Rel22 and Personal Updates + the Continuation of Our Existentialism Series

Rel22 Website Update

by R.E. Slater

A month ago I began a series of articles on Process-based (Processual) Christian existentialism using Whitehead's process philosophy as versus psychological existentialism built upon non-process-based philosophies. Each will give meaning to us in their own way... although as a Christian/religious person my own meaning will derive from a theological framework as versus the nonreligious existentialist who may be agnostic to religion or completely atheistic to it.

Further below you will find the series I was developing before becoming slowed down by this year's foot-and-ankle surgeries. Thankfully, though I slowed down a little bit, I have been fortunate enough to work at document production between energy slumps and pain medications.

Lately, I've been catching up the Relevancy22 website covering this past summer's current events which I had missed. I've also have provided a shorten process series re Segall, Davis, Whitehead, and Cobb, among others.

However, this isn't necessarily bad as playing catch-up to missed series allows us to take these series in all-at-once. Whether in my undergrad or graduate studies, I tended to read and study my classroom projects in "batches" as versus chapter-by-chapter. By doing so I could see and understand the bigger picture rather than absorbing the minutiae of data segmented between subject material.

With the advent of livestream cable I can now do the same with Cable TV series and Internet streams... I can watch and think through series all-at-once rather than piecemeal a week at a time. Perhaps it's age but I think it makes things easier to remember and understand.

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My Health Update

by R.E. Slater

Pictures of Nursing (3X / wk) and festering foot infections

which have required several surgeries this past summer and fall...

What Open Wounds Look Like Before

and After Using a Wound Pump

April through August 2023

Resting Up After Prosthetic Removal

& Cleanout Surgery

September 2023

My latest surgeries have gone well. What started out as "maintenance surgeries" later become "removal and fusion surgeries". Through the summer my surgical infections from January 2016 never left and never got better. At first they did... but it took three long years. But they never went away. So after eight years of up-and-down health limitations I finally gave in to reality in September of this year.

Looking at my foot I was nursing three open wounds with several more rising to the surface... my management of wounds had come to an end. I called the doc, saw him a day later, and we planned a surgery for the first Monday of the next week. The infections were spreading and he-and-I both wanted the prosthetic gear out of my body post-haste.

And so, the motility device is gone as I use this fall and coming winter seasons to place life "on hold" to heal up and get better. My last recourse was an amputation but at least up to this point I've not had to consider this (excepting, of course, the discovery of Boston's Mass General where a MIT specialist removes limbs in such a way as to decrease phantom pain nearly to zero).

At present, the infected prosthetic is out of my body and it is responding very well to the drugs and healing. My ongoing fight with health issues may become a thing of the past but my real I had ever been to keep the motility device in my foot. This is not to be as there is a 35% risk of becoming re-infected with a replacement device.

So after this summer's cleanout surgeries in April (#1) and August (#2) along with a long, long, long losing battle with the several infections still ravaging my body, I finally agreed with Infectious Disease and my Orthopaedist to a series of "rebuilds" starting with (#3) the full removal of the foot and ankle prosthetic which includes a surgical cleanout  and the placement of an antiseptic cement ball into the empty space.

What came out - Internal Motility Prosthetic

September 2023

My Condition Presently between Surgeries

Nov 2023

the aftermath of a bloody surgical wound being cleaned up  in the med office

I bought two inexpensive knee walkers to get around the house

the splint behind the knee required a rag stuffed
behind it to relieve the chaffing going on

Structural Gear to be Implanted:

a Titanium ball socket with foot fusion

January 2024

refer to:

Powder metallurgy with space holder for porous titanium implants: A review

Then (#4) a fourth surgery with another reopening of the ankle area this past November with the main ankle-bone's partial removal + another cleanout + placement of yet another antiseptic cement ball into the open space.

And finally, sometime this coming January of 2024, a (#5) fifth and final surgery removing (and reuse of sic, cannibalizing of) the remaining anklebone + cleanout + the placement of a custom-built titanium structural device into the fully emptied area + the fusion of the ankle to the foot. This would complete all surgeries unless infections arise again.

