Babies Born of The Sacred Spirit

I am so weary of those who cannot acknowledge the sacrifice
Of the many abused women that so often are called mother and wife.
Each time a woman bears and loves a child forced upon her,
Without abusing the child, she is, of eternal salvation, sure.

Damn what's called "Christianity" with praying and laying on of hands;
Getting our human hands dirty is what healing of our earth demands.
Your "God" doesn't change diapers or take away the physical pain
That, when mother-in-law, husband or child dies, will forever remain.

Only the arms of others who understand and are willing to absorb grief
Have any hope of, the void left by physical death, to decrease.
Those who claim The Sacred Spirit don't often get their own hands dirty;
They are much too busy assuring you that "Christians" are above pity.

We are born with tactile bodies as humans in The Sacred Spirit's chosen race.
"God" will provide, they say; not salving the voids of smell, sight, and taste;
How starved are we for human touch that we have no physical compassion?
Somewhere in religions' history, the sacred physical fell out of fashion.

The sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch of my children and my mate
Have been the experiences that keep me able to, The Sacred, relate.
I hear the Sacred Spirit commanding me to fearlessly reach out my arms
And assure others, in The Sacred Spirit's care, they won't come to harm.

I turn to others who say they are disciples of the Spirit of The Sacred;
My emptiness and grief has them run and hide, as if we all were naked.
If sterile prayer is all "Christianity" has to offer to those who are dying,
I see no new life that it is offering me, so I have stopped trying.

My children, who offered me hands and hearts of service with joy
Became unable to support me, as my mom's "Christianity" I employed.
Their are too many who feel that physical decay is untouchable;
Not realizing that what we call human waste is, with new life, over-full.

I am tired of practicing and preaching the joy in every new ideation
Of The Sacred Spirit in each of life's heaven-on-earth manifestations.
My children have long-since tired of their mother being different;
I must wish them peace as they leave. For this, I feel that I was sent.

My body will still long for them and their children in their physicality;
I've always wished I was manifested in a different body than me.
Thus far, my beloved mate, the other half of my earth-bound soul
Hasn't run from the impossible demands pushing me to an unseen goal.

My prayer is that my beloved mate has loving arms that will hold him,
When The Sacred Spirit calls me to be other than my mate's best friend.
I didn't sign up to be a martyr; that was my "perfect" older sister.
If you've chosen me, my mother and sister will be forever bitter.

It's fine with me if you changed your mind; I don't mind dying,
But the lack of companions in this quest is getting a bit trying.
Every time I think I'm sent a companion, he/she becomes unavailable;
This seems to be the "Christian" society in which your earth is full.

Your priests, and the parents you gave me, sent me to the wild.
Why don't you simply leave me alone, as your feral child?
My religious friends say that I'm a child of yours, their god;
Clearly, they haven't walked the path that you gave me to trod.

Your priests, prophets, and vast array of famous penitents
Did not reveal the challenges of the world to which I was sent.
Those who we accept as leaders seem to be the Anti-Christ;
I am asking, in all childlike humility, for your Divine advice.

The Church of Rome is accepted as the seat of "Christianity;"
Reading their bloody history, I believe that this can't be.
But there are so many true Christians sold their bill of goods;
Is there a reason you handed over to them, your whole brood?

I know I am not a prophet, deserving of Divine answers.
Many seem to believe they have run out of earthly chances.
I believe you are, as usual, leaving much to our free will.
Some have an active Sacred Spirit; in others you are still.

I will not force the answer of eternal life for the dead.
I will remember them fondly, if necessary, in your stead.
I hope that, in this way, any shred of your Divine Light
Will be preserved as part of The Eternal Sacred Might.

Perhaps this philosophy will break the cycle of procreation,
Where tribes compete for supremacy in your Sacred nation.
Adam and Eve, and their children set such bad example;
I think their many misguided paths to peace have been ample.

Clearly their ancestral way is not working to lead to peace.
We ignore the Jewish leader Jesus; why hasn't war ceased?
For the sins of their fathers, are they still to be rejected?
Or are we to understand that the innocent are to be protected?

