I have been contemplating my navel a great deal lately, which is a futile attempt at hypocrisy since the last time a had a naval was 1985 after a nearly fatal auto accident and major surgery on my abdomen.
Anyway. I’ve been seriously contemplating life. Because at the ripe young age. Of 82. I sometimes wonder how I’m still here. But God does have something for me to do. Maybe it’s just writing this blog. Where I attempt to pull that past love and kindness together, Peace and charity through my words. to those who read my blog three or four times a week I publish. Today my musings settle on medieval doctors, you remember the ones with the masks and the large horns that stick out about a foot and 1/2 from their faces, practicing voodoo medicine. I’m seeing one today because I’ve had migraine headaches for about two 2 1/2 years. I feel pressure on my brain. You know, sleeping, lying down, sitting in chair, standing, walking, exercising, reading, writing. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 1/4 days a year. And all they do is say, here, take this pill. All from their horned masks. Voodoo. . .boo!
There is no Jesus walking around here and able to place his hands on my head to cure me. But. . . there is a God. . . and he does reach down every day. . . to comfort me and tell me that everything’s going to be fine. Because like you and all sons and daughters, I am one of His beloveds, and the path I walk on is sacred, as I do His bidding on Earth. In my daily meditations I receive a message to meet people with agape love, recognizing the face of God is in every person that I meet.
Friends, I am a great skeptic. I am of great faith. I believe in God, and I believe that She believes in me. I believe there was a man, a prophet, a healer named Jesus. When he gathered his disciples, he merely said, “Follow me!” He never said to believe in him, but always to believe in His Father. I understand this to mean that his miracles were performed by God, not by man.
Therefore, As I walk the streets of Virginia, I meet God with a smile and a blessing every time I say hello to someone new.
Russell Kendall Carter, BA. MAT. Dlitt.
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Violence rules our world. If we don’t like something, we burn it down; if we don’t like someone, we shoot him. See? Problem solved in one easy step. Suspicious boat heading to our shores, shoot it out of the waters; politician we don’t like, kill him; high school kid playing a prank on my lawn, shoot him dead. It’s OK, our guns rule the world; ask our President.
Isaiah 24
They shall beat their swords into plowshares
Our politicians agree, because they dare not make any laws against the gun money being passed around the halls of Congress. (Sshh! we’re not supposed to know or talk about that.) We just visit the families of all the children and kneel and pray with them when their children are killed in the mass shootings at their schools or their church schools. This shows we really truly care!
I truly believe that mankind is not a feebleminded as we appear. Sometime in the distant future we will come to our senses snap judgements, not hate make offerings more important than weapons, where lovingly kindness is our first response to hardships and not violence.
Harvey ‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt is the father of the two grown boys in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Gooper, the older son, is the play-by-the-rules son and kisses up to Bid Daddy because he wants to inherit the farm when Big Daddy dies. Brick, the younger son, drunk and drifting through life, couldn’t care less. He is the favorite son.
In a very good dramatic scene, Brick and Big Daddy confront each other in the basement of Brick’s house, where Brick stores all his childhood toys and football honors. Big Daddy cannot understand why Brick is throwing away his life with alcohol, and Brick cannot understand why Big Daddy will not have the operations or take the medicine to ease his pain. Big Daddy says, wincing with pain, “It’ll kill the senses too! You… you got pain – at least you know you’re alive.”
With the pain, you know you’re alive. He’s wrong, you know! Forty years ago, I was involved in a near death auto accident. Since then, I have lived a very successful and prudent life. I have no complaints except that I have experienced pain every day since that dreadful day, and I will tell you that when you got pain, you know that parts of your body are dead.
BUT, with a strong faith, I have been able to overcome all of this and realize that my eternal body is pure and belongs to God. God does not allow that body to feel pain, so I comfortable with that fact and blessed every day of my life.
So, Big Daddy, pain don’t tell me nothing about being alive, only God does.
If I read the Bible correctly, and accept the mythology as written, exactly, about, 2000 years ago, in the aught twenties, a vagabond man named Jesus wandered around the lands east of Jerusalem causing an awful lot of problems for the religious leaders of the times. He healed the sick and the lame, raised at least two from death, and forgave many from their sins. We call Him the Son of God; and He called God, Abba. And my question is: do we as sinners have the right to call God, Abba, as Jesus did? Jesus being the official Son of God, or Son of Man as He called himself.
I was raised in the mystic faith of Christian Science where we all we created as people who could heal as Jesus did, therefore, I deduced that we were all children of God, so I being a son of God could legitimately call God, Abba. When I moved to Virginia, my wife and I joined an Episcopal church, and I very quickly learned how much of a sinner I was to assume being an equal of Jesus. I was not allowed to take this liberty. I was not pure enough.
Being completely lost, I began a life-long study of Jesus and Christianity and have been turned around several times, led down blind allies, turned around, started over, questioned Jesus, questioned myself, never truly questioned God. My faith remained with me. There are two truths we can pull from history. Jesus preached and told many stories and parables promising that we are all children of God.
At the Council of Nicaea, to end all the bickering and arguing, Constantine finally called an end to it and demanded it be as it stood st that time; all agreed. And the structure of the church they created was similar to that of the military Constantine led. The exception being in names, instead of Lieutenants, Captains, and Majors led by the General, the church would be led by priests, bishops, cardinals, and the Pope. Just as strict a hierarchy.
