Hats off to the men & women who keep us free

The 66 days of Christmas--Celebrating it the Naoi Meadow Way

Devotees of the Naoi Meadow Way and the Lucan Chapel have an interesting way of doing the holiday season.  Notably, we stretch it out as long as we can! Sixty-six wonderful days!  It actually begins on November 1st, All Saints Day, and runs all the way until January 6th, the Epiphany.

To understand why it starts so early, you have to realize the importance we place on the season of Advent, which begins this year (2015) on Sunday Nov. 29th and runs until Christmas Day--four Sundays hence. Since Advent is to be taken seriously as a time for prayer and contemplation--and not for chaos, excess or hubbub--we try as best we can to have our gift shopping already done prior to Advent Sunday.  It is a tough challenge, but it is fun, and worth the effort. 

In a perfect (nonprocrastination) world we would be making or buying Christmas gifts for our loved ones throughout the year. But, since that rarely happens, tradition calls for us to take care of it between All Saints Day (Nov. 1) and Advent Sunday (usually the last Sunday of November).  Notice that this means we are typically finished with it prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday and are able to relax while others are going nuts.  Being a part of that crazed rush of lunacy would violate the reverence we attach to the Christmas season as well as our reluctance to promote or engage in crass consumerism.

November is also when we do our fall housecleaning--and, again, this is for a reason.

Each family's home is their most sacred space year-round; which is why we are not supposed to tolerate cursing, rudeness, or violent forms of entertainment within those rooms and halls. But, this season is especially significant as we prepare to open our doors and our hearts to the new savior child. Everything needs to be as spic 'n span as a church for the impending arrival of Jesus into our homes and our lives (and, of course, for the arrival of friends and loved ones for the holidays as well).  So, a thorough fall cleaning of one's house is symbolic of the way we shine up our lives and sweep out the manger of our inner hearts to provide a new abode for Jesus.

Thus, the month of November is kept busy with shopping, artsy-craftsy stuff, and tidying up.

Then comes Thanksgiving. This is the last feast and hoop-la before the serious matter of Advent begins (sort of akin to Halloween before All Saints Day...and Fat Tuesday ahead of Lent). And it is a time for getting together with family and expressing gratitude to Jesus and the Father for having blessed us with good things and the wherewithall to come up with the gifts we have just spent the month gathering, making and stashing away in a safe place awaiting Christmas Eve.

Thanksgiving Day is for--what else!--eating...and watching football...and engaging in family fellowship and the usual merriment. Friday, for those who are so inclined, can be a fun party night. But then, come Advent Sunday, it is time to get serious about the meaning of the season.  In the olden days, it was a time of fasting and prayer.  We don't go quite that far; but we do make every effort to keep it blessed with the highest level of Christian values and make it a time of peace, beauty, contemplation, and celebration of (all) life.

Those next four weeks of Advent are when we relax and enjoy decorating our homes, trimming the tree, and baking the cookies. But it also when we turn our attention to the beautiful things that Jesus and his message of peace represent, the real meaning of the Christmas holiday. Services are attended. Family worship night is observed in the home each week. Hymns and caroles are sung and enjoyed. All indees are kept away. And, each morning, the children eagerly open the little glittery windows of the advent calendar, one by one, ticking off the days in anticipation of Christmas eve, the arrival of Old Saint Nick, and the most sacred birthday celebration ever.

And when Christmas finally gets here, it keeps right on going...for 12 more days! In some families, little token gifts are exchanged each day, just as in the song.  Alas, however, all things must end.  So, with hearts a bit heavy, we wrap it all up on January 6th, the Epiphany  (which commemorates the arrival of the wise magi in Bethlehem), and poignantly go back out into the real world and return to our regular lives. Until next November 1st!

And that is pretty much how we do it.  A splendidly long way to celebrate the real meaning of Christmas.  And that, friends, is the Naoi Meadow Way.   www.naoimeadow.org

It's time to update and rethink the Second Amendment

Back in the founding fathers' day, arms were basically muskets and dueling pistols. But in today's world, they might be everything from AK47's to pipe bombs to nuclear-armed drones.  Certainly, an ordinary citizen should have the right to own a weapon for protection or sport.  But in this age of technology-driven terrorism, foreign and domestic, we cannot afford to allow anyone and everyone to brandish weapons of mass killing.