I have finished rearing my children; I'm ready for martyrdom,
If my death will help secure safety for their children to come.
I care not at all for the mission of the rights of women
If these women care not about the children of their wombs.

Too many parents seek their own comfort behind their offspring;
No wonder we're passing down fears that past parents bring.
Allow all to face their own consciences, from which we're free,
If they engage in carnal pleasures without any responsibility.

We should hold each responsible, egg donor and that of sperm,
To provide a trust fund to insure that each child will learn.
Rules of responsibility securing the future of children in creation
May achieve the goal of a compassionate community's salvation.

Barring this ability, conception control implants
Are the only way responsible society has a chance
Of allowing those with no Sacred Spirit to choose
Extinction of their kind. What do we have to lose?

The arrogance of preaching a gospel of transferred guilt
Is the Sacred Spirit's trash dump of humanity's filth.
I struggle every day to nudge my soul to follow holiness;
An innocent child's destruction, my Spirit won't erase.

My hope is if I have, in my life, the excess resources
To provide for my "Christian" society's other re-courses,
I want to save an unwanted child, to this I will commit
Resources (but, what of time?) as if my own blood, I'd see fit.

Jesus spoke clearly about those don't do, only publicly pray.
Many have their own children they don't protect from being prey.
We continue to march for that in which you say you "believe"
Not adopting innocent the children that the Spiritless conceive.

Babies need loving arms, safe shelter, clothing and food
Not prayers that their soulless parents will somehow turn to good.
Though I mourn for every unwanted child as yet unborn,
I believe giving them back to The Sacred Spirit is the lesser harm.

Waiting on The Word

The most maddening thing about having children is never knowing when it's time to let them finally fly on their own or fail. When do we stop feeling responsible for not warning them of every danger that we wish we could protect them and their children from experiencing? When do we accept that our children have the right to ignore us and make their own decisions, no matter what harm we foretell, based on our experiences and those of the wise people to whom we have exposed our children? When do we stop feeling their pain all the way into our wombs?

I grew up in an age where children were to be good mirrors of their parents skills and virtues, even if the parents had no idea what they were actually projecting onto their children. Parents turned all their fears into anger, and attempted to control their children with fear of parental reprisal, even into eternity. It was perfectly acceptable in many families to, literally, torture the disobedient child. We had no trouble believing that "God" was a vengeful father who felt no pain if we were burning in hell forever. After all, we deserved it.

Throughout the Judeo-Christian bible, it seems that we never learn that fear doesn't create faith. We continue to go a few steps toward responsible compassion, only to go thousands of years back. We continue to get people of peace to show us the way, and continue to shove them aside when they don't get there fast enough or the road gets too rocky. Why is this?

Maybe the stories of the bible are like that. Maybe we keep getting new words to warn us back onto the path to peaceful co-existence, but we keep getting scared and going back to the mistakes of the beginning. One definition of insanity is when we keep repeating behaviors that don't work, expecting different results. We continued to kill the prophets until there were no more to kill. Is all of humanity insane?

We are now going to have to take responsibility for our own collective future. An earth, like a house, divided against itself will always fail. This earth is all of humanity's home. We will all sink or swim into eternal harmony together. We have the Sacred Spirit in each of us that, collectively, will light the way, if we stop attempting to avoid proximity to each other and competing for most-favored status. Do we really believe that a Sacred Spirit would play favorites like human parents often do?

Maybe we no more need prophets. Maybe we're ready to all be priests, spreading the sacred with our own inner light radiating and igniting others. Maybe we all need to put on our big boy and big girl faith and go forward with confidence in our mission. People of responsible compassion will find you. You don't need to follow any earthly leader other than The Sacred Spirit in your own head. This Spirit never asks anyone to be put to death, except those who have put out The Sacred Spirit's light in a vulnerable soul. This is one way that you know if the voice in your head is The Sacred Spirit.

Abraham was a man of the old way, believing that God, like the gods, wanted blood sacrifice. But he was told by The Sacred Spirit that it was time for a new covenant with The Sacred Spirit. What would have happened to all the world if Abraham hadn't waited for clarification of the voice in his head?

