LINKS
February 7, 2011 - My story as a Spiritual Detective continued today, when I heard Boz Scaggs “Dirty Low Down” playing on the car radio and watched a “BOSS” license plate pass me on the highway. This mystery originally began as an odd chain of events that linked my ancestor Roger Williams to Boz Scaggs and Adam and Eve. Then a friend shared the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who refusing to submit to Adam’s dominant will, jumped the gate out of
Later in the day, while walking, my thoughts turned to a book my mom gave me, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. This expose is about millions of young girls being sold as property, beaten into submission, and enslaved into prostitution. The authors share stories about the few heroes who are dedicated to freeing some of these women and helping them establish sovereign lives, while hundreds of other people just turn their backs.
This caused me to think about the New Testament, Matthew 15:31: “So that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of Israel.”
While pondering this line – and the words lame, blind, and dumb – I found a navy blue golf pencil lying on the road. It was well-chewed with some lettering, “Highland LINKS 1892”. Hmmm. I didn’t know how it fit in, but then neither did I know how it didn’t, so I filed it away. Further along on my walk, I heard the cawing of crows. Oddly, there was a single crow in every tree along that stretch of road. How could all this be connected, I wondered. Yet all things invariably are linked if you look deep enough, so it was up to me to figure out how.
Once home I went straight to the dictionary. I wanted to look up lame, blind, dumb, and links. Stepping over a pile of books in our study, I bumped one and sent it tumbling. It fell on my foot. Another clue: The book, “The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor,” is a detective story about the discovery of a 46-million-year-old fossil dubbed “Ida." Check out the skeletal hand!
Okay, now the dictionary. I looked up “lame.” The first definition was “crippled.” The third definition was “poor, ineffectual, and imperfect.” “Lame” can also suggest indifference, or lack of concern.
Next up was “blind.” It has a slew of alternative definitions, the first being what you’d expect, “sightless,” but it’s the others that caught my attention:
2. lacking insight; unable to understand or judge; ignorant
3. unseen; out of public view; private; dark; obscure; not easily discernable
4. heedless; inconsiderate; reckless
5. complicated; winding; difficult to trace
6. not bearing flowers or fruit; unproductive
The eighth definition was “closed at one end; having no outlet,” as in a blind alley. The eleventh was “not controlled by intelligence,” and the twelfth was “insensible.”
As for the word "dumb," I found unwilling to talk; silent; reticent; temporary speechless, as from fear.
So what was Jesus really teaching? Could it be that he was teaching empowerment, intelligence, attentiveness, assertiveness, and courage. As a teacher, he sought to educate his people about the Truth and Freedom. By standing up to Tyranny, he set an example of tremendous integrity. When we speak of Jesus dying for our sins, could it be that the sins we speak of were everything from injury infliction and reckless oppression at one end of the spectrum to ignorance, laziness, apathy, and reticence at the other end.
In John 8:32, Jesus to the Jews, “The truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?” 34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
The word “link” also has many meanings, and right now I’m thinking of the links of the heavy chains of slavery. “Link” is defined as
- any of the series of rings or loops making up a chain or chain armor
- a section of something resembling a chain
- anything serving to connect or tie; as, a link with the past
- to unite something by intervening
February 8, 2011 – Lying in bed this morning, my thoughts turned to Roger William's written dialog between the Gods of Peace and Truth, and its concluding sentence: “That the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus, The Prince of peace. Amen.”
The Daily Word for today is Synchronicity: “As I relax into the flow, I experience more and more moments of spiritual synchronicity.” I interpreted this as a time to seek out more spiritual clues, and there they were...
Clue #1: Our daughter came home from school yesterday, announcing she had won an essay contest on American Citizenship. She left a copy of her paper, “Participation: Basis of American Identity” on the kitchen table. The paper launches with a commentary on our melting pot culture “differences and diversities abound, as every person celebrates their own individuality. Yet there is one quality that all true Americans appear to share: participation... a true citizen is not afraid to plunge in to the issues and make a difference.”
The paper goes on to discuss “the Rights of the Colonists,” written by Samuel Adams in 1772, and the life of “Ida B. Wells.” Playing detective, I recalled the fossil "Ida" from The Link and the Highland Links 1892 pencil. I decided to google “Ida Wells” together with “1892,” and immediately found a dense paragraph at www. webster.edu that began like this...