Part of the problem, of course, is the archaic and confusing wording of the 2nd Amendment. I think it is high time that it be amended it in such a way that it accomplishes two things: (1) It would update the 'militia' section with more modern and relevant wording, such as: "Since a well-organized militia may become necessary in a time of crisis to the security of a state..."; and (2) Instead of the vague, ambiguous phrase 'right to keep and bear arms', it would distinguish between "ordinary" weapons and "exceptional" weapons--and define more specifically what kind of 'arms' might reasonably be needed by the everyday person for protection or sport...as opposed to those which are 'exceptional' in the sense that they serve no purpose other than mass killing and should therefore be reserved for trained and certified individuals who have registered as collectors, professional peace officers, persons threatened, etc.

Personally, I would limit the sale of weapons to people who are over eighteen and have proven themselves to have a stable personal history--continuous employment, for instance, and no police record.  I would suggest wording in the amendment specifically stating that "Congress shall have the right to define what constitutes "ordinary" and "exceptional" weapons and shall from time to time update those definitions; and that the Congress shall defer to the individual states the responsibility of setting age-limits, mental and physical requirements, and other criteria for gun and weapon ownership"...or something to that effect.   

Statistically, arming the public will cause more shooting deaths, not fewer

More shootings this week...and more talk about arming the public. The reason I doubt that that would ever work comes down to pure statistics--the numbers and odds of something happening. Keeping in mind how incredibly rare mass shootings are, let's see what would happen if we start inviting people to arm themselves--"just in case".

Scenario 1: Let's say one in five (20%) of all college students and professors carries a gun to class...along with some 20% of all high school and elementary school teachers and administrators. Of all the hundreds of thousands of schools across the country...and all the hundreds of millions of people who attend them, what do you think the chances are that a particular armed good guy would ever have the opportunity to use his or her weapon against a bad guy? Almost nil, I'd say--maybe one in 50 million? And, if there were, say, a 50% chance of him or her actually winning that confrontation, the chances go to perhaps one in 100 million of him or her successfully warding off an attacker. To me, given those odds, it would not be worth my time and effort to bother getting a gun, the training and the permits.

Now...Scenario 2: I would bet money that of the 20% who are eager for the chance to carry a gun to a classroom, many are people who either have some sort of bad-ass attitude or a dose of paranoia, or both.   So, given the likelihood of those groups of armed good guys containing a few deranged morons, what do you suppose the odds would be of some student or teacher with an ax to grind or some personal or mental issues, going off the deep end and becoming the bad guy (the attacker)? Way higher, I'd say, than the Scenario 1 figures of 100 million to one.

So...bottom line: If I were in one of those classrooms, I would be much more worried about one of my fellow classmates packing heat and then going berserk than I would about some intruder storming in with guns blazing. Having classrooms full of armed people would make the chance of one of them CAUSING mass shooting deaths a lot greater than the chance of one of them ever PREVENTING mass shooting deaths.

(I know, it sounds like a convoluted argument. Sorry. But ponder it over and over, and see if it doesn't start to make sense).

Can we auto-correct humanity?

A favorite poem of mine.  Gets right to the heart of our mixed up priorities, as I see it.  I've been accused of being anti-technology...to which I reply, no....I am not anti-technology; just anti- obsessing-over-technology.

If you agree, look me up at The Naoi Meadow Way (my personal way of connecting with Jesus).

Let's purge "gun" and "mental" from the dialog

We are wasting too much time bickering around the margins.  Neither gun control nor mental health screening will ever solve anything as long as we live in a country where the mentality is to worship guns.  The reasonable view should be that a gun is nothing more than a tool, like a hammer or a toothbrush; handy when you need it, but staying tucked away in the toolbox or drawer until then. No one I know builds their whole lifestyle around collecting bigger hammers and meaner toothbrushes, hangs them all over their walls, or carries them around in the pockets of their camos, cargo shorts and hoodies in order to make a social statement.  If examining mental issues is what is warranted, then the the mental issue that we should start with might be the psychology of our society at-large..

