God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

- Timaeus of Locris

**

You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of one who gives and kindles joy in the heart of one who receives.

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(The following is transcripted from my imperfect notes taken this past weekend. The talk was by Roberta Bondi, taken from her books on the desert Abbas and Ammas;  "To Pray and to Love"  "To Love As God Loves" and "Memories of God".)

Roberta Bondi Talk
Retreat July 26, 2008
Cherry Log, Ga.

It's interesting to ask:  What the desert fathers (and mothers) thought they were doing?

They were fulfilling Jesus' command to Love God with their whole heart and their neighbors as themselves.  Everything was measured by love -- love of God and love of neighbor.
This is the 4th or 5th century.

In the 6th century,  we find Dortheus.  The favorite activity of the monks was fighting with one another.  There are accounts of Monks peeing on the heads of other monks -- you name it.  He has many "Why you shouldn't fight with your brothers" sermons.   The normal response would be something like: " I could just love God if I didn't have to put up with these horrible people."

Think of a circle you draw with a compass.  God is at the center .  People and the world and all in it are all around.  Draw a line from God to world,  world to God , and the closer you get to the center (to God) the closer you get to other people.  You can't love God and not love other people.  Moving towards God doesn't move you apart from other people.   It's a piece of information about reality  --- about the direction you're going.    How can I tell when I'm making up God?  Or when it's really God and not something else?   ["Oh,  I can't know about all the horrible things in the world....."]    This drawing,  this metaphor aids discernment.

FEARFUL BELIEFS IN OUR VERY BODIES

The starting point of the Christian life is love of God and love of neighbor.  They had no illusion  -- that you suddenly woke up one morning and loved God and your neighbor.  We have to learn to do it.   We have to move on that path of love in our lifetime.
"How can I learn to love _____?"
Be considerate of him.  Have sympathy.  Have mercy.  Help him out.  Regard the well being of the person as your own.
Break it down into tiny little steps.    It wasn't laid out in advance.  It's not paint-by-numbers.   It wasn't predetermined.  Break down the job.
Learning to love is a long process.   The hypocrisy of Christians can be the pretense of it being a done deal.  Pretended knowingness and pretended insight.....  It comes from needing to act as though we are already there,  which again,  creates a lie and a false self that leads us away from love of God and love of neighbor.   It's much deeper and harder than that.  The humility demanded knows that this task takes our entire life.   So it is futile to pretend to be at the end of a path that has only just begun.   You can't love the person you don't know.  Which includes yourself.

We have inside of us,  fearsome abusive images of God.   How does God (that God) love us?    If the interest that God has in us is primarily critical,  how do we internalize that relationship?   The images of hell,  criticism,  lack of love,  lack of acceptance,  guilt and failure stand between us and the love of God.

The emphasis on 'belief in ______"  (virgin births , aspects of creedal and dogmatic life) without curiosity was not the way of the desert fathers.  We cannot exclude our own curiosity.  "If I had loved that God -- that would have destroyed me."   It's not just a 'head' image, but what is true in every pore of your body.

HEROIC MEASURE TO 'FIX' WHAT IS 'WRONG'

What about God do we have wrong? It is  that aspect that we have wrong that ruins us.  Our life's work is investigating that which is "the good news." We think we have it right, but it's always under investigation. The warning is against our own tendency to want to take heroic measures to fix that which is 'wrong'.   We have to understand that seeing it changes it.   In the 21st century,  we say "work harder work harder aim higher aim higher".   The desert culture says,  "back off."

So,  if you're trying to set up a prayer discipline,  set up 1/2 as much as you think you can do.  Cut that in half.  Make it so that you can actually DO it so you don't get discouraged and quit.  See the long view,  the change over time.  It's not just the prayer.

Anthony, one of the first of the monks , dating from the 5th century:
[from "Sayings of the Desert Fathers"  trans. Benedicta Ward]

"When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie,   and attacked by many sinful thoughts.  He said to God, "Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone;  what shall I do in my affliction?  How can I be saved?  A short while afterwards,  when he got up to go out,  Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his work,  getting up from his work to pray,  then sitting down and plaiting a rope,  then getting up again to pray.  It was the angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him.  He heard the angel saying to him, "Do this and you will be saved."  At these words,  Anthony was filled with joy and courage.  He did this,  and he was saved."

