Surviving on Little

Learning Faith and Love in a Box of Sunshine

By Victor L. Midyett

Recently Shirley made the comment to me that, “We know how to survive on little.” I got to thinking about that and realized that it was mostly my missionary upbringing [see “Missionary Kid” stories] that taught me how to survive on little.

Old Age

By Shirley Skufca Hickman

“You still have a nice figure,” he says.

I know he’s lying, and he knows I know.

What he means is he remembers how I used to look,

Just as I remember his thick, curly hair,

His strong arms tight around me.
Firm thighs pressed against mine.
Now, not so firm, not so tight.

We close our eyes and remember how we used to be.

His experienced hands know how and where to touch.
Our kisses less exciting but more loving.
We are like sturdy oaks surviving savage winds.
We shade each other from the scorching sun
And give protection from the crippling chill of age.

Copyright © 2020 by Shirley Skufca Hickman

Goines On: Heaven on earth

Click image for more vignettes

As Goines approached Walmart’s pharmacy entrance, he saw a couple of policemen talking to entering shoppers. As he got closer, he thought he recognized one of the officers: Officer Shell had been assigned eight or ten years ago to the housing development Goines lived in, under the town’s Community Oriented Policing (COP) program.

Hoping you and yours are well

And what about everyone else?

By Moristotle

Yesterday morning I messaged a beloved cousin, “I hope you and all yours are well.” Even before I pressed Send, my “inner voice” spoke up to remind me that it represents my universally compassionate self, which avoids stepping on a bug or a little frog, which is sobered into silence whenever I eat the flesh of an animal that did not hope to be slaughtered to become food, which had been stirred the day before when I witnessed from a few feet away a frail-looking bird hovering on a branch of our persimmon tree, the mild wind ruffling its feathers.

Thor's Day: The tie that binds

By Morris Dean

The English word "religion" derives through Old French from the Latin religiō, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but some modern scholars favor the derivation from ligare (bind, connect), probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e., re (again) + ligare, or "to reconnect." [Wikipedia]

Rabbit climbs wall

I was delighted yesterday to see that one of our rabbits—hey, we're their people—had climbed the wall of our raised planter (which is three 6" x 6" timbers tall, plus 2" cap).

Yum, yum, good, I'm imagining him (or her) thinking.

And a yum-yum good photograph too.

It's looking to me more and more possible that our rabbits can climb over the 2' cage wire I stapled around the bottom of our shadow-box fence. Of course, they may be using a tunnel that could even be part of their underground warren (or warrens)....

Laughter, too, as well as love and learning

Story behind photo

As a result of writing yesterday's post—or rather of dislodging its concluding joke ("It's probably because of all the meat they eat")—I have added "laughter" to Moristotle's masthead. Its tag used to read, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, and learning on Earth."
    Now the masthead says, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, laughter, and learning on Earth."

And how do we celebrate laughter?
    By more laughing, of course.
    Same as we properly celebrate love by loving, life by living, and learning by continuing to learn.
    Fortunately, the best learning comes from loving and living, especially when we can laugh about it.
_______________

Footnote: The photo initially published with this post came from a quick google, which netted a group of anonymous, mixed-race, but all young people. To me, at the time, it was a photo of laughing people. Nevertheless, I decided to replace the photo with my favorite one of myself laughing. I guess it could be titled, "Laughing Oldster."

    Here's the first photo I considered using. I didn't decide against it because the individual laughing isn't human. He (she?) is higher-animal enough for me. But somehow we can't be entirely sure that that is a laugh, we are that different from chimpanzees.

103 years ago today

My father was born on this day in 1905. Over the years of my own adulthood and middle age I've seen so much of my father in my own mannerisms of body and speech, and yet he remains largely an unknown man to me. That is, though I perhaps knew him as well as most men know their fathers, I feel that there's more about him that I don't know and never even suspected than that I did come to know.

Somehow, beginning as a bookish teenager, I felt there was a kind of divide between him and me, a division that afforded me much grief of longing, particularly during my late twenties and my thirties, when my own children were young. I felt a mysterious need to connect with my dad, to somehow get on the same wavelength of understanding and feeling. It's hard to define what the "connection" would have been, or exactly what was missing that I thought needed to be there. I never felt that the connection got made or the missing parts got filled in. At some point in the final years of his life (1976-1980) I accepted that they never would. I even convinced myself that that was okay, even though I don't really think it was.

Could it have been a simple failure to really know that he loved me, or a failure on my part to really appreciate him, to understand to what extent his life had consisted of pleasure, to what extent of pain? He grew up the oldest child of a large family. At an age when I was reading books, attending school everyday, preparing for college, he was working a mule in the fields (in Arkansas) to help feed his brothers and sisters. That is, he didn't have my "advantages," and ironically it was probably those very advantages that constituted the gulf that I felt divided us. My so-called advantages pushed me into a world more of the mind and the imagination than of everyday, present reality.