We live in a nation that was founded by angry, anti-government rebels.  We fought a civil war instigated by angry, anti-government rebels.  So our fundamental culture in the United States has always been one of violence, not peace.  We don't look to Gandis and Dalai Lamas as our leaders; we go with Cheneys and Trumps. And, as long as we continue to wave the banner of anger and teach our children to distrust and rebel, any effort to limit gun sales to the gentle and passive of spirit will always be an exercise in hopeless futility.

So I suggest that we stop using the politically poisonous words "gun", "mental" and "screening" altogether, and shift the discussion instead toward the prospect, however unlikely, of reforming our culture from the medieval mindset of anger and violence to one of peace and understanding.  It should be possible.  After all, that is exactly what Jesus did vis-à-vis his own culture.  Not many went along, but those who did transformed the next two thousand years.  And you and I and our civilization came out of that very reform movement.

We don't seem very Jesus-like today, however.  So what happened to us?  

Our dilemma called 'Virtual Overcrowding'

Why is there so much violence and corruption going on today?  Why is everyone so obsessed with themselves? Why do people, especially younger people, have so little regard for life, for things that are natural or historical, or for the concerns of others?  You may have heard me say before that I am afraid that the glory of our human civilization has peaked, today's technology revolution is simply the final chapter of the waning Renaissance, and we may well have begun the downward spiral toward another Dark Age. I don't know what we can really do about it, except try to understand it.

The dilemma is very, very complicated--a combination of problems, as I see it.  So, let's look at problem number one and save the others for another day. This is the one I call 'Virtual Overcrowding'--a weird sort of population explosion brought on by the way technology puts us micrometers away from virtually everyone else on Earth. If you are a social media obsessive, you probably think this is a good thing, right?  However, it's always been true that the more people we come in contact with each day, whether directly or indirectly, the more chances there are for conflict...and the more need there is for regulation, laws, and, yes, political correctness (i.e using discretion and practiced dishonesty).

Back in the old days, we might have come in contact with maybe a couple dozen people a day---family, friends, coworkers, etc. But today, thanks to technology, we come in contact with thousands (Think of every face, or image of a face, you see on TV, the internet, social media, in public places, driving down the street, etc.). You are not aware of it, but these are people you are in contact with and affected by. And when you are in constant contact with such a huge number of people virtually every minute of every day, and are expected to be politically correct to every one of them, it eventually warps the whole way you interact with people and the society around you. It can mess your mind up. You start to become antsy and irritable, and things resembling depression, ADHD and PTS begin to seep into your personality.

Scientists have known this for years.  I remember learning it back in biology class; that when so many of a species---mice, monkeys, ants, or whatever--are crammed in a cage together causing severe overcrowding, they start doing wierd things: rape, deceit, violence, sexual perversion, stealing, substance abuse, etc. In other words, their society breaks down.  Could that be what is happening to us?

My theory is that we are suffering the consequences of over-population--not actual numbers of people, but 'virtual overcrowding'.  Hence the mass murders, terrorist activities, and disregard for institutions like religion and family. Our society is crumbling under its own weight.  And it is especially bad for young kids whose developing minds are also having to cope with other powerful forces:  peer pressure, for instance, and negative influences coming at them from all directions, including the dark worlds of entertainment and marketing.

So there you have it.  One of several  possible problems worth pondering. The others we can go into someday. But the question facing us now is this:  Is there anything we can do about it? I don't know, but I have a sense that we basically have just two choices: either resolve to change our culture by adding more moral and ethical parameters...or opt to leave it altogether and go live in a small insular community (like my proposal, the Naoi Meadow Way) where we and people like us get to call the shots and do things our way.   Personally, I am rapidly losing confidence in the first option.     

Pope Francis sure reminds me of Jesus

I am not Catholic, but I do consider myself a co-traveler with them. And I have been watching this week's Papal visit with a lot of interest. As I have said on my FB timeline, I admire what Pope Francis is trying to get across to us all, and I agree with just about everything he has said while in our country. So I won't dwell anymore on that. But let me add something else: What I find most awesome about this particular pontiff is his Jesus-like manner and qualities.