When Jesus was born, there were still many who insisted that God wanted blood sacrifice, even after all of Jewish Jesus' witness to a new way of worship through responsible compassion for our fellow humans. With great sorrow, Jesus went alone to the garden to listen to The Scared Spirit and decided to allow himself to forward with becoming the sacrificial lamb that some of his people demanded.

He was very clear in sharing his vision of The Sacred Spirit, along with instructions for how to spread The Spirit, one relationship at a time, as he shared The Spirit with his friends and followers. He had even given instructions for how to love each other, including how to work out our differences. None of this included killing people, although it did include walking away at times. But Moses had already given us ample example of that.

"When will we ever learn? Oh, when will we ever learn? (With apologies to Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger's Blowin' in the Wind)

Gayle and the Great "Magic"

"The real presence of Jesus in our lives -- and His power to re-shape us -- is the point of the Gospel. It is not an historical document; it is the Word of God to us: Take and eat, and be transformed." - Gayle Nolan OneBirdWatching.blogspot.com

Gayle is quite an accomplished bible scholar and amazing teacher. In fact, my daughter has given Gayle credit for teaching her a new way to pray. I was brought up in a very letter-of-the-law religion. My mother and I taught rote prayers, as was the way of our religion. Believing that we could hear God was simply arrogant. We were certainly never to approach God in any manner other than abject fear, preferably through an intermediary.

Gayle was the "religion" teacher at a small private school at which her husband was head master. I credit my long-term friendship with Gayle for planting the seeds of the enormous faith my daughter has and seems to be passing on to her two daughters. My daughter says that Ms. Gayle taught them that the way to pray was to go and sit silently under a tree and "listen." What a concept, but Gayle was always a renegade, like that.

What a blessing it is in my life that I have been able to expose my children to so many who radiate their Sacred Spirits from the very marrow of their bones outward into the universe. Gayle absorbs the gospels and many other sacred scriptures into her body like most of us absorb nutrients from our physical food. She then spreads the product of her "digestion" process in her words and her deeds. I have always been convinced that Gayle thought her children and husband should be able to live on their faith alone. The words, I could live on, but families insist on being fed physical food.

Many is the day that Gayle's hungry husband would come home after working and attending evening classes to find the two of us sitting at her kitchen table. In the words of the song "The house was dark and the pots were cold." Bless him, he never banned me from their home. I could have at least cooked while we talked, but I was much too mesmerized by Gayle's views of faith and her God. Thankfully, manna would regularly fall from heaven, in the form of a pot of vegetable soup from Gayle's mama's kitchen.

Her mother, unlike Gayle was a no-nonsense kind of teacher and woman of great faith. Imagine what her reaction must have been when she would walk into Gayle's house to find her three grandchildren dressed in super hero and fairy princess garb, dancing on the coffee table and the window sills. Gayle called these her children's "magic years."

I have never heard Gayle or her very faith-filled husband proselytize; they simply allow others into their aura, and it spreads their faith. In the words of another song, their version of God "walks with me, and talks with me, and tells me I am his own." I like this kind of Christianity, no matter what a person's "religion." With people who can hear The Sacred Spirit calling, all the years seem to be "magic."

The Sacred Spirit

I am convinced that many are Christians without having heard the name "Jesus." The Christ is The Anointed One, and each of us can share in being limbs on the "Body of The Christ."

It seems that, throughout the history of humanity, humans have sought an anointed one to lead them to harmony on earth. Jesus himself said that The Holy Spirit is the spirit anointed to stay with all of humanity for all eternity, lighting the way to heavenly harmony on this earth.

To say that Jesus is the only manifestation of The Holy Spirit that was ever in human form simply doesn't make sense to me. It seems to me that since humans began scratching manifestations of The Holy Spirit into cave walls, the lesson has been clear. All nature is imbued with a certain special life-giving "Something" that has the potential to burn brightest in humans.

Jesus seems to have been anointed with an incredible amount of the Holiness which he couldn't help share with others through the celebration of his life with everyone whom he encountered. He came from a remarkable line of people who had been focused on finding and following the path to harmony on earth for centuries preceding his birth. As the seeking of The Anointed One (The Christ) was passed down from generation to generation, it became stronger and stronger in the children of the faithful. The seed and the womb that produced Jesus were especially anointed, indeed.

