Healana

Our world needs your help, dear God.

Our world needs your help, dear God, to return to a state of peace with one another. There is little joy in the world and we kill one another. There is little compassion and we attack one another with words of hate. There is little knowledge of one another, and we listen only to ourselves.

We have created.

We have created greater monetary wealth for some and greater poverty for most. Our livelihood and our economy crumble around us. We are surrounded by self-made fears. Our bodies have fallen into decay. We reach for ecstasy and have fallen into despair. We grumble and complain. We have forgotten the attributes of godliness.

You are.

You, dear God, are the perfection we hope for: To come to a knowledge of graciousness, real compassion and patience; To be abounding in kindness and faithfulness, assuring love for a thousand generations, forgiving transgression, iniquity and sin and granting pardon. Bring us to the values we need so desperately that underlie all of life’s goodness. Return us to joy.

Only you know the way.

Our fundamental belief has become that only we know the way to you, but on the way we have lost the values that you represent. One of us has said, “if you do not belong to my religion, you can never arrive at the highest rung of heaven.” Another says, “when the Messiah comes, only those who follow my beliefs will be saved.” And yet another says, “if you do not bow down the way that I bow down, then you shall not live. My way is the way of life; yours is the way of death.”

Our world needs your help.

Our world needs your help, dear God, to heal this arrogant belief that we can find the Rapture here and now, that the human intervention of worldly destruction can bring the Apocalypse and peace. It is only yours to bring.

Heal.

Heal this Tower of Babel we have created, and by loving-kindness, return us to the heart of God. Heal, oh my soul, dear God, for I am here, willing to heal myself and your world. I am truly here today and I am ready now to heal.

Amen.

Found in the heart of the healers
many eons deep
in the intimate nearness,
the fulfillment of all their dreams,
in the reality of now.

Paul, the layman, September 15, 2004

Jer 17:14 Heal me, oh Lord, and I shall be healed.


The Fellowship

In Holland, unlike anywhere else in the world, Santa arrives drawn by horse! But this year, here in Hillsborough, North Carolina, the DVD extended version of the Lord Of The Rings arrived in a sleigh drawn by Gandalf's horse, Shadowfax. It was a timely gift from my son this year. None of the Nazgul's flying creatures pulled that sleigh.

My children and I enjoyed seeing the three movies together, but they also understood my nostalgic and literary interest in Tolkein's Trilogy. After dinner, on went the DVD. At 11:15 we finished disc one, enthralled and happy at last to see all the details which were left out of the big screen version, cut in order to keep the movies of reasonable length. It made us appreciate the director, Peter Jackson even more.

Being rife with complaints over the movie missing subtleties from the book, we finally filled the corners of our minds with the DVE version, now jam packed with Peter Jackson's new action shots, with the Trilogy details we had yearned for and with the Tolkeinisms which had been left aside.

I wear Tolkein like a thirty-three year old hat, newly refurbished and more comforting than ever because one evening in 1971 I was gathered up with our group by the hippie, Steve, who then opened a book unknown to the rest of us. We lived with nine hippies and our seven (legitimate) children on a Middlebush, New Jersey farm. Steve said he wanted to read something aloud we would like. For the next three months, we frequently settled down after dinner while someone read a chapter of the Trilogy to the family that night.

Thus it was that when I heard that the movies were making, I wrote my first new song in years. It was about Hobbits. But then the three movies debuted with music by Howard Shore. Beautiful. Seeing each movie in its turn I was thrilled at the trueness of the characters. I sat, wonderstruck, through pictures that had only been in our minds. At the same time there was disappointment in missing much of the nuance and meaning from the books. Along with pathos and humor I found extensive war and violence.

The extended version DVD brings back the nuance. DVD one came to an end eleven fifteen at night in the middle of a battle scene and I wanted to see more. So did my sons. But "OK, that's enough for tonight," I said reluctantly, knowing my early schedule for the next morning.

"Well, Dad, you go to bed. We'll see the rest without you."

"How can you watch my gift without me, you …" Well I called them the name that meant they were illegitimate. But I told them that I knew they weren't, and that I was going to bed whether they watched more or not.