Overall, the series of procedures which I've been dreading has gone better than I had thought. Considering all the many years of competitive sports I played it could've been a lot worse. This problem here was related to a fall I had down a mountain at 14 years of age where I had to stick my foot into a crevice lest I fall off the cliff which was fast coming up.

Since my father didn't "believe in" modern medicine at the time I've played sports all my life on a partially injured foot which lately was turning upwards. I had had an early total knee surgery many years earlier with no problem so the foot surgery in 2016 I wasn't concerned about. However, infection rates run 4-6% in modern hospitals and I was one of the unlucky patients to experience it.

All-in-all this medical health year has gone well... it has required a lot of patience and pain management. Further, the antibiotic drugs left me fatigued with stomach v.  nausea after-affects. I also had to undergo several iron-therapy infusions to offset the fatigue I was experiencing as my iron levels had dropped quite low.

But thankfully, I've never gotten any of the Covid variants my friends and family were getting even though I've had times where I felt like I may have contacted the mutating virus. In the area I live there are a lot of Trumpian republicans who adamantly refuse to wear a mask to protect me and others... and who also refuse to take their Covid shots... thus complicating our region's health factors along with my own lower resistances to Covid.

And yet, both my spouse and I have not been infected and have diligently kept up our vaccine shots so that this past July I got my sixth "bivalent shot" (re Covid-19's 4.0 and 5.0 variants), along with a pneumonia shot for older people and a season flu shot. Later, this coming January-February of next year I will receive a seventh  vaccine shot (for BA2.75 + EBB 1.50 mutations). As I tell my church friends, I "glow in the dark" in the evening! :) 

All for now,

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

and remember our friends and strangers in Palestine, Gaza, Israel,

the Ukraine, Russian, and all the Migrating families from

South and Central America needing God's grace and help.

by R.E. Slater

December 18, 2023

Michigan in December

* * * * * * *

SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19

Charts and Data Information

Mapping the evolutionary profile of SARS-CoV-2
and COVID-19 using mutation order approach

SARS-CoV-2 variant biology: immune escape, transmission and fitness

Virus Mutations Reveal How COVID-19 Really Spread

* * * * * * *

Forthcoming Existentialism Series

Let's Talk About Process Theology vs Universalism

The Processual Complex Memory of the Universe Is Significant for Cosmic Life

R.E. Slater & ChatGPT - The Purpose & Meaning of Life for a Christian Eugelion, Part 1

What Gives Life Meaning, Part 2 - unfinished

Christian Existentialism, Part 3 - unfinished

More on Christian Existentialism, Part 4 - unfinished

Existentialism in Education: Themes, Philosophers, Pros and Cons

Are Fragmentation, Trauma, and Demoralization at the Root of Mass Shootings?

         

Dear Reader,

Uvalde. Buffalo. Tulsa. Sacramento. Indianapolis. Boulder. Charleston. Orlando. Aurora. Columbine. These are just a select few of an ever-increasing list of places we have come to associate with mass shootings in the United States. Each time, we ask ourselves, "Why?" Why does this continue to happen more in the U.S. than in any other country on earth?

This was the question I explored in a recent blog I wrote for the Cobb Institute. Now I hope you’ll join me for a dynamic discussion about this important issue on Thursday, July 21, 2022 at 7:30pm Eastern/4:30pm Pacific. As I wrote in the blog,

"Rather than just arguing about whether the problem stems from the individuals or the guns, I’d like to suggest that the roots may lie even deeper. And until we are willing to follow the threads all the way down, we will never find a way out of the crisis of mass shootings. I strongly believe that the roots of this problem are cultural fragmentation, an epidemic of trauma, and widespread demoralization. In other words, we are living in a sick society that is producing mass shootings out of its sickness."

