Author: rkcdlitt

We have so many problems in our society today, it is a wonder why we choose to fight between ourselves over what color we are, or what or national origin is. I am from British stock on my father’s side and Italian/Sicilian stock on my mother’s side. Having been a history and culture professor before concentrating on teaching writing, I am fully aware that there is a great racial mixture in my background. On my father’s side, I am English, which means that there is some German and French blood running through my veins, and Scottish, which means that I may also have some Viking blood in me, which could be Norwegian, Swedish, or even Russian. On my mother’s side, there is French and Italian, which could also mean some Austrian, or Hungarian blood, but it also could be some norther African blood, which means I could have a mixture of Greek and Black African blood running through me.

I know that I can send for a DNA kit to show where my extended long-dead relatives originated, but I don’t care. I am part of humanity, you know, the one that God made in his image and likeness. I cannot imagine what God looks like; this is far beyond my capabilities as a mere mortal human. What I am certain of is that there is no color for God; He, or She, is beyond and far superior to an image of Him, Her, as a mere mortal. To me, the face of God is Jesus. According to my faith, and the faith of millions of others, Jesus is the Son of God, or at least the most important prophet placed on earth by God.

As I look back on the makeup of Jesus, as the Son of Mary, the granddaughter of David, many generations back.  If that is so, we know from the Bible that David co-habitated with Bathsheba the nubile Queen of Central Africa, which, in all likelihood, means that there is Black African blood in Jesus. The face of Jesus, as I portray Him, is not that of Max Von Sydow, or Jeffrey Hunter, who portrayed him in the movies. If I were to take a realistic stab at it, Jesus was probably a short man, of middle eastern, or east Asia complexion. I know that this next statement will offend many, but I must make it anyway. If I am going to truly think of what Jesus looked like 2000 years ago, he could probably look much like Yassir Arafat did when he lived. Short, but with a dynamic personality that attracted many poor workers to follow him.

I think that God had a plan for this; we cannot know what Jesus truly looked like, which is why, when you enter a Christian church that is not predominantly white, Jesus is portrayed as a man with dark skin.

So, when theologians, and people concerned with racial reconciliation, I truly believe that what they really mean is that as a community, we must re-form our thinking. This is a formation, or a re-formation of God’s society. Any reconciliation must come from within each person. We must reconcile within our own selves how we want to  live and who we want to share this wonder world with.

I apologize if I have offended anyone; my prayer is that I have planted a seed within those who read this. That seed should be to reconcile with yourself and God so that we can reform our society, the entire society of the world into a more open and accepting entity.

God bless you all. I Love you all.

Hate and Judgement

An interesting combination is hate and judgement. Can we avoid the only judgement that matters?

On this July 4^th, the 242^nd anniversary of the birth of our nation, I cannot truly call us the home of the free; there are entirely too many people of color and financial deficiency who are not truly free. Too many people are judging these people on their looks or economic status, using hate to put them down. I do not like or approve of this.

I sometimes become pessimistic about what our society is evolving into; but then I remember that the youth of today will become tomorrow’s leaders, and optimism replaces that feeling of pessimism.

True, at times we appear to be a spiritually impoverished nation, anger and bitterness control the headlines.  But the optimism of the youth of today encourages me to think that the evil that seems to pervade our society will be replaced by something more akin to what God wants of us. What we have created is failing; hopefully, what the youth will create will be more loving and caring, with less hate.

My generation has enlarged the dangerous weaponry that our fathers’ generation began; we perfected a way to kill us all, but something inside of us has prevented us from executing the inevitable. Sorry, Arnold, the world of the robots will not control our lives, causing eternal havoc and war.

Jesus’ last words to his followers was to put your sword back; his followers were not allowed to use violence to protect him. I pray that our future leaders will shun violence and look to love and peace. I see the youth demonstrating against the openness of our gun-enriched society. Prayerfully, I hope that when they take the reins of society, more level heads will prevail.

Love will win in the end; this I am sure of.