They stayed up and watched, those sons of… um… mine. I can't blame them. Youth fights a war of its own while we wise old men and women only dream of conquest. We send our sons and daughters out to fight in the Fellowship that rings us. War is so exciting. War invites us to kill, to be heroes. It is from the Ents led by Treebeard that we learn about true bravery. Deep and careful considerations done in no hurry will tell us if our enemy refuses friendship after long and patient attempts. Then we must defend. Still not to aggressively war.

Remember it is those who war who destroy our forests and our people. They destroy with war and fill their pockets with the profits of war.

There is something else of interest. The movie, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, is the first film to feature NaturalMotion virtual actors. These virtual actors have been allowed to evolve over generations on the computer to walk and run and have the natural body responses of human actors. For example, when struck by an arrow, they crumble into a heap under their own bodily responses as a human would, differently than a cartoon, which needs to be drawn. This computer software allowed the orcs and the men of Mordor to respond as any soldier would on their march to war.

So what decisions did these robots make?

They ran away.

Only advanced programming by NaturalMotion startups Torsten Reil and Colm Massey kept the hordes of evil on the dying fields.
And how are we humans programmed?

A fellowship rings us. And war invites us. How will our own genectically programmed software allow us to respond? We want to fight. We want to run away. We want to be a hero.

We want to make a friend of someone we thought we had to fight. In Tolkein’s story, Frodo befriends Gollum. Yes, Gollum dies. In the end, evil destroys itself. Mostly, we don’t need to do the killing.

“Please,” I asked of humanity, “let the straight lines of our family’s lineages dissolve, and create a pan-human lineage. All humanity is moving in one direction over time, after all. Expand the human idea into a circle that includes us all and turns our ‘lineages’ into ‘circulages.’”

Early this morning, I looked out my bedroom window to the pond. There it was, surrounded by too tall loblolly pines. Purple Martins swooped in where mosquitoes should fear to tread. Bats filled bellies with the last of their bug-eyed breakfast. The battle of nature. Could we humans get beyond the nature of aggression, or would we eat the body, mind and soul of our created enemies, filling ourselves with the raw juices of the chain of life forever?

Then I fell back to sleep. I dreamed that we humans were dropped into the pond of existence as a pebble dropped into a pond of water. Our ripples expanded to the shores in rings that were the shared gifts of human ideas. In the pond, the ripples hit the shore, weaving back on themselves in a beautiful dance of the rings of life.

We can disturb the pond with our angry sticks in righteous anger over the rights and wrongs we have done each other.

Or, instead, we can sit by the pond and watch the sunrise of life. We don’t need each other’s oil, each other’s water, each other’s money, each other’s flesh. We see the sun, or we will see the sun go down on the dark night of our early death.

We can resolve our differences in love. We can reside in the circles of the human idea; live to an old age to see our progeny at peace with the land; die in dignity, happiness and good health; create safety, ease of life and the peace of normal life and death together.

Those who war destroy our forests and our people. They destroy with war and fill their pockets with the profits of war.

If they want war, let those who think they rule go to the front line, along with the 1200 soldiers whose lives and families have already been destroyed by death, thousands more who have been maimed and forgotten, and allies and foes whose deaths have been uncounted. King George was not like the kings of Rohan and of Gondor, who rode into battle with their fighters against the greatest of evil, the Lord of the Rings, the ruler of Mordor. King George was afraid to die. He was like the king of the legions of the dead. He would abdicate his responsibility and lose his honor, or like the Steward of Gondor, he would send his horsemen to a useless battle and grieve the death of his lineage.

It is too easy to send someone else to fight when there is danger. It is hard to take the bully by the hand and make of him a friend.

There is a difference. The ruler of Mordor created war. He was truly evil. Evil does destroy itself in the end. But those who create war destroy themselves in the end, crumbling into ruins along with the unfortunate souls who are taken along with them.

“The 1200” foot soldiers sent into our battle died fighting an evil leader, too, but one who had little power, no link to orcs or other terrorists and no weapons of mass destruction. This is a bully to stop, but no need to send our families to die in war. Stop the evil, but preserve yourself. Use wisdom. You don’t need to run away as the robots did, but evolve, and make yourself powerful as Gandalf. Make yourself a powerful and wise friend.