Chat Spot

[Steve Plonk]

Thanks to Ron & Zero Hero (Aka Still Trucking) for your comments...I, too, am a seeker
and have been for years. Some of my big pilgrimage was to Rome, Italy, & New Harmony, Indiana. I've been to Glastonbury, UK & climbed the Tor.

I've traced some ancestors to Canterbury & the ruins of an old Abbey nearby. I saw the funeral of RFK at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.
I stopped off at various cathedrals, to & from & on the way. I have also been in Jewish synagogues(sic).
I've been to the Buddhist shrine in San Francisco, & the Shinto temples in Kyoto, Japan.

But, I still come back to the Christian faith. There is something about the Salisbury Cathedral, after visiting nearby Stonehenge, in the U. K., that still pulled me back like a magnet.

Another one of my favorite cathedrals is St. Marks in Venice, Italy. I really liked
the Indiana Jones segments & James Bonds segments which take me back to my youth & long visits in Venice. My friend, who died recently, wrote a book I cherish called "Venetian Blue".
I've been in the catacombs & salt mines where the early Christians hid from their enemies.

I've always liked my friends who were the Bahai's. But I'm still an unorthodox United Methodist. We MUST peacefully co-exist. This belief is the challenge of the 21st Century.
We must show tolerance for others who come from differing backgrounds, etc.

I am partisan, but anytime I see the peaceful exchange of power during the Inauguration of our President, I get glassy-eyed & sentimental. I have had the opportunity to
live in a country whose generally been good to me. We have freedom of religion here,
but there is a ways to go, even so...Good luck, & God Bless US every one.

[RonPrice]

Indeed, we are all in it together. I thought that was a clear messsage in Obama's inaugural address:

1. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.

2. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together.

American political institutions, like those in Australia, or Canada where I grew-up, have a great deal of difficulty working together. People who are supporters of one party or another are convinced of their position and resolute in their support for it. I simply haven't been able to make this partisanship work for me spiritually, intellectually, or theologically. The loyal opposition has always seemed loyally opposed.

How many wake-up calls do we need before we rethink our commitment to bringing opposing viewpoints together for the common good, so that differences don't spur violence? With too many examples of escalating conflict, and invoking the fire of heaven on those who don't agree with us, coming together calls for nothing short of a transformation of society and attitudes. A gift as precious as unity -- in diversity, not uniformity -- will be hard won. Working together is going to keep us all busy; it's a tough call.-Ron

[stilltrucking]

I render unto Caesar what I can stand to render. I vote even if we are a decadent empire. I can not get as enthusiastic about Obama as Steve. Something about a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a kill list just don't sit right with me.

I joined the Religious Society of Friends because of my violent nature. I get my theology from heretics.

in friendship Ron.
jack tilles
72 year old four f hippy skid from baltimore

[RonPrice]

What a delightful reply, stilltrucking. Your words inspire an honest response that reveals some of my 60 years experience of the Baha'i Faith. I am a committed Baha'i and believe in its Prophet- Founder who claims to be Christ returned; I believe in the Baha'i System. But, like all systems, individuals in it are one of the several big tests for most believers. Individuals are far from perfect in all systems, ideologies and parties.

Also the indifference of the wider society to the beliefs I hold dear has been another big test. In Iran 1000s of Baha'is, believers in the Babi-Baha'i Faiths, have lost their lives due to their beliefs; but in the west no one would ever kill me for what I believe. Yes, stilltrucking, heretics are often good teachers for me too.

I keep my violent nature in place with drugs for my bipolar 1 disorder, anti-psychotics and anti-depressants, which are part of the weaponry of psychopharmacology. They have been more valuable to me in helping me get through life than many a belief. The science of psychiatry, indeed, science generally, has been a wonderful tool for humankind and for me as I go to my TV, my internet and my car---all part of the world of modern sicence on which our world of materialism is significantly based..-Ron

[Steve Plonk]

I return to give you my visions of Whirled Peas! Simply marvelous, fellows, simply marvelous.
Glimpsing that St.Pete, in trot of time, comes through the binding of the bind, which holds the Book of LIfe. G-d gives the gift of life & we, of course, are most eager to receive, in our humble pie. Selah...

[stilltrucking]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edwQ8UhQt7k

[Steve Plonk]

Still Trucking, Good post about "The Gatekeepers" movie on youtube.
Sometimes rounding up suspected terrorist perps in paddy wagons is a good idea.
Get 'em before they bomb and/or multiply.