Kindness

I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are. We seem to be destined to not view other people as equals. Most religions accept what is said in Genesis, that God created man in His image; that’s all men; not just those who are like us. It appears that a permanent state of class warfare of the rich persecuting and punishing the poor has been with us throughout history, throughout the entire world as we know it; but it is only called class warfare when the poor try to rise against the rich. Being a former history teacher, I accept that history is written by the victors; but, over the last fifty-plus years, more literature has appeared that was written by the repressed classes.

This is rich literature, written by the people of these different cultures. I am thinking of authors such as Louise Erdrich, writing of the Native American culture, and Zora Neale Hurston, writing of the African American culture. When reading this literature, I am not only placed in the stories as an interested observer, I am also engulfed by the beauty and depth of cultures that these stories represent. To truly comprehend this, I decided that I must share this inner light I received with my literature students when I taught in college. Comprehension begs actions, which in turn brings contemplation and understanding.

I have never had the opportunity to live amongst these different cultures in America, but by reading of them I have learned to appreciate the awesome wonder of all life. Our spirituality forms our inner lives and is then lived outwardly in the world, which is to live a life of love and justice for others. True contemplation must become action; so, I take it into my own spiritual being, being grateful that I can share it, taste it, and sense it. This is one way we can learn to Love and appreciate all people. When we Love all people, we appreciate and respect all people. Isn’t this what God wants?

When we Love, we leave our self-centered hearts behind. We share our personal gifts; working together, our sense of community grows, and our selfishness dies, a difficult death, but a worthwhile one. I believe that when we stop living for just ourselves, a culture of brotherhood and sisterhood replaces jealousy and contempt. We are made as individuals, and in that light, we are different; but this differentness does not mean we are not alike in many ways, owning the same dreams, sharing the same pains. By creating these loving communities, we all gain; we all create the heaven within us that Jesus so often spoke.

Be Non-violent

Violence comes in many forms: it is ugly and awful. It is a sadness that permeates our society. We choose to be violent; we also choose to be non-violent. When we choose non-violence, we do so because of our love for all people, regardless of who or what they are. There is no space in our hearts for violence when we love.

Violence rears its head in many forms. It is not only an act of physical aggression; it is also an act of psychological attack, such as what is going on at our borders today. Violence against a family can be as horrific as separating mothers and children. This is not what God wants of us. Jesus preached that we must love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The word must is much more emphatic than the words should or may be. Must is a commandment.

I have to agree that if we love God, if we love our families, we cannot close our love, or keep our love from people we do not know. If we open our hearts to the stranger, God will do the rest. Is this so hard to do? My wife often chastising me because I use terms of endearment to people I have just met, or a server who brings me my breakfast at our local diner. I respond by saying that God knows I mean nothing demeaning by calling her love, or him brother.  

I admit that I am not always diligent in my relations with others; I also believe that we all share in this shortcoming. If I do not live as we are supposed to live, I cannot say that I am a true loving person. If my thoughts begin to revolve around my own pleasures and happiness, I may be excluding others. It is times like these that I do not have “a heart at leisure from itself.” It is times like these that I am ignoring God’s message to me and to all.

I try to be attentive to what God is asking me to be today; even though I am relatively weak to change national events, I can work to change our local position to be in alignment with what God wants from us.

Is it so difficult to love one another? Is it so difficult to respect the humanity of others? If our answers are yes, then we are not the God-loving people we profess to be. As I look back on my life, I recall that for the first thirty-five years, I neglected any participation in anything that reeked of racism; but I also did nothing to combat the racism I grew up with.  My sister was an activist, marching in Washington to protest our country’s violation of human rights; she participated in the demonstrations in D. C. which included the march when MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech. I was proud of her, but I did not join in, maybe due to the fact that I was too involved in my serving and history with the Marines in the early to mid 60s.

Since then, I have been more active, but behind the scenes, non-violently. Presently, I work for social justice, banishment of the death penalty, and economic stability and equality for the less-fortunate members of our community. I also write long, factual letters to our congressmen. Being a former history teacher, I am able to include many historic trends.