Jesus' Anointed Spirit drew others to him, like flies to honey. People simply want(ed) to walk in his footsteps because he brought joyful peace with his mere presence and preaching. Jesus said that, in The Fullness of The Sacred Spirit, there is no Jew or Gentile, no male nor female. He also said that he was the vine that was connected to and fed by The Sacred Spirit  that fed The Sacred Spirit to all on earth when they ate of the fruit that is nourished by the branches of The Anointed on earth. He said that those branches are the people who follow in the earthly footsteps of way to The Sacred Spirit. As was taught by Jesus' Jewish ancestors, humanity is made to be anointed with The Sacred Spirit in a special way.

We seem to instinctively honor those who walk among the vulnerable, spreading The Sacred Spirit through their presence, laying hands on lepers and  little ones alike in The Sacred Spirit's healing ministries. The problem seems to be in a form of infantile sibling rivalry, that the path simply isn't big enough for all of us. We continue to attempt to kill the roots of vines that have sprouted up in gardens other than our own, rather than attempting to graft new hybrid life onto vines that will eventually stop bearing fruit without new branches to absorb and process The Light.

When will we give up the notion that the way to new life is through destruction of old life. We seem to simply be spreading the seeds of The Unholy onto our selves and our children. All Sacred scriptures, since the beginning of humanity, seem to proclaim the old Sacred seeds will fall to the Sacred ground and transform into new Sacred energy. That which is not Sacred will self-select and destroy itself, but we must be unafraid as we hold the hands of our own children and walk in the strength of our own faith.

Religions that conquer by war will die away, if we recognize that conversion by fear is not true conversion. True faith without fear seems to come from the understanding that all Sacred Energy is eternal. When we embrace peace patiently, the Sacred Spirit that is our own anointing will, in one manifestation of life or another, experience complete harmony. All life that we touch on earth carries our Sacred seeds into another manifestation and generation.

The way of The Sacred Spirit seems to have always been that we may have to move to different, more fertile ground, to keep our family faith alive and to keep from being overrun by the weeds of The Unholy. Perhaps the problem is that we are planting too many times in soil that can no longer nourish life. All ground becomes Sacred ground if it is filled with The True Spirit of harmony on earth, as it is in heaven.

They will know we are The Anointed (Christians) by our responsible compassion for all life on this earth, and by our patience in the face of others' fears.

Queenie in the Kitchen

Gayle talked in her blog, OneBirdWatching.blogspot.com today about the biblical account of Mary and Martha. She wrote how both behaviors exist in the same body, both being important to a life of prayer and service. I really resonated to that entry after the day I had on Saturday.

I was granted the gift by my friend, Queenie, of accompanying her to the kitchen of an off-the-boat Italian woman's son's home. Saturday, we were going to learn to bake Italian cookies. Richard has already perfected the baking of Eda's best biscotti ever, so I was thrilled with the opportunity to add to our repertoire of original Italian delicacies.

Real Italians are powerfully passionate people, even about the almonds and figs for their family's favorite foods. Many people don't know this, but the Italian influence in the New Orleans area is so strong that after being here for a year you become part Italian Catholic. It's in the food, the wine, and the air. Francesca should be famous as the queen if the New Orleans Italian kitchen.

I don't know what I expected, but we arrived at Francesca's son's home and were greeted by her gentle and gentile daughter-in-law. Upon walking through the great room, we came upon a beautifully appointed open kitchen looking over a huge majestic dining room. This was the kind of table where homemade Italian food would be properly honored. We were ready to roll up our sleeves, scrub up, and begin. But wait!

Through the door at the edge of the dining room was a second kitchen. Be still my heart, a prep kitchen as well as a show kitchen in a private home. Only in the mansion where my Italian friend, Noel, works had I been exposed to such a foodie's fantasy.