Here's a link on youtube for the results & spin on the Israeli elections:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2TCNuI5rI4

[stilltrucking]

The guy who made that movie had some good things to say about Obama, I thought you might like to read them.

[Steve Plonk]

Still Trucking, I appreciated the comments about Obama, in the Gatekeepers link.
Glad you sent the link.
There are also good comments about Obama in the link I sent you.
No one is particularly fond of Netanyahu (sic), but they can work with him.

[stilltrucking]

An America cramped by defensiveness

By Peter J. Munson, Published: February 1

Peter J. Munson a major in the Marine Corps, is the author of “War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America’s Quest for the End of History.” The views expressed here are his own.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... ml?hpid=z7

Since I returned home, a darkness has grown in me as both I and our nation have failed to live up to the sacrifices of these young men and women. I had no expectation of “victory” in Afghanistan or Iraq, whatever that would mean. Nor did I expect some epiphany of strategic insight or remorse from the nation’s brain trust.

I just found that I could not square the negativity, pettiness and paranoia in the discourse of our country’s elders with the nobility and dedication of the men and women I had seen and served with in Afghanistan.

[RonPrice]

The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering, chatspot. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment.

His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness, but there is much man must learn first to achieve this type of happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him, hopefully. Of course, there is no guarantee. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most. But so, too, does suffering lead to suicide and intense depression, and much else at the negative end of life's spectrum.

It's a very complex ballgame, chatspot. Thoreau went for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity." When you read his journals(1839-1861), though, you find out the terrible depressions he went through. The theme I am talking about has libraries of books on the subject. For me, enoughs---enough, for now.-Ron Price, Tasmania

[Steve Plonk]

Just thought I would actually chat... What about those "Baltimore Ravens"?!
Nice that they won the "Superbowl" for a change. I rooted for them against
the favored "San Francisco 49ers". Any other Ravens fans out there?
Apple core, Baltimore, who's my friend? The Baltimore Ravens...

Normally, I'm a Tennessee Titans fan, but our team didn't make the final playoffs this year.

[Steve Plonk]

Well, it appears that my reference to an American football game went over like a lead balloon. So, let's change the subject. Ball is in your court, internet lurkers.

[short timer]

I used to live and die with the Baltimore Colts. I had a Johnny Unitas style crew cut in 1958 and I was always late for school cause I used to spend so much time coming my hair just right for the girl in the math class of Miz Reese. I remember her name still and her skin so marble I could see her veins.

Never played sports in high school, I tried out for junior varsity lacrosse but got cut because I was lazy. Did not like to work out get in shape.

Chit chat about sports that's all I got for you.
and this cartoon
in friendship jt

[RonPrice]

Some more chit-chat below about sports, Steve.-Ron
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Two Prose-poems follow:


Poem # 1:

FOOTY and BASEBALL

Part 1:

On the ninth day of spring in Australia, 9/9/'07, I attended the first footy game in a big stadium in Australia-at York Park in Launceston Tasmania. I had lived in Australia for 36 years and two months at the time--nearly 60 per cent of my life; I had watched parts of several games on small ovals across Australia and, of course, seen dozens of parts of games on TV. But I don’t think I had ever watched an entire game. I was married to a big football fan and having a son and two step-daughters who also enjoyed the game, it was difficult to escape its regular sound in our home for six months of the year, especially at the weekend. Given the centrality of this game to the Aussie ethos, I felt my attendance and what it involved deserved a prose-poem to mark the occasion even though I only watched part of the game and even though it was only for the under 14s. But the game was a grand final in the NTJFL, the northern Tasmania Junior Football League, my 14 year old step-grandson, Tobias Wells, was playing and my wife saw that it was an essential part of my grandfatherly role to attend.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 September 2007.

Back in what many saw as the quiet fifties, my attention, my spiritual and physical resources, my curiosity, was channelled into sport, school and an emerging interest in the opposite sex. The energies of that young child and adolescent who had just begun the long race of life were, indeed, stretched to the full during those halcyon days by activities having little to no connection with any organized religion. Organized religion in any form has not been a popular activity in Australia and Canada, at least in the places where I have lived all my life, although certain evangelical-fundamentalist groups have attracted large followings, and I was not among those followings.