Our desire in the spiritual life is to be heroic -- get get where we're going.  To have arrived.  All the people to love -- how hard that is!  It's somehow easier to live within the fantasy of the great deed,  being somehow a superbeing,  being valiant.   We ask ourselves,  "What am I going to do?" and look around for some great purpose or great deed to hurl ourselves towards.   The desert teachers point our gaze back to the ordinary things of one's life.  Making rope and standing up and praying.  Nothing is heroic about this world.   The "big stuff" is what tends to get us in trouble.

ABOUT BEING UNABLE TO KEEP UP WITH MY PRAYERS

Prayer

About prayer itself they had little to say;  the life geared towards God was the prayer;  and about contemplation,  who could speak?  Arsenius prayed on Saturday evening with his hands stretched out to the setting sun,  and he stayed there until the sun shone on his face on Sunday.  The usual pattern was to say the Psalms,  one after another,  during the week,  and to intersperse this with weaving ropes,  sometimes saying, 'Lord Jesus Christ,   have mercy upon me.'  The aim was hesychia,  quiet,  the calm through the whole man that is like a still pool of water,  capable of reflecting the sun.  To be in true relationship with God,  standing before him in every situation -- that was the angelic life,  the spiritual life,  the monastic life,  the aim and the way of the monk.  It was life orientated towards God.  'Unless a man can say,  "I alone and God are here",  he will not find the prayer of quiet.'  It is the other side of the saying of St. Anthony,  "My life is with my brother.'

[The Sayings of the Desert Fathers  trans. by Benedicta Ward, SLG]

**
"It is helpful to understand that regularity is more sustaining in prayer than intensity or length.  You are spending time with God,  learning who God is and who you are,  learning to love God and God's world,  and this happens over a matter of years. If you miss some days,  start again,  and think small. A brother told an Abba that he had gotten away from his monastic disciplines,  presumably including his prayer,  and he felt too discouraged to begin again.  The Abba replied by telling him this story:

" A man had a plot of land.  And through his carelessness brambles sprang up and it became a wilderness of thistles and thorns.  Then he decided to cultivate it.  So he said to his son: 'Go and clear that ground.'  So the son went to clear it,  and saw that the thistles and thorns had multiplied......  He said: 'How much time shall I need  to clear and weed all this?'  And he lay down on the ground and went to sleep.  He did this day after day.  Later his father cam to see what he had done,  and found him doing nothing."

When his father asked him about it,  the son replied that the job looked so bad that he could never make himself begin.  His father replied,

"'Son,  if you had cleared each day the area on which you lay down,  your work would have advanced slowly and you would not have lost heart.'  So the lad did what his father said,  and in a short time the plot was cultivated."

So the Abba told the discouraged brother,

"Do a little work and do not faint,  and God will give you grace."

The disheartened brother took up his prayer again with patience without trying to do everything.  You can,  too.  Prayer is for you.  Prayer is not a test of your character,  and endurance contest,  or a heroic task set before you.

**
Heroic doesn't work. 

That thinking tells us lies.  It makes up false Gods,  like the God who hates us.  The belief in a hateful God is different from not believing in God.  It's hard to let go of these ideas and feelings.  The world is made is a way that makes us long for God,  for the love of God.  It is the love of God that holds us all in existence.   No matter what bad or destructive notions we have,  we're made to want/desire "the real thing."  We seek what is genuine.  We love and don't love at the same time.  But that which is of God,  which is the truth ,  will help us to seek our way.  We are learning to recognize and to know what we are.  We are gaining the insight to know what is in us intrinsically.

The thought or the inner belief that God hates us is a terrible wound,  a hurt.  It is as though we are a child watching our parents drive off saying "we're never coming back."   In the book of Genesis,  God saw it (creation) was "very very good."  The goodness of reality confirms for us that God was good in that particular way.  That the world was lovable.   We can see in the world 'the beauty of God,'  this God of Creation.
In the midst of this sorting out,  we can begin to want the scary heroic part for ourselves.