Anyway, Dad, I just wanted to tell you again, as I did my best to tell you almost thirty years ago, that I love you. I still love and always will love you, even if my understanding of you was imperfect and my memory of you is at best an approximation of who you really were. And thanks again for everything.

"God-blessed freedom"

Now that I've recovered from the embarrassment of having been called "a fine upstanding Christian" by one of my readers, I'm ready to say a bit more about "God-blessed freedom" (as I termed it yesterday).

I assume [what I think we simply must assume for discussion of faith to proceed]: that humans are free—at least to some degree, which might even be extensible through self-knowledge and discipline.

It follows, if we are in some sense created by God, that God created our freedom. That's part of what I meant by the phrase "God-blessed freedom." The other part of my understanding of this God-granted freedom is that with it comes the implicit invitation to use it. In fact, it may be a logical necessity. For does it make sense to say, "You are free, but don't act freely"?

Religions of course provide various instructions or directions about how to use it. A good friend of mine thinks that the message of most religions (that is, God's message as promoted by these religions) is to "do good one to another." Nevertheless many religious people study their holy book to get explicit, specific instructions about how to be good, as though they didn't particularly want to exercise their intelligence to figure it out. (Indeed, freedom can be a burden, for it entails responsibility.)

What delighted me yesterday was to realize that to exercise my freedom on my own, honestly and from love, is sufficient to "be okay with God." It is not necessary to do anything else—like pray, attend church, read the holy book, even worship as ordinarily understood. It appeared to me that using my freedom could itself be an act of worship, an act of obedience and praise.

But in practice I don't dwell on that, for I don't get warm, fuzzy feelings from the concept of being obedient to God. "Obedience to God" seems on its face to require that a person follow explicit instructions. How can that be free?

The feeling I felt upon gaining this insight I compared yesterday to the feeling I had upon "being saved" fifty-six years ago: The significance of God's blessing of freedom came to me as a stroke of forgiveness and liberation.

Being pragmatic about this

I've been buoyed today by comments on my post "Grave second thoughts." A theme of the post and of the comments is that good people acting as individuals can (or should try to) make the world a better place. Maliha, for example, speaks of "walking the walk" when it comes to religion:

The meaning of "walk the walk" goes beyond rituals...extending compassion, working for justice, and being commited to the spirit of the law as much as the law itself.

And after I admitted that I myself had been "tilting at windmills" with my impractical, idealistic proposal for a "new, consolidated Abrahamic religion," that thoughtful and compassionate blogger Scary Monster reminded me that

To dream and hope for the improvement of life is neither foolish nor a waste of time. It's the questions we ask ourselves and each other that will eventually bring things into balance.

In questioning the sources of my quixotic bent, I guessed that I might have been

motivated by my 1960s, Beatles desire to find a way for currently unreconciled groups to "come together now, love one another right now"....

And Maliha responded:

At the risk of sounding Hippy, I would like to see a "love" revolution, which will bring us closer to ourselves and to each other. I saw this saying (is it from the Bible?) on a church notice board once:

When the power of love overwhelms the love for power; only then peace will reign [she was paraphrasing].

I thought it was really gorgeous.

And, serendipity of serendipities! I investigated a new visitor to Moristotle who also commented on the post ("Jolene42") and discovered that her motto on her own blog is

When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have peace.

And she attributes it to Jimi Hendrix!

Anyway...

A little later, I was driving to pick up our poodle Wally at the groomer's and listening to R.W.B. Lewis's biography of the James family (The Jameses: A Family Narrative, pp. 562-563), when I heard this passage:

The whole contrast of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism, James then said [in Lecture VI on pragmatism at Columbia University in 1907], was now in sight (italics his):

The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.

In the closing lecture, William James enlarges on that last image of an adventurous universe. The grand issue arises of "the salvation of the world"; and as against the pessimists who declare it impossible and the optimists who think it inevitable, the pragmatist takes the view that the world's salvation is possible. The pragmatist, says James, believes that the world can be bettered, here and there, bit by bit, in patches—and this by the moral and intellectual actions of individual human beings. "Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow...why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places...of the world [italics added by Lewis]—why not the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making, so that nowhere may the world grow in any other kind of way than this?"

And this brought me right back squarely up against one of the things that most struck me in Sam Harris's book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion: his attack on the philosophy of pragmatism was no less hard-hitting than his attack on religion. (Pragmatism, he said, is relativistic, but truth is truth.)

It is fitting that my circling back from Harris to reconnect with my belief "in Something that we know as God/Allah/or whatever other name" should circumscribe the enabling philosophy of William James.