Part 2:

The following poem tells a little about one of the sports, baseball, its context in my life, in modern history and this new Faith whose connection with my life was a largely peripheral one during the years of my childhood and early to mid-adolescence. I wrote the following poem six weeks before leaving the classroom and retiring from employment as a teacher at the age of 55 in 1999.

So often in life I felt strongly that I just could not stay any longer in a place—a town or a city--in a work situation, in a marriage or in any one of the multitude of other relationships one can have in life. For one reason or another I just had to go, had to split, as we used to say colloquially. Sometimes the reason was obvious; sometimes it was inexplicable; sometimes the choice was not mine.

In 1953/4 I felt strongly that I had to leave softball for hardball and third base for the mound, the role of pitcher. In 1950 I had to leave our house in RR#1 Burlington. The former was my choice; the latter had nothing to do with me. Such is part of the nature of fate, determinism and free will. In August 1962, at the age of 18, I played my last game of hardball in the juvenile league for the Burlington All-Stars. I pitched a full nine innings in that game and in the bottom of the ninth I was hit for three runs and we lost the game 3 to 1. The next week my family moved to another town and the next summer I worked for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to make money to go to university and did not play another game of baseball until I was 39 and lived in Katherine, Northern Territory, where is was so hot that after a few innings in one game I gave it up with an excess of sweat on my brow as a lost cause.

Part 3:

When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith, both of which grew up in the modern age. The game of baseball was born in America in the 1840s as a new activity for sporting fraternities and a new way for communities to develop a more defined identity.1 Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions.

The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. I wrote the poem which follows about seven weeks before teaching my last class as a full-time Tafe teacher in Australia. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “The Big Picture: Part Two,” ABC TV, 18 February 1999; and 1John Nagy, “The Survival of Professional Baseball in Lynchburg Virginia: 1950s-1990s,” Rethinking History, Vol.37.

They both grew slowly
through forces and processes,
events and realities
in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball and the Baha’i Faith
along their stony and tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi School
of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect
of Shi’ah Islam.

And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would climb
to the heights of popularity
that baseball had achieved
quite early in its history.

Baseball was a game
whose time had come,
a hybrid invention,
a growth out of diverse roots,
the fields and sandlots of America,
as American as apple pie.

And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was, as we all were,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it--
and us--apart.

Ron Price
17 February 1999
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A second poem about baseball, written about a year after retiring from full-time teaching to Tasmania, where I lived in its oldest town, George Town---also conveys something of the flavour of those ‘warm-up days' until I was 18 when my curiosity about sport was exceeded by curiosity about other things.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Poem #2:

A BASEBALL-CRAZY KID

In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only perfect game in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.1 That same month and year R. Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange Australia, in the extended PS of her letter, that it was “much better for the friends to give up saying “Amen.”2

The following year Shoghi Effendi died and Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play professional baseball, retired. I was completing grades 7 and 8 when all of this took place and, even at this early age, was in love with at least three girls and possibly four in my class: Carol Ingham, Judy Simpson, Karen Jackson and Susan Gregory. I found them all so very beautiful. Karen was the first girl I kissed.3 -Ron Price with appreciation to: 1"The Opening of the World Series: 2000," ABC TV; 2Messages to the Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi, editor, Graham Hassall, Baha’i Publications Australia, 1997, p.419; and 3Ron Price, Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1, Photograph Number 102.

I was just starting grade seven
and still saying amen
occasionally when I went
to that Anglican Church
on the Guelph Line
in Burlington Ontario
with my mother and father
and saying grace
just as occasionally.

I watched the World Series,
a highlight of autumn
for a twelve year old
baseball-crazy kid, back then.

And I passed the half-way point
of my pre-youth days1
when I was the only kid
with any connection
with this new world Faith
in these, the very early days
of the growth of a Cause
in the Dominion of Canada,2
a Cause that contained the seed
for a future world civilization.

1 1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days.
2 In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada. The 400 Baha’is that started the Ten Year Crusade in 1953 in Canada became 800 by the time I became a Baha’i in 1959. In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then knew, or later came to know.

There may have been other pre-youth but at this early stage of the growth of the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight of its history, I was not aware of them. Most of my friends were agnostics or atheists, with one of two garden-variety of Christians, that is Christians who were Christians because it was the only choice, part of their cultural inheritance.—See Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1987, p.46.

Ron Price
23 October 2000
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