As I watched him today visiting the students at a parochial school in an impoverished area of East Harlem, it brought a tear to my eye. This could have been Jesus Himself ("Suffer little children to come unto me"), I thought to myself. It was an indescribable scene.  To witness the smiles and hugs and heartfelt words, in English and Spanish, that he shared with these wide-eyed kids as they eagerly showed him their classrooms and the special projects they had obviously worked on for months to get ready for this once-in-a-lifetime experience was blessed beyond words.

And these children we are told are nearly all immigrants (60% Hispanic, 20% African-American), most from impoverished or broken homes, and some even without parents at all, having migrated here by themselves in last year's wave of refugees from Latin American.

Those who know Pope Francis say he is rather like a parish priest who just incidentally happens to also be Pope...and he was completely in his element in that school. He loves that kind of thing, being hand-in-hand with regular townspeople, especially the least amongst us, and especially the children, and would have stayed with those kids all day if he could have. And I do believe it.

As I watched the innocent laughter in the eyes of those children, I think I was seeing for the first time the real face of the world's migrants, refugees and immigrants up close. And as I looked into the face of the Pope, I think I almost saw Jesus. Certainly, I cannot recall ever before seeing a Christian who came so close to being what I always pictured the savior to have been like.

My prayer is that others besides just myself watched this event, saw a bit of Jesus in that classroom as well, and came away as I did with a new perspective on the world and what we need to do to make it better for all who live in it.

Tolerance by all needs to be the result of Religious Freedom laws

The so-called "religious freedom" laws being debated in Indiana and Arkansas clearly illustrate the war of wills which, although age-old, does seem to be ramping up of late between older, close-minded conservatives and younger, close-minded progressives. Face it, few amongst us still live in tiny, insular communities of like-minded folks, and no one else. Today's society puts almost everyone in potential contact with almost everyone else. So, to peacefully coexist elbow to elbow with one another, everyone has to bend a little and learn to think of others.  The laws, in fact, should force them to do so, whether they like it or not.  Tolerance is the price of freedom and rights.

Conservatives (unless they want to move to a remote cabin in the backwoods) need to do their part by admitting that they will always have to share their space with people who do things they find offensive. And, by choosing to be members of society, they have a responsibility to put up with those annoyances, try to ignore them, and move on.

Progressives (unless they want to move to a remote, self-reliant commune somewhere) need to do their part by admitting that, while they may inherit the earth someday, they haven't yet.  They don't own the public square---and, with their right to be non-traditionalist or eccentric, comes the responsibility to avoid offending people around them whose values may be more traditional and less politically correct than theirs.

These religious freedom laws are tricky. They must be very carefully worded in such a way that both sides are forced to compromise and become more tolerant. Or else they will never work.

Breaking News! Texas is out of execution juice!

OMG! It's Armageddon at the Alamo! And just when all those illegals are pouring over the hill like leafcutter ants to a Willie Nelson picnic! Our officials are in a state of panic to be sure. Ted Cruz has been on the phone with the White House, begging Obama for federal aid--and has even hinted he will try to avoid shutting the place down until at least the end of the week.  Meanwhile, Gov. Abbott is bringing Ted Nugent back in to head up an interim firing squad system--just in case we fall behind schedule--and has been on the phone all day with Utah, trying to determine if readily-available pearl-handled six-shooters will get it done, or if a gatling gun would be better.  How will we survive this crisis?

Same-sex leaning: By birth for some, by choice for others

Would-be Presidential candidate Ben Carson keeps proving over and over that he is not ready for prime time.  You may have heard his opinion this week that being gay is "absolutely" a matter of choice---as evidenced, he says, by the homosexuality displayed in prisons by inmates.  Is he looney? Or is he correct?  Or is he partly looney and partly correct? Okay, here is where I come down on that:

As a never-been-married total layperson on such matters, but a fairly seasoned people-watcher, I believe it would be incorrect to pretend it is a one-size-fits-all proposition.  The gays and lesbians I have known over the years seem to me to fit, more or less, into one of about 3 main categories:  (1) Those who are born with a biological makeup, perhaps genetic or hormonal, that gives them a propensity for same-sex attraction; (2) Those to whom it is a personal preference, like preferring someone older, or younger, or bigger, or skinnier, or lighter, or darker, etc.; and (3) Those hipsters who gear their dating life around what is trendy at the time, especially within their own circle of peers.