The first excited utterings, in a very heavy Italian accent, had to do with not having the right size bowl and the absence of the necessary twenty eggs. Julia Child was never any more entertaining than was Francesca. There were ways to do things that were sacred, and we were in danger of committing cooking heresy. Her daughter-in-law pulled out several bowls as substitutions, "No! No! No!" in the way an only Italian grandmother can express her dismay.

This prep kitchen is bedecked with gorgeous granite counter-tops. When a suitable bowl couldn't be produced, Francesca sent her daughter-in-law out for eggs, and plop! Ten pounds of flour hit the shiny surface in one big white mound. Queenie suggested that we should be writing down the recipe. What recipe? As with all really good cooks, measurements are a matter of feel, not a matter of science. Could Michelangelo have written a recipe for painting the Sistine Chapel? The only difference is that we worship the paintings forever; we eat in mere minutes the lovingly made artworks of the great chefs.

I was amazed at the similarities in teaching cooking methods between this tiny immigrant Italian and myself. When I was a professional cooking teacher, I didn't arrive in the classroom with written directions. I appointed a student in the front row to follow along, writing down all my "guestimates" of how much of each ingredient. I volunteered to be that front-row student for Francesca. I have problems standing for long periods, so this suited me just fine.

Queenie is just learning the intricacies of the kitchen, now that she's in semi-retirement. She was greatly enthused by adding the great globs of other ingredients onto the massive mound of flour. My three-year-old sister making mud pies with me had no more glee than did Queenie. It mattered not to Francesca when the half gallon river of eggs started cascading dangerously off the mound toward Queenie's feet. Not to worry, what Queenie lacks in height, she makes up for with fast reflexes.

I was enjoying being Mary, sitting at the feet of the master (mistress?), for a change, converting her Italian- tinged directives to my own shorthand for later transcription. But with Francesca, every warm body had to get into the act. You want to eat, you cook...unless you're her sacred son, who she says with pride "doesn't know how. He asks too many questions. How much you put? I no know how much."

After incorporating all other ingredients into the dough, it was time to have lunch while the dough rested. But there was to be little rest for Francesca and Queenie. Francesca had planned a feast for us. Out of her daughter-in-law's refrigerator, she produced veal cutlets that, she explained, had been breaded by her with her own bread crumb recipe. Out of the pantry, came a quart of her should-be-famous marinara sauce, that Queenie had helped her can many months before. Out of one of her five-gallon buckets, that she had brought in when she arrived, came a plastic bag of her hand grated "stinky cheese."

While Francesca set to work frying the veal and fussing about the inadequacy of the pan, I stood by asking about ingredients and procedures.  She sincerely bemoaned her inability to teach because she couldn't say "how much." By this time, I think she was toying with being comfortable that I could translate her directions to something resembling a recipe. Maybe it was the way I handled her measuring of milk by the handful into the dough that calmed her. i sincerely answered that she was the best kind of teacher, the kind that helps you learn by assisting the artist.

She and I had seemed to bond over the understanding that flour doesn't always contain the same amount of moisture, and almonds have varying amounts of oil. I think she was willing to trust me for the moment, but the proof of my trustworthiness will probably come when her daughter attempts to use my written recipes. Queenie was set to work making salad while Francesca boiled the pasta.

Meanwhile, Francesca's son had breezed through the kitchen, kissing us all on the tops of our heads and doing a bit of fatherly flirting with his two daughters. He didn't stay for lunch, but his sister entered with her two children, a nine-year-old girl and an eighteen-month-old boy who clearly adores his Nona. But he broke Nona's heart when he took one look at lunch and started saying No! with his hands and his beautiful little-boy soprano voice. I had a son with that gleam in his eye. I don't think it was meant to be an affront to Nona's culinary talents, but that he didn't want to take time out of chasing the dog to be strapped in a chair to eat.

Francesca seemed to feel that a meal without a man at the table just wasn't worth spending time on. She insisted that her daughter get the son-in-law on the phone and "make" him come to lunch. The party was on! "Ma, don't start with me! He's got other things to do!" "What he got to do? He gotta eat."

Queenie held the salad bowl up to Francesca in the position in which the alter boys hold the vessel of hosts at communion. Francesca anointed the romaine with a few ingredients and finished off with vinegar, "Just a splash." After tossing the salad, Queenie got us to the table, with the only "man" being in a high chair, by announcing, "Manga!"

