Rewrote for obvious reasons: An Ecumene in Saipan I was ordained clergy with the United Methodist Church(“United” got added at the General Conference 1968 in Dallas, Texas where Iushered) for thirty years, though only five of that spent attending to a localChurch and parish, the last one being the English language worship service ofthe Immanuel KMC that related to a UMC conference in the Hawaii District andthe Annual Conference of Southern California. Most of my ordained life was spent with an ecumenical groupthat promoted and demonstrated human development in villages and communitiesaround the world regardless of their religious affiliation. We had Hindus in India’s Maharashtra by theDeccan plateau; we lived with the non-reserved locals called Metis, the mixed blood whose parentscohabited with European trappers in North America; and doffed the “salaam” withthe Muslims in Malaysia. My ordination was hardly noticeable other than themethodical way of my expenditure in the various assignments I took, but thatcame more as a choice rather than with the profession. After three years in Saipan as a Methodist cleric way out ofepiscopal supervision, the local congregation’s support was evidently untenable;the congregation was one of the small 60% of the denomination that depended onthe support of the 40% larger ones. Mypredecessor also institutionally separated from the graciousness of the Korean host,a product of arrogance, I decided to a strained self-support structure thatignored authentic faith and practice. Disregard the previous paragraph. It was not material, more like whining thananything else. For those who grew upunder the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Jewish affirmationthat the Way Life Is (YHWH) is the way life is, is deep, and regardless of how Saipan’sIUMC came, not unlike the countless stories in the Old Testament, life as it isgiven can be lived. The New Testament added the caveat, witnessed to by theexample of Jesus of Nazareth who we labeled with the title of the JewishMessiah and Greek Christ, that life is nothing but expenditure. Our lives are not for saving as it was forspending, spent to the last drop even when it leads to a Cross! So I led the United Methodists in thatdirection. The above messages from the Old and the New Testaments whentaken at what they say rather than as object of adulation and idolatry, grabthe angst of any existential creatureof the 20th century. In the “Lord and Master” metaphor of the MedievalAges conveniently adulated one for accomplishments, or blame another forfailures but in the process, we lose Moses to Hollywood’s Cecil de Mille andCharlton Heston, and Jesus to the cute angels of the heavenly realm in thechapel. NASA’s probes of outer space accidentally provided us withan authentic icon for our time, the earthrise, and instead of quibbling whethermy description of deity in the sky was more sovereign or accurate than anyoneelse’s, we looked at the Earth and the creatures in it, and guess who we end uplooking at? You and I, humanity, and theplanet Earth. The Greeks called the inhabited world, Ecumene, appropriated by the Christian Church as the area of one’sdiscipleship and expenditure. Mycolleagues of the Interior Mythos Journeys group focus on the experience withand against the Ultimate Reality, no longer upward looking but directed to theedges of the extremes of human experiences. Still, Ultimate Reality could not shake shadesof the God-talk, and the illusion the later held remained the same. My responsibility is to accept the given-ness of myexistence, and heeding statistical probability, I decided that 86 years ofexistence was my due. My genetics favorslongevity but the lungs got terribly nicotine-clouded a while back so I choppeda decade off my life expectancy, and buckled down to being solely responsiblefor the time I chose, alive till 2031. Shortness or longevity of probability is c’est la vie, and having appropriated j’aime la vie as my nom-de-plume,I am on to rock-and-roll with the pen. The temporality of the finite is all I’ve got. It is my assigned responsibility, the arenaof my ecumenicity. I would not mind thecompany of the Mythos group when it looks this way. It was fun writing for the dailies, the Saipan Tribune, and the MarianasVariety. I quit writing for both inAugust thinking that being a teacher at one of the private schools was going tobe time consuming. I thought only of teachingstudents, be a productive part of a school, and contribute to the evolution ofpedagogy. Ligaments and cartilages in the joints started to freezefingers; the leg calves cramped badly and the spondylosis of the cervicalvertebrae bothered again. I quit elementaryschool end of September. I still guide NMC students to learn their English, starttheir classes with repeating: “This is the day we have. We can live this day, or throw it away. This is the day we have.” Living on earth is a choice. I’m back to being a Saipanecumene. Reflections Johnand Lynda Cock, US volunteers, brought