Blessings,


Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D.
Director, Process & Faith

Sheri D. Kling, Ph.D., is the director of Process and Faith with the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology (CST). She also serves as director of the John Cobb Legacy Fund with the Institute for Ecological Civilization. Sheri earned her Ph.D. in Religion: Process Studies from CST. In her work as a writer, teacher, and spiritual mentor, Dr. Kling draws from wisdom and mystical traditions, relational worldviews, depth psychology, and the intersection of spirituality and science to help people transform their lives. She is the creator of Deeper Rhythm and Transforming Women as well as a faculty member of the Haden Institute. Her personal website is www.sherikling.com.

* * * * * * *

Photo courtesy Kelly Sikkema

Are Fragmentation, Trauma, and Demoralization at the Root of Mass Shootings?

https://cobb.institute/blog/process-in-praxis/are-fragmentation-trauma-and-demoralization-at-the-root-of-mass-shootings/

by Sheri Kling

Jun. 15, 2022

Uvalde. Buffalo. Tulsa. Sacramento. Indianapolis. Boulder. Charleston. Orlando. Aurora. Columbine. These are just a select few of an ever-increasing list of places we have come to associate with mass shootings in the United States. Each time, we ask ourselves, “Why?” Why does this continue to happen more in the U.S. than in any other country on earth? According to National Public Radio, there have been 246 mass shootings in the first 22 weeks of 2022. That adds up to more than 11 shootings per week. Meanwhile, the New York Times identifies a “disturbing new pattern” of shooters who are under the age of 21.

They point to such causes as online bullying, aggressive marketing of guns to boys, and a “worsening adolescent mental health crisis” that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Frank T. McAndrew, a Knox College psychology professor, describes the young men typically involved in such shootings as people who “feel like losers, and they have an overwhelming drive to show everybody they are not on the bottom.”

We might be tempted to quickly conclude that such assailants are “mentally ill” and leave it at that. But those of us who have struggled with depression, anxiety, or other conditions cringe at the lumping of never violent people into the same category as those who would pick up arms to kill. While trying to understand the mental state of shooters is valid, other justice-oriented people voice concerns over the number of guns in the U.S. and seek a legislative solution to keep guns out of the hands of those who would use them to murder.

Yet rather than just arguing about whether the problem stems from the individuals or the guns, I’d like to suggest that the roots may lie even deeper. And until we are willing to follow the threads all the way down, we will never find a way out of the crisis of mass shootings. I strongly believe that the roots of this problem are cultural fragmentation, an epidemic of trauma, and widespread demoralization. In other words, we are living in a sick society that is producing mass shootings out of its sickness.

Fragmentation

We are a fragmented people – societally, interpersonally, and intrapersonally. We can see it in our politics, in our lingering racism, in our lack of close relationships and the resulting loneliness and social isolation. We can see it in skyrocketing increases in depression and drug use. We even see it in our addictive use of technology that, while promising to connect us, often leaves us even more isolated.

The dominant understandings of reality that lie unquestioned at the bedrock of Western culture are at least a part of that fragmentation. The Western worldview is dualistic in its separation of mind from body, and humans from nature. It’s also still stubbornly mechanistic – seeing reality as made up of “dead” matter, billiard balls that are pushed around by external forces – even as we learn from biological and ecological sciences and quantum physics that nothing in the natural world behaves as a machine. Such dualistic and mechanistic worldviews pull us apart and deny the validity of our experience. They see humans and the world as objects to be exploited rather than sacred subjects with which we might be in cooperative and respectful relationship.

Trauma

In the late 1990s, Vincent Felitti of the Kaiser Permanente health system in San Diego and Robert Anda of the Centers for Disease Control conducted a ground-breaking study on the effects of adverse childhood experience (ACE) on adult health and behavior. Known as the ACEs study, it explored the early life experience of 17,000 participants. Ten categories of adverse childhood experience were ultimately identified that included physical/emotional/sexual abuse, having an alcoholic or drug abuser in the household, physical/emotional neglect, and divorce or an incarcerated parent. Based on their responses, everyone was given an ACE score that represented the numerical total of each category experienced.

