Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim ~ teaser

Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim: A Personal Manual for Prayer and Ritual ~ by Edward Hays, 2008

"Christianity is an indoor religion. The windows of our churches are stained, and while beautiful, they prevent worshippers from seeing and praying in communion with creation."

— from the Preface to the New Edition, page vii

Sunday Salon ~ it's about time

Before I forget it, all you folks in the United States were supposed to turn back your clocks this morning.  Did you do it?  If not, you have an additional hour to get wherever you were planning to go.

BOOK on ORDER

Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death ~ by Katy Butler, 2013, memoir

Katy Butler's parents wanted “Good Deaths,” but forces within medicine stood in the way.  Butler was living thousands of miles from her vigorous and self-reliant parents when the call came:  a crippling stroke had left her proud seventy-nine-year-old father unable to fasten a belt or complete a sentence.  Tragedy at first drew the family closer:  her mother devoted herself to caregiving, and Butler joined the twenty-four million Americans helping shepherd parents through their final declines.  Then doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, keeping his heart going but doing nothing to prevent his six-year slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery.  When he told his exhausted wife, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter were forced to confront a series of wrenching moral questions.

• When does death stop being a curse and become a blessing?
• Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying?
• When do you say to a doctor, “Let my loved one go?”

When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a prolonged and agonizing death, Butler set out to understand why.  Her quest had barely begun when her mother took another path.  Faced with her own grave illness, she rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death head-on.  With a reporter’s skill and a daughter’s love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of medicine.  Her provocative thesis is that modern medicine, in its pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents.   This revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that dying has become.  And it chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a new movement trying to reclaim the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized.  This book is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system.  It will inspire the difficult conversations we need to have with loved ones as it illuminates the path to a better way of death.

GREAT-GRANDKIDS

Princess Raegan at the ice show is quite a change of character from last week's funny face with Cheetos.  She's four and a half.

I like the roses decorating her sleeves.  She attended Disney on Ice: Princesses and Heroes last Sunday, October 27th, with her parents and both sets of grandparents.

Meanwhile, Jaxon went to the beach last month with his parents.  He'll turn three in December.

And here's Jaxon as Mr. Peanut for Halloween.  Raegan and Jaxon are my two great-grandchildren, and Jaxon will soon have a baby sister.

The Sunday Salon's Facebook page links to other blogs.

Caturday ~ charge conference

United Methodists — especially United Methodist clergypersons — will understand this question completely.  'Tis the season for each UM Church to have its annual charge conference, where paperwork is completed and filed with the District Superintendent in a meeting to look at how well (or poorly) the church has done during the past year.  I may be retired, but there's no such thing as a former ordained United Methodist pastor when it comes to marrying, burying, or preaching.  Therefore, at my church's charge conference on Monday evening, copies of my "Report of Retired Pastor—2013" will be among the reports in the stacks of paper (one copy for the district office, one for the church, one for the pastor herself).

To answer Grumpy Cat's "do I have to?" question ... No, Grumpy Cat, we'd actually rather you not come to the meeting.  As for myself, do I have to?  No, technically I don't have to attend, as long as I send in my report.  But I do plan to be there — Monday evening, November 4th, 7:00 pm — yep, I'll be there.  So will these characters, apparently.

Beginning ~ with words that alienate

First paragraph

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me," says the old proverb.  We now know that this is a lie.  Words can wound, alienate, and degrade people.  Language can also affirm and express love.  Care for language is a show of concern for people and a revelation of the attitudes of the speaker.

The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation ~ by Priests for Equality, 2007

From the back cover:  "Although this new Bible is certainly an inclusive-language translation, it is much more:  it is a re-imagining of the scriptures and our relationship to them.  Not merely replacing male pronouns, the translators have rethought what kind of language has built barriers between the text and its readers.  Seeking to be faithful to the original languages, they have sought new and non-sexist ways to express the same ancient truths.  The Inclusive Bible is a fresh, dynamic translation of the Bible into modern English, carefully crafted to let the power and poetry of the language shine forth — particularly when read aloud — giving it an immediacy and intimacy rarely found in traditional translations."

This book was delivered today by UPS, so I haven't really started reading it yet.  At 799 pages, plus the vii pages (7 pages) of the Preface, it isn't really intended to be read straight through.  One unique thing about this Bible's layout is that the Hebrew Scriptures are laid out in the order used by the Jewish Tanakh:

The Torah (Law)
The Prophets
The Writings

When Jesus referred to "the Law and the Prophets," he was using a short-cut name for his Jewish scriptures.  Those are two of the three sections of his Bible.

Matthew 7:12  "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets."