We were thoroughly enjoying the lively lunch conversation about fifty years of marriage, Italian-style, when Francesca proclaimed, "Talk is good, but we got work to do. Back to the kitchen!"

Everybody really got into the act at this point. There was to be no more division of Marys and Marthas. The fourteen-year-old genius granddaughter ran for cover. Two other nine-year-old granddaughters came in and fought to be Nona's favorite cookie makers. The daughter-in-law prepared baking pans, rotated them in the oven, removed cookies, and dusted them with powdered sugar. Queenie and Francesca worked as a small (in stature and numbers) assembly line, rolling dough and placing almond and fig fillings in the centers before covering with more dough and placing on the baking sheets. The daughter-in-law placed the pans in the oven.

Every time her daughter-in-law opened her commercial convection oven, Francesca would announce, " I love this oven, but she won't let me steal it!" Her daughter-in-law replied, without missing a beat, " I told her she could have it if she can lift it out and carry it out by herself." Francesca finally admitted that she could buy one, but she didn't want to spend a thousand dollars on one when she's ready to "retire" from cooking. I got the feeling that this same conversation transpires every time Francesca cooks in her son's home.

Francesca's daughter entered with her toddler and announced to her mother that she was leaving the active little boy with her mother, so she could go shopping. Her mother replied, quick as lightening, "I have work to do! You don't do nothing!" Queenie jumped in with, "We'll watch him. You go." Francesca's look at Queenie was pure incredulity. At this point, the daughter burst into laughter, while her mother continued fussing. "Ma! I was just kidding! I don't leave him with you went you're not making cookies; I'm not going to leave him with you now!"

Francesca was already off to the races with fussing about how her daughter wasn't getting any cookies because she didn't help make them. This led to a rollicking discussion of the favoritism shown to the son, which took us full circle back to "He don't know how!" Another conversation that has probably been circling for almost fifty years.

Francesca must have then noticed that I no doing nothing, so she set me to work rolling dough. I've never had manual dexterity, so several times she fussed about my uneven dough. I offered to let her beat me with her wooden rolling stick. She said, "I would, but I know how that hurt." Did I wonder how she'd know what a whack with a wooden stick feels like? Not in the least.

My mother and grandmothers wouldn't let me help them either because I was too messy. More than once my mother's mother threatened to hit me and my younger sister with a broom handle. And when I attempted to learn drums from a nun in high school, she ended trying to teach me after two lessons with the words, "You're a spastic." i was grateful when Francesca simply patched the bald spots in the dough.

I'm not sure if I'd gotten any cookies to take home if I hadn't gotten into the act of rolling and stuffing for a few minutes. More than likely, I would have because my man arrived to take me home and I don't think Francesca knows how to let a man leave with a token of her talents to remember her by.

It took me two days to recuperate. Welcome to the Old New Orleans Italian way. Manga!

Pre-Productive Protection

In a recent Time Magazine, an article referred to the replacement of the term, "Reproductive Rights" with the term "Reproductive Justice." We continue to relabel a movement without a clearly defined mission, hoping that all who hear will be attuned to the message. Reproductive Justice is not a women's issue; it is a children's issue, and by extension, a humanity issue.

When a very close friend whose children my husband and I assisted with parenting showed me a photo of her ten-week-old unborn grandchild, I could hardly breathe with the awe of the moment. We are already deciding who he/she looks like. My friend said the baby looked like Mr. Peanut; I insisted that the skinny legs could only come from his/her grandmother, my friend. We both loved that baby already so much that we could smell him/her. Every baby deserves this kind of community commitment.

That is the damn point, you patriarchal misogynistic jerks who think that women are walking wombs with eggs for you to fertilize with your superior seed. You have no empathy, much less real committed love, for your children or their mothers. For centuries you have acted no better than roosters in a hen house. What you don't seem to comprehend is that all but a very few male roosters are killed at birth, and only the best stock is kept to reproduce. It matters not what the birth order of the baby roosters; only one is needed to service the whole flock of females. And what a mother or grandma of baby roosters thinks is no measure of superior stock. Neither is first-born status.