Photo courtesy Kat J

The findings were stunning. Only one third of participants had an ACE score of zero, one in six had a score of four or more, and one in nine had a score of five or more. The researchers found an alarmingly strong relationship between a higher ACE score and the leading causes of morbidity, mortality, chronic disease, and risky behavior.

We are a traumatized people.

When mass shootings happen, we want to know why. We desperately grasp for explanations by understanding the shooters’ motives. But in a recent article in ACEs Too High News, Jane Ellen Stevens argues that dwelling on motive just gets us a “useless answer to the wrong question.” The right questions to ask about, for example, Payton Gendron, who targeted the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, might include: “What happened to this person? What happened to a beautiful baby boy to turn him into an 18-year-old killer spouting racist screed?” Stevens draws from the work of Jillian Peterson and James Delaney who studied every mass shooting since 1966 and found that “the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying.” Stevens goes on to tell us that

The effects of ACEs begin showing up in childhood. Kids experiencing trauma act out. They can’t focus. They can’t sit still. Or they withdraw. Fight, flight or freeze—that’s a normal and expected response to trauma. So, they have difficulty learning. The schools that respond by suspending or expelling them just further traumatize them. When they get older, if they have no positive intervention from a caring adult at home or in school, in a clinic or other organization who is trained to understand trauma, they find unhealthy ways to cope. They turn to addictions of all types—alcohol and other drugs, violence, stealing, lying, overeating, gambling, thrill sports, etc.—to soothe themselves to endure their trauma and the effects of their trauma, such as depression or violence.

She goes on to recommend that communities establish a forensic ACE review team to investigate the childhood experiences of each mass shooter and analyze every step in that person’s life when an intervention could have changed the course and, possibly, the outcome. How much healthier might our communities be if we took seriously the prevention of trauma?

It’s also critical to remember that people can heal from trauma. In my own life, deep inner work and spiritual practices like dream work have helped. Wounded people wound. But is this the end of the story? According to writer and theologian Henri Nouwen,

Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

Photo coutesy Nick Herasimenka

Photo courtesy STNGR Industries

Demoralization

It’s not just fragmentation and trauma that are making American culture sick. According to John F. Schumaker, a retired psychology academic and author of “The Demoralized Mind,” “Western consumer culture is creating a psycho-spiritual crisis that leave us disoriented and bereft of purpose.” He argues that many people who are identified as depressed are actually suffering from an “existential disorder.” He writes,

Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment. The world loses its credibility, and former beliefs and convictions dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction. Frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments, as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle. The label ‘existential depression’ is not appropriate since, unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person’s life.

Demoralization is the realistic response. Let’s let that sink in for a moment.

Schumaker points out that the core characteristics of consumer culture, including individualism, overwork, hurriedness, debt, and hyper-competition, all affect us negatively and the typical sources of “wisdom, social and community support, spiritual comfort, intellectual growth and life education have dried up.” Schumaker notes that, unlike in the past, people no longer have guiding principles or philosophies of life to give them an “existential compass.”

In the absence of such a compass, we gravitate toward what Noam Chomsky called a “philosophy of futility” in which people feel powerless and insignificant. Schumaker also points to the lack of what Raoul Naroll called a “moral net” or cultural infrastructure that meets “the key psycho-social-spiritual needs of its members, including a sense of identity and belonging, co-operative activities that weave people into a community, and shared rituals and beliefs that offer a convincing existential orientation.”

We are a demoralized people.

People who are dehumanized, demoralized, and dispirited by these forces see the whole world as disappointing and life itself loses its credibility. Though we may be tempted to demand that people just “suck it up,” we’d be wise to listen to Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

If we are a sick society, what might make us well?

I believe that broader adoption of a process-relational worldview would certainly help, by showing us that at all levels of reality, we are interconnected, dynamically in process, and creatively empowered to actualize value in a world that we belong to. In a relational world, we are never alone, we matter, and we can experience positive change, no matter how fragmented, traumatized, or demoralized we may be today.

