“Believing it was the goddess Iris who helped guide woman’s souls to heaven, the ancient Greeks planted iris flowers on the graves of their loved ones…” – Pinterest. Thousands of years later, the Iris is still planted on the graves of loved ones, especially women.
My flower art assistant. With friend.
The Calla calls out with its hook.
I don’t know if you can call it a Sabbath, but I’ll try. Maria and I are working hard not to work hard on Saturdays and Sundays; we have been wearing ourselves out.
I start today with my daily bird watch (a wonderful meditation), and the Cambridge Pantry requests for food support. Your response has been excellent, and your struggle to keep love alive is fantastic. We will win that struggle; love is much more powerful than hate. You are keeping faith and hope alive for lots of people, including me.
If I can, I’ll get a few flower photos up later. In any case, I’ll see you tomorrow morning
Today, Saturday the 29th, the Cambridge Food Pantry asks for help getting some chili back on the shelves. The last one was picked off yesterday (see Volunteer Ellenor above). Sarah is also eager to get some tomato sauce from the soup the Army of Goods sent earlier. Chili is one of the most requested foods in the pantry.
The urgent item is the Polygraph for the new and much-appreciated dental shelf.
Fresh fruit and vegetables four times a week.
Sarah’s item request:
Contadina Tomato Sauce with Italian Herbs, 15 Oz (Pack of 12 Cans), $14.16.
None Left on the Pantry shelves: Amazon Bargain:
Hormel Chili With No Beans, 15 Oz (8 Pack), $2.24.
______
Thanks for sending these wonderful messages.
I wanted you to see just some of the soups and clam chowder still coming into the Cambridge Food Pantry. Thank you.
Thanks for hearing the appeal for soup. For the first time, the stock will last a week or two. You are angels. Keeping Love Alive!
The Amazon Cambridge Pantry Urgent Wish List is accessible anytime, day or night.
Click on the links here or use the green button at the bottom of every blog post. Every item on the wish list is urgent and updated several times daily. Some people are adopting favored items and sending them when they can. Thanks for the messages; the pantry volunteers greatly appreciate them.
“That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris, which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns and where, in some dapped depth, man’s mind had been born.”
— Vladimir Nabokov.
My assistant flower photographer,
The Christian was required and created for one purpose and no other: “to be one more worker for the kingdom, one more transmitter of the divine Charity, the great spendthrift of God. From the first, writes Evelyn Wunderhill in “The Soul’s Journey.”
That, she wrote, was Jesus’s request and command; it was the very purpose of Christianity. An amateur seeker, I grew up searching for faith, and the closest I came to it was Jesus Christ, whose message was simple and very powerful: help the needy; sanctity is helping those with nowhere else to go. Of all the dogma I read and heard of, that message made the most sense and deeply inspired me.
I did not come to worship Jesus as a God or feel comfortable with what Christianity has become in our time. But there is no doubt about Christ. He was the primary transmitter of the Devine Charity, the world’s first faith about helping those who need help and calling on others to do the same. If I couldn’t embrace Jesus as a God, I could embrace him as an inspiration.
He did not and does not need to be a God to me for me to be deeply touched by his straightforward message and try to follow it. That is as close to God as I need to get.
The brilliant spiritualist and mystic Wunderhill said Jesus was humanity’s sacred pattern. I love her message, too. “He sets the standard,” she wrote, “showing what man is meant to be, revealing himself in every demand on our generosity, however homely, and by that demand alone and our response to it, separating the real from the unreal, the living from the dead.”
Christianity has a new standard; I can’t claim to know what it is, but I do know it’s not something I can follow. There is nothing Christ said that I can’t embrace and accept.
Many people who call themselves Christians have betrayed and abandoned him, but that is not the business of me or the mystic. I’m on my own. The spirit of the most potent message and messenger ever known in the world is not dead and will emerge when needed in one way or another. It’s getting close; I can feel it. Love is missed and in need of rescue.
He who altered the world will, in one way or another, return, not in Mosques and Churches and Temples, I suspect, but in the hearts and souls of all of us who want a better and kinder way.
I no longer understand the core message of modern Christianity; I can only see that it has lost the way of the founder. The sacred pattern for humanity is in the hearts and souls of the plain people, not any Church. How strange that the message of Christ would beat in my heart; a Jew turned Quaker into a mystic, all alone in a world of oddballs and fellow mystics.
I have to define my idea of faith and spirituality; it doesn’t fit into Christianity or any other faith right now. But isn’t that what mystics do?
I’m with Underhill, a passionate advocate of mysticism, life in reality, and truth. She never lost faith in Christ’s message.
“The worth of men,” (and women), wrote Underhill, “is not judged by their admiration of its beauty, but by the perfection with which it is reproduced within their own lives. We are required to express that which we are shown in contemplation in action, not by our peculiar beliefs and punctual religious practices, but simply by the exercise of Rescuing Love. That is an incredible and timely goal, free of cruelty, hate, and rage.
So, this spiritual work is undertaken without entirely realizing it; my job is to Rescue Love and take it back from the haters by doing Christ’s work—by loving others and helping them reduce their pain and fear. The mystic, Underhill says, has to come to faith by himself or herself, not the dogma of strangers.
I don’t need a church, a movement, or a label stuck in my head for this. I only need to be me and do good when I can find the need.
How does one “rescue” love?
I love the idea of Rescuing Love; it is precisely what our society needs and will, I believe, become a powerful movement in its own time. What a beautiful way to fight back.
