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This 9/11, The Beatles and Tikkun
By Eileen Fleming (about the author) Page 1 of 4 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Eileen Fleming - Writer
Every time I awoke it was to images of a Divided Congress at President Obama's Health Care Speech the other night.
BUT at sunrise, it was The Beatles and my memories of July 2005 that
filled my head and brought comfort to my weary spirit. I offer them 2U dear readers with HOPE for US to TIKKUN this world:
TIKKUN is Hebrew for mend, repair and transform the world.
TIKKUN
is also an an international community of people of many faiths calling
for social justice and political freedom in the context of new
structures of work, caring communities, and democratic social and
economic arrangements. We seek to influence public discourse in order
to inspire compassion, generosity, non-violence and recognition of the
spiritual dimensions of life.
What
follows
is my experience of
July 2005 at TIKKUN's first conference for Spiritual Progressives which
I attended 3 weeks after my first trip to Israel Palestine and I returned from my seventh in June 2009.
Everything that follows actually happened-but as I was writing fiction in
2005-I wrote it all down in this chapter through the fictional character Jack Hunt of KEEP HOPE ALIVE
Chapter 12: THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN...
“The Revolution starts now, when you rise above your fear and tear the walls round you down.”-Steve Earle
On
Wednesday, July 20, 2005, in Berkeley, California, Jack intuitively
sensed opportunity blowing in the wind as he rounded the corner from
Durant and Telegraph on his way to UC Berkeley's MLK student union
building for TIKKUN's first annual conference on spiritual activism. As
he crossed Bancroft Way, a young, beatifically-smiling latte-skinned
youth handed him an electric green slip of paper announcing:
“Compassionate Caregivers: Medical Cannabis. Two locations, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week.”
Jack
mused, “Now that my third anti-inflammatory has been pulled, I can't do
narcotics in moderation, and I am not ready for joint replacement; I
wonder if maybe this is an invitation from You to move out here?”
Jack
soon forgot all about the aches in his joints--in particular, his
knees, which had been crushed in an auto accident when he was
twenty-three and then again at twenty-six. The MLK student union
building was jammed with people from all faiths, and those who were
spiritual, but not religious, who were imagining a new bottom line for
America and her true place in the global village. Jack glided up the
stairs to the second floor and deeply inhaled the energy emanating from
over thirteen hundred American citizens who had gathered in the Pauley
Ballroom in support of a new bottom line based on love, compassion,
caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and behavior; and motivated
by generosity, kindness, cooperation, nonviolence, and peace.
Jack
imagined a society that honored all human beings as embodiments of the
sacred, a society that enhanced one's capacities to respond to the
earth and the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. He
imagined the Kingdom of God, where men would turn their swords into
plowshares and not make war anymore.
The
invocation was offered by Father Louis Vitale, a Franciscan who
reminded Jack of one of the least of the seven dwarfs, until he spoke
and revealed himself to be a man of profound wisdom, enrobed in
well-worn burlap:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
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