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

[Nancy Lanphear]

Dear Nancy ,
"
As I read your email this morning, it began to resonate for me  with some of
Fred's writings.  I went back to read a particular one called,  "A New
Cosmology - A Swamp Yankee's journey ...... "  Please see it on Fred's
memorial page and listed under his blog entries.  The link to his page is
www.elderfred.wordpress.com   .  I would love to hear your response relative
to your journey.

I am finding it emotionally difficult yet necessary to read some of Fred's
writings each day.  He has always been a visionary, a quality that
intensified as his  physical limitations increased.

In community,

Nancy




2010/10/26 Janet Sanders <jsanders at bconnex.net>

>  Dear Nancy,
> Thank youu for your continued creativity and exploration.  Your early work
> with teaching  imaginal education was one of the reasons I joined the
> order.  I have appreciated your on-going willingness to be open to the new
> that was emerging.  Many blessings, Jan----- Original Message -----
>
> *From:* nancy <nangrow at verizon.net>
> *To:* Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> *Cc:* Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
> *Sent:* Monday, October 25, 2010 8:34 PM
> *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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