DNA is now able to prove paternity ( and genetic superiority), so some of you now grudgingly support your offspring and their caretaker, but you continue to act no better than barnyard thugs. I believe it is time to let you self destruct; you are anachronisms in modern society. Dinosaur dads may have been better fathers to their offspring than are many of you. We know that one close relative of the dinosaur, the penguin, is better at parenting than many of you.

We cluck our tongues and say how awful it is what Muslims do to their women. We still have households in America who treat women no better, and it is still not against International law to use rape of women AND CHILDREN as weapons of war. THINK ABOUT THIS. We have had people calling themselves Christians for over 2000 years, and we still have no international treaty against this abomination.

I was not wanted except for the services I could render as a caretaker to children of my parents beginning when I was four and we lost our Black nanny. My eventual status in society was as a servant to the children that I bore and to their father. This began in 1955 and continued until the present, in many circles. I began publicly speaking out against this when my daughter was in danger of dying four years ago and had her own husband and daughters to minister to her in her illness. I woke up about my real role in today's world. There are some things (like cancer) from which I could not protect my own young, so I began to channel the grief that I felt into protection of the children of others.

Reproductive Justice is an attempt to make sure that every child enters into a responsible, compassionate community, committed to creating world peace for all generations of children and those yet to be conceived. We can begin by making sure those who create children without responsibility for caring for the child and others who neglect and actively abuse children (including by creating them through incest or rape) have millstones tied around their necks until they throw themselves into the sea. Meanwhile, we can allow mothers who can't commit to protecting their children, both born and unborn, to make their own decisions about whether it is better: to kill a child's body before birth or the child's soul as he/she lives without love.

Fear, Myths, and Faith

Humanity is prone to fear of the unknown. This is usually a result of poor understanding of something and inability to create an action plan for dealing with the root of our fears. Sailors were justifiably afraid of fog in the days before satellite navigation systems. They could not anticipate what lay ahead, which may lead to their demise. They created myths to give them a sense of power over the unknown. The myths were probably based on the storyteller's comfort level in having the skills to deal with whatever lay beyond the mists.

Scientists, too, make up myths, which they call theories. As theories are tested, scientists come to conclusions that help them plan progress in the physical world. When a theory is tested enough to satisfy the statistics by which scientists predict events, we think of the prevailing findings as facts. These are actually the prevailing theories that seem to be factual. Great scientists never lose their sense of wonder about the unknown. They never lose their awe in attempting answers to mysteries.

There is a huge difference between fear and awe, but our religious traditions often interchange the two concepts. The Psalms speak eloquently of awe, but much of scripture speaks in fear of that which cannot be seen or understood on a physical level. Myths are created by the storytellers to assuage their own fears and those of their communities. The only tools the tellers had were words describing what surrounded them. They used the known as metaphors for the unknown. Their fear and awe were real, but not the words that could not begin to describe, in earthly terms, Infinite Power.

When scientists began understanding the nature of the unseen power that we call energy, and ascertained that all matter is manifestations of energy, this opened a whole new way to experience Divinity. The masses of energy that we call stars can be seen with telescopes long after these stars have burned out. How is this possible? The same way that we still see the faces and hear the voices of those we love long after their bodies have died. Energy never really dies; it simply goes into other manifestations.

The concept of a Holy Spirit being part of every human may be as old as humankind. The belief that this Divine Energy is the same in The Holy Spirit and in humans was codified in the book of Genesis. Isn't it possible that, by all the names that we call god, The Big Bang is, in fact, an explosion of The Holy Spirit? Isn't it possible that this holy energy has been free for the taking ever since the beginning? Isn't it possible that free will gives us the ability to manifest as much, or as little, of this Holy Energy as we choose? Isn't it possible that peace on earth is actually achievable if each of us commits to focusing our "Force" on responsible compassion?

This concept certainly gives me a greater sense of awe that the thought of god as a jealous, vengeful, war lord creating a soldiers and a son for enforcing his bloody will. I don't need to understand it to have faith in it, but this is what I believe.