A Letter from Jack Minnis

 Not the activist Jack Minnis of SNCC, but the Jack Minnis of Powelton Village, Philadelphia, "a loving, funny, wonderful man who is deeply missed' as his obit says.   Phd in American Civilization from the U of Pennsylvania, who taught at Drexel along the way as advisor and friend of many, and of the lit mag, the Gargoyle from 1961 until about 1966 when he became chairman of the English department of the newly founded Philadelphia Community College, he finished his doctorate in 1963 with a dissertation on Joseph Stevens Buckminster: A Critical Study. 1784-1812, the minister as a man of letters, bluest of the blue bloods in every way and a paradigm of its later type:

 "He learned Latin and the Greek New Testament at age four, entered Harvard College at 13, and graduated in 1800 at age 16 with both bachelor's and master's degrees. Upon his graduation, he spent two years as an instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 1805 he became minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, and quickly launched an almost legendary career of eloquent preaching, biblical scholarship, and literary production which set the tone for the pattern of the minister as a man of letters...His mastery of the emerging "New Criticism" from German Biblical scholars led to his rational investigation of the Bible, subjecting its text to the same scrupulous scholarly investigation given other texts from antiquity"

 Jack's work on Buckminster is referenced  in dissertations completed of American Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2 (May, 1964), pp. 257-259.

Jack had advised the Gargoyle from 1961 but it was three years later that I became involved in that effort. I met Jack in the 6th term, the moderns, of the mandatory humanities program  at Drexel that he taught, then elected a class in the modern novel with him in the fall of 1962, when at that time I declared that I wanted to write. I was not precocious in any way, just a middle class kid who had worked in Pittsburgh factories who knew nothing of what he later found out, like his family had been Mennonites in Philadelphia from 1700, but was nonetheless about to embark to Central America to work for Editorial Caribe of the Latin American Mission, for two co-op terms, so six months. The lesson of my life is only believe and all these things will be added, as appears in Humanyte, to appear, where "all human beings are geniuses." Before this at Drexel I had studied for two years, two nights a week, in the evening program of the Philadelphia College of Bible, chaired by Charles Ryrie then, who spoke in chapel often (1958-62) and later was professor and dean of doctoral studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, and in depth study of the book of Matthew with Clarence E. Mason and Romans with Andrew Telford, once pastor of the Factoryville Church, where Ladoit Stevens also served later, who I worked with in Editorial Caribe, so not without influence. From that study and a radical experience known among renaissance believers, a catastrophic conversion right out of the 16th century, where  “the man who has passed through feels like one who has walked from nightmare into ecstasy…all the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace...Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. It is faith alone that has saved him; faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang." (C.S. Lewis. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 32f).   I was drawn further and further where "if any one be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new."  These are the people I belong among.

 

 That explains  my evening studies, that set up living in Central America, prefaced by this expressed desire to write mentioned to him just before departure, and probably my love of the Elizabethans. This was his last letter 19 May 1963 with some Buckminster in the wings. I initially took it humorously and still do, but it seems to be more socially relevant to me at 84 than it did whenever it was reread, as does Ecclesiastes 3: 15 and the whole of chapter 3 remembered in his relation, for I knew him well after two classes: "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and Elohim requires that which is past" (Traina)

 

If you figure that out you go toward the salvation of  "an impression, like a wave of electricity going through and through me. It seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love for I could not express it any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. It seemed to fan me like immerse wings" (Charles Finny) that together with what Abraham Godshalk says, that "regeneration, at least in its commencement, is a work of the mind, and when it first takes place, it has the lusts of the flesh, yea, all the evil inclinations to war against; and even ignorance itself, together with the temptations and allurements from without," will see you through.

 

The Letter

 

Dear Andy, 

 

1. School begins 24 June for enrollment of students; classes start 25 June.

2. I don't know what I'll be teaching-or even if I'll be teaching. We'll probably know on the 24th. 

 

I turned Night and Creation into the contest. If you win--good; if you don't, nothing lost. I'll be able to get them back after the contest. I will not be much help to you as a critic of your poetry. I'll ask Mr. Hollis to look at them; he is a good critic. As far as I can see, you had the inspiration, but lack the discipline of a practicing poet (rhyme, rhythm, alliteration etc).

