Thursday March 19, 2009
Miss Rita, anything you’d care to say on this anniversary of your escape? You see, you weren’t left here because they’d forgotten to pull the plug!
And all the saints…
I had a dispute once with an Episcopalian woman, who told me in some disdain that Protestants don’t have saints. Eventually I thought to ask her why so many Episcopalian and Anglican churches were named St. John’s, or St. Paul’s, or St. Mark’s, etc., but I never got a straight answer to that question. I think she considered the apostles to be in a class by themselves, so that although they were called saints, it was an honorific, something like calling someone a Kentucky colonel. In this I may not be doing her justice, but in any case, it is clear that she was acting from the not uncommon Protestant assumption that Catholics, as Catholics, are superstitious idiots.
(I don’t know why it is, but I continually find myself defending aspects of the Catholic Church in conversation with people who don’t have any experience of what they’re talking about. My own Catholic boyhood has always served as a useful window into a world that I could not otherwise understand emotionally. Maybe this is why I came in to a Catholic family.)
Robert Clarke’s cure — and us
My English friend Robert Clarke, author of The Four Gold Keys and An Order Outside Time, tells here, in a few words, how he came to the quest that saved and transformed his life.
My Cure Could Help Others
By Robert Clarke
Many years ago I had fallen into a very deep and prolonged state of depression.
I had lost all belief in religion, in there being any deeper spiritual meaning to reality. What loomed threateningly large to me was nature, with its savagery and its largely unconscious cruelty, the devouring of life by other life etc. I knew that nature has its beautiful and delightful side, but the stark brutality and immense suffering that forms so large a part of it had become devastating to me. (As Jung says, dig up a square foot of earth and it will contain thousands of minute creatures devouring one another.)
What also affected me was the fact that nothing is permanent; the people we love and have loved, the things we love and have loved, all eventually die or fade away, including, of course, ourselves. The Earth we walk upon, and even the Sun that gives light and warmth to the Earth, will in time no longer exist. Given enough time, the very universe itself will no longer be, or will be entirely different.
All of this affected me so deeply that getting up in the morning became a problem. Who wants to be part of such an ultimately meaningless and often ugly reality? I eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, because life cannot continue in so negative a vein; something has to give. In time, doctors patched me up to a degree, but I was never what you would call well. However, though I had no inkling whatsoever of it, things were about to change completely and dramatically.
Papa Hemingway
In rereading The Sun Also Rises, I realized for the first time that Hemingway did not admire or entirely approve of his narrator. At least, that was my conclusion. So, I asked him.
Papa? That right?
Is your narrator you, however many of your traits you may have given him? Yes, I didn’t approve of his pimping his love to Romero. It amounted to betraying himself and his aficion. “It was not pleasant,” I said, not meaning that he was misunderstood but that he was reaping where he had sowed. A man may share one of our passions as he may share our politics or our taste in art, and yet have no fundamental connection to us.
Of course. Thank you. Is there anything that we who have profited from your life and words can do for you?
Our reputations don’t mean anything to us now in terms of ego or career-building — but they do matter in that they can make it easier or harder for someone who needs us to find us. So merely spreading the word about how you see us helps us.
Mr. Lincoln on our elections
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
9:30 AM.
Mr. Lincoln, a proud day. We owe it as much to you as to anyone.
You owe it to yourselves. The angels of your better nature — as I said in my first inaugural address.
It is America becoming ever more the symbol of the world, isn’t it? That’s how I see it, anyway.
A symbol, yes — but perhaps more than a symbol. Perhaps you might say in truth and not in metaphor that is a magical miniature, still, as it was to a lesser extent in my time and as it may become to an even larger extent in times beyond yours. It is the form into which energies may be concentrated and hardened into reality.
“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”
This was my column for September in The Meta Arts, an online magazine, which is to be found at http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html
“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”
I got involved in one of those arguments. You know the kind, where the two sides start from so far apart, believing “facts” that are diametrically opposite, that there is no real way to come to agreement. What’s more, she was a friend of a friend, and I wanted to be careful not to let an argument become a heated dispute.
But the “facts” she was quoting with such certainty were just not so. Missionaries, she said, were merely agents of imperialism, using their religion as a weapon to destroy native institutions. Like so many people – political liberals, mostly — she assumed that religious institutions are automatically corrupt, that missionaries are automatically bigots, and that efforts to convert natives of other cultures were mere manifestations of racism.
But in this she, as most people in our generation, was the victim of ignorance fostered by leftist ideology and propagated by lack of historical memory. For instance, she had never heard of the slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and when I quoted it, had no idea what it meant or why it was adopted.
Continue reading “The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”
More coming attractions…
My Story1 – Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality
Is there an afterlife? Do God and spirits exist? If so, do they concern themselves with human lives? Of these things, our societyteaches nothing because it knows nothing, and thinks that we can know nothing. So it dismisses the idea of telepathy, out-of-body experiences, ghosts, spirit possession, and any form of afterlife experience, including heaven and hell. It disregards the power of prayer and disbelieves the ability to heal by touch and at a distance.
But from work at The Monroe Institute and elsewhere, I learned how to obtain first-hand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. I learned how to extend my abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. My experience shed new light on the reality underlying this world that has been described repeatedly in the world’s scriptures.
From my own experience, I have become convinced that we are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. This life is not our only life. And although we see ourselves as separate from each other, we are all connected to one another by way of our intimate connection with a larger being that cares about us and can be trusted. This larger being is a source of foresight and wisdom, made available to us at times of its own choosing and/or upon our request. Nonetheless, we may often lose communication with it, by failing to remember that we are more than we appear to be.