Bottom line?  I would surmise that most of the time you are born with it, but sometimes you choose it.  Either way is okay by me. It's none of my business.  That is, until you get into trying to redefine marriage, an institution which human civilization invented a long time ago more as a way to create a stable home situation for having and raising children than to create a nice bond between people who love one another or to provide them with legal rights.

In the olden days, when church and state were inextricably linked, 'marriage' worked for all of the above.  But, now that times have changed, there needs to be an entirely new civil institution just for the 'bonding' and 'legal rights' issues, split off entirely from the largely religious institution of 'marriage'.

To arbitrarily give 'marriage' a broader meaning than it has always had would serve to completely water down the significance of every marriage that has ever taken place.  Suddenly, whatever our grandparents and all those other generations of kinfolk had that was subsequently passed down to us as 'family' would be rendered a whole lot less meaningful.  How can that possibly be right?

Beware the existential threat we face from the dark side of technology

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  The adage has been around for years---millennia if we care to trace it back to the garden of Eden and God's dietary advice.  To modern people it has always seemed little more than a trite cliché and not particularly relevant--until now, that is--until the Computer Age.  The rapidly deteriorating situation we see all around us today could not be more dangerous, and it is a direct result of a little knowledge in the hands of a lot of naïve, ill-informed young people.  It also has a name: Technology.  And when technology becomes the golden calf, worshipped as a God by naïve, ill-informed young people by the millions, it becomes, for all us, a WMD--a weapon of mass destruction.

Been following the news lately?  It is not good.  Bombings in public places.  Kidnappings, beheadings and burnings alive of people in cages.  Drones over Paris and high school football stadiums.  Hormone-driven teens from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere chasing their dreams of lust, romance and derring-do into the clutches of alluring, treacherous terrorists.  Hackers shutting down critical systems and endangering peoples lives everywhere.  All of these things are the direct result of young computer-savvy kids, Millennials mainly, who thought they knew it all when they proceeded to upset all the apple carts and then go merrily on their way.  These are the same kids who grew up learning by way of violent video games how to employ their new-found anti-Christ--technology--to wreak mass destruction, and the art of sharing those skills via social media.  Now a bit older and more bored, they are being easily lured into playing real-life killing games by predatory, radicalized cult-leaders who know exactly how to manipulate naïve, ill-informed young people.

ISIS and al-Qaida are the two biggest facets of a movement which is metastasizing at an alarming rate.  Those groups are opportunistic, moving like blazing wildfire into failed states throughout the Middle East and Africa, or anywhere they see a power vacuum waiting to be filled.  But why are these countries "failed"...and who made them that way?   Let's review the recent history.

It began in Iraq when our coalition removed that nation's stable government, killing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with...nothing.    Then came the so-called Arab Spring when more of those naïve, ill-informed young people, chatting it up with one another on social media, mistakenly concluded that they were ready for freedom and democracy, overthrew the stable governments of Gadhafi, Mubarak, and al-Assad, and replaced them with...nothing.  Those power vacuums, now being eagerly filled by bloodthirsty, opportunistic psychopaths pretending to be religious, would never have occurred in the first place had it not been for social media and the dark side of technology.  Yet, those who worship at the feet of that golden calf remain in denial, refusing to imagine that their little bit of knowledge could have led us directly into the jaws of the most dangerous situation the world has ever seen.

I have said it before that human civilization has very likely rolled up and over the pinnacle of the waning Renaissance--the Computer Age being the last stage--and is now poised to begin the long, frightening descent toward another Dark Age, where innovation ends and deterioration starts.  And we have one thing to blame: a little knowledge and a lot of technological fire-power in the hands of the naïve, ill-informed, bored, and treacherous.  That is the real WMD.

It is time to be afraid!



 

Is it patriotic to love the country as it is, or as we envision that it could be?