 

Don't worry about Russian novels until you get back to Phila. Arrange to keep your face clean, instead. You might also arrange for a fast get away if necessary.

 

So long as man has the ability to use his reason, he will continue to question any religion. It is a part of existence to continue questioning. Your personal faith is a precious thing which like most things of any value needs polishing periodically. Polish it with some serious questioning. Chances are that the result will be a deeper sheen instead of a smashed crystal.

    What we have most to dread is that we use our religion as an excuse when refusing to use our reason. There are so many students at Drexel- and elsewhere too-whose religious belief is such an excuse. This sort of laziness leads only to stagnation. If a religious belief is not strong enough to withstand serious criticism, then it is probably not a very valuable asset.

[ I smile at this as I type, for from the first moment I have been caught up in the electric every moment, every day since, throughout some 60 years, and through it all never question or doubted.] 

One thing I think you will observe as you go along is that more people are devoted to the frills than to what you term "pure Xnty." For those who stress the necessity of being a good Christian and participating in church activities are often more interested in participating than being. Each of us must find some area in which we can be unique, superior. Hopefully, this area is one demanded by society so we can make a living doing what we want. The church is an excellent place for weak people to find fulfillment. {It is so easy to be righteous} So you are going to find a strange bunch of bedfellows. Do not allow this to dissuade you, though. There are such people in many fields--and as far as this being a Christ-less century-- I think it is more irreligious than any other, but certainly not void of Christian emphasis. You must note that the hold on morality which the church once had is gone. This makes it seem much more irreligious than it probably is. However, a decrease in the importance of the churches in moral matters doesn't necessarily mean an accompanying drop in belief in Christ.

    For example, Mr. Bauland, a Jew, probably does more to arouse Christian feeling than any other teacher at Drexel. By blasting without mercy (and often without validity) at the smugness of the church he strips off layers of frill and makes people question their  religion--many for the first time. Let them become atheists for a few years; they'll change as soon as the uniqueness wears off. Then they base their belief on something solid. Besides, his life (when people aren't looking) is probably more Christian than 90% of church members!

Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Jack Minnis

To comment, he means well to have written so much and I still appreciate it, but, shades of the German critics that Buckminster introduced, I sat in seminary classes at the Seminario Biblico while there, in New Testament and in Greek, with Ricardo and Irene Foulkes and there  heard the complete Schweitzer, Renan and Bultmann lineup about historicity. Ricardo, a Julliard pianist before Professor, befriended me. We went weight lifting together and to the Opera, where he had performed. He finished his doctorate in Strasbourg just when I finished the M.A. at Iowa and we corresponded thereafter. Such folk were interested in what the Black Life was about. Since I was, as it were, in it, that made for some respect in their eyes. Of course later I translated both Ricardo's work on the Revelation and Juan Stam's too. Stam was a brilliant mind and heart, but his work on the Revelation, a book only for martyrs, that will never be in English, which you can find out why if you live in the Empire succeeding Rome, but  the moralists, will not know this, as I read with ever more understanding, Ecclestices 3.16, and 15 and all of chapter three with Jack's letter.

 

 When I landed back in Philadelphia for my last year of college, I did have to make a 'fast get away" since at the news of my brother's demise I has gone in one day, but shell shocked as much as any from the extremity I had lived and witnessed, which has appeared in all my writing since, in which without thinking about it, I have left all these moral worlds Jack speaks of behind.

 

 I did not intend so many works would appear in the 1964 Gargoyle, they were chosen by the editors, I just submitted them. One, Frankie, was submitted under a pseudonym. At that meeting I attended they broke up laughing so much they could hardly hear it read. After they were done I confessed. I suppose that comic tone fits the later fiction to a T. The poems are what Jack must be referring to with questioning, highly biblical and moral, but not intentionally, they just were. The realized fruit is at The True Light that Lights, first published by Parousia in Nigeria.