Can I say for sure that such a change would stop mass shootings? No. But surely a healthier society, with healthier people who aren’t fragmented, traumatized, and demoralized would enjoy more creativity, peace, harmony, and beauty. That is the world I want to create.

-- Sheri Kling

Catherine Keller - How to think about the pandemic

CV19 link

It awaits us to determine how we will react to crises in our lives

always with God as our helper as we work towards resolution.

- Catherine Keller, "How to think about the pandemic"

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Keller_(theologian)

A Letter from Catherine Keller

https://medium.com/@dostlund_42808/a-letter-from-catherine-keller-1930029c4914

April 2, 2020

Dear Ones,

Particularly, in this letter, ones who claim some seriously biblical, or explicitly theological, orientation. Amidst this pandemic, ones who may be wondering….

Is God punishing us?

We — the human species — certainly deserve it; we have gone way out of kilter in our most basic creaturely responsibilities. We’re out of balance, way out of sync with the wisdom, the Word, of the creation. We have taken our materiality for granted, in utter ingratitude. Isn’t this pandemic, and maybe worse to come, just what we have coming to us?

Is God testing us?

We surely are being tested, tried, exposed in our multiple vulnerabilities — challenged at our edges, both spiritual and physical. And that is not just as individuals and families and local communities. It is also our systems of life together, our economics and our politics, that are being tested. Some are failing worse than others. And our big national system is so far failing

big-time. But are we all together tested? By God?

Is God teaching us a lesson?

If so, we better learn it fast. So often, we have let the most aggressive and greedy portions of our species organize our material interactions, our global economies. Not that they asked our permission. But we who have less power have ceded much of the life of the planet, local and global, to the systems of power. We blame the powerful, but we do not reclaim the power. We have much to learn…so terrifyingly much.

Is God fixing the world?

Our carbon emissions are coming down, with millions of flights grounded. If emissions keep coming down, we might just prevent that 1.5C rise in global temperature. And pandemic can also bring down population levels, which have grown beyond sustainability. After all, the Bible teaches that it took the Great Flood to bring about a fresh start for humanity — and everything else. Almost total decline of the human population and the nonhuman ones too. Later, it took ten plagues to make Pharaoh “let my people go.” Huge collateral damage to the innocent, like Egyptian children and non-Hebrew slaves! Is our present plague the way God — like it or not — is fixing our world?

For many folks who find solace and guidance from their biblical faith, those questions must somehow be answered ‘yes.’ And this sense of divine intervention may lead them to do good, moral things. They can find biblical passages to read literally, to rip out of their context, to ignore millennia of history between an ancient text and our context, and find this kind of God who is directly and violently punishing, telling, testing, fixing.

I respect anyone’s sincere faith. But faith can get trapped in misguided interpretations. So, in the interest of the truth without which faith is an illusion — let me answer those four questions I posed.

Is the pandemic God’s punishment?

The coronavirus is having punishing effects, largely on the most vulnerable and least deserving. But “punishment” is supposed to signify justice. And yet in this and in most of the plagues of world history, the poor and the frail are the main victims. Doesn’t this make them the objects of a horribly unjust punishment? Besides, if God were the direct controlling agent of history, surely such unjust side-effects, such sloppy collateral damage, could have been avoided! Indeed, our getting to this point would never have been necessary.

God, in scripture, wants justice. So…no. God is not deploying the coronavirus to whip, execute, or otherwise punish us. Not even just to send us to our rooms like naughty children. Besides — isn’t punishment far too crude a notion for what we call God’s will?

Well then, testing us? That isn’t so punitive.

No, it’s not as punitive. But do you mean that God designed the pandemic to try our faith or our character, individual or collective? Again…no. Yes, our capacities are being put to the test as a society, as communities, as individuals — but not because God has selected this means to make folk grow better or stronger through suffering. Often, this “test” will have the opposite effect: we may grow weaker and die. Or we will fail the moral test and stock up for mere survival. Or the political system will pour maximum resources into reviving the economic system — rather than into the screaming needs of the suddenly jobless.

