[Oe List ...] An apology to the "girls"

Mon Nov 18 19:56:18 PST 2013

Hi Jan, Jaime and other colleagues engaged in “remembering” on this the 50th
anniversary of 11/22/1963,

On that day in 1963 I was driving home from my last class before
Thanksgiving break at Harvard Graduate School and stopped for tea with a
former Smith college classmate who lived in Cambridge, MA.  Neither Elaine,
my friend, nor I experienced being diminished in any way – in the church, in
the university, nor in the workplace – by the “firmly in place patriarchy”
Jaime references.

If there was any “living model” who emerged from that sad time it was JFK’s
wife, the beautiful, composed, caring one, utterly  sensitive to the need to
place her own grief above that of ministering to the grief of a nation.

I’m currently leading a group at our church in an Advent study of Borg and
Crossan’s The First Christmas.  The authors remind us in Chapter 2 (lest we
have forgotten or overlooked it) that one of the 3 key themes in the Gospel
of Luke is “an emphasis on women,” a theme carried forth in both the Gospel
of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles (a second volume of his Gospel) written
about 80-90 CE.

I’m guessing we might begin there in exploring within the Judeo-Christian
tradition the origin of the “divine feminine,” worthy of being both “chosen”
and “spoken to by angels” (as was Joseph repeatedly in the Gospel of
Matthew), and that we might resist later “heresies” of
mucho-macho-patriarchy.

Just my two cents.

Grace and peace – and prayers that the gifts of all God’s creation may be
appreciated,

Marilyn

From: oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net
[mailto:oe-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of LAURELCG at aol.com
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2013 3:06 PM
To: Oe at wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] ST Nov. 21 from Jaime

Thank you, Jaime. I grew up in west Texas and had already migrated to
California by Nov. 23, 1963. Fred and I had recently moved into a new home,
built by a contractor who was a member of the John Birch Society. When the
news of the assassination first broke, everyone assumed the assassin was a
right-wing nut. I heard the contractor haranguing his workers next door as
they took their lunch break. "They should find the person who did this and
give him a medal!" His story changed when it turned out the assassin had
lived in the land of dreaded communism.

I was struck, Jaime, by your apology to us "girls" in the third paragraph. I
would love to start a conversation on this list about the Divine Feminine.
With a Catholic background, you probably encountered Her early on. When I
was asked in a class with Starhawk in 1989, and she asked, "When did you
first encounter God as a woman?", the only thing I could think of was an E.I
Academy class in 1970, when we studied a paper by St. Theresa of Avila. She
wrote to nuns in the language that sounded like the King James version of
the Bible. She wasn't speaking of the Divinity as female, but just the fact
that she used the pronouns "she" and "her" in religious-sounding language
sent me into uncontrollable tears. It was the first time that I felt I was
being addressed as a full human being, though it took many years for me to
work out why I cried so.

It seems to me She is coming back in power at this time. Does anyone else
see it?

Blessings on your good work, Jaime,

Jann McGuire

D.Min, University of Creation Spirituality, 2002

In a message dated 11/16/2013 3:35:43 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
wangzhimu2031 at aol.com writes:

JFK 1963

It was four years later after President John F. Kennedy went down by the
grassy knoll across the downtown book depository when I first whiffed a
lungful of Big D's arid air.  We had taken exception to the irrelevant type
of theological reflection we encountered in the backwoods of Kentucky in
'65, and since we were not inclined to join the denominational services of
religion, I quit perusing Thomas' tome! 

Before heading back out to the Orient, however, a friend in Chicago told me
to get in touch with a former Manila missionary who was then in-charge of
students' affairs at a Theology School in Dallas, Texas, reportedly more
open-minded than the warm-hearted but parochial one I had west of the
Appalachia.  

Having been lured into the Protestant chapel by the likes of John A. T.
Robinson's invitatory Honest to God, and the fresh winds of biblical
scholarship and practical spirituality offered by theologs (sorry girls,
church patriarchy of the 60s was firmly in place) like the NT scholar Rudolf
Bultmann, the evangelical Dietrich Bonheoffer, the urbane Paul Tillich and
the New England ethicists, the Niebuhr brothers, with collegial welcome from
Vatican II, Hans Kung and the venerable Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, I was
not inclined to master the litany of classical pat answers as I was eagerly
intent in sharpening realistic and authentic life questions. 

In the Dallas of '67, I was shocked to find out that JFK was still one of
Dallas' least-favored Presidents; there were some who actually held Lee
Harvey Oswald as some kind of a folk hero!  A block from my dorm was home to
the John Birch Society.  To their credit, the members did look like children
of the washed and well off, clean-shaven and neck-tied.  My anticolonial
third world political orientation was not one of their favored homebrew.
The school, in spite of its laissez fair scholastic tradition was still a
denominational school for pastors of local congregations, and some drove
wearing wide brim hats in pick-ups to the school yard displaying a rifle
rack behind the driver's seat.

We remember this because November 22 marks the 50th year of the
assassination of JFK in Dallas, an occasion that brought tears to our
innocent teenage eyes while we as a part-time working college student DJ'd
and read news at a local radio station in the Cagayan valley in '63.  

Huff Posts recently carried an article with a JFK hand-written speech that
was to be delivered in Austin, Texas on the evening of the fateful day.  The
speech's ending, addressed to the Democratic Party in Texas, went:

Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed.  And our duty as a
Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all
mankind ... So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not
quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake ...
determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers
of peace and abundance.

The voice of America's Camelot was stilled that day before it had the chance
to utter those words.  

The Ivy league look of our Methodist-related school by Central Expressway on
Highland Park belied its vaunted progressive credentials as children of
families dripping in crude drove their V-8 guzzlers on campus from spreads
dotted with derricks and cattle in the range.  The studentry showed more
frenzy in fraternity and sorority traditions than the scholastic virtues of
academé.  Like the manicured lawns in the surrounding homes, University
yards were kept trimmed, the buildings swept clean, and residences
maintained by southern blacks and Mejico Tejano servants who appeared
properly cowed still wearing imaginary white gloves to do their chores.

It did not take long before our youthful gait joined the parliament of the
street, holding vigil by the flagpole with a professor prayerfully
protesting the war in Vietnam; we also walked with placards in front of a
Washateria near the Hilton that displayed a sign: "For Whites Only."  As a
foreign student, a mendicant monastic in a sea of privilege and wealth, I
was tolerated but was socially kept at a distance.

The world that snuffed JFK's breathe was alive and well in Lyndon Johnson's
wide sprawl of '67 when I tally-hoed into Highland Park.  A decade later,
primetime TV chronicled the lives at Big D's Southfolks.  A few years into
the series, I gave up my "JR" nickname when the character J. R. Ewing played
by smirk-faced Larry Hagman became the poster boy for Texas drawl's smarts
and cunning!

JFK's hope for new frontiers of peace and abundance, in his view, from a
nation of immigrants to one poised to send a human to the moon, continued as
the nation's metaphor to justify military expansion, its arrogance rudely
awakened by the collapse of the twin towers of NYC one fateful day in
September.  The shot that felled JFK in Dallas turned into a booming crash
in New York with repercussions haunting corridors of powers that do not tire
in spit-polishing Uncle Sam's uniformed soul. 

Fifty years later, the nation struggles with its undocumented immigrants.  A
message we saw on a young boy's t-shirt would have made JFK smile: there are
no immigrants on planet earth! 

Jaime Vergara
w <mailto:pinoypanda2031 at aol.com> angzhimu2031 at aol.com

yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all,
celebrate!

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