 

*  In the fall of 1928, Andy Telford returned to the area, after pastoring a large church in Ottawa, Canada.  Andy Telford returned to pastor the Three Rivers Bible Church from which he served Factoryville for the next four years.  Pastor Telford finally departed to assume responsibilities in Philadelphia.  Andy would pastor the Berachah Church in Philadelphia for over twenty-five years.  He also taught for over twenty years at Philadelphia College of the Bible, Washington Bible College and Berean College.  Andy Telford would conduct Bible Conferences and Evangelistic services all over the country well into his eighties.

Doris Lessing & Population Eidolia Architecture

Doris Lessing died (17 Nov 2013) at the moment these paragraphs were written.  Swelling became a preoccupation of every meme, translated as group intention and collective intuition: “the chief one [enemy] is the nature of the group mind, the collective minds we are all part of, though we are seldom prepared to acknowledge this. We see ourselves as autonomous creatures, our minds our own, our beliefs freely chosen, our ideas individual and unique…with billions and billions and billions of us on this planet, we are still prepared to believe that each of us is unique, or that if all the others are mere dots in a swarm, then at least I am this self-determined thing, my mind my own” (Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments, Preface).

In the Preface to The Sirian Experiments (1981) Doris Lessing continues that in the context of a battle “between Forces” involving Canopus and Sirius: “I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had been used for the purposes of experiment by more advanced creatures…that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess and that there might have been a science in the past which we have forgotten…that we may be enslaved in ways we know nothing about, befriended in ways we known nothing about” (viii). 

The entire human race tripled in the life span of the life of one grandfather. U.N. 2017  stats gave 2.2 billion obese, about a third of the planet These people literally did not exist before 1970 when BMI of 30 was a rarity. In the UK, a quarter of adults were obese – with a body mass index over 30 thereafter. It compares to just one in 35 in the 70s. Ambulances had to be redesigned, and elevators, chairs for 500, 1000 lb. patients. This "bariatric" engineering of doors, seats, beds, clothes were needed to contain all the flesh. BMIs of 40 with comorbid conditions were common, the highest level of obesity among children and young adults in the U.S. was nearly 13%. Egypt topped the list for adult obesity at 35%. Not only did this epidemic not exist in 1970, neither did its victims. Earth population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, up from 2 billion in 1927. It was like cattle in a feedlot. The entire population of the globe tripled in the lifetime of one grandfather, tripled in number and exploded with these 2 billion so obese in size that a person of 1950 would walk into a Walmart and say, WHAT HAPPENED?

This bloating compounded with the swelling of the earth from within. If you like to argue inner to outer, the edema of swelling bodies on the surface, with fluid stuck in its tissue, followed from that swelling of inner earth This was not from magma and ocean growing, but pressures of the sun and swellings from the strangelets of CERN.   Group synchronities appeared wholesale form the sales of surveillance capitalism to the penetration and reading of the mind of unuttered thoughts to build the data base and to sell products. DAll the machines had formed a collective linked together. People began to think they needed one too, but in this the people were the machines.

Wrestling with the massive increase of world population in so few years, tripling since 1927, coincident with waves of obesity of individual size, with all swelling, seeking for an answer to this oddity, I made a request to understand. Practically in the instant I was presented with world population and Babel Data. It went like this. Triple population size in three generations connects to Babel Data and the building of its Tower in the sense that the bricks are analogues to people as data centers, whose every behavioral habit aggregates to build the AGI system of intelligence, but more so, extrapolated to describe every human genome. and amend it with CRISPR implant and emendation as desired. So the population had to increase to gather the date to build the “tower.” Wedding soul and machine this Babel would ‘ascend to the heaven” on the backs of these 7 billion integers. Thus the human is the key to break the heaven in an ascent back-engineered from the original human creation to this hybrid result.  The Singularity and instant change in consciousness which accompanies this means more than joining it to Alexa and the global system of boundless of non existence. But this is the purpose of the tripling world pop in the first place, to get this easily manipulated data. The masses of deformed people with slowed awareness from digital inference with their thoughts resembled the radioactive  fascin-formed, abnormal growths of radioactive Fukushima where a common daisy was bloated, elongated, swollen with hormonal, genetic, bacterial, fungal, viral and environmental genes and memes.