But then, isn’t God teaching us a lesson? Teaching us that we are all interdependent with each other — with all creatures, even with viruses?

No. Not if you mean that God has designed the disease to teach the lesson. It is too little too late, on the front of climate justice. And it is too much too fast, in the assault upon the weak. So, even if, improbably, we do collectively, globally — maybe even nationally — learn a great lesson about our togetherness as creatures, it won’t be because God has decided on pedagogy by plague.

Like it or not, you may insist: this crisis may be how the omnipotent God is now intervening to fix a sinful world. Don’t you believe that the Lord works to repair His world — whatever it takes?

Oh, I do think God works always for tikkun olam, the repair of the world. But no! Not by big destructive omnipotent interventions. No, God is no Big Fixer. The story of the flood powerfully narrates the radical new start that is possible after systemic human ugliness and tremendous natural disaster. And let us remember it is a highly condensed story, as is that of the Exodus — not a natural or literal history. Besides, the repair of the world in the Bible is a work of deep care, not careless destruction. The flood and the plagues, including COVID-19, do not care.

The God of Jesus, however, cares infinitely. And precisely for that reason, that God cannot, must not, be understood any longer as “in control,” as the omnipotent Lord who either always already determines all that is (in which case the world shouldn’t need repair in the first place); or as the One who occasionally steps in Big Time to Fix it.

Yet that is a big debate. “Theodicy” names an old theological argument about how to justify God — as just — in the face of unfair suffering. Christians often just go for the afterlife answer: whatever happens here, God will reward His own in heaven. As to this world, with its COVID-19 and other plagues — they assume it is somehow God’s will that we suffer (as punishment, as test, as lesson, as fix) and, well, it doesn’t matter anyway because I and my own are going to heaven when we die. The big supernaturalist shrug of — whatever.

So, no, I do not think that even the heavenly “out” works to relieve us of our collective human responsibility to be and do this world — better. Now.

Well, then, how is God working? Or are you saying that “God” is just a delusion of my wishful thinking or my unthinking tradition?

No, not that either! It is because we inherit some delusions about God that I offer this theological exercise. Those notions that God is an all-powerful force of control — always or when “He” deems fit — may actually obstruct God’s work in the world and in each of us. And it might be that God’s work in the world depends upon our work — precisely because the mystery called “God” is not a projection of sovereign dominance. Not something, someone, that works by top-down control.

If no, no, no, and no — how, then?

How about — by creative collaboration with the creatures?

The coronavirus is not sent as a divine punishment. But something not unrelated: in this crisis, God may well be calling us all to account, holding us responsible for the wellbeing of our world. It doesn’t mean God willed this crisis to happen — or any of the horrors and holocausts of history. It means that nothing happens apart from God, because God isn’t something that exists

apart from the world: the world is a part of God, and God participates in each part of the world. God feels and suffers it all — with us. But God also calls to us to face the meaning of this punishing plague, to face the interdependence of us all — an interdependence that our civilization conceals from us, that this contagion reveals to us.

God did not create the pandemic in order to test any of us; God didn’t create the pandemic! But perhaps we are being tested. Not by the torments of a bully God, but by invitation to rise to the occasion. To find the courage and the care that will sustain us.

And as a species, are we not being tested — to see if we might come to terms with our creaturely connections to each member of our species and to all the other species of the planet? If we fail the test, it is not that God will punish us but rather the consequences of our collective actions. It is the consequences of our actions and inactions that will bring us down. If not to the virus, then to the catastrophic effects of global warming. Coming soon. But isn’t the ultimate biblical test always and only love? If we rise to the occasion, it is because we grow in that dauntless love that casts out fear.

God is not spreading the coronavirus to teach us a lesson. The disease is the effect of imbalances between culture and nature. In this case, maltreatment of wild animals and systemic disregard for environmental regulations triggered the outbreak. But maybe God is trying to teach a lesson in and through the pandemic. Doesn’t God mean — the one who is always calling, inviting, us each and all? Trying to teach, to inspire, in the midst of whatever is happening?