“During the late 1800's, violence against blacks increased at alarming rates and mob rule was becoming the norm. The KKK established a "reign of terror," murdering and lynching innocent blacks, while most southern whites looked the other way. In 1892, Ida B. Wells was again faced with tragedy in what became known as the "Lynching at the Curve." In March 1892, three close friends of Wells, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, opened the People's Grocery Company. The store was located directly across the street from a white-owned grocery store, which had hitherto maintained a monopoly on, what Wells described as, "the trade of this thickly populated colored suburb" (Duster 48). Angered over the loss of business, a white mob gathered to run the black grocers out of town. Warned about the encroaching mob, the black men armed themselves, and in the ensuing confrontation, wounded three white men who had invaded the store. The next day, white newspapers printed exaggerated accounts of the previous day's events, claiming that "Negro desperadoes" had shot white men (Sterling 78). These sensationalized depiction's gave rise to another mob that stormed the jail cells of the three black men and killed them. Wells responded to this atrocious act of violence by writing an editorial in the Free Speech urging blacks to leave Memphis. She wrote "There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons." In two month's time, six thousand black people left Memphis, many relocating to the Oklahoma Territory. Those who remained, including Wells, organized boycotts of white owned businesses in response to the lynchings (Sterling 80). The Lynching at the Curve marked the beginning of Wells' anti-lynching campaign. (1892 is also the year that the “Pledge of Allegiance” and “
Clue #2: Lying next to my computer, where my daughter sometimes works, I found a reading assignment - the following poem on a single white sheet of paper.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Written by W.H. Auden, this poem was inspired by a Breughel painting - link here.
Clearly the poem highlights the apathy with which humans view individual suffering. Grabbing Edith Hamilton's Mythology reference off the bookshelf, I flipped to the index to research the story of Icarus. Directly below the name "Icarus" I read "Ida, one of the nymphs who cared for the infant Zeus," but there was no page number, so I googled "Zeus" and "Ida" and follow this link to dig up some information. Here's a summary of my findings...
1. Zeus's mother, Rhea, had to hide her son away from his cannibalistic father, Kronos. The nymphs of Mount Ida, namely Ida and Adrasteia, placed Zeus away in a secluded cave, nursing him with honey and goat's milk.
2. The Kouretes Daktyloi were rustic Daimones (Spirits) appointed by Rhea to drown out her infant's crying with their frenzied dance of clashing spear and shield.
3. The Kouretes were gods of the wild mountainside, inventors of the rustic arts of metalworking, shepherding, hunting, and beekeeping. They were also the first armed warriors.
4. The five Daktyloi ("fingers") were usually regarded as identical to the Kouretes. These also had an equal number of sister named Hekaterides, who together appeared to represent all ten fingers of the human hand.
5. The male and female Daktyloi were also joined in marriage, perhaps imagined as the harmonious "finger to finger" folding of the hands.
In 1990, Deep Purple released their thirteenth album "Slaves and Masters". 13, by the way, is the Colgate number. In 1817, 13 men - six clergy and seven laymen - met in the frontier settlement of Hamilton with "13 dollars, 13 prayers, and 13 articles." (To this day, members of the Colgate community consider the number 13 a good omen.) In that meeting, the men founded the Baptist Education Society of the State of
Flipping further, on page 26 of the Colgate Scene began a six-page article, “The Forgotten Freedom Fighter,” about a free black man who served as the linchpin of the Underground Railroad, but was left out of the history books. Page 32 began an article, “Beyond the 11th,” about empowering women in
At this point my brain is clanging with heavy metal music, clashing with shields and spears, clinking with heavy iron chains, and clacking with skeletons of ancestors. Is someone up in heaven pulling my chain?
A side observation about crows and the clues they may provide.
One internet piece of content began: "Countless cultures point to the raven as a harbinger of powerful secrets. Moreover, the raven is a messenger too, so its business is in both keeping and communicating deep mysteries."
Raven symbolism of wisdom and knowledge-keeping is connected with the Welsh hero Bran, the Blessed whose name means raven. Bran was the holder of ancestral memories, and his wisdom was legendary.
The raven is symbolic of mind, thought and wisdom according to Norse legend, as their god Odin was accompanied by two ravens: Hugin who represented the power of thought and active search for information. The other raven, Mugin represented the mind, and its ability to intuit meaning rather than hunting for it. Odin would send these two ravens out each day to soar across the lands. At day's end, they would return to Odin and speak to him of all they had spied upon and learned on their journeys.
Raven color changes are also mentioned in Christian lore when Noah sent a raven first to confirm the receding floodwaters. When the raven did not return, it was said God turned its feathers black for its failure, and Noah sent a dove out to do the raven's job. And since then, the raven has gotten a bad rap as being anti-mankind.
I'm not convinced. I rather think (as long as we're postulating over legends) the raven is very pro-mankind and its feathers turned black from sorrow - a heaviness in its heart to witness the floodwaters were still too high to accommodate the birthing ark.
We seem to be on a paper trail, some of us might need to pull out our Reading Glasses as we move forward.
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