterson, pastor of the Blue Bayou Presbyterian Church of Gray, Louisiana came through Minneapolis on their way to a conference in Duluth. Kristina also works part-time as a researcher at the University of New Orleans’ Center for Hazards Assessment and Risk Technology, a Center that has maintained its integrity by refusing all funding from BP.
A three-hour interview with them will lead to a commentary on Views from the Edge on the effects of Deep Water Horizon, the ravaging of the coast by the oil companies since 1940, the distribution of BP settlement funds, and the life of these subsistence fisher people on a disappearing island.
Areas of Greater Boston are in lock-down this morning because of the madness that lit the fires of hate and violence, whatever the reason(s) behind the bombings at the Boston Marathon. In times like this, I often turn to deeper sources for strength, hope, and peace. Veni Creator Spiritus is one of them. The second and third stanzas of the lyrics, attributed to Rabanus Maurus in the 9th Century C.E, become in 2013 a prayer for the people locked in their homes in Boston:
Thy blessed unction from above
is comfort, life, and fire of love.
Enable with perpetual light
the dullness of our blinded sight
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
with the abundance of thy grace.
Keep far our foes, give peace at home:
where thou art guide, no ill can come.
To hear the plainsong, beginning with the ringing of a bell, Click Come, Holy Spirit, Our Souls Inspire.
“I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done,” Giffords wrote. “… I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. … I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say, ‘You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.'”
The former Congresswoman (AZ) is still recovering from the assassination attempt that left her with serious brain injuries and caused her to vacate her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The quote above is from her Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Click “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip” to read the entire piece. Here’s a further excerpt:
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
A sermon on forgiveness as releasing or letting go preached at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN April 7, 2013. The sermon is indebted to Professor Robert Kegan, neo-Piagetian psychologist at Harvard University and Professor Mona Gustafson Affinito, Southern Connecticut State University Professor Emerita and author of Forgiving One Page at a Time and other books on the theology and psychology of forgiveness.
Isle de Jean Charles Band
The Chief is one his way to Duluth with Kris Peterson, a mutual friend and environmental activist pastor and researcher with the University of New Orleans Center for Hazard Assessment, Response, and Technology. Kris and her husband, Dick Krajeski, were guest speakers at First Tuesday Dialogues, a community program of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church, following the explosion of Deep Water Horizon.
Return here for a post later tomorrow on the interview with Chief Naquin re: the current state of affairs on Isle de Jean Charles three years after Deep Water Horizon.
Yesterday’s vote in the U.S. Senate comes down to this: cowardice in the face of gun-lobby bullying.
How did they bully?
A well-funded misinformation campaign by the NRA, gun-manufacturer’s lobby, and FOX alleging – although the bill itself explicitly prohibits it – that the moderate compromise proposal would mean a “national registry” of gun owners and erosion of the Second Amendment. The fact that the bill’s co-sponsors had “A” ratings by the NRA made no difference. What makes a difference is money and profits. And the difference they make is fear.
Why were the Senators cowards?
They put their campaign financing ahead of moral principle. According to President Obama, speaking to the American people yesterday, NOT ONE of the Senators could give him or Vice President Biden a reason for opposing the legislation…other than “politics“. Not one.
90% of Democrats voted in favor. 90% of Republicans voted against it.
Polls show that 90% of the American people SUPPORT universal background checks and limiting the size of magazines.
Democrat Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) broke ranks with their Party by voting against.
Republican Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) broke ranks with their Party to vote in favor.
BREAKING NEWS: Last night former Republican Presidential Candidate Senator John McCain, joined by Senators Collins, Kirk, and Toomey, invited the other caucus members of the Grand Old Party (GOP) – “the party of Abraham Lincoln” – to join them for an evening at Ford’s Theater for a private showing of the film “Lincoln” and discussion of how he and the children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School died.
Thanks to Sojourners for publishing “After Boston – Above and Beyond“, published earlier on Views from the Edge.
Views from the Edge 