  In the recent fifty years of the passing of the conventional out of existence, modeled on 5000 years of the Greco-Roman, Sumerian-Babylonian world, Yahoo vested all its powers into concomitant Greek Roman Babylonian Sumerian ritual myths. Following the expectations of empires, masons and subterranean passages, the geography of D.C. laid out in a pentagram as the Washington Monument and Capitol of an Osiris and Isis state. This state sought to restore a secret vision fromeons before. The rituals of the Vatican, D.C. and  the other capitols extended into space, corresponding to star maps and systems, ritual alignments with Sirius, Regulus, i.e. Isis, Horus, the belt stars of Orion and secret angles 19.5 degrees, 33 minutes.  It's was a Scary Time for Scorsese. In the strategy of hidden architectures designers of the Washington Mall and the Vatican Square mirrors used buildings to Shape Mind to a predicted encoded end. The present was colonized by the far distant past. 

Architecture  

The Swelling made it easier for buildings to shape the mind of the deformed that entered them.

The tripled population of physical persons was tripled again by the breaking of all boundaries and conventions.  Architecture was made over into paradigms of crowd control, sexual architecture in the enforcement of government and stereotypes of sex, race, misogynist politics. Redesignation of a door in a wall to indicate some exclusive entry spread to weaponized immigration, weaponized journalism-propaganda, weaponized education (Léopold Lambert).  Weather, once thought to be natural was weaponized to add to weaponized sex, cyber sex, hybrid humans. The individual was expected to conform to these agendas or forfeit all rights. The weaponized architecture above the door in the wall was fitted to a flat earth as an art dome by the thousands of digital satellites. It was as if were blowups from a bubble pipe, like the creation of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost. Symbols were weaponized but again the purpose was important enough omit. The crashing of the Israeli moon mission, Beresheet, ominously named, In the Beginning, for the first words of Genesis, 450 feet about the surface of the moon, the burning of  the 800 year old timbers of Notre Dame were weaponized theatres like those that killed the president in the park like Julius Caesar or decapitated his head by the locks to desensitize the actual occurrence, being the decapitation of American government. The power of building and symbols to model reality was made easily obvious by architect Frank Gehry when he modeled the modeled the Bilbao Museum after leviathan and buildings of mental health institutes after fractured heads. It was as if the accidents and tragedies of the new modeled reality, the wreck of Concordia a model of the state, any wrecked car the senate chamber. These were meant to prepare the deadpanning of the public space to install its well rehearsed digital replacement of the solid the way the digital replaced print. Piezo electric implants replaced awareness, bastardized reverse ethics replaced conscience. 

The ideology of broken borders turned upside down on people as they entered the buildings. What had been human gender engineering, where "vehicle compartments and office furniture calibrated on a male standardised body, ironing boards, vacuum cleaners and kitchens  calibrated on the female"  Weaponized Architecture became the perception that a door with a lock and key that allows only a part of a wall to open, that dictates only certain bodies may enter, is a not so subtle progression to suggest a warden and a prison, an apartheid state, border walls, container camps, detention centers, fortified police stations, fences, checkpoints broken make the wall porous and allow any broken concept to enter. Abortion as life, male/female as reject as eidolias to benefit private property were legislated. Cognition was the first means of deception. World events, being deceptions caused by cognition, were improved by denials and replacement with more, newer cognitions. The buildings of  The entire Washington capitol interpreted this way “surrounds a body with walls that force  incarceration.”  So Lambert says that while "ideologies were not invented by architecture, architecture is a means to implement their violence on bodies."

 Eidolia 

Images were even more effective architectures than buildings. Whether these were Pareidolia like the Mars images or an earthly Cydonia of albedo effects that mimic the Face on Mars depends. The experts of the ever enlarging subject of alleged  'tetrahedral constants,' and stellar alignments in NASA projects, like  Hoagland's Dark Mission of Mars saw architectural eidolia coded in buildings and statues and art where they were said to hide messages reflecting the biology of the human and the natural.

