I would not have noticed her had our subway car not cleared of people at Lexington Avenue. She wore a tattered stocking cap. She removed it and stuffed it into her jacket. She held a grimy w…
Source: Mother, You Need Shoes
Do you know that there are people who will, literally, die if the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is repealed? Literally. Die. I know of at least one friend – a young person, beautiful, intelligent, amazing – who has been told by her medical team that if the ACA is repealed she has four options: 1) move to another state 2) move away from her home and family, and into a nursing home 3) pay for everything out-of-pocket – which would bankrupt her family (it would cost more than a million dollars a year) or 4) go into a hospice and wait to die. Basically, people like my friend – who want desperately to live – are being forced to face the fact that their political representatives don’t give a rip if they live or die, so long as their rich corporate buddies can make a profit.
The United States is the only industrialized nation that has for-profit health insurance. It is shameful. It is murder.
I myself rarely use the health care insurance that I’m enrolled in. But, as a member of a community, and as a responsible citizen, I have no problem contributing to a pot of money that will help others who find themselves in the same circumstances as my friend. There are ways we can provide for each other as a community that we can’t provide as single individuals. I can’t give my beautiful young friend the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year she needs to survive – but I can share my part of a collective health insurance pot with her, and I’m happy to do so.
My dear Humoristian hooligans-
If ever the world needed your kind-hearted sass and your good-natured love of humanity it is now. We are living in interesting times, for sure – but you were made for these times – and the world needs what you have to offer. May your love and courage touch and uplift all you meet today. May your sense of humor lighten the burden of those who are athirst for joy in a desert of responsibility and solemnity. May your smile be contagious, and your joy transforming.
Go out there and work your magic!
Karen
So the youngest son got to decide what CD to put into the player as we’re driving through Seattle. He picked one out of my collection and plopped it into the player with a big grin on his face. Mamma Mia. Yup. So there we are sitting at a busy stoplight in Seattle – cars jammed all around us. “Slipping Through My Fingers” comes on. He cranks up the volume to, like, the loudest loud (an “11” on the Spinal Tap scale), rolls down the window, and rests his tattooed arm on the top of the window frame. Then he starts beating his hand to the beat of ABBA and nodding his head up and down to the song – like he’s really into it – and I am just dying with embarrassment and laughter – cringing and laughing so hard I have tears pouring down my face. The kid cracks me up. I cannot imagine being part of a family with no sense of humor.
I was looking through old drafts in my wordpress file, and came upon this quote:”I care not what you believe; not one atom do I care; the one important thing for me to know is this – that you are entitled to my compassionate consideration; you are entitled to my respect; you are entitled to my applause for all that you do that is in the right direction. You are entitled to my kindest wishes, to my deepest encouragement; and you are entitled to nothing from me but that which means love and charity and loving kindness, and you must not get anything else from me.” – Edward A. Kimball
And I can’t think of anything else I need to add to that.
If we would open their prison doors for the sick, we must first learn to bind up the broken-hearted. If we would heal by the Spirit, we must not hide the talent of spiritual healing under the napkin of its form, nor bury the morale of Christian Science in the grave-clothes of its letter. The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love. – from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
My dear Christian Science friends,
I humbly suggest that there are things we should consider NOT doing – because… well… we ALREADY look weird enough.
1) Instead of saying “I’m feeling ill” we sometimes tell people “I am working on the problem of a belief of sickness…” By the time we finish telling people we’re not feeling well, their toddlers are graduating high school. This is weird.
2) We wonder why we haven’t seen Ed in church for a year, and then finally someone tells us he is “no longer with us.” In other words – he died a year ago, but let’s not talk about it. This is weird.
3) We can no longer read up-close, but refuse to get glasses because that would be “giving into error.” This is ego and vanity, and it’s also very weird.
4) If we visit an optometrist, dentist, or other medical doctor we feel terrible pangs of guilt and remorse and feel unworthy of Christian Science, and a disappointment to God. Okay. Listen. God doesn’t give a hoot about that stuff, one way or the other. When we try to attribute human emotions and feelings and judgment to God we are anthropomorphizing God – trying to make God man-like. God is unchanging Love, Truth, and Life, and nothing we do or say or think or believe is going to change the nature of God, or Her love for us. So please, friends, stop doing that guilt thing! It is really weird.
5) When we catch someone using improper Christian Science-ese in conversation (refer back to #1), we sometimes seem to feel it is our duty to lob an earnest, lengthy, preachy lecture upon them “correcting” their thought and setting them back on the right path. We sometimes do this to non-Christian Scientists, too. Heck, I’ve seen Christian Scientists doing this to people they’ve never even met before. This is a little off-putting. It’s also totally weird.