their family to Indonesia and othercountries to help catalyze human development among willing local villages andcommunities. We first hailed each other as we often crossed paths inChicago in the 70s. Since2004, they have sent out a daily blog called Journey Reflection—afew minutes reflection with an image, a noted person’s quote, and dialoguebetween “Journer” and guru “Nez”—adding up to 3.8 million reads in some200 countries and territories since 2004. Once ina while, when I send feedback, or an article about to be published in one ofour Saipan dailies, they quote a part of our musing. So a symbiosis hasdeveloped. Their reflections I support, especially their earthrise. Important to me is the word “earthrise” itselfthat I chose as the title of my column five days a week in the MarianasVariety. My image of “reflections” is curved arrows pointing back towhere they originated. Pictorially, amirror image is a powerful picture of a reflected figure, though of course, thequality of the mirror affects the quality of the image. Image is a key. It isa holding category of our experience, internal response, objective discourse,and decided deed. Reflection happens oneach and on all before the deed. The sudden change of image in the last US Presidentialelection is a good example. AOL andGoogle, aided by Safari, get Internet allowed by WiFi from IT&E. Since I write for the Marianas Variety, the paper provides me local and regional news,but the national and international events are carried by whatever AOL andGoogle offers since the AP services that feeds into my paper tends to get staleby the time it finds ink. Anyway, the image projected was a stable Hillary about tobreak into the misogynist character of the American people. Now, I had not encountered the word“misogynist” since College but during this election, my friends pointed it outas one reason Hillary might not make it. TG, the competition was acting like a buffoon, they averred. That’s the other image – The Donald unable tocontrol his twitting and his tongue, alienating the women and the people ofcolor. But he sure had the angry andfrustrated “low income white American male” eating off his hands. The media, it appears, wanted to keep the reporting“balanced” without appearing to favor one side against the other. After all, media collectively does not havean independent mind other than what it discerns to be the will of themasses. Or, so we thought. The Hillary-Trump election fest suggestedsomething different, indigenously American media, lively and rambunctious. Media had its own agenda. All throughout the campaign, Hillary was projected as a virtue-less“criminal” capable of deeds to forward a singular political interest. Trump on the other hand might have been anAlbino buffoon but he reflected the mind of a “silent majority” whoseinterests, it is said, has been stepped and stumped on since the War in Vietnamand Civil Rights movement. The votingreflected such division. Seven revolutions simultaneously occurred since the 60s bymy count: women, youth, Third World, international business, education,minorities, and local communities. IfMLK got the Civil Rights focused early on, some of us wanted to educate theThird World not to grovel under the First World’s table for scraps anddroppings, the youth took placards and stones to further their causeparticularly in the Universities, local village and community participation indecision making in Town Meetings and Community Forum, “women’s rights as humanrights” was Hillary’s forte, and Trump represented a Wall Street version ofinternational business. In the midst of all these came the assault of our image ofhome. Heretofore, heaven provided theescape from the vicissitudes of common existence, and the enlightened religiousgroups tried to reform their structures to embody the change that needed tohappen, but the earthrise consciousness pulled us out of looking skyward ondivine benevolence, and looked earthward for the creativity and innovation ofhumans. Sheer expenditure out of unadulterated freedom came strong. It does not make humans any more special thanthey already are, “winner and free” from conception. Obviously, reflections do not come on measured stepsone-to-four. It often happens in a flashwithout the neat categories of how images are formed, or the nature of theseven revolutions. In one of the Cock’s JourneyReflections, they located a photo of the Earth papered by the symbols ofnations on one side, and a NASA picture taken from one of the Apollo missions,both held up by human hands with the national identities as what people “think”the Earth is, and the NASA photo as what the Earth “really” is. They said to me in one graphic what I mightwrite a whole book for, were I to portray the same message. In our time, to be human is to reflect on being theearthrise! I chose to be earthbound. That’s all. Interior MYTHOSJourneys (IMJ) Michael May and his crew have created a website (www.interiormythos.com) and the IMJthat promotes images of