Why then doesn’t the divine voice break through better? So many who declare themselves God’s spokespersons teach anything but that love — anything but the biblical love of the least, of the stranger, of every other. How can they confine love to their own community, race, religion, kind? How do they manage to drown out God’s teaching? Perhaps, because it comes in such “a still, small voice.” Might this pandemic, demanding so much sudden solitude, give us a chance to enter that stillness?

No, God is not going to fix the world through this or any disaster. So how can we hope for repair of the world? Certainly not by waiting for God to do it for us. Not by ignoring the spirit of wisdom that whispers, that breathes, within each of us always. Each of us individually.

But each, only in our all-togetherness — human, animal, vegetable, mineral. That togetherness takes on new meanings now, in all the layers of planetary interdependence, deadly or benign, oppressive or just, at home or in public. Now, as we learn that social distance does not mean separation, right in the midst of catastrophe, that Spirit might turn you, turn me, turn us together — into catalysts of transformation.

We might not fix much that is already too badly broken. But in a new, dark hopefulness, might we become creative collaborators? Even with the Creator, the one who triggers the simplest matter and the subtlest minds to new creation?

This is not a story of top-down creating. This new creation comes as we cooperate with each other and with the divine source of every other. This is new creativity in and through whatever chaos besets us. The chaos might feel like the Apocalypse. But remember that apokalypsis, at least in the Bible, does not mean The End of the World. It means revelation: not a final closing down, but a great dis/closure.

In whatever chaos we experience, we recycle everything that we can: ecologically and socially, democratically and theologically. We do not wait for a dictatorial fix from on high. We enter into creative collaboration in a process we can neither predict nor control. For the process of the new creation remains mysterious. “The new heaven and earth” translate no longer as supernatural intervention or afterlife escape — but as the radical renewal of atmosphere and earth.

I hope each of the four no’s have morphed into an odd kind of yes. Into affirmations of something of what you — you wondering ones — already deeply sense, feel, consider. And begin to do.

Love,

Catherine

March 2020

catherineekeller.com

Andre Rabe - Select Videos

Icons of Beauty

by Andre Rabe

Beauty is not something we simply behold … its something we enter into.

It disrupts our indifference and draws us to what is worth pursuing.

Does God Have A Clue ...?!

by Andre Rabe

Does God Have a Clue What It's Like to Be You?

by Andre Rabe

Of Giving of One's Self through Dance

'How Generous Are You Willing To Be?' A Dance Teaching Story

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesua/how-generous-are-you-will_b_6441146.html

by Jesua, healer, mentor, writer, mother

January 12, 2015

When I was 20 years old, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, I made an incredibly brave choice. I decided to dedicate one third of my college curriculum to the studying of modern dance.

Prior to that point I had been studying psychology, philosophy, writing and religion, as well as the visual arts. But the summer after my sophomore year I had a near-death experience, spanning several months, suddenly finding myself bizarrely ill, drastically losing weight, finally, after collapsing in fever, discovering a huge tumor the size of a cantaloupe swelling rapidly with blood inside my spleen. And so, after maneuvering and surviving three surgeries, having negotiated with angels and revisited all my life contracts, I was, needless to say, irrevocably transformed.

After taking a semester off for healing, I returned to college in January for my junior year and somehow knew that if I was going to successfully remain free of disease, I would need to fully and completely incarnate. I would need to actually inhabit this body I was living in, not just drag it around, loosely tethered to my spirit. And so, I decided, with huge trepidation and terror, to dance.

It was an especially courageous choice not only because I had never danced before, but because I still actively lived with mostly invisible neurological "damage" from my waist down, as the bi-product of childhood meningitis, had worn leg braces as a child, and did not have access to "normal" mind-leg control.

I had healed to the extent that hardly anyone (besides my mother, maybe) would notice I still slightly dragged my left foot. But in a dance class, requiring complex coordination and balance, my physical limitations would be horribly exposed.

