Oh I don't know what to title this

Reflections on the church, the light, Adnan, Hafiz and my lunch

Hello beautiful friends! Thank for you joining me on the journey. If you’re new, welcome! I hope what you find here, as I share some of my journey, supports you in your own in some way. If you find this work of value, please share it!

Yesterday on my walk I came upon a retired engineer and his dog. I met this fellow and his wife during the pandemic when I climbed a snow banks to let them pass with sufficient social distancing to be considerate. I did this not because I ever thought any of the measures taken where likely to be effective - as I knew intuitively that 6 feet wouldn’t be enough and that masks would probably cause unintended harms and also not be very effective with small virus or virus like particles. I did this out of a genuine desire to love and honor my neighbors. They were very grateful and I made a joke to help me remember their names: “It’s very lovely to meet you, but don’t Cindy me a Bill.” Cindy and Bill have five adult children and numerous grandchildren. Once when they were expecting a grandchild to stay with them and a bit nervous about it, I taught Cindy EFT on the sidewalk and she said she already felt better. Bill is a musician and loves the forest, and I found recently, is a Christian. I have many religious flavors that run through my soul from other lives and this one, and Christian is one of them. It appears to be one that I am being invited to re-explore after having delved into my Jewish heritage earlier this year, followed by my Sufi heritage. I am sure I will circle round to all three, as life is a spiral. But back to Bill. Bill told me, under bright sunlight that had cleared after a gloomy and energetically difficult morning, that he had opportunities to play his music at church and that he also just joined the choir. I took the opportunity not only to celebrate that place of joy in his life, but to open a conversation about The Doctrine of Christian discovery. An educated man and a Christian man, he’d never heard of it - just as I had not a few weeks ago. We had a lively discussion about, ranging from the single skull that formed the basis for Nazi psuedo science to the realities of spiritual warfare, the need for grace, however we conceptualize that, and the fact I’m glad not to live in the time of Acquinas, for he surely would have had me killed for being a heretic. We talked about how he, along with Augustine had a foundation laying role in making it okay or even advisable to use violence and pain to win converts or to terminate the lives of those who cannot be won by lesser forms of influence, and to involve the state in such executions. Constantine paved the way for two words that would not have existed as collaborators in the soul of Jesus: Empire and Christianity. And with the Law of Christian discovery which began with Papal Bulls and was cemented into legal Precedent, which was affirmed as recently as 2005 by Supreme Court Justice RBG, Indigenous Peoples have been decimated on every level in State-Sanctioned, religiously justified ways up to and including the present day. The Church is 100% complicit.

Ever since my son’s birthday this past December, he, and husband and I have been reading a Hafiz poem each evening from a book of translations by Rassouli, who has studied Hafiz for over 30 years. Rassouli explains in the introduction how one day as a boy, listening to his Sufi uncle and his friends reading Hafiz, one of adults acknowledged, “I don’t understand Hafiz.”Rassouli also put in that he too did not understand Hafiz, and that his journey over his many years of study has been one of deepening the ways in which he doesn’t understand Hafiz, so that how he doesn’t understand Hafiz now are different from the ways in which he didn’t understand Hafiz as a boy.

Last night I had my own rather funny journey of not understanding Hafiz. how his journey of “not understanding Hafiz” Last night my son selected the poem, while I was the reader. The one he selected for us to read together from our collection was one which contained the lines “In the arms of the healer.”

Earlier in the evening we had been talking about some serious topics, including how churches and Christian organizations are typically invested in the same stock portfolios as secular institutions, and that often these investments are extractive – leading to a conflict of interest. We discussed how it’s pretty much the opposite of what Jesus taught when he said, “You can serve God or mammon but you can’t serve two masters,” and how being invested in extractive industries creates a conflict of interest for churches, as well as individuals. Recently my husband tried to use his work retirement fund to pay for my major dental work, which will exceed our budget. He is not even allowed to take his own money out until he is 59. And a half.

