RELOCATION

Dear All of Us,

By the sixth grade 
I had attended 
six schools.
While a bit free spirited, 
I was not even close 
to incorrigible - honest!
Neither were my parents 
skipping town before the sheriff 
closed in for unpaid rent.
Dad 's career careened us 
across the country.
I got to see lots of places 
and meet all sorts of people.
Actually, I rather liked it and
adjusted to the relocations easily.

It was a good bit different
when I entered the seminary.
That relocation involved 
a lot more change and adjustment: 
- a highly regimented life, schedule and ethos
- You did what you were told and did so 
  in prescribed circumstances and manner 
- forty guys to a dorm, too many of whom 
  snored up a storm
- protracted periods of silence
  throughout the day
- meals miles from Mom's good cooking
- assigned and mandatory  
  chores, study halls and chapel 
- no TV or leaving the property
- cold showers (young males, no girls) 
It was a bit of an ecclesial boot camp.
I did adjust to the relocation,
but it took some doing.


Sixty five years later here you and I are,
abruptly and roughly relocated 
to a really different space
by this world wide Pan Problem.
And it's hard as hell to adjust 
to this kind of a relocation.

Everyone wants to know
how we're going to get through this
and when will things get back to normal?

It's like being dislocated in place.

It's also like being relocated
captive in a foreign land.

What we're going through right now
is our version and experience 
of what the ancient Israelites
endured when forcibly relocated 
to a foreign land.
Jerusalem had been leveled,
and they were swept away.
It was their Babylonian Captivity.


Like them, 
we have gotten ourselves into 
our own forced relocation.
We've become so lopsided in our living
that we're falling over and apart.
It's not that God is punishing us.
It's the chickens of our behavior 
coming home to roost.
So much has gotten 
so unreal for
so long in
so many ways
in our culture and way of living
that we really could not handle 
a natural disaster for all our 
money, expertise, science and resources.
We are so split and spoiled 
that we couldn't be together 
and pull together to head off 
this destruction of what we had,
this terrible relocation,
this captivity of our culture.

One germ disables our bodies.
Another disables our societal soul.
Together they have relocated us 
in a bad place.

In their bad place,
in their Babylonian Captivity,
the Israelites suffered 
that painful dislocation 
for seventy years.
In that time and pain 
they came to their senses.
Great good developed.
Those seventy years  
became for them a
    
   Reality Retreat. 

It readied them for 
renewal and relocation
           to
        Reality  
A New Now and Way.

When will we return
from our current captivity,
return to normal?
Well, my money says 
we need to invest heavily
       In our own 
     Reality Retreat
before we'll be readied
to return to anything 
close to a healthy normal.
And when we do return,
it better not be 
getting back to normal
as it was before.
That "normal" caused 
this terrible dislocation.
We will only get 
to a good place 
when we have grown into 

      A Renewed 
          and 
     Real Normal.

As mentioned here 
in an earlier posting
Richard Rohr offers us 
a lot of help in this.
He outlines for us a
    Reality Retreat
        entitled

"REALITY INITIATING US"

It is very hard
It is tremendously promising.
It guides us through 
this dislocation and 
opens a way to 
a fresh relocation.
Please see below for

 A RETREAT FORWARD. 

Tough times in a bad place,
faced and embraced,
grew the Israelites free 
to a healthy 

       RELOCATION

May it be so for us and our world.

        With Love,
    in a pained place 
     and hopeful yet,

        John Frank

           *****


This week we were blessed by folks 
from the country of Lesotho
joining in with us for the first time.
       Welcome to them 
                and 
all our new associates here at

     "frankly speaking"

  spirituality for the street

-posted each Thursday evening,
       east coast USA time
   johnfrankshares.blogspot.com

-available each Friday 
 by automatic email delivery
        sign up above

-past postings are available at
         BLOG ARCHIVE
      right column here


              ******

     
 A RETREAT FORWARD


Welcome to paradox.
We retreat to forward.
We step away from "A Fix".
We retreat to where we are.
We don't get ahead of pain.
We feel it.
We see the seeds of destruction.
We face our planting of them.
We lament the harvest of unrealness.
We let The Spirit sweep a cleanness.
We accept and plant Spirit given
          
         Seeds of Real.


This retreat is offered for
prayer and pondering
as long as it takes to take.

It calls for slow, deep looks at 
self and society as 
            was, 
                 is, 
                    can be.
It calls for going through 
a defining and demanding
             Initiation.

Approached on our own,
this retreat will only 
make things worse.

Coming soul naked, 
accepting enfoldment in
    LOVE's EMBRACE
is the only approach to
   A Retreat Forward. 

            *****


Wise worlds initiate the young.
Otherwise, the young bolt to destruction.

We are not a wise world.
We do not initiate our young.