images, from the serious mythos flying around everyculture, most in the tradition of Zeus of Olympus, transcendent more thanimmanent. Something happened in 1968 when one of the Apollo missionsshot a photo of an image of the Earth rising over the lunarscape, and anearthrise consciousness was born. Well, it had always been there in humanimagination but this time, a physical turn occurred where the looking was nolonger directed skyward, where the metaphor of Zeus, Deux, Dios prevailed, butearthward, replaced by the flesh-and-blood reality of the humans, Gaia reborninto the 20th century. While the image of the earthrise, according to guru JosephCampbell, provided the new mythological icon of our time, the appreciation ofprevious mythos has been on-going and had not actually left the metaphor of theEnglish language though it used the imagery of bygone days when Lords prancedover their ladies, and Masters ruled over their slaves. YHWH that is the Torah’s word for living life “the Way LifeIs”, had a long history of correspondence with the Ra of Egypt that establishedpatterns with the flooding of the Nile, which then birthed the worship ofOsiris, Isis, and Horus, and justified the claim of Pharaoh that he was firstand there is no equal. YHWH remained the“IS-ness of reality” in the same way Allah is the “no-thing that cannot beidolized” but nevertheless, was the inevitable reality that humans have to livewith, enshrined in well decorated mosques. Salaam kept in common. I joined the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago in 1972 that Imet earlier on a snowy February 1967 on the Westside in a geography the groupdelineated as Fifth City, a play on the four sociological make-up of the Metropolisas consisting of the Inner City, the Center, the Suburban, and theExurban. The fifth city cut across allfour, appropriating their gifts and limiting their contradictions. Michael May cut his teeth working with thegroup and when it dissipated, started his Indiana-based IMJ operations withother colleagues that has since decided to take the digitized technology of thewebsite as its presentation medium. Thegraphics are lively. It also quotes Joseph Campbell’s conviction that OneMystery cannot be expressed in words of thoughts and is beyond human conceptsof time and space, but nevertheless, its contemplation connects us individuallyand collectively. The encounter is ofutmost value because one encounters the Mystery of the Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality rather than the nature of temporality andfinitude is its focus, and though the website exploration fits our method ofearth-looking rather than sky-gazing, exploits the human creation of MYTHOS, itis nevertheless, too close to the transcendent God-talk of a previous era togive comfort to the earthrise that affirms and grounds the wisdom that “thereis no one else coming.” Myth is the discourse, used to reflect the interior journeysthat keeps the discourse on concrete subjects of human and culturalreflections, and in that, we are colleagues on a similar journey. It is the focus that differs. Methodologically, we go in the sequence ofobjective sense, impressionistic feelings, reflective thoughts, and decisionaldeeds. I ran the classic four terms, God-Christ-Spirit-Church in anOctober series in this paper. However,the articles were more of a “farewell” to a previous orientation than a“welcome” to a new one. Not unlike theIMJ group, articulating the new reality does not come easy as our metaphors areindelibly linked to that of a previous era when “deity and divine” were stillup in the sky, and the profound reality of humanness was scorned, muddied inthe earth’s surface. Still, the IMJ group’s depth study modules follow the fourcategories of our familiar. It takesreligious of the up-against-ness called G-O-D, the permission giving reality inthe midst of life, the Christ, the lifestyle of freedom called the Holy Spirit,and the gathered people who embody a sociological understanding, the Church. What is Reality? Whatis the Inner Journey? How do I live inFlow? How do I serve? The IMJ do notsimply build on the wisdom of Judeo-Christianity, it also takes on themeditative and contemplative ways of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and Islam. The curriculum of IMJ articulates and explores contemporarymythic language in the life-lived-in-depth context of the 21stcentury, the global, quantum scientific and universal reality in which welive. It delivers the possibility of “authenticlife” for those who chose to spin the myth congruent to reality. We might part ways at this fork. I no longer dabble in the Ultimate Reality ofthe universe, though the depth intensity of experience may push us further thanwhat we are used to. I grew up with thespeculative. I now retail simply in therealm of the temporal and finite. wangzhimu2031 earthrise consciousness, a gift; earthbound commitment, my choice yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate! in all, celebrate!