[Oe List ...] witness in October, 2010

Mon Oct 25 22:24:28 CDT 2010

Thanks Nan.

How refreshing after watching some really absurd political debates this
evening. 

When we have all finished it still will only have just begun.

With kindest regards.

M. George Walters

Resurgence Publishing Corporation

4240 Sandy Shores Dr

Lutz, FL 33558

USA

Tel: +1 (813) 948-7267

Fax: +1 (813) 333-1787

Mob: +1 (813) 505-9041

URL: www.ResurgencePublishing.com

Professional Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mgwalters

From: oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:oe-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf
Of nancy
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 20:35
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Oe List ...] witness in October, 2010

Colleagues, old and new, near and far, greetings!

    This has been a wake up year for me.  Here I thought that at 82 I could
relax a bit, til I had a dream of my seminary professor informing our class
there was no retirement for clergy.  They had a job for the rest of their
life!

    This was a shock for me, not because I'd forgotten it, but because the
radical new age we are in raised so many questions of what could be done and
what needed to be done.  Four little shockers:

    1 "Reading again our old sign, "What appears to be the breaking up of
civilisation may be just the shattering of old forces by life itself!"
This struck me most about the church.  We are a smaller and smaller group,
and whiter and whiter as time goes by.  Working for ICA around the world was
never that, and I kept feeling something should be done, yet we didn't
manage anything!

    2. I have read Spong from time to time, and this fall actually finished
"Eternal Life: A New Vision." We still have folks in our senior class who
talk about God and point up to heaven.  Bill and I have taken them on one at
a time, and most will acknowledge now that they are not talking about some
old man living  in the clouds, or even above the heavens. Their are other
religions that share this image in some form, and while we still find Jesus
to be out model and teacher, we are much more selective in what we
understand literally ffrom the New Testament --and the Old!

     3. A film on National Television a few months ago really woke me up.
They were documenting the most recent discoveries in space. They started
with our old notions that Earth was the center of the universe and sun moon
and stars circled it. From there they went on to show the other planets in
our galaxy, and earth became a baseball in comparison.  Then they moved
further out to new discoveries and the earth was a dot in the massive
heavens, and finally actually disappeared in terms of size and significance.

    4. I actually finished Spong and found he claimed, "I began to seeGod in
a radically different way: as part of the universal consciousness in which I
stand." "Suddenly it made sense to me that the ancient name of God found in
the Hebrew scriptures was part of the verb "to be".  God the great  I Am
blends with the I Am affirmations that each of us must make on our journey
into self-understanding."   "Individuation wwithin the oneness of God
enables us to transcend all the human boudaries of tribe, race, gender.
sexual orientation and even religion."

    It all forced me to the understanding that my life is not yet over and
there is work to be done.  Because of this we work on creating the new
community of fellowship instead of the narrow bands of family. We have no
"Order" as we had in Fifth City, but we are finding a significant number of
women and men who care and are ready to work for a new society or
neighborhood or body of people to bbegin with, who are ready to work at the
new earth.  What a birthdy present!!

Now that hope really would be something to leave our grandchildren!

        Nan(cy) Grow, still wearing the Order ring after 42 years.

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