We are young no matter our years.
We are not initiated.
We have bolted to destruction.

We need to be initiated.
We need to accept

    Reality Initiating Us

Fair Warning: It's hard.

All world religions initiate along the same lines.
The goal is to put the young in their place,
not the one they claim if uninitiated.
The latter places them in danger 
and they place the rest of us in danger.

Right now the world is endangered, 
              lethally so, 
by a global society uninitiated by reality.
Our goal here is to let reality put us right,
put us in our real place 
in the composition of creation,
woven into a firm social unity,
not singular threads pulling apart,
unraveling the fabric of that social unity.
To say it otherwise, we're in big time trouble
for all the loose cannons careening
across the deck of the not so good ship,
                    Shared Life .

Such initiation challenges our bolting ahead 
unchecked and destructive.
What we are going through right now 
is the result of just that - 
the destructive bolting ahead 
by legions of those uninitiated by/to reality.
They are not mostly young of years.
They are neighbors, co-workers,
friends and family of all ages.
They are central to government, politics,
business, entertainment and sports, 
religion, education and finance.
They are we.


Checked and put in our rightful place
we are then in sync with reality. 
Reality with a capital "R"
is another name for God.
It is of a piece with 
other ways of saying God:
     Truth, Goodness, Being, Existence, 
     Actuality, Unity, Cosmic Energy, Love.
Great to be in sync, placed with such.

We are blessed to have retreat guidance 
from Richard Rohr. His series is 

      " Reality Initiating Us "

It would be good to take more than a day 
with each day of it.
Sink into it.
Let it sink into us.
Consider:
  - What's being shared here.
  - Where am I with it?
  - Where are we as a people with it?
  - What needs to change
  - What does that mean for me, for us?
  - What is the reality, The Reality here?
  - What is the promise, the harmony, 
    the goodness of being righted to Reality?

Richard's Series is online at:

Richard Rohr - Daily Meditation Archive - Center for Action and Contemplation
                      March 29, 2020 to April 12, 2020

                                     *****



        An Angry Prayer

             Psalm 137

        A Lament over the 
    destruction of Jerusalem


By the rivers of Babylon -
   there we sat down and there 
         we wept
   when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there 
   we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
   asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for
         mirth, saying
    "Sing us one of the songs of
           Zion!"


How could we sing the Lord's
        song
   in a foreign land?
If I forget you. O Jerusalem,
   let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof 
         of my mouth,
If I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
   above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the 
         E'domi-ites
  the day of Jerusalem's fall,
how they said, "Tear it down!
        Tear it down!
  Down to its foundations!"
O daughter Babylon, you
         devastator!
   Happy shall they be who pay
       you back
   what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take
        your little ones
  and dash them against the 
        rock!
                    ******

OUCH!!
No soft pedaling here!
Those rough, raw ancients
were angry at the destruction of 
their location and their relocation 
as captives in a foreign
place and way.

While we play at being 
much more polite and gentile, 
we're every bit as furious 
at our parallel fate.
So let's take those folks 
in their time and place.
They put our 
"Smack'em upside the head"
more crudely and more honestly.

The Israelites had to get around 
to seeing that 
their sinful, sick ways
set them up for down.
So do we.
How long and how much 
do we need to hurt,
to suffer, before we see 
that it is the result 
of our sinful, sick ways -
  - selfish, surface satisfactions,
  - few having more 
    than they can count or use
    (failed CEO of Boeing fired yet
    leaving with $62,000,000 in benefits)
  - most not having enough 
    to count on for decent, 
    humane living 
    (refugees at our borders, 
    the homeless in Syria
    to name two of too many millions),
  - so sadly called "Reality" shows 
    that fundamentally give lie to healthy living
    ( your pick of too many),
  - principle sacrificed on 
    the altars of politics, power and profit
    ( sad same pick )
  - intimacies that aren't
  - not only the lie of "alternate facts",
    but blatant misinformation -
    precludes any sure footing 
    for decision and action
  - churches more market share driven   
    than Spirit driven
  - enough military to destroy earth 
    and civilization multiple manys.


Of course there are and have been 
good people, movements 
and institutions aplenty.

As a whole. though, we as a people 
have gotten sloppy and sodden, 
following trends and leaders on a path  
to tip, trip and down.

The ancient Israelites 
saw it, changed, 
readied for remedy and relocation.
Will we?

                    ******


   It hardly matters what day it is anymore, 
  since the future is so unclear. I sit quietly,
  and I open my heart and mind 
  for the unexpected. My prayers of the heart are
  "humility, through mystery," and
  "peace, through acceptance." - C. Thorman


                    ******



                   NORMAL ??

"Normality is a paved road: 
 It's comfortable to walk,
 but no flowers grow on it."

         Vincent van Gogh


               ******