  'Hallucination-like image,' or the French éidolie hallucinosique, is supposed to occupy short duration of a limited perception, like the Charles Bonnet syndrome of "lilliputian" hallucinations in which things are smaller than normal. In the public sense of eidolia howerer, too many connotations occur to define a clear border between pathological and benign. Cf.  Pair of wings -eidolia or in the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

Such code could be seen in patterning a building after a wrecked ship at sea. Or the code might be mythical, as the dead sheep on the throne of St. Peter with the mouth of a giant locust that Jonathan Kleck called Abaddon. Turned upside down to him this became a vagina to signify the events of Genesis 6 where in the Book of Enoch the angels sought to begin a hybrid race, known variously  as the entire Greek pantheon of gods. So upside down the
Throne of St. Peter was a pudenda, meaning the entire female reproductive system into which angels come and go through the surrounding pubic hair, and Fallopian tube, uterus, clitoris. OK?  Therefore it might not be too surprising if all those nice angels are going in and out of a vagina in this most famous critique of the Vatican throne are also fantasies of human biology in architecture. That's right.

The news blamed deficit spending, saying that their enabled debt made them buy more food and they got fat. The 1910 German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch who invented what is called the Haber–Bosch Process—the only known method to extract nitrogen from the air since its invention, it is claimed, led to an explosion in human population growth that had remained virtually balanced with nature for thousands of years.

 What diseased imagination conceived this throne along with all the other bizarre relics of world religion is not as much in our intent as what an imagination healed of that would see. 

Occult American Mirror World

 To consider the background of the occult American world, lit's most highly acclaimed content in Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and its mystical, often biblical interpretations of biblical substance as separate from the narrative accounts, allowing for the difference from that time to this when a longer form of sentence and brilliant description was an equal attraction with the content, there being no immediacy of digital entertainment, hard as that may be to believe, as said, narrative prowess aside, which in all the leading writers of the canon is so excellently to tell a tale, but what is the tale about? It is an investigation in fiction or poetry of the apprehension of the unknown. It is as if these were common handbooks of magic, or distillations of them, driven by madness, or drugs, or secret kabbala  rituals, versions of the Babylonian Talmud translated for the ungentle goyim, what Yeats is doing in his investigations with his wife, but which it is not unfair to say is best described in Enoch I, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, so back to the Bible again. Much of it is bible based, or inverted, mirrored. This suggests both that there is truth in the literal source so twisted, and that there is an unknown reality counter to the biblical, separate and apart, to which these writers also constantly refer. Back and forth they go. That Emerson and Thoreau add the transcendental expanding selfhood with Whitman, is another variety on the theme. We may take religion as a branch of literature withal, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian --Muslim less so -, or literature as a branch of religion, and literature as the hand maiden of religion, as the Romantic poets seem to take it, with or without God. That such ideas amplify in later writers from Crane to Faulkner confecting history within, like retelling the American west in Cormac McCarthy, always getting more violent and adding the popular occult in multi-voiced authors of children's stories, always with twists, like the mother who forbids here daughter to read the Narnia series lest it corrupt her from Harry Potter. You mean you don't believe in magic, these children ask a skeptic? From the furries to otherkin, preparing, it supposes, always preparing the appearance of the other self, other world landings now gone to fear every stray satellite, orb, underground apocalypse seeming to promote the Revelation of John, again the biblical, to the forefront of modern takes of the occult.

This graduates into the question I took up in linguistics in 1970 when analysis by synthesis was the theory of how to make text interpreted by machine, which could not be done, but in 20 yrs or less the ARPA net linked those half dozen universities to precursor internet connection, the very point that Amos de Shalit urged on Ben-Gurion in those sabbath night discussions so long ago sponsored in the prime minister's home, where he hosted as many advanced physicists etc as he could to discuss this linking many machines to share data bases and analysis, so by 1993 transferring text to digital print as on Ygdrasil Journal, etc. The future question of the extreme complexity of our biology and its balances of enzymes and peptides that fuel our intellects, abstracted to a machine so I can argue with open Xai is the mirror world.

