[Oe List ...] ST Nov. 21 from Jaime

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

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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