I pray the what I now do is pleasing to God. All members of my family, all six billion of them, deserve God’s grace.

Loving and Living

Some people look at world events and think that the end is not far off. Nuclear war could destroy us all in a matter of minutes. I question this; no matter when or how we live, the end for us can come at any time. I had a high school friend who died in an accident at age 18; another had a massive heart attack at age 32. I don’t know if I will live another year, or week, or day. It’s not my position to determine when God will call me home.

Knowing this, we must not let our problems create difficulties for others. We must consider all people in our decisions. We cannot forget to love those around us. By loving them, we allow them to live as they see fit, or as they can. I will do nothing to make their lives any more difficult. I will do everything to make their lives better, if only spiritually through prayer.

By loving people, we show them what we believe; by living a life of love, we allow people to live and love as we all should. I will not allow any of my former egotism to get in the way; I will all Egoism to be present. (I hope you know the difference). By living a life of Love, we strengthen and renew our own and others’ hearts. When fear and doubt invade our lives, we cannot allow them to mislead us into doing harm to others. In Matthew, Jesus says we cannot love money and God. I wish all would understand the meaning of this.

I find it upsetting that we in the United States have plenty of money for war, weapons, and bailing out banks, but never have the money for health care, education, or welcoming our neighbors, which is taught in all religions. I pray each day that things will change. One truth of Jesus is that we cannot praise both God and money. Many of us in the US have forgotten this. By praising wealth, we short-change ourselves and society. Nothing good ever comes from praising wealth – only more greed and less caring for our neighbors, or as I say, family members.

I pray that things change; I pray that things change. By praying this, I comfort myself, which in turn, allows me to serve others as best as I can. What we do we believe; what we believe we do.  

Justice

The Oxford English Dictionary defines justice as just behavior, the quality of being fair and reasonable. Justice, according to the Bible, involves making individuals and community whole, complete, by maintain goodness and impartiality.

Since its inception, the United States has led and been the model for the UN’s human rights council. But this is no longer true; we have withdrawn from this important international commission because our leaders are no longer concerned with justice.

I am morally and spiritually offended by how our country is treating people with different ethnicities than ours. My daily meditations seem to be futile. My practice used to be to bring my friends into my core to pray for their health and welfare. Having been a public-school teacher and college professor for the last 24 years, I have had the honor of being with Americans who are rich and poor, black, brown, and white, people from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America.

Throughout these years, all my students have become a part of my wonderful family. I love them all. I cannot distinguish them by gender, ethnicity, or economic status. They are all important to me, as I pray that I am important to them. These family members are veterans, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, suffering with PTSD, insecurity, a lack of confidence; I have had students who have terminal diseases and prison records.

I don’t care what their pasts were; they were my students and are now a part of my family. All deserve fairness, reason, Love, and impartiality. This is the way that I live my life.

I can only pray that men and women of similar beliefs and practices will come to their God-given sense of justice and correct this abomination on on southern border.

From Psalm 40: I do not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and your saving help. I do not conceal your love and your faithfulness from the great assembly.

This is a very interesting thought for today – at least for me. As I am now closer to 80 than 70 years on this planet, as with all of us old folks, I am beginning to experience some physical insecurities. At times, these are depressing; I get upset that I am no longer able to put in a full day teaching (which is one reason I finally and forever retired this past May).

I have to force myself to recall these words from Psalm 40. This comes from both the Christian and Jewish Bible and is repeated in the Qu’ran. God walks with me, whether I remember this or not. I may doubt many things, and since I am only human, I sometimes question this. Fortunately, my good wife, and my intellect, and above all my faith brings me back to this substance.

