Fall: One of My Four Favorite Seasons

Fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year. There are three others, but they will come in due time. And that's the point. I love every season, and fortunately I am usually getting tired of one just when it's time for the next to burst on the scene with all its magnificent uniqueness.
Dappled floral carpet, speckled canopy, unduplicated palette, breathless beauty, crisp air, forgotten smells wafting up to fill the nostrils and transport me to tranquil ecstasy. Count the colors underfoot and get lost in matchless beauty. Verdant, azure, rouge, and amber. Orange, sienna, royal purple, and baby pink. Green merging with yellow, outlined in black and brown. While the squirrel scampers out of reach, jaws packed with winter's nourishment, to sit on the out stretched limb chattering her displeasure at my disrupting presence.
Sit by the babbling brook watching the slender minnows dart to and fro or hold their positions in the never-still water. The sun sparkles on the rushing surface as the gentle breeze shifts the leaves to yield a cinema of light and shadow. How did that moss manage to fasten itself to that slippery rock? Doesn't that leaf on the low hanging branch tirelessly sipping from crystal nectar ever quench its thirst?
If I'm still long enough the chipmunks accept my admiration and continue their tasks as if I belong in their world. Little feet scurrying noiselessly from gnarled stump to piles of gray, lichened twigs, one eye upward, ever cautious. Out of the corner of my eye a doe, twitching ears, flickering tail, with fawn in tow, stealthily tiptoes, nibbling as she goes.
Clouds, sun, wind, and muted silence enfold me in the bosom of Mother Earth. What lessons this world has to teach me !

God's love is like water

Ancient Daoism used water as a metaphor for finding harmony in the world, with nature, with one another, within one's self. I find it soothing and helpful.As the Tao Te Ching describes it, water finds its level and fills every nook and cranny. There is no place water can not find and silently and efficiently fill with its goodness. Left alone to patiently wait, muddy water comes to clarity, settles debris, and calms confusion. Water is soft and supple, yet supports heaviness and lifts and carries obstacles. A single drop of water, steady and consistent, over sufficient time will crack the densest rock.
For me, God, the indescribable that surrounds/upholds/leans toward goodness/yearns for wholeness/that which is/experienced as love, that God's love is like water. God's love waits indefinitely patiently; it never gives up. It is there before I ever come to consciousness. And the moment there is the slightest crack (hope? plea? need? surrender?) it flows into our lives without reservation or precondition. God's love will fill every dark corner of my hatred, prejudice, selfcenteredness, greed, delusion of ego and grandeur. God's love will lift me up and support me in acceptance of my already-goodness that was forgotten in the cachaphony of distractions around me. With patience, focused inwardness, the world's oneness become clear as the origin and goal of this love. God's love, our love breaks down walls of separation, dissolves hatred, finds meaning in service to others and compassion for the disadvantaged. In the presence of this love everyone, everyone is accepted as valid, of infinite worth, loving and deserving of love.
What if we saw God's face in the face of EVERY stranger? How would we respond?

Absence of critical thinking

This bumper sticker used to amuse me: "America's OTHER deficit--lack of critical thinking," but not any longer. Given the "look at Me" press conferences, shameless repetition of lies and misinformation, and repetition of senseless votes expecting a different result, I am convinced we have the largest gathering of morons in any one location in recent history. Ignorance and myopic morality are incarnated in Tea Party representatives and Republican leadership of both Houses. Most of us have heard most of the examples before, but they deserve repeating.
1) What do they NOT understand? the 2009 Congress passed the ACA, the President signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it. IT IS LAW!
2) Sen. Ted Cruz, articulate and charismatic, is stupid and irrational---or he thinks we are. Instead of offering funding legislation void of the attempt to defund Obamacare, he suggests voting on budget items piece by piece. Think about it! The result will be the same. The government will get funded and Obamacare will remain in tact. Why not offer a total package without the stipulation concerning ACA and get on about the business of addressing the debt ceiling, solving the financial crisis long term, and SAVE the jobs being lost daily and costing OUR government over $200 million a day. Real lives are impacted, children are going hungry, national security is jeopardized, etc. despite what the mindless idiots on Fox News say. ex. Hannity said his income wasn't being hurt by the shut down. How insensitive can you be!
3) Siding with greedy business and dismantling the EPA, approving fracking for example, threatens our lives and health as well as that of our children and grandchildren. But they are willing to surrender the future for short term, personal hedonism.
4) They argue for less government in our lives and turn right around and want the government to tell us who we can marry and what women can do with their own bodies..
5) The one government controlled entity they mindlessly support and continue to give a blank check is the military industrial complex. This only demonstrates their lack of compassion for the disadvantaged and their commitment to violence. You don't keep having sexual intercourse to preserve virginity!
People get the government they tolerate. Silence is complicity. It's time to put a government in place that cares for all citizens and addresses human needs.