Obits. Philadelphia. Randy Kraftson, Fred Phillips

 

Randy Kraftson used to debate his Presbyterian predestination. He and Dave Harvey were civil war buffs, a further contest against the entitled. We together taught a junior h.s. youth group Sunday nights. Later he asked me in a nice way that he thought i was upstaging him in front of the kids. I could not admit to it, however i owe him because we were on an outing with these kids, my little brother along too, playing touch football at Valley forge. I had the ball and he was defending so I put on him the world's best fake, planted right to go left, all the more, and heard a loud pop, fell to the ground. They took the body to Bryn Mawr ER, my father got angry at my brother for telling him the news. He was on his way somewhere. It was 6 Pm Sunday. late summer '62. I was on my way somewhere too, to Costa Rica in Jan, so I wore crutches a while and tolerated my knee popping out there when i played one on one basketball. On return, 1963 they did the medial cartilage op, but missed the ACL.  That was before MRI, which  resulted that in '67 when i was called for the draft physical in Des Moine with a busload of fodder, the ortho doc could wiggle the knee in his hands and i flunked the test, meaning when they put their hands up i watched. so i did not go to Vietnam, but to Texas instead. I trace this to that moment at 11 in the Korean war, when walking alone on a Sat morn early, a covering came upon me from above with the realization that i did not ever want to kill. So Randy Kraftson is owed a debt as the instrumental cause  of that realization. Much obliged.

RAYMOND KRAFTSON OBITUARY

Raymond Harry Kraftson, an accomplished attorney and businessman who lived most of his life in Bala Cynwyd and Villanova, PA, died peacefully on February 21st, 2020 at the age of 79 in West Chester, PA. Ray, to his friends, and Randy, to his family, was born on June 20th, 1940 in Drexel Hill, PA to Harry and Elisabeth Kraftson and was the eldest of six (Judith Ann, Timothy, Meredith, Constance and Claudia). He is survived by his beloved wife of 55 years, Marguerite, nee Knewstub, of Devon, PA; four children, Donald (Ann) Kraftson, Marguerite Kraftson, Audrey Kraftson and Michele (Brian) Griffin; and three grand-children, Brooke and Charles Kraftson and Cecilia Sikdar. Ray was a member of the first graduating class of the Delaware County Christian School, where his father was President of the Board. He earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and J.D. from the College of William and Mary, Marshall Wythe School of Law where he was Editor of the Law Review. He began his career as a trial attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then joined the Philadelphia law firm of Ringe, Peet and Mason. He moved to in-house counsel roles at Monsanto, Life Assurance Company of Pennsylvania, INA (now CIGNA) and Safeguard Scientifics where he was General Counsel and Secretary. He served as General Counsel and raised capital for Safeguard’s portfolio company, Novell, which changed computing worldwide through technology contributing to the emergence of local area networks (LANs). Ray finished his career as a businessman and entrepreneur, initially as President of Ailes Communications where he had previously served on the board for 15 years during which time Ailes guided the successful political campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher and many U.S. Senators and Governors. Ray also founded Ariane Capital Partners, growing it into a top ten private fund placement agent. He served on the boards of numerous other companies including Hoffman Surgical in Conshohocken, PA and particularly enjoyed his board associations with The Baldwin School, Gladwyne Montessori School and InFaith. He was a long-standing member of the Philadelphia Club and the Merion Cricket Club where he enjoyed dancing on the porch with his wife and three daughters. Business colleagues knew Ray for his compelling arguments, bow ties, colorful suspenders, precisely folded pocket squares and speedy driving to meetings. While Ray certainly enjoyed travel in fast cars, he loved long trips on trains and would coordinate his travel around their schedules. He was a gentleman, a voracious reader and Civil War buff. Ray’s Christian faith was exhibited by his dedication to St. David’s Episcopal Church, where his father-in-law, John Knewstub, had served as Rector for many years. Ray was a member of the vestry, Junior Warden, Property and Capital Campaign Chairman and influential in recruiting St. David’s current Rector, Frank Allen. A skilled mechanic and race car driver, he could be found in his garage listening to classical music while preparing his antique/classic/race cars, motorcycles and boats for his next adventure. During the early 70’s, he piloted his MGB to many Sports Car Club of America wins, lap records and three top-three finishes at the SCCA National Championship Runoffs at Road Atlanta. Ray restored four antique Chris Craft mahogany speed boats powering them with modern engines. He loved surprising other boats on Lake Winnipesaukee, NH where he cherished vacation time with his family. In his later years, he could be seen (and heard) in his 1955 MGTF which he had restored specifically for a three-month tour of Europe in 1972 with his wife and son. A service celebrating Ray’s life will be held at 9:15am on Saturday, March 7th at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, PA. Donations in Ray’s memory can be made to St. David’s Church at stdavidschurch.org/giving.