I attach the words of Basilea Schlink, a 20^th century religious influence in Germany for almost 100 years. “I do not want to be respected by certain people; I do not want to be admired. Lord, accept my commitment today. I do not want to worry about whether I get a bad deal; I do not want to be involved in myself. I want to trust that you will not let anything happen to me that would not be for my good. I always want to think the best of my brother and sister and not give way to any mistrustful thoughts again.…”

This is a passage I often read to bring me back to reality; this is especially needed now, when I doubt what my future will be.

Whatever will be is not in my control, so I trust myself to rise each morning, pray for those who are in need, and thank God that I am with my friends and families. This is a good day and a good time to be active in this world. There are interesting times ahead, all of which I anticipate greatly.

Bless you all and my the Good Lord walk with you always.

I have a daily prayer that basically asks that our society does not slip back to the age-old practices of white privilege, western privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, entitled Christendom, and American isolationism (I call these the six deadly sins). All of which are practices that we began eliminating from our society over fifty years ago. I ask for nothing but one thing: that His will be done, that His kingdom come, and that His nature be revealed. Then all will be well.

This, however, is a difficult prayer; I accept that nothing is impossible for God, but mankind has been given free will, and right now our free will is rapidly crashing down a deep abyss after being derailed by those who are obsessed with money-hungry and power-hungry greed.

I have been deliberating greatly on the need for a kinder, gentler community over the past several weeks; this is one area that always needs further discussion. To Love our neighbors, as Jesus commands, is a very difficult thing to do; but, we must begin doing it. Just to get historic and political for just a minute: between 1933 and 1935, a powerful popular person became chancellor of Germany, with a very week Reichstag. I all hope we remember what happened in the ensuing ten years.

Don’t put words in my mouth, but I pray that we do not repeat the failures of human society again. Our president is in word and deed a very popular person, using a very weak congress to achieve his goals. We don’t really know what his goals are. They may be excellent; I pray they are. But I also know that our community of families is being undercut on a daily basis. We cannot believe in strong family values if we continue separating children from their parents.

This practice is bringing back four of the above deadly sins. As a Christian, as a western, white, semi-privielged male, I shed a tear every time I read about the 1500+ children that have been misplaced after separation from their biological parents.

Jesus di not want anything like this to happen; neither did Peter, or Paul, or any of the other disciples. Even under the structure of the early Middle-Ages Christian Church, the white men in robes, as strict as they were, did not foresee anything such as this in their domains. None of the original desert religions created by Jacob, Paul, or Muhammed had anything like this in mind.

My brothers and sisters, I ask that you included the above prayer in your daily routines, as I have done.

Pray with me . . .

Who are our neighbors?

I often get confused, and I will admit, I also often get upset, with people’s actions toward each other. I cannot overlook someone who has not had the same opportunities as I have. I do not want to use the term advantages, because coming from a lower middle-income family, born in Newark, New Jersey, I do not consider myself advantaged; but I do consider myself a product of my opportunities, when I learned to recognize and accept them.

One of the things that I have begun to realize and to share with others is the idea that even the simplest things in life are filled with multi-level meanings. Cornell West said, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.” I couple this with the Bible story of the Good Samaritan. Many times, we have difficulty in recognizing who in fact our true neighbor is. It could be the family living in the house next door; it could also be the family living in the single-wide house in a trailer park; it could also be a poor Venezuelan family on the border of the United States seeking asylum.  

My heart tells me that it is all three; two of them I have yet to meet, at least face to face. But, in all cases, these are my neighbors; these are family members that I have not had the pleasure of sharing a meal with.

My heart tells me that if I had not recognized the opportunities that came my way, I would not be where I am today. In 1990, while I was the president of the NPHS booster club, the Athletic Director came to the monthly meeting in September and announced that he had just lost his swim coach. To make a long story short and meaningful, I ended up being the temporary coach. After four years, this lead me to pursue my masters degree in history to become a history teacher at NPHS. This opportunity began my 24-year career teaching at both the high school and college levels.

One of  these same people that I have not met could recognize the same possibility and end up becoming a teacher who affects the lives if his or her students. This is not impossible to imagine, unless you have no imagination whatsoever. Only a loving outlook on life can produce and add to the life of our neighbors.