The center part of the world's pie is for God.  If something else gets put there,  it'll make you miserable.  That's not the place for that.  No person,  thing,  concern or object will fit in the place , for that is God's place.   If we persist in placing something or someone inappropriate in that place,  it will not work and we will grow more and more let down.   They simply cannot fill that place.   If we persist in forcing the issue , it is to the detriment of all concerned.  Our attachments are a sort of idol.  They are not wicked.  They just make us miserable.

Even if "I don't trust God"  ,  I trust these teachers,  these desert people.  They won't lie to me and they love me,  even it they're wrong.  (Abbas and Ammas)   It's our ancestors,  our grandparents.  We trust the integrity of their vision,  of how they lived and died.  Their lessons and teachings are still valid for us.  They are trustworthy.   We can keep reading them,  stay in the relationship and learn from it.

Dogma and belief,  i.e.,  that 'Jesus Christ is the Son of God' etc. was not terribly important to the desert teachers.  Their view was that we are made in a way that we're drawn to God.  That 'Christian' was not the only way to do it.   That relationship,  that search was senior in importance to dogma or what one believed.    The search involved the longing of one's entire being,  not just our head.  It's not our convictions that save us (so to speak)....

Even the words 'Save Us'  referred to what will continue to bring us to God.  It involved a way of being and thriving in spite of what else is going on in life and the world not just 'fire insurance.'  Scripture and how it looks brings the recognition that kindness and love are what brings us to the Throne of God.   Kindness and love reveal the love of God and allow us to pass on this 'saving' this salvation,  this grace.

The idea that one "can't believe the wrong things" can also be a dangerous fallacy.  The view that God's righteousness is primary,  that there is a knife edge about right and wrong can bring about in a person or a community a position of exclusion and legalism.  The primary characteristic of God is  ______,  --- if it is the wrong thing here,  that idea will lead you to hurt and exclude people from the love of God.

If you are Christian and trinitarian,  the reading of that dogma can become destructive religion if God is on top,  Jesus is subordinate and the Holy Spirit is flying around somewhere...... The religious arc that portrays Jesus as effeminate and weak is headed towards the religion that enforces "females obey males."   Church doctrine includes the idea that the three of the trinity are equal.  This makes a fundamental difference.

We give ourselves reason to believe ourselves to be inferior.  It doesn't matter what we believe.  We can be terrorized by what we believe.  We can hurt people with those beliefs.

In the early church,  they were still figuring it out.  We're still figuring it out.  As Origen says,  God comes to each of us according to our need.

Any Christian doctrine that breaks our spirit and demoralizes us is false.  God isn't about crushing us.

"Our mother -- our father" :  God comes to us according to our need.  God is that presence there for you.  We thrive as a result of that prayer.  God is that presence that nourishes and nurtures us.

Love is foundational.  It is the basic principal .   That which destroys love is for us to avoid.

There is a need for gentleness with ourselves,  rather than bullying and 'controlling' ourselves.  We drive ourselves away from God.  We speak harshly to ourselves.  We alienate ourselves from God in this habitual degradation of our godliness.    When our interaction with either someone else or ourself is dominated by control and trying to make guilty,  when we bully ourselves with these tactics,  we just want to get away.

We commit to the discipline,  not to use language to ourselves that cuts us down.  It is the picture of mercy and kindness of the Ammas and Abbas that counters the picture idea or image of God /Self/ other as adversary. 

It's so easy to fall into the trap.  Few people have too high an opinion of themselves.   God isn't interested in either our perfection or our sin.  Then we can lose the need to be heroic.

We will be saved.  We will be preserved in our seeking of God.  We will find what it is to fulfill our own nature.  We will find that which keeps us in life and lets us die in trust.  We don't need to know beyond that point.

**

Cross-posted to Alive on All Channels

**

A New Way to Study How Muscles Work

With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice

On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French daredevil named Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat of illegal tightrope walking that, according to a New York Police Department sergeant who recounted Mr. Petit’s act of physical poetry in dry press-conference prose, would more aptly be described as dancing.

