please take action

i am not going to go off on my soapbox tirade about the FDA (the EPA, the CDC etc.) and how they are simply puppets for american corporate giants.

i am going to ask you to please take action against the latest in a long line of questionable decisions being made by the FDA. this particular mess up is the one where they are going to OK the selling of meat and other products from cloned animals, and not require any labelling to that effect. ri-goddamn-diculous. honestly. no one knows what kind of implications or health hazards these products will have. they should AT LEAST make it mandatory to TELL people what they are buying. honestly!

please, you don't have to have a US address, just click here to send a letter to the right people.

signing off,
a very pissed of me

a Great Idea

so i have been thinking about this. and i wondered to myself - can human beings really love 'god'? for all intents and purposes, 'god' is really an abstract concept; an idea really. can we devote our whole hearts to this idea of god? some might say that jesus was the human manifestation of god and that we are to love jesus. but again we are faced with trying to be in love with a prophetic figure who lived two millenia before now. not an awfully long period in the grand scheme of things but we can scarcely imagine what jesus was really like - it's kind of like a long distance relationship through letters really. again, we have an idea but nothing concrete.

so my question follows this thought that in the same way an artist puts a great deal of himself into his work, can it not be argued that the Creator has done the same with all that She has made? can we not fall in love with "god" by being present with all living things that have come from Her hand? is she not within these things? could it be that the collective existence of life is the embodiment of God Herself? and therefore, loving God is really just loving Her work?

but we must be careful, i think, not to generalize and just say "i love every living thing." i think the crux of the matter lies with being present with the individual. see every person, every animal, every tree, flower, plant as an individual. Anthony DeMello says that once a child has been taught the name of something - a cocount tree, for instance - that child will never again see another coconut tree but the first one that was named to her. (very loosely paraphrased). it's in doing this, i believe, that we miss out on hundreds (of thousands?) of potiential encounters with God. if i could let go of the urgency to be somewhere else and simply be with the people i am with at any given moment, then i think that is where i will meet, experience, share, in God; in Love.

for me, salvation lies in the life of jesus, much more so than in his death because he modelled this kind of presence so well. he was where he was. i guess i would say that his life was made up of countless moments.

a life of moments. wow. what a concept.

[edited to add that i will explain/explore gender terminology with reference to God in another post.]

the divvying of one's heart

there's this church that i pass by fairly often and they have one of those marquis type signs where they put up a one-liner "message" each week. i kind of like this because it serves as theological fodder for me. i read what's there and instead of immediately dismissing it as CCR (crazy christian rhetoric), i think about it and ask myself questions like: do i agree or disagree? is there any truth to it? how can it be of any service to passers by? can they find Love through this one liner? (i mean, what is the point, exactly?)

this week it reads: make sure no one has a bigger portion of your heart than God.

hmmm... so the implication is that we are to devote only a portion of our love to God and a big portion, but a portion nonetheless. and then the rest is for i guess family and friends. but what if loving everyone was really loving God? could it be that we can really only love Love by loving everyone the same?

for me this is a daunting proposition. can i really love everyone the same? Mr. Phillip who washes my car on the weekends? The sour checkout girl at the market? My coworkers? My parents? My husband and kids? even though I truly believe that we are all one and that every single human being is my ... (counterpart comes to mind) .. and my brother/sister (including my kids, eventually.. ish) and that every one of us matters to Love exactly the same it still isn't a part of me like the way i say hello without thinking. Like the way i kiss ryan a hundred times in a minute without thinking. Like the way that sometimes when i look at nathan every fibre in my being just wants to hold him and feel him next to me - without thinking.

I am still having to say to myself "this woman is my sister. this man is my brother." and even so, do i really believe when i tell myself? sometimes when Mr. Phillip comes to wash the car and I have given him a paper plated meal, a part of me wants to ask him to come in and sit to share the meal with us, but that part (if i am to be honest) is greatly overshadowed by the 'sensible' me who says, what if he comes in and makes plans to break in after he says the layout of the house? and the unspoken thoughts too about the boundaries that exist between us.

do you get what i'm saying? (do i get what i'm saying?)

i don't know. but i believe that loving LOVE, the Divine is best expressed by loving who S/He loves too.

Going to Great Lent...s

as you may or may not know, it's lent. started on ash wednesday, which was just last week (for those of you non-lenters). i have been observing lent for as long as i can remember.

i was raised as a catholic. the typical tri-annual catholic: christmas, new years and easter. and even then it was usually me who was dragging my family to church. i also went to a catholic all girls high school where there was the obligatory chapel on campus and i faithfully attended lunch-time mass on Fridays for at least the last three years of school.

even after renouncing catholocism some years later and eventually becoming a staunch (crazy, left wing) evangelical, born again believer, i continued - for reasons unknown to me - to observe the lenten season. a tradition that, i guess, became a big part of my spirituality. i never did the whole no-meat-fish-on-fridays lent, but i did give up the usual things like chocolate, soda - i think even smoking (back when i used to fumar) - you know that kind of stuff. in more recent times i have gone without TV (an enourmous deal for me), chocolate again (a wicked big deal) and this year... ahhhh, this year - what a gem! guess what i'm going without? added sugar. added sugar? you ask. what does that mean, added sugar? well, it means that i am still eating things like fruit and honey. but no sugar in tea or coffee, no cereal (with sugar - which is every single one worth eating), no yogurt, no granola bars, no cookies (!!!!); more specifically no oreos (double !!!) - nothing at all that has been sweetened.

christian spoke last week about the practice of fasting and how it's really just practicing practicing to do without. so that, according to Dallas Willard", we can be strong and sweet when we have do without. at first i didn't understand what he (christian) meant by "doing through practice that which we couldn't do through direct effort" (slightly paraphrased due to poor memory). but then he opened by trying to juggle (trying being the operative word), spoke and then closed with AJ actually juggling. and i got it! practice for the spiritual things. what a concept! i need to talk more about this but i need to get ready for a birthday party. gotta run. but i'll be back.

welcome

so my this is my second blog. my other blog is about motherhood and such delights. but then i really started going off on a huge 'god tangent' and i figured i should now dedicate my big theological questions to their own blog. so welcome to my spiritual journey.

i'm going to move some of the posts (or maybe copy) from MilkShaken and put them on here.

Okay, gotta run.