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Life Arts    H4'ed 12/26/10

John Lennon, Dorothy Day and Christmas 2010 in the UK

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"War must cease. There are no victories. The world can bear the burden no longer. Yes, we must make a stand. Even as I speak to you, I may be guilty of what some men call treason. But we must reject war: Yes, we must now make a stand. War is murder, rape, ruin, death; war can end our civilization. I tell you that within a decade we will have weapons capable of ending this world as we have known it." [IBID]


Day's prophetic voice is also a friend of wisdom and "Wisdom is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, and certain. Not baneful, but loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent, kind, firm, secure, all-seeing and pervading all spirits. Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion and SHE penetrates and pervades all things by reason. SHE is the aura of the might of God and a pure effusion of the glory of The Almighty. SHE is the refulgence of eternal Light, a spotless mirror of the power of God. And SHE who is one, can do all things and renews everything. And passing into holy souls from age to age, SHE produces friends of God and prophets." - WISDOM 7:22-8:1

Day took Jesus seriously and understood that for a Christian the higher law is God's not man's and for a Christian, God is love and "love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of cities. Love is not killing...Our Manifesto is the Sermon on The Mount, which means we will try to be peacemakers."


But more that Dorothy and Tolstoy, it was John Lennon who inspired me to THINK for myself and act accordingly.

Dorothy Day entered the Catholic Church, but I left it at the age of 12, in the summer of 1966, inspired by Lennon's honesty.

Up until I was about six years old, every Sunday morning was spent in a glass-encased room at St. Bernard's one holy Roman Catholic Church, in Levittown, Long Island.

The glass-encased room was called, and literally was, the Cry Room.

Growing up with television, it was natural for me to stand up close against the soundproof glass and watch 'the show' on the other side.

Every so often, I'd hear the priest's voice filter through the loudspeaker above my head. But it was all Latin to me: and back then, it really was!

I see myself now, just as I was then, surrounded by squirming kids and uptight adults, engulfed by the sounds of crying and whining, and I truly believed that was church.

Once my younger brothers had grown, I got to be in the main room and the show lost its mystery to me, for the Latin had been changed to English and quickly became routine.

When I was 9, in 1963, two life altering events occurred.

By Thanksgiving that year, I was overfilled with images of JFK being shot and John-John during that motorcade. He was just a little guy in a short coat with his knees exposed who saluted as his father's casket rode by and many of America's other children also bid goodbye to their childhood.

But, three months later, the gloom was gone, for the Beatles appeared on a Sunday night in my living room, and the world as I had known it changed again.

In the summer of '66, it was reported that John Lennon made a comment to a friend and reporter that the Beatles were more popular with my generation than Jesus was.

I agreed with him, for my friends and I knew every lyric to every Beatles song, but nobody ever quoted Jesus.

Lennon made me think about my own hypocrisy, and that led me to drop the institutional church.

It was in July on a Saturday afternoon, immediately after the ritual of weekly confession that I knelt at the altar and mindlessly repeated the same old prayers as the week prior. But on that particular day in '66, in the middle of the three Our Fathers and ten Hail Mary's, it hit me like a light. Those words that I uttered never changed anything, and I got up and walked out, convinced I was doomed for hell, for I had failed at Confession!

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Eileen Fleming,is a Citizen of CONSCIENCE for US House of Representatives 2012 Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org Staff Member of Salem-news.com, A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu" (more...)
 
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