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@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@aol.com) angzhimu2031@aol.com yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate! _______________________________________________ OE mailing list OE@lists.wedgeblade.net http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net