In case you missed it, Rudy Giuliani is catching flak for his comments this week questioning the President's love, or hate, for America.  This is not new, of course.  There is a fringe element that has been saying these same things for eight years, from the very moment they first laid eyes on Barack Obama.  But there is a reasonable voice out there as well, suggesting we think about it logically for a moment. How can anyone profess to know who loves the country and who does not?  And what does that mean? We all love some things about it, but have concerns about other parts of it.

I think I love America.  You probably think you love America.  Conservatives insist that they love America, and so do progressives.  The President and the First Lady must love America or else why would they have chosen to dedicate their lives to public service at the highest level?  To get to the answers, we have to dig deeper and ask the even harder questions:

Do we love America as it is, or as we would like for it to be?  When we see the flaws in America--too much liberalism or libertarianism, too much aggression and bigotry, too much disregard for tradition, or too much income inequality--and we choose to speak out, does that make us less patriotic...or more patriotic?

Who is the real American patriot?  The one who sees things as they could be and asks 'Why not?"? Or the one who doesn't care?

Those whose religion is being hijacked need to be the ones to pick a label for the hijackers

"We are not at war with Islam; we are at war with the people who have perverted Islam". That from President Obama today sounds like a new and significant change in administration policy.  For perhaps the first time, they are on the record as calling this a war. But the childish back-and-forth over what to call the enemy marches on, the President demonstrating that he is still as timid as ever when it comes to risking upsetting the political correctness faction of his party by making any direct reference to Islam.

It may seem like mere semantics, but it really does matter.  We have to have some way of intelligently discussing the people with whom we are at war, and that calls for a mutually agreed upon glossary of terms. The White House has a penchant for the innocuous "violent extremist". But, no, that doesn't get it. That could include everyone from Timothy McVeigh to the IRA to the Manson family to the Somali pirates to the Mexican cartels. We have to be more specific and come up with a label for this one particular group, one that clearly describes them as they really are: a bloodthirsty cult made up of a handful of radicalized quasi-Muslim leaders and an army of thousands of unprincipled ne'er-do-wells and street gangsters blindly following along for the thrill of the kill. How do you describe that in two words or less?

Maybe that is a call our Middle Eastern coalition partners should make.  After all, their religion is the one having its name and reputation slandered.  Their neighborhood is the war zone.  Their citizens are overwhelmingly the ones being terrorized.  And it is becoming pretty obvious that this is their war to lead.  Maybe it should be up to the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Kurds and the others to decide how they wish to refer to this common enemy. If they can come up with a description that omits reference to their religion, that should be good enough for the rest of us. We should respect that decision and add that terminology to our lexicon.

Finally, the war against Isis is beginning to have a Muslim face

It's time for the whole world, every nation and every culture, to unite behind the Jordanians in an all-out counter-assault against those criminal marauders, unleashing all the power we can collectively muster. But it has to be the Muslims leading the way.  It is their fight.  It is the name of their religion that is being dragged through the mud, and it is mostly their innocent people who are being killed.  It needs to be the Jordanians, the Saudis, and the other Islamic nations on the front line with their boots on the ground...with the U.S. and the rest of the coalition lurking behind to provide funding and support.

There is nothing remotely religious about those scumbags...so this is not a holy war. But, for anyone who has ever wondered what WWIII will look like, this could be it.

This blog is about to take on some new energy

Hello everyone.  This place has laid dormant for much too long.  I started it back in 2008 but I never had a chance to take it anywhere exciting.  Now that I have more time, I have decided to delete the old stuff and give it a whole new life.  This is where I plan to share my thoughts and ideas with those of you who have a passion, as I do, for making our little corner of the universe a more pleasant and beautiful experience.

Is it political?  Often, yes.  Is it religious?  It might be at times.  Is it fun?  I hope so. Is it about attitude adjustment?  Bingo! It absolutely is!  But what do you say we let it evolve and see what happens, shall we?  If you happen across something on here that grabs you, log in via Google and let us hear what you think.  Or, to see what else I am up to, click the dove above...and follow the links.

May each of you have a wonderful spring and a fruitful and awesome 2015!

Reed