Published by Main Line Media News from Feb. 28 to Mar. 8, 2020

 

Frederick Carrington Philips II  1939-2013

I have always been a stranger and foreigner, fellow citizen with the saints and of the household of God and given to walk among formed people as friends. Finding at the death obit of Fred Phillips he was born the day before my brother 25 Oct 1939 with whom I had the diametric opposite relation is startling because those days were unconscious, therefore true. I knew him in high school in that one year, studied together to black coffee in my room. I never was in his house, he was two years older but in h.s. with me suggests a gap. We drove back and forth to Drexel in his car often, arguing, dialoguing the testimony of Jesus. I took him to Oliver B. Greene once I recall. He was a darling of Jim Fallon of philosophy class and went to the colloquies at Fallon’s house, he who spent three weeks on what happens to an acorn when smashed. I remember he and Bill Franklin in the foyer of our house jousting with karate hands.  Nobody jousted with me though, it was all mental.  He won three purple hearts and a  bronze star.We visited the extravaganzas of Dewitt Jayne together. That I would know but not know such sublimities is evidence of cadency, falling, but not falling, since after I returned from San Jose, at the funeral in Bala Cynwyd Fred appeared to offer his condolences. Maybe the last time I saw him. Unlucky in love, married three times, he said you might as well marry rich, and did, but it failed him.  An Ltc in wars! I often tried to trace him later, but could not until his death. He lived on Stone Island FL. -his daughter, Kathleen Heming.  "He leaves his daughter, Kathleen Heming and her husband, Jay Nardone, two grandchildren, Ian and Mikaela, brother George Siglin, sisters Susan Hendricks and Katherine Santino and several members of his birth family. He will be missed by his daughter-in-spirit, Katherine Leidenberg and her brother James Blythe and their families." 5/19/22

To Norma Phillips, 1440 Stone Trail, Enterprise, FL 32725

The Violent Bear It Away. Flannery O'Connor

Asking Jesus to "stab me in the heart," is full Gael, and O'Connor should be seen among those great extremes as no less a religious figure than Yeats, who was plenty of that. Without her violence we would not know how the violent can carry the kingdom of God away,  but that is as prophetic as the "Second Coming," where "The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." If you have not and are not seeing the Violent Bear it Away that is because it has been shielded from your eyes by such distractions as applied, which it is the business of O'Connor to annihilate, hence all the images of fire in her work.

The sun on the tree line, a red mammoth, the wood thrush's four notes, the forked birch that frames the sky on the first cover of the two chimneys, the burned clearing, open mouthed, the breeze on his neck, a threat that encircles him with its violet shadow and talks to him so that he lights the tree on fire, torches the now burning bushes and the whole landscape as a prelude to the Calling Feeding of the 5000, in Ch. 12 sees in the cornfield, the wall of the woods, black Buford on his mule, who mounded the uncle's grave, all amid the hunger, loaves and fishes, night streaks of the red hunger tide rising in Abel's blood cleansed by the red gold tree of fire that consumes the darkness, like the fire in the furnace, Elijah, Moses' burning bush burning anointed by a raised grave as he heads with the speed of mercy to the city to preach, fulfill the call.

Without the powerful extremes infused into this writing, the stores lose all their power, for we are always alert fro the next apocalypse to break in, when Mrs. Greenleaf rocks back and for, "Jesus, stab me in the heart," as her act of devotion. With out all the invocations of violence to Jesus these works translate into  domestic chit chat  of laundry women with their betters. But another powerful validation for its favor is in the preservation of that time when a black person could be glorified into a N, a primal force, an unknowable god, while at the same time a denigration, for that suits to a T the white critical world to celebrate its racist heart while glorifying it. These became the upright moralists who inherited the tradition of Bonhoeffer. 