For many years after, Mr. Petit’s stunt was a cherished footnote in the annals of New York history, one of the touchstones of a crazy, awful, glittering era in the life of the city. The destruction of the twin towers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revived the memory of that earlier aesthetic assault on the buildings, which is now the subject of “Man on Wire,” James Marsh’s thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary. Wisely, Mr. Marsh, who based his film on a book Mr. Petit published in 2002, never alludes to Sept. 11. That would have been both distracting and redundant, since it’s impossible, while watching a movie so intimate in its attention to the towers, not to be haunted by thoughts of their fate.

But it is also worth recalling that the trade center inspired more love posthumously than while it stood. Mr. Petit was an exception. A zealous, daring wire walker — the French word funambule is a more lyrical, as well as a somewhat more ridiculous-sounding term — he conceived a passion for the structures even before they were built.

As he recalls it (and as Mr. Marsh imagines the scene in one of many witty, unobtrusive re-enactments), the young Mr. Petit was flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office when he saw an article about plans to construct the two tallest skyscrapers in the world side by side at the bottom of Manhattan. In his mind, and then in a series of sketches and diagrams, he drew a simple line connecting the buildings and imagined himself perched atop it.

What kind of person would think of such a thing? How would he go about accomplishing it? Why? Those are the questions that preoccupy Mr. Marsh, whose earlier films include the semidocumentary “Wisconsin Death Trip” and the fictional feature “The King.”

The first question is answered largely by Mr. Petit’s own testimony. In his 50s, he is elfin and energetic, a beguiling combination of showboat, idealist and con man. And in his early, outlaw years, before the twin towers walk brought him fame and a measure of legitimacy, he combined an exalted sense of artistic mission with a street criminal’s sense of serious mischief.

Accordingly, “Man on Wire” is constructed like a heist movie, in the manner of “Rififi” or the revived “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise. Though Mr. Petit was alone on the cable that August morning, his walk in the sky was the result of a conspiracy of true believers and casual adventurers. In his two previous acts of guerrilla funambulism — at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and on the Harbor Bridge in Sydney — he relied on the logistical and moral support of several friends, including his lover, Annie Allix, and his faithful sidekick, Jean-Louis Blondeau.

In interviews, they and some of Mr. Petit’s other confederates — including two American goofballs and Barry Greenhouse, a flamboyant insurance executive who served as the all-important inside man — reconstruct their project, which they referred to at the time as “the coup,” in fascinating detail. There were engineering problems and also challenges that seem to belong to the world of espionage, as well as the inevitable tensions that arise when a group of people pursue a dangerous goal.

Why did they do it? Rather than risking banality by addressing this question head-on, Mr. Marsh allows the answer to be at once self-evident and profoundly mysterious. A work of art is its own explanation, and “Man on Wire” leaves no doubt that Mr. Petit’s coup deserves to be called art. Mr. Blondeau, a sensitive and cerebral foil to the impish Mr. Petit, chokes up when he recalls watching his friend step out over the abyss. “The important thing is that we did it,” he says.

And without making any grandiose claims, this lovely, touching film demonstrates that the World Trade Center sky walk was an important event. The proof is in the emotions — amusement, amazement, awe — evoked by those images of a tiny human figure balancing above a void. Also gratitude. It is easy to imagine that, in contemplating the scale and solidity of those brand-new towers, Mr. Petit saw them at least partly as the vehicle of his own immortality (whether or not he survived the crossing). No one looking up at the New York sky on a hazy morning 34 years ago and seeing a man on a wire could have suspected that the reverse would turn out to be true.

“Man on Wire” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes nudity, sexuality and drug references.

The Role Is a Workout, but She’s Fit

The New Knitting: This Is Not Your Grandma's Arts & Crafts

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2008

You don't have to handcraft your next checkbook cover out of an old plastic tennis racket sheath that you plucked from a neighbor's garbage bin, cut up and sewed. You don't have to adorn your bathroom curtain with repetitive designs (sea horses, say, or tugboats) using a chiseled half-potato and colorfast fabric paint. You could use the free checkbook cover the bank gave you and buy ready-made curtains. Nor must you snip the sleeves off that knitted top and replace them -- get out the matching thread --with floaty scarves. But hey.

The DIY movement wants you to make stuff. The DIY movement is huge, and sometimes it's charming and sometimes it's annoying and it is an anti-mass-production insurrection, a cuddly-soft revolt whose arsenal is crochet hooks, needles and glue guns. It is active in an all-too-passive age. It is a revolution against dehumanization in a programmed, processed world, and Doing It Yourself declares the self. It is an anti-retail uprising whose strategy is Make, don't buy -- at least not new, never full-price. It is one more way to recycle, restore, rescue and renew -- and every stenciled paper bag transformed into gift wrap, every lipstick tube transformed into a tampon case, cleans up the Earth while telling major industries: Fuck you.

A flood of books, many of them spawned by blogs, takes up that chorus. In Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister (North Light, 2007), Rene Rigdon and Zabet Stewart declare themselves "sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out." In Lotta Prints: How to Print with Anything, from Potatoes to Linoleum (Chronicle, 2008), Lotta Jansdotter suggests chiseled turnips and carrots as well. In Creepy Cute Crochet (Quirk, 2008), Christen Haden promises: "You can teach yourself to crochet, often in as little as one day (it's true!)." In Alternation (North Light, 2007), Shannon Okey and Alexandra Underhill hail "enviro-chic." In Subversive Seamster (Taunton, 2007), Melissa Rannels and Hope Meng declare: "We derive the most fashionable satisfaction from knowing that we are reusing and recycling what already exists in this material world -- and looking damn good doing it!"

You already know this, or you will: Crafting is back.

Not as it was when pioneers made dolls from clothespins -- when your average person even knew what clothespins were. But that's the point. This is not crafting by necessity. This is not crafting to kill time. This is crafting to claim identity, to save the world from soulless junk. To casual observers it looks like adults making toys and keeping them. But this is a resurgence with a vengeance.

By the start of this decade, the counterculture had reached a near-endgame. Just about every aesthetic and activity that could have been informed by punk already was. We might not have been aware of this as such, and still we might not credit it, but punk spawned so much of the angryuglybeautiful, the violent getpisseddestroy that we take for granted now. And DIY: Punk was DIY music, after all. Played in DIY costumes at DIY venues, with DIY announcements taped to poles. But by this decade, punk was one-plus generation back. What hadn't yet been long-since punkified? What had stayed so uncool so long as to still be untouched?

Did someone say "embroidery hoop"?

I craft too. Check out these bottle-cap-framed miniature colored-pencil portraits, this coquillage matchbox.

These new crafting books -- and dozens more, such as Khris Cochran's The DIY Bride and Kristen Rask's Plush You -- turn the toothpick-whittling our ancestors did beside the bonfire into something now performed in dorm rooms under Che posters. And just as postmodern crafters refashion polyester golf trousers into floofy plaid faux-feather boas, they are also deeply invested in refashioning the public image of crafting itself. It is imperative that they distance themselves from past crafters, who were not cool: from the toothpick-whittlers and the summer-camp lanyard-plaiters to the late-20th-century toilet-roll-cover knitters and tie-dyers. This is not your grandmother's crafting, they say -- literally. The Anticraft authors proclaim craft "de-grannified." Plush You! scorns a "stinky, grumpy old grandfather." Subversive Seamster's authors urge readers to raid "grandma's wardrobe" and make sexy corsets out of "old man pants." It's as if they feel compelled to keep reminding us that they're young.

Well, every youth revolution must present itself as radical and new -- even if, as in this case, the tools and fruits of that revolt are age-old and one of its driving forces is nostalgia: for remembered "Star Wars"-era childhoods and for eras that ended long before these crafters were born, lost tiki-torch-lit cocktail party years adrift in sock-monkeys and napkin rings. They call it kitsch. They make what their ancestors made, but now it's funny, angry, sexual, political. Among its rabbits and robots and puppies, Plush You! spotlights stuffed felt donuts: frosted, with bugle-bead sprinkles. AlterNation shows you how to transform pillowcases and button-down blouses into saucy corsets. Anticraft has corsets and a crocheted cat-o'-nine-tails. Subversive Seamster, too, has corsets and the "Peek-a-Bootylicious Skirt."

Subversive. Sinister. "Scream yourself hoarse," the Anticraft authors propose. "We're all outcasts and refugees from the mainstream here. We want you to help us carry this along, which makes it political -- a stand against the current trends in society to sanitize grief, drug sadness, hide obscenities, stigmatize sex." Thenceforth come instructions on making scarves, stockings, purses, earrings, stuffed felt Easter eggs, a soft woolen hat. The hat is "an antidote to the bright colors this season forces upon (us)." The eggs are appliqued with decapitated rabbits: "Sew on bloody hole at the top left of the bunny body using red floss. Sew on the bone so it appears to be sticking out of the bloody hole. Embroider blood drips and arterial spray using red floss."

One of the revolving mottoes at the seminal site Craftster.org is "No tea cozies without irony."

At its most basic, we're talking popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. At the far end of the spectrum, it's soldering irons and pearls. In between lies this vast realm of clever, creative, not bone-simple but still basically doable-without-a-design-degree projects, your rubber-stamped note cards and drawstring tote bag. That's what insiders, aka craftsters, like to call them: projects, lending all this snipping of felt and sewing-on of sequins a semiacademic, art-grant, observerish tone.

That tone is crucial, because the craftster scene is one to watch. Like earlier eras' garage-band and punk and 'zine scenes, this is one of those rare, actually of-the-people crusades that start from the bottom up: a few plebeian pals horsing around in a basement and somehow, somehow, whatever they come up with catches on. That this can still happen in a processed world should give us hope. In 2003, Boston-area computer programmer Leah Kramer started Craftster.org based on a lifelong hobby that she hadn't realized many others shared until she started posting project ideas and pictures online. Almost entirely by word of mouth, the site quickly expanded to more than 100,000 members. Thousands more join every month. Other sites pepper the Internet, long-tailing the crafting subculture into subsubcultures: the neo-knitters, the book-cover refigurers, the sewing-machinists. And yes, this anti-industry intifada is now itself an industry, with its own superstores, TV shows, ad-laden Web sites, celebrities and books, because after all this is America. Still craftsterism is, at heart, all heart. It has to be. Originality is non-negotiable when anything is made by hand. In a consumer culture where even the so-called customized is mass-produced -- think ring tones, think M&Ms printed with your favorite photograph -- this is the revolutionary part. Human one-of-a-kindness.

Even the same "project," completed by different crafters, yields different results. Because each finished product is so intrinsically personal, each stitch and each silver spray-painted pea a wee receptacle of memory (I did this part while listening to Tisto, right before the rainstorm, talking on the phone to Dad), and because the movement's ethos is so intrinsically populist, craftsterism (as punk and 'zines once were) is a social barometer. At craftsteramas like Boston's Bizarre Bazaar and San Francisco's new Renegade Craft Fair, whose premiere event drew bustling crowds this summer, the "projects" on show and on sale expose the hopes and dreams of an ever-increasing faction of the young and hip: their obsessions and their preoccupations. Their themes become memes. Making crafts takes precious time. What icons, which motifs, which messages are, to their makers, worth it?

Well.

Visions of childhood. Again and again, the kittens and the monkeys. And the big round staring eyes -- made of felt, buttons, French knots, beads, polymer clay, classic cheap plastic shake-'ems, set wide apart for maximum wistfulness and affixed even to renditions of non-living things: to stuffed popsicles and rocks and fruit, staring, usually smiling. Why? These are eminently fearsome, fearful times. Most modern craftsters belong to post-Roe v. Wade generations often criticized (and envied) as the most wanted, most spoiled, most infantile and most narcissistic in history. It's no surprise that so many solace themselves by spending days and nights with cuddly toys. The past, your own or some putative past that came before, is a known territory. How tempting to retreat into a time before anyone ever heard of global warming, a time without war (or with wars which, being so long ago, seem sanitized and not quite real).

"This is stuff to remind you of childhood, to comfort you in your darkened apartment," we read in Plush You! Its repertoire of staring-smiling felt fried eggs and staring-smiling stuffed fleece ice cream sandwiches and staring-smiling candy corn and staring-smiling trees and staring-smiling cookies and a staring-smiling Brussels sprout, all made by different craftsters, "represents real-world things but in a surreal, softly perfect way."

Visions of hell. Creepy Cute Crochet's title says it all. Instructions that your grandmother might actually recognize -- "Row 4: Ch 1, sc 1 in same, sc 2 [inc, sc1] 5 times, sl st to close round (23)" -- lead to utterly adorable, round-bottomed Satans, Grim Reapers, and the like, to be stuffed with polyfill or poly-pellets. Amid its irresistible owlets and donuts, Plush You! includes zombie sock monkeys with loosely stitched gaping wounds, eyes dangling out on blood-red yarn, amputated legs ending in bloody stumps. Another stuffed toy in this book is a "poor little bunny whose throat has been cut." After drawing the slash with thick red craft paint, we read, add realistic droplets. One section on a nearby page shows how to craft vomit. Apply thick paint to make it "look as if gravity is at work and the fluids are pooling."

It's a 21st century merging of comfort and fear, childhood and death, escapism and protest. "We're all about the cute and pretty," announces Plush You! -- and yes. We have reached a point in history at which a certain sector of the populace finds puke pretty and cute.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

Uncertainties About the Role of Doubt in Religion

“Belief in God isn’t quite the same thing in 1500 and today,” writes Charles Taylor in “A Secular Age” (Harvard University Press, 2007), his formidable exploration of how the conditions of religious belief — and of unbelief, too — have changed for modern Westerners.

Religious faith was once the air everyone, even the doubter, breathed. Today, religious faith, in its many forms, stands as but one possibility alongside a range of nonreligious outlooks that the honest believer cannot simply dismiss as deluded or depraved.

Far more than in the past, Mr. Taylor writes, believers must live their faith “in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.”

Religious thinkers, of course, have long argued that uncertainty and faith are not the polar opposites often supposed; that indifference, and not doubt, for example, is the greater adversary of faith; that absolute certitude about God often reflects a dangerous arrogance.

But the idea that contemporary faith, at least in the economically developed West, is shadowed by uncertainty on a new and different scale begs for some empirical investigation. Is such a doubt-haunted belief merely the intermediate stage in that slow retreat of the “Sea of Faith” that Matthew Arnold lamented in “Dover Beach,” and that has left much of Western Europe with little more than a veneer of cultural or nostalgic religiosity? Call this the familiar transition hypothesis.

Or is there a newly emergent faith that is deep and constant, marked by familiar forms of prayer and practice, but nonetheless alert to, perhaps even enlivened by, the whisper saying, “I am convinced I’m right but I could be wrong”? That would be a faith lived, to use a favorite phrase of Professor Taylor, “in a different register.” Call this the new steady-state hypothesis.

At first glance, the latest findings from the United States Religious Landscape Study, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, promise a way of examining those alternatives. This survey of more than 35,000 Americans asked people not only whether they believed in “God or a universal spirit” (92 percent did), but also whether the believers were “absolutely certain, fairly certain, not too certain, or not at all certain.” While 71 percent replied “absolutely certain,” a sizable portion (17 percent) fell into the “fairly certain” category.

What if one explored this latter group’s answers to other survey questions? How important, for example, was religion in their lives? How often did they pray or attend worship services? How convinced were they that there would be life after death?

From the start, one could suppose that the fairly certain would prove less devout or observant on such measures than the absolutely certain. At least some of the fairly certain, it can be assumed, are people in transit, shifting toward disbelief and already distancing themselves from traditional religious life.

Nonetheless, if it turned out that the answers of the fairly certain came even close to those of the absolutely certain, it would confirm the idea of a stable strata of deeply committed, actively practicing religious believers who have also integrated a significant degree of doubt and uncertainty into their faith.

The Pew study itself did not make such comparisons between the absolutely certain and the fairly certain believers. But its huge sample of interviews meant that these subgroups were large enough to make statistically reliable comparisons.

Gregory A. Smith, research fellow at the Pew Forum, was kind enough to fire up the computers and churn out the numbers. Unfortunately for anyone looking for a new model of strong faith with doubt, the fairly certain believers were not at all close to the absolutely certain ones on frequency of prayer and worship, the importance of religion in their lives, belief in life after death, and several other measures. In most cases the fairly certain believers were closer in attitude and observance to those saying they were not certain.

For example, 71 percent of absolutely certain believers considered religion “very important” in their lives; only 22 percent of the fairly certain did.