Matthew 22:36  "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"
 37 He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'
 38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
 39 And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'
 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

In this version, the Writings include books used by Catholics that are not part of Jewish scriptures.  Protestants put those "extra" writings into what is called the Apocrypha.  The important point is that this version intends to be both inclusive and egalitarian.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.

Library Loot ~ Oct 30 to Nov 5

Who Discovered America? : The Untold History of Peopling of the Americas ~ by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson, 2013, history

Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas — offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America?  This book calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known “discoveries” of European explorers, including Christopher Columbus.  Menzies combines meticulous research and an adventurer’s spirit to reveal astounding new evidence of an ancient Asian seagoing tradition — most notably the Chinese — that dates as far back as 130,000 years ago.  He offers a revolutionary new alternative to the “Beringia” theory of how humans crossed a land bridge connecting Asia and North America during the last Ice Age, and provides a wealth of staggering claims, that hold fascinating and astonishing implications for the history of mankind.

The Fossil Girl: Mary Anning's Dinosaur Discovery ~ by Catherine Brighton, 1999, children's (England), 8/10

It's 1811.  Ten-year-old Mary Anning, her brother Joe, and their widowed mother are eking out a meager existence running a little fossil shop in the seaside town of Lyme Regis.  After a storm wipes out most of the shop’s merchandise, Mary and Joe begin the slow work of restocking the shelves.  They search high and low for fossils, and one day Mary spots a huge eye in a cliff face high above the town. She resolves to bring the creature down — no matter what the risk.  The exciting discovery and recovery of the first complete fossil of an Ichthyosaurus is told in an attractive graphic novel format, perfect for reluctant readers.  For ages 5 to 9.

I'm frustrated with this book because it let's her brother be the one who finds the fossil, not Mary.

Stone Girl, Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning ~ by Laurence Anholt, illustrated by Sheila Moxley, 1998, children's (England), 7/10

Mary Anning made an astounding discovery at age 12 when she unearthed the first full skeleton of a giant ichthyosaur in the cliffs above her home in Lyme Regis.  This incident — in which she was helped by a little dog she rescued from a cemetery — was the beginning of a long career that saw Mary become the world’s best-known fossil hunter.  For ages 5 to 8.

These are about a real person.  Mary Anning, born in England in 1799, discovered the full skeleton of an ichthyosaur in the cliffs above her home when she was only 12, a discovery that made her one of the most famous fossil-hunters of her day.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages us to share titles of books we’ve checked out of the library.  Add your link any time during the week, and see what others got this week.

Teaser ~ The Politics of Experience

The Politics of Experience ~ by R. D. Laing, 1967

Laing was a young British psychiatrist who attacked the Establishment assumptions about "normality" with "a radical and challenging view of the mental sickness built into our society."  I've quoted from the back cover of this book that I read in the early 1970s.  Wow, that's 40 years ago!  Unpacking boxes of books, I ran across this dusty paperback and decided to share some quotes from it as today's teaser.

"As we experience the world, so we act.  We conduct ourselves in the light of our view of what is the case and what is not the case.  That is, each person is a more or less naive ontologist.  Each person has views of what is and what is not" (p. 142).

Okay, I suppose I should define ontologist for you, since I'm probably the only philosophy major here.  Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being or reality.  It deals with questions about what is.  So an ontologist is one who investigates what makes a human, human.  Have I lost you?  Okay, let's try another quote.

"Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them" (p. 53).

I never took a class in psychology, so I asked a professor of social psychology about taking his beginning class — he was visiting at my house with one of my friends.  He had been reading the titles on my bookshelves and said, with a wave toward my books, "You don't need it."  This book was probably right there on those shelves that day.

"Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth" (pp. 72-73).

On the previous pages, Laing was describing the way our teachers teach — or taught back then, 40-some years ago, before "common core" and "teaching to the test" became the norm.  Reading snippets of this book, I notice it seems very dated.  Or maybe I just haven't thought about these ideas in decades.  Has anyone else read this book?  Or even heard of it?

Monday Mindfulness ~ Om for peace.

OM is a beautiful word.  It has the same roots as the words I AM or AMEN.  These words are the sound of the Divine, the All That Is.  It is a great mantra for meditation, and it can bring you profound peace.

This word is also on the pendant I'm wearing.  It is used to symbolize the Hindu religion.  From the top, going clockwise, these are the religions symbolized on my pendant:

• Christianity ~ the cross
• Taoism ~ yin-yang shows opposites in balance
• Islam ~ crescent and star
• Judaism ~ six-pointed star
• Buddhism ~ eight spokes represent the Eightfold Path
• Hinduism ~ the word Om (or Aum)

The Dalai Lama said, "When there is peace among religions,there will be peace in the world."