O'Reilly and Dugard found Jesus!

Bill O'Reilly and Michael Dugard have just published Killing Jesus, another in their series of history-making deaths.I am amused and glad.
While the promotional material does not provide any information about their scholastic qualifications for such an effort, they have certainly captured popular imagination. I am amused because O'Reilly is giddy over revealing "new" information about the circumstances leading to and the technique of Jesus' crucifixion. Real scholars have been studying and writing about this for over two hundred years. They have been talking about the lost tomb of Jesus' family first discovered in the 1980s. O'Reilly ignores the latter and insinuates he has new information and insight about Jesus' intentions and the "facts" around the death. His sources are a literal harmony of the canonical gospels and lip service to scant extra-canonical material. He dabbles with confirming Jesus' actual words like the Jesus Seminar has attempted to do with sound scholarship but subjectively chooses what to include and what to exclude. For example, he claims Jesus actually said "Father forgive them" while on the cross, but O'Reilly leaves them out of his reconstruction because NO ONE COULD HAVE HEARD HIM SAY THEM IN THE CHAOS OF THE SITUATION!
I am glad they published this book if it will create conversation around a very significant historical event and encourage people to study and search responsible scholarship. This has been my personal and professional passion for years. I offered my own interpretation in a religious historical fiction entitled Jesus: A Would Be King available on Amazon.
Fundamentalists will be outraged. Liberal scholars will cavalierly dismiss it. Responsible scholarship it isn't, but that never stopped the sale of books. Read it. Read mine. Let's talk!

Reunion

I remember as a child (5 and 6 years old) going to family reunions in Salem, South Carolina. It was always on the grounds of the Salem Baptist Church. There were long, wooden tables that just about buckled with heavy loads of coconut cakes, fried chicken, potato salad, green beans, macaroni pie (that's cheese and macaroni for those of you who didn't grow up in the south), sliced tomatoes, homemade biscuits, etc etc Uncle John was the residing patriarch for many years. In recent years it has provided the opportunity to stroll through the cemetery, revisit ancestors, relive family history, and always pay homage at Great Grandfather Daniel's rock monument ( he built it one rock at a time down in the pasture when he went to pray; I always wondered what he was thinking about: state of the world? state of his soul? those months he spent as a prisoner after the Battle of the Wilderness?)
Most recently the reunion has moved to Devil's Fork State Park right outside Salem. Most have died, so it's Uncle Roy's children and offsprings. It is time to renew acquaintances, retell stories for the hundredth time, embellish and even lie a little, and still enjoy good food. Every year is a little sadder for us old timers now----one or two less relatives, new aches and pains, reality of knowing it will be the last time you see a certain loved one. This year my dearest cousin managed to screw her courage to the whipping post and show up. Her body is riddled with cancer; her spirit is strong and undaunted. We simply kissed and hugged. Words were unnecessary.
The highlight of the day was meeting a "new" relative. Only one cousin knew he existed, born 57 years ago and reappearing only last February. Mother and son met for the first time in July, he came to the reunion, and promised to return Christmas. Any fear or embarrassment was wiped away in the joy, love, and acceptance expressed by everyone.
REUNION WAS REAL AND PERSONAL!

Enough to make a teacher cry

It was the first night of the new class--Business Ethics for Mars Hill University--and the preppy, young man was anxious to share his viewpoint with everyone.
"I don't want to be here. I don't want a college degree." All this despite the fact that his employer required it AND paid for him to be there!
"Why would you not want a college education?" I asked.
"Because I might learn something and have to change my opinion about what I think and what I believe. I do not want to change my opinions."
I admit I was momentarily speechless. Isn't that the purpose of education? to grow? to learn about a world of people, places, ideas that I did not know? If I knew everything I needed, then, yes, an education would be useless. But I am finite, limited in experience, fallible. As I tell my students, I am white, male, bald, southern, WASP. How can I possibly understand black, female, Indian, etc etc.
I go on to say that if we don't stand for something, we will fall for anything. So I invite and encourage students to suspend judgment, at least for a time, listen to the voices of strangers, check your sources before you swallow what anyone says hook, line, and sinker. Verify from multiple sources the "information" and "misinformation" that floods the news waves everyday. And just because it is in a book and claims to come from "God," doesn't mean it is so. Books are only humans opinions, and everybody has one.
I always remember that young man. He happened to be an avowed ultra-right wing Republican, proud fundamentalist Christian, and very chauvanistic. His ethics were Libertarian. He could just as well have been ultra-left wing liberal, atheist, bleeding heart. The mind sets are the same---closed, arrogant, egotistical superiority.
I'm a teacher and proud of my profession. I humbly wake up everyday excited about offering alternatives to untested viewpoints and know I have been intrusted with an awesome responsibility.
It is the thirst for knowledge and responsible use of it that makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom.