sojourn stories...

free your mind...

"Imagine how your life would be different if you really recognized that Reality is a boundless, open, integral, holistic, unified field (unifield) wherein everything is inter-related, inter-connected, in dynamic co-creativity, or co-arising."

watched the movie "what the bleep do we know?"   it was mind bending and familiar at the same time, challenging and inviting, disruptive and confirming...

Louis Carroll said it best, "curiouser and curiouser!" 

more later...need some time to soak it in and let it simmer;)

willing to just be...me

The movie, Chariots of Fire, tells the hauntingly true story of two British athletes competing in the 1924 Olympic Games.  In one scene in the movie, one of the men, Eric Liddel, talks with his sister, Jenny, about his passion for running and for God Liddel was a devout Christian, slated to travel as a missionary to China, and Jenny disapproves of the time and energy that Eric is putting into running, since it takes him away for the mission that she understands.  A key moment in the movie transpires when Eric looks at her and states..."God made me to run, and He made me to run fast, and when i run I feel His pleasure."

i love this statement...the bold, certain, unswerving in an awareness of the giftedness bestowed by G-d and the pleasure it brings both G-d and the created one when the gift is utilized...Pleasure that comes to G-d and to the created one, each time that a gift is used...a gift exercised, offered, poured out in utter delight...without much effort or forethought. The awesome confidence, ability and willingnes to 'run' because that is what G-d has made me to do, and when i do so... when i "be" who G-d has made me to "be"...well, then i feel G-d's pleasure!

Where/when do you/we feel g-d's pleasure?!  Are you/we willing to just BE???

oh, the pleasure of being! (Eric is #14, running with full abandon, knowing the essence of all that he is...he is free to just be...)

god shows up...

Joan of Arcadia...

i love the show Joan of Arcadia...there is always something that i learn about G-d, about myelf, about being fully humanlydivine.  The show depicts a girl, joan, who walks through high school with an interesting and growing relationship with G-d, who is protrayed by a variety of characters from a young girl to a punk rocker, to a man on the street who calls her by name, indicating that he/she is G-d.

Tonight's episode, focused on injustice, as Joan was falsely accused of wrongdoing and then has a myriad of experiences that reinforce the randomness of injustice at times.  The show ends with this wonderful interaction between Joan and G-d, who is played by a man who could be mistaken for a bouncer.  He comes to talk with her, as she finishes her after school job at a bookstore...

G-d:  "Hey there joanie."  (i just love that G-d would be so normal, so approachable, so relational and say hey there!)

Joan:  "Still waiting…I don’t know why you had to put me through all of this…nothing added to, nothing happened..."  (she says to  G-d, rather angrily and bothered)

G-d: "Things happened..."

Joan:  Where?  When??? (with a sarcastic chuckle)  (such freedom she has, to just say it like she feels it...expresses her feelings to g-d)

G-d:  "Why are you doubting me?"

Joan:  "Before when you would tell me what to do , maybe I’d screw up and stuff, but by the end I would see something." 

G-d: "So you think you had no effect?"

Joan:  "Yeah..." (with a duh… tone of voice)

G-d:  "Ahhh... "  (he says with a dawning sense of understanding) "You remember Emily Dickensen?" 

Joan:  "Yeah, you can sing all of her poems to Yellow Rose of Texas" (as she breaks into a two line example)

G-d:  "Huh...?" (as G-d looks at her with a hmm/huh kinda look, and then begins to read her the following Emily Dickensen poem)

Faith --is the Pierless Bridge

Supporting what We see

unto the scene that We do not--

Too slender for the eye

It bears the Soul as bold

As it were rocked in Steel

With Arms of Steel at either side--

It joins --behind the Veil

To what, could We presume

The Bridge would cease to be

To Our far, vacillating Feet

A first Necessity.

 

Joan:  "I don’t think that goes with yellow rose of texas..." (she say wryly...again, just her willingness to banter with G-d, to challenge, to question, to play)

G-d:  "Seeing the results of your actions is not important…only the actions are… like a recluse who wrote poems she never never published and here they are touching people 100 years later."  (G-d hands her the book and Joan looks at the book, looks inwardly, pensive, questioning... pressing against a desire to understand.)