I seriously thought we stopped counting half years by the time we were five or six years old, or 11 or 12 at the oldest. But apparently, when it comes to extracting yourself from Blackrock/Vanguard, it takes until you are 59 and a half.

My very youthful looking husband turns 50 tomorrow. I may start a paid Substack after all, although I will always keep this section free for all.

My son asked what’s mammon. I said, “Basically money.”

My son commented with a sardonic humorous tone, “Has anyone heard of the word “hypocrisy?”

We then discussed how money isn’t bad – it can be a resource to help you flourish and do great good in the world – it’s the attachment to money that is problematic. If God told you to give away all you had, would you do it? If God said, become rich and use your resources to truly better the world, would you do it?”

In addition to reading about extractive industries and how they impact the Christian Church’s unwillingness to commit to undoing current atrocities and land theft regarding indigenous people, as detailed in The Land is Not Empty, and also explored in a more secular way on Substack by Peter D’errico, I am also side reading a pair of books that look at the interweb of various corrupt influences that date back, in their current iterations, to around WW2. In that book, the relationship of Adnan Khashoggi, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, BCCI and Epstein is examined. You can also learn more here. I thought Adnan was a journalist or something until I learned he was actually an arms dealer. I guess that must have been circulating in the recesses of my subconscious because when I read the Hafiz poem, “Into the arms of the healer,” I thought it read, “Into the arms of the dealer.”

Interestingly, something I’ve given thought to lately is how much energy we put into understanding the darker side of the things compared to how much energy we put into the light, the healing, the love, the joy, the peace, the creation.

I know some people for whom the balance truly would be to spend some time exploring just what is going on with the planet in terms of the darker side of things – not to become the vibration of the fight, but to be empowered with discernment as we make real life, day to day choices and use our voices and creativity in ways that support the world we want to birth, while removing our consciousness from being used to generate lesser realities that might seem appealing or tolerable without clear discernment, but are actually quite nefarious. Taking an honest look is important in order to avoid inadvertently having good intentions used for ill and being taken advantage of or being part of the problem. I have often tried to lovingly wake people up to these realities as I understand them, which of course, is a very incomplete way, just like my understanding of Hafiz. This year is likely to give humanity a pretty undeniable wake up whether they like it or not. Yet how it goes will have more to do with the way we handle it energetically and in our co-creation with life and highest trajectories than whether we know about the details of various agendas or not.

On the other hand, I know some people, myself included who need to rebalance in the other direction: to invite and focus on the light that not only reveals – but also the light that heals.

This was brought home to me in a humorous way when I misread the line of Hafiz that said, “into the arms of the healer,” as into the arms of the dealer. My first thought when I misread it was “Adnan Khashoggi,” whom I used confuse with his brother Jamal, who was killed in Saudi Arabia for speaking out critically against the political regime and was killed at the order of the crown Prince, from what I understand.

When I misread the line, I immediately told my family about my misread, as we have a lot of jokes about mishearings as part of our family culture. Hubby and son both laughed and I told them, “Maybe I really do need to focus more on the light than understanding the dynamics of the distortions in this world – so I can read Hafiz without thinking Adnan Khashoggi. That said, Hafiz himself uses his poems to call out Hypocrisy often, so don’t expect I won’t too!

My intention for myself personally this year is peace. My mantra is “The pristine light of God is now easy to access and stabilize within myself, for the benefit of all life and for all that imagines it is.”

My husband had the day off today, following several long days of work in Urgent Care. After we dropped our son off his piano lesson, we had lunch together at a cafe we haven’t been to for some years. It’s changed in some ways, remained the same in others. The service was remarkably fast and the two young women who helped us, both at the register and bringing the food to our table, were lovely. We shared a scramble, a smoothie and a matcha tea. When the woman who brought over our food asked if I was waiting for anything else, I said, “Love, joy and world peace.”

“Same,” she said with an expansive, brilliant smile.

But we don’t have to wait for it. We can co-create it, one loving moment at a time, whether confronting systemic injustices from a heart of love, or meditating in the sunshine, as I did when we returned home.