I call God, Abba, because I believe I am a child of
God: because for the past dozen years, even though I have an undeniable strong Christian history, I have called myself a man of faith, faith in God, faith in Jesus. Faith in Abba!
From my old 1896 King James Bible, Matthew writes “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (5:5);” but in the Old Testament, the Pslamist writes, “but the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace (37:11).” Meekness is also one of the four dignities in the study of Buddhism. Being meek is not being weak; it is being kind and bringing love into all situations which we find ourselves involved. You may be surprised how many irate people become tongue-tied when my last words to them are “I love you.”
Thomas Merton made a simple choice to live a life of personal love and communication with God when he entered the Trappist Monastery. Some of my friends in one of my reading clubs condemn his reasoning believing that personal prayer and a closer relationship with God does nothing to change society. I disagree. I am merely small cog in life’s spinning wheel. I have no political or social power the effect instant much less lasting change, but I can recuse myself in my private room and pray, as Jesus invites in our New Testament. I do believe that prayer is effective; therefor, my prayers and my nearness to God are beneficial, even in our Facebook and Instagram society.
I have come to the conclusion that joyful living is always when we are moving toward the light of God’s Love and our love of life. All is love and everything I understand is Love because it comes from God through the goodness of people. I always imagine the threshold of God’s heart shining through us, teaching us to love our enemies, again and again, and again. What a wonderful world it would be!
I am blessed to have taught for approximately 25 years. I guided my high school students for 15 years through European history and basic economics in New Jersey and for approximately 10 years teaching history and literature to freshmen and sophomores, Actually, first and 2nd year students in a Virginia community college. My only regret is that I did not start to do this as a younger man. Whereas, then at age 50, after a lifetime of studying and then teaching history and then evolving into a literature professor using the great literature of the world to help explain human history there were a few things that I learned.
Mankind was given an absolutely marvelous brain by God; but refuses to use it. Man seems to indeed live by impulse rather than wisdom. For example, and please don’t get me wrong for they do some great deeds, and I’m not condemning them, but many of the great religions of the world are built on select groups, led by consciousness, and resolutely, mythology. And these groups are destroying the beautiful creation that God made in which he put mankind in charge. I say this, for many, many people are left behind to suffer, needlessly. And the cause of this suffering is withholding the necessities of life, food, clothing, housing, and proper medical aid.
Although I now teach not in a classroom, but through my writing I try to awaken the hearts and minds of a greater audience, or let’s say a greater classroom. When I first entered the world of teaching, I tried not to go into it with clouds over my eyes. Realizing that we do not teach people, you open their minds to other new and different ideas. I look at mankind and its institutes of religion although I have condemned them earlier, I am optimistic. We aren’t always perfect. But eventually we do catch on to the realities of the world. We can’t really blame ourselves because we are inculcated by the great moneyed institutes, but if we open up our hearts and minds to see that poor person lying on the side of the road, beaten down by society, to the one that only the Samaritan stopped to assist. I read in the Old Testament, and maybe you can call me an Old Testament Christian, but there are 10 basic commandments that God asks us to follow. There is also an ancient Hebrew custom that says do not turn away the stranger. When he comes to your house for help, invite him in. It may be God calling.
On a local level, I see many churches, many different faiths getting together, helping those in the community who are in trouble. Which in the long run can possibly save us as a species. But this has to grow upwards, it has to grow up to the ultimate stage, into the country. We cannot allow the homeless to suffer. Our country is too wealthy. We must convince the politicians, the churches, the wealthy, and then we’ll see. To realize that the building that you dwell in is not the important thing. Outward appearance seems to rule all facets of government and church. . . and family. The simple Hut will do the same thing; has the $20 million building or home made a better family, or government, or church? No, it is the works done inside that matter.
I think upon my relationship with God. And realize that I am one very small peanut. Or better yet, I am one grain of sand. On the eastern beaches of Virginia. Insignificant. As an individual grain of sand. But I also know that when the when all of us grains of sand get together we can do great things. I look at the beautiful sand-filled beaches, of New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, and the people who love. . . that’s Love! Turning their toes into the warm sand. The children who loved to build sandcastles. What a wonderful thing for all of us grains of sand to do. We protect the shores. From the violent oceans. So, it’s grains of sand joining together. We’re not only protected. Active. But we’re productive. As grains of sand, we also do something much more important.
Everywhere together we could feed and house the poor. As people living in the world. On Earth today. Economists say that there are between 6:00 and 7:00. Billion people. That’s a hell of a lot of grains of sand. Think of the good that we could do if we emulated the sand on the shores. I live for the day. We understand that one grain of sand is no different than another grain of sand. One person is no different than another person. One group of people is no different than another group of people. We share one common goal. And that is to survive. On this rock where we live, this rock called Earth, I pray that we all can in our individual faiths and beliefs recognize the divine mystery that man’s relation with God is for all of us. Not just the select few. Our intimate relationship with God calls all of us to love the outsider and care for those forgotten by society—the ones who are rejected and tossed away by our ignorance and selfishness. Can we truly live on an Earth that struggles to be alive? God willing, we can.
Meditating to Heal 
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