"Your work is out there Joanie, you just gotta have faith…"(G-d says tenderly and quietly, as he meets her eyes.  I love this portrayal of G-d's heart to his child)

Then the music begins as she thinks about her day, and the show cuts to scenes of the people she has impacted that day as she wrestled with the injustice that affected her.  The faces and hints of changed lives, the possibilities around the next bend for the truant high school student who connected with the art teacher, the teacher who had been doubting her impact, the lessened lonlioness of others…all becasue of joan's life and involvement with them throughout the show, in seemingly benign ways.

...and as the piano plays and the lyrics begin,  (a great song, "have a little faith in me," by john hiatt, that frames and fleshes out the vignettes resulting from joan's actions ) it is clear that it is faith in the larger,  the unseen, unknowable that really does make a difference.

...I wonder what i would be like for each of us to believe that our life impacts others toward life, toward realizing and living into their giftedness...i wonder and i hope and i pray and fight and seek this kind of truth out....

and this was not even their best show...Be sure to catch it friday nights @ 8:00 (eastern time) on CBS.

shalom, susie

Hotel Rwanda: not so proud to be an American

This past weekend, I saw the movie, Hotel Rwanda, Profound, powerful film. A magnificently told story, whose raw emotional impact is intensified by the movie's skillfully woven script and score.

Ten years ago, over the course of 100 days, in the central African nation of Rwanda, almost one million people were brutally murdered by their own countryman .  The events were virtually ignored by the rest of world, in an inexcusable display of feigned ignorance.  However, one ordinary man, Paul Rusesabagina, doing his very ordinary job, did an extraordinary thing.  Inspired by his love for his family, he demonstrated great courage and used his skills as an excellent hotel manager and the favors he had curried through the years to feed, protect, house, and rescue 1268 refuges. Hotel Rwanda tells their inspiring story.

Most notable, director Terry George veers away from the usual gratuitous gore, so commonplace in many of today's films, resulting in a growing desensitization of this generation moviegoers.  Instead of relying on the extensive use of graphic violence to portray war crimes, George drew eloquent emotional expressions from his actors employing a sense of  visible fear, of impending death juxtaposed against the innocence of children and inexorable liveliness   Additionally, the element of suspence that innocent people will inevitably be caught and brutally killed, once the UN forces abandoned the Rwandans, was a far more effective way to draw the audience into the terror of the times. 

I sat in the theater, not so proud to be an American, but even more so, ashamed of myself.  Unlike Adam, (whose link, to an intriguing and challenging perspective, I have included below) I was not 14 when this happened.  I was 32.  And 10 years later, I am ashamed that my head was in the sand, and that I was not as aware as I should have been...as I could have been...and that I naively believed the lies that the news media propagated.  I know that I must be more intentional to regularly look beyond my little life and begin to be not only more aware, but to be more proactive in the realities of living in a fallen world.  I came home from the movie and surfed the web, trying to educate myself a bit.  I read the 16 declassified documents that are evidence of our inaction during the genocide. (They can be found at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/press.html).

As I read, I was further convicted at my ignorance and self absorbtion.  I am not sure of all that  I can do, but I can do something, and that is a beginning.  So often I get lost in the realization that I cannot do everything, or I get overwhelmed at the 'everything' that there is to be done and it paralyzes me...my sister, has taught me to be willing "to do or to be  a something."  It is not all, but it is not nothing either, and 'a something 'is what I can offer quite often.  And the 'something' offers the possibility to become "a something more.'..but never 'an all or everything' this side of heaven.

In the last 5 years, I have since become aware of so much injustice in my own back yard, my own county, state and country, but even more so in the world, that I can not pretend I do not see.  In the movie, Hotel Rwanda, there is conversation between a journalist and Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) regarding the world's response will be when they see a tape of the atrocities that are occurring in Rwanda.  Paul is hopeful that the UN troops will return, while the journalist sadly responds that he believes people will see the tape, during the 6:00 news and pause for a moment...they will think it is very sad, and then go back to eating their dinners.  I don't want to be that person, ever again.          ~Shalom,  sam

(Read Adam's post:  http://cleave.blogs.com/pomomusings/2005/01/index.html)