Many of us look at ourselves and cannot imagine how we can be this open in our outlook; many of us just don’t know how, or we are to busy to think we can learn to be this open hearted. I find that if you follow your heart, you cannot do wrong by our neighbors living on the edge of society. All of us can learn to love our neighbors; it is not impossible; it is not even unfeasible.

Thinking of the poor refugees on our southern border, I am reminded of Father Zossima. For those non-bibliophiles, he is a main character in my favorite novel by Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zossima prays for his forgotten souls with the following: “Remember too, every day and whenever you can, to repeat to yourself, ‘Lord, have mercy on all who appear before you today.'” 

My grandmother, as doty-ish as she was, always said, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” a good lesson to remember when dealing with those we think are below our station. God’s Love leads my heart always; it leads me to risk the attachments of Love for all my neighbors.

So – all those people who upset me with their haughty attitudes, well, I also recognize them as my neighbors, and I love them just as much.

 None of us are perfect; especially me; I try, but alas, I have yet to succeed.

Maybe my new unknown neighbors can help!!

June 6 1944 D-Day Thoughts

On this 74^th anniversary of D-Day my thoughts are very multifarious, I think of the bravery, the fear, the loss of that day . . . on both sides. Families grieving over the loss of a son, a husband, or a father. Being a former Marine, who was blessed by not facing combat, I do understand what all of these men had in common. All of the men had one job to do; they had the most intense focus imaginable.

I wonder if we in our safe communities can share that intense focus. Richard Rohr refers to this as living in the now. But what does this genuinely mean? Think of the possibilities we can perform if we focus on that one thing in the moment. As I am thinking on paper, I have a Haydn symphony playing in the background; I have the window slightly open, listening to the birds at our feeders; I look out the window and see the Afgan war veteran washing his car for the third time this week; and, I am thinking about the next few days when my focus will be on the Finance Commission and Vestry at St. George’s. All of these are distractions that can keep me from focusing on what I am doing now.

The beauty of nature, the myriad displays of colors in neighbors’ gardens, and the sound of a soft breeze blowing through the trees outside my window all calm me to help me focus on what I am now doing. But, I have to ignore all of these dream-filled distractions to keep on my path.

I complain to Linda that she spends to much time on serving others at The Table at St. George’s. At times, it seems as if her whole life revolves around serving those members of our community living on the forgotten edges of society. God has blessed them with a woman who is devoting her life to their needs. I am blessed to have a wife with such a mission. And, truthfully, there I times I feel that she spends more time doing this than she spends with me. After all, these are our retirement years; we should be doing what other retirees do.

But no, God has chosen us, has chosen Linda to spearhead this idea of The Table and make it the success that it is today. She has had tremendous help from other doing this, and I am grateful that God has included these other people in this project to make it what it is today.

In order to make this successful, it took an inordinate amount of focusing on the tasks at hand. Diversion was not a possibility; it was an impediment.

But this is the kind of focus we all must have to accomplish our goals in life. The men storming the French beaches 74 years ago dedicated their lives, sacrificed to allow future generations peace. The volunteers at The Table are sacrificing hours of relaxed pleasures to bring a better life to our brothers and sisters who have not shared in the prosperity of our country. I am sure that if roles were reversed, each would do the others’ jobs. God gives us gifts, gives us dedication of purpose, gives us the love of others to sacrifice our lives, or something in our lives, to serve our fellow man.

I praise God and I thank the men who sacrificed seven decades ago; I also praise God and thank the many volunteers across this country who dedicate their lives to help those less fortunate people who are parts of our extended families.

I have rambled from idea to idea today; but, as I read over what I have written, I will not change a thought; all these have contributed to my overwhelming gratitude for being where I am today, experiencing not only the beauty of the world outside my window, but also appreciating the whole world outside my window. Where I am today is because of the sacrifices of people who have helped put me where I am.  

May God walk with all of my families today.