And so they were, and so it was: immensely, painfully humbling. How many times did we, the students, line up, one by one, to dance across the floor? And how many times, come my turn, did I trip and fall, and then feel the others turn away aghast, in excruciating embarrassment on my behalf? Plenty of times, I'll tell you.

There were days I simply couldn't face the challenge, and pretended I was sick. There were days I sat on the sidelines, fuming with grief and envy that I couldn't move with the grace and fluidity and ease of neurological connection my classmates could seemingly take for granted.

And yet slowly, slowly, I learned to dance. Neurological pathways literally opened, healed and came to life in my lower body. Muscles developed. I cultivated my mid-line, learned to celebrate gravity, learned to enjoy the power and thrust and pleasure of movement. My spirit dove all the way down into my pelvis, my legs, my feet. My life-force came IN.

There were moments I actually tasted physical ecstasy for the first time, true surrender to life. There were moments I discovered, firsthand, what it was to be danced.

Then, one day, in the middle of morning warm-ups, moving through a simple routine to the comforting familiarity of the live piano player's warm-up melody, suddenly my dance teacher waved to the piano player to stop playing. The room was silent and all the students stopped dancing.

A tiny woman with a huge voice and presence, our teacher approached me slowly in her petite, graceful, chiseled body, with hungry, angry ferocity shining in her eyes like a panther about to pounce.

Then, in front of the entire class, she yelled at me, scolding me, with so much intense love and conviction and passion I have perhaps never recovered since.

She said: "Look at you, shame on you! Holding these long, beautiful limbs so close, so tight to your sides? Look at you!?"

Then she got in my face: "How generous are you willing to be? How generous are you willing to be with your whole life? Will you share yourself with us? With the world? Do you dare? Or are you just going to hold yourself tightly in, hold these long arms and legs all to yourself?

"Are you just going to be stingy? Just keep yourself to yourself for the rest of your life? In case you fall? In case you fail? In case you make a fool of yourself? In case we see how imperfect you are?

"OR: are you going to choose to just be generous anyway? To just take up as much space as you actually take up? To be as big, as graceful, as long, as gorgeous, as enormous as you actually are?"

She stopped, out of breath from her spontaneous explosion, and stood there, staring up at me, tears of wisdom's fierce love glistening in her eyes. Stunned tears came to my eyes as well, and I met her gaze, with what must have been the light of humbled gratitude.

If I had known how to bow then, I would have bowed. I would have fallen to my knees and kissed her feet. But instead I just stood there, meeting her gaze, shaking, knowing I had been given a tremendous teaching, a true gift.

That was one of those life-changing moments: in my dance, in my heart, in my life. Bless her heart, such a true teacher, a true life-midwife. She awakened in me something that was sleeping still; in fear, in laziness, in reluctance to actually embodying my imperfect body, in resistance to taking up as much space in this lifetime as I was here to take up.

Her words come back for me now, 20 years later, as I continuously summon the courage for leaps and bounds and surrender of a different nature. Her words are a soothing balm, an affirmation, a blessing: "How generous are you willing to be? Will you share yourself? Do you dare? Or are you just going to be stingy? In case you fall? In case you fail? How generous are you willing to be with your whole life?"

True generosity can look as many ways as there are individual moments to live. It is not necessarily a grand or public gesture of exposure. It could be as simple as your own hand tenderly touching your own face. It could be a deep breath. It could be the generosity of forgiveness, or self-forgiveness. It could be a smile. Or the simple word "yes." We always know, deep inside, what the choice of generosity could look like for us, in any given moment. Generosity of presence, of honesty, of kindness, of trust, of love, of truth.

Just imagine her fierce eyes of immense love, my friend, glaring at you like a hungry predator, saying: "How generous? How generous?" and just feel how it inspires you to open your heart, spread your wings, and live and love and dance and be danced with what remains of this fleeting life.

I dare you. I meet you here in this generosity. With all my being, I meet you.