Strike 1 against the new steady-state hypothesis.

But the Pew survey also asked those who believed in God whether their view of God was more like “a person with whom people can have a relationship” or “an impersonal force.”

Obviously, religious practices like worship and prayer usually assume a God who has relationships with people. So what if one limited the comparisons between absolutely certain and fairly certain believers to ones who, in both cases, also described their view of God as “personal”?

In this case, the gap between the two groups closes — but only modestly. Strike 2 against the steady-state hypothesis.

Of course, there may be still other ways of slicing and dicing the data, or of looking at differences among particular religious groups. Strike 3 may not be inevitable. Nor can the transition hypothesis be declared the hands-down winner.

Since 1988, the General Social Survey, a highly regarded opinion survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, has asked a parallel but somewhat different set of questions that explore confidence or uncertainty about the existence of God.

Mr. Smith points out that from 1988 to 2006 the percentages of people giving each answer have remained relatively unchanged. That does not really bolster the steady-state hypothesis because it reveals nothing about the patterns of worship and prayer and valuing religion that correspond to these degrees of certainty or doubt.

But those findings do challenge the transition hypothesis, which implies an increase over time in the number of doubters.

So what exactly does it mean that many contemporary believers will be living their faith “in a condition of doubt and uncertainty”?

As academics love to conclude, more research is needed. That, at least, is fairly certain.

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Jessica Wapner , Scientific American

From Friends of Silence

see also....

“The eternal moment is outside of time, is not a part of our past or our future, and yet it is lived amidst all our everyday activities. It is in the eternal moment that love is born. Love does not belong to time, and its timeless quality is well known to all lovers. The lover has to learn to still the mind in order to catch the moment and stay true to love’s unfolding. Wayfarers tread a path that lead from illusions of time to the eternal moment that belongs to the soul.

Frrom “Signs of God” by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

**
We are made of time
We are its feet and its voice.
The feet of time walk in our shoes.
Sooner or later, we all know,
the winds of time will close the tracks.
Passage of nothing, steps of no one.
The voice of time tells of the boyage.

--Eduardo Galeano

**

Eternity is one time, its only dimension: always.

...ACIM

**
Memory is the repository of the past, which is where most of our living takes place. we have divided life into past, present, and future, and this division, like all of our divisions, removes us from the fullness of living, from the mysterious unknown and unknowable movement of life that isw the source of all beauty. The past exists only in memory, and thefuture is merely a projection of past memories. Now, this moment, is all there is.

-- From The Secret of the Yamas by John McAfee

***
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
in a relative way,
And returned the previous night.

---Anonymous

**

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of life, the clearer we should see through it.

-- Jean Paul

** We were breaking an unspoken social rule. we were talking about God and religion at a time when the stakes were high, when turmoil and confusion were the order of the day. We were harried, busy mothers, but at our meetings we found ourselves released from Time, suspended from the reality of the outside world ... Our relationship was turning into something sacred, something we began to call our Faith Club.

-- From The Faith Club : A Muslin, A Christian, A Jew
by R. Idliby, S. Oliver, and P. Warner

***
In the timelessness we discover god. If we have ever become aware of the moment when we understood something, we must have realized the extratemporal nature of the event. Extemporaneous means outside of time. Indeed, the git of making extemporaneous comments hinges on our receptivity to inspired wisdom, reaching our consciousness from the realm of the timeless.

-- From Beyond the Dream by Thomas Hora

**
When time is a friend, you relish how it works. You know that your purpose is within you and that eventually time will unfold a dream, an integrating vision for your life purpose ..... My future is behind me. I can’t see it, while I can see my past which runs out in front of me.

-- Sharon Franquemont

**
He was still and gazed deeply into the infinite pool that bears stars into being. Above him was a tiny smudge of light that was the closest galaxy. It was spinning, spinning, but so far away that one could look for a whole lifetime and not see it alter. The galaxies out there whirled into each other like discs, blinding into space without colliding -- passing through each other at thousands of miles per second, yet they did not appear to move.

Suddenly he understood: Time is an illusion of the mind. Only love remains.

--From Eclipse of the Sun by Michael O’Brien