6) When someone tells us they’re hurt, to state “there is no sensation in matter” and then ignore the person who’s come to us for human comfort does not seem to me very Christianly or Scientific . Please take whatever human steps you can take to help or comfort someone who’s come to you in need. Dismissing someone who’s hurt or sick with the words “there is no sensation in matter” is kind of lazy, not very loving, and really, really weird. Although we can, and should, see the truth – the perfection of God and Her creation – when confronted with a picture of injury or sickness – that is our job as Christian Scientists – Mary Baker Eddy tells us in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love.”
7) Long meetings about whether it’s okay for a reader to thank a soloist after her solo; whether we should be allowed to read from any bible but the King James Bible in church; whether we should call ourselves “Christian Scientists” or “students of Christian Science”; whether we should refer to Mary Baker Eddy as “Mrs. Eddy” or “Eddy”; whether we should exclude people from membership in our branch churches because of their sexual orientation, or because they use medication, or because they haven’t ascended, yet; whether we should allow any kind of accompaniment but an organ; what readers should wear on the platform; and etcetera, are all, in my opinion, a colossal waste of time and a distraction from the real mission of Christian Science, which, I believe is the transformation of our world through the power of God, Love. To expend a huge amount of time on human fussiness and opinion and narrow-minded nonsense, instead of on the healing work that Jesus demanded of his followers, is a terrible shame. It is also beyond weird.
8) We sometimes walk around with a kind of smugness about ourselves as Christian Scientists – like our religion owns the power of Love and Truth. We sometimes seem to be especially smug if generations in our family have been practicing Christian Science. Or if we’ve gone to private Christian Science schools. Or our parents or grand-parents held official positions in the Christian Science church – like CS is something we somehow inherited from our parents and grandparents. Umm…. no, the power found in Christian Science is not genetic – it’s not like the midi-chlorians that “run strong” in the family of Luke and Leia of the Star Wars movies. Christian Science is available, equally, to all of God’s children – no one has more access to the power of Love than anyone else. And to think that we do is just completely weird.
9) And if you’ve read this post, and none of the things I’ve mentioned that make us look weird seem weird to you… well… that is just…yeah, weird.
In his book, Rolling Away the Stone, Stephen Gottschalk writes: “…after the death of their founder, Christian Science became to a significant degree routinized… Eddy appears to have anticipated with great apprehension that the Christian Science church… would settle down into a kind of bland predictability when she was no longer on the scene. To her, being a Christian Scientist in any meaningful sense involved not only a strong commitment but, in a sense, a spirit of adventure.” And Gottschalk quotes William F. Hillman as writing: “The awakened Christian sees Christian Science as a means for coming into the full truth of being – the full awareness of God… It turns man away from system, dogmas, formal creeds, to God… Christian Science describes Mrs. Eddy’s experience of God. It is not a theory about God or speculation about Him… it is this experience we are after and not some understanding of a system. ” Gottschalk writes: “The readiness to plunge ahead, to leave behind what had been outgrown, to move in a new direction before it could be fully determined where it would lead – these traits were elements of Eddy’s sensibility… If there is a pattern to her life, it is the recurrence of new beginnings, and new departures.”
Dear readers,
Ahem. Yeah. You might have noticed I am shoveling out the prose this morning. What happened was – well… I thought I’d clean out my “Drafts” box – so I’m tossing stuff out and re-working some of my old drafts and posting things I’d forgotten I’d had in there.
I do apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing in your email boxes today.
Sincerely,
Karen
The other day I had to take care of some business on behalf of my dad. At one point I needed to know his birthday – I can never seem to remember when Dad’s birthday is – it’s either this day in June or the next day in June – and I was ready to give him a call to find out, when I realized all I needed to do was go to Wikipedia.
Whoaaaah…. right?
“Old age” comes little by little, I think –
little surrenders of who we are
to the experts and authorities,
to convenience and comfort –
someone tells us we need to stay out
of the sun, to eat only certain foods,
to travel only at the right times
and to the right places,
and to wash our hands after every
handshake and human touch –
and we listen and obey.
And so we spend our days in “preventative”
exams – counting the pills into our trays –
hoping to increase the number of our days.
And little by little we relinquish
the small pleasures that make life
meaningful – the joy of adventure,
noon-time lunch with our faces turned
towards the sun, whipped cream on
our cocoa, shaking hands with new friends,
and listening to our own hearts to create lives
worth living.
And we lose our lives in a fear of death.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 