This does not any way negate the beauty of her prose, the burning tree of the mammoth sun on the tree line. He who made all things can honor all things. So Tarwater as opposed to holy water, the designated prophet who seeks to avoid his call, like Jonah, anoints himself in the grave of his uncle, fills his face in the dirt, that gives him the black eyes at least, as all this overlooks the cornfield, the field white unto harvest, wheat and chaff, and the feeding of the 5000 in his hunger and non hunger at it all. 
These are some readers notes for riders to this stupendous UnRagnarok.

  If you are wanting to transverse the spiritual realm of the pain and horror of this calling of the imagination and are reading Christian authors to get you there you should know how the good live and die. Thomas Merton died with a faulty wired fan in the middle of his chest in Bangkok. Al Cameron died with a full fledged stroke heart attack in the Walmart. Alex died with a wish to shut him up. Art G died with 8 years of Alzheimer. Rev O as a recluse abandoned on a bed in a home unannointed, and that is on me. They glorify Bonhoeffer's death, but do not imitate it. They bow down in their living rooms. Dr. King, JFK died from their lusts. Cut to the chase why don't you. So also went Sister Celine. Charles Williams taught Lewis to trade his own life for anothers. John Cullen of a sudden illness in a day. So to explain the violence I look at Savannah, of Conrad Aiken too, and his corpuscular consciousness, and therefore Ambrose Gorden to whom I gave some octopus meat to illustrate, but the land the islands the inlets the swamps the humidity must have more to do with it than the  human. Why just looking to join the two I check to see if Roseanne Potter was from there, by association, find she died two days ago. In the transactions of suffering Clannery is asking for the grace to seek to suffer. Her podcasters do not celebrate that verse thought,  "to know Christ— the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death." In the gothic southern style this gets dramatic play in the violent bear it away. Did you know the charismatics corner stone of dominion is to take the kingdom of heaven by force? To be swallowed up in the fire, what could be better? If you have lived this way all of life in this medieval fire of unknowing in the fhe furnace, burning, not burning, you can read ch. 12 of The Violent. 

 "Dear God, 

I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside."

 That she addresses the Father of Lights in whom is no shadow of turning who oversees and inhabits creation to the sparrow on the altar, as so abstract, I take her to the Mennonite, The real life and death causes of extreme sacrifice, pacifists and militants who background this moral in all regions and times, now focus on Pinter's America and the West. Two sides of uneconomic coin oppose the cultural West of every Greek myth, Proteus everywhere, Dionysius liberated, Orpheus inebriated. Let us call them Mennonites and Muslims, lack of self defense and counter offense, who think the knock at the door, the firing gun, the sirens are for them. Iraqis and Mennonites pray at start of day, before they plow a field or eat a meal. They pray on the way to market and mosque that they may live or die. They pray past the hospital up the way to school. Hospitals, markets are full of victims, fuller than prisons. When American reporters honk their horns they get out their prayers.

But you should read Fox's Martyrs first to bone up on your techniques, and the inquisitions and all in one The Book of Mennonite Martyrs Flannery does not know, where Mennonites and Muslims, but at the same time verbalize that Flannery's brillant acceptance is not also because she expresses the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson and Count Tolstoy who could not abide Jesus the Blessed any more than Tarwater. How far satire goes to replicate the very thing it mocks is a matter for Goethe whose young Werther sparked a rash of suicides, so which O'Conner is uproariously funny to a Christian, she gives aid and comfort to the enemy beside. The very formal address of the prayer journal of words if of the heart need never be spoken might have been sent to the universe.Her podcasts do not celebrate that verse thought, "to know Christ— the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death." In the gothic southern style this gets dramatic play in the violent bear it away. Did you know the charismatics corner stone of dominion is to take the kingdom of heaven by force? To be swallowed up in the fire, what could be better? If you have lived this way all of life in this medieval fire of unknowing in the fhe furnace, burning, not burning, you can read ch. 12 of The Violent.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13067179-the-violent-bear-it-away