Dances remember one's heritage

Churches, customs, and civil groups are often called "communities of memory" because they remember lessons of the past that are often forgotten by mainstream culture.

One example of this is the party we attended last week: For entertainment, the local Women's club danced the fandango and the Quadrille, in traditional costumes. Alas, the average age of the women was 70, so this dance heritage might be lost in the grass roots villages in another ten years.

The Philippines has a rich dance heritage, and like much of the country, it has mixed the Spanish and American and Asian cultures with local folk dances. .Some nice photos HERE of various dancers. Luckily, the heritage may be dying in favor of modern dance in the young, but it has been kept alive thanks to local dance groups and heritage societies.

In Manila, the elite families are often Chinese, but up here in the country, many less wealthy but prominent families like my husband's family have Spanish blood...and although thanks to land reform we no longer own the local land (except for a few acres per family member), until about ten years ago, when my husband visited during the fiesta, he would bring lots of US cash, and the farmers who once worked for his father would visit, bringing a little rice or fruit or sweets as a gift, and he would give them a dollar or two as a gift.

Sigh. We could see it coming...the farm villages got electricity in 1990, and by 1995 you could see TV antennas, bamboo houses replaced by concrete housing, and signs in the shops saying : Cellphone calls to Saudi available here.

Few of the children, who now are educated, want to go back to working the land when jobs in Manila and overseas are available. So now the roads are lined with the vacation houses of people from Manila, and we have to hire farmers for our small fields from the Visayas...

Yet the older generation still remember their heritage, although in another generation one may no longer see a quadrille danced at a fiesta.
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The Imitation of Christ

If you don't mind logging onto a right wing site, the Freeper religious forum is posting the Imitation of christ one day at a time.

Newsweek "priestess" and poor reporting

Newsweek has a "fluff piece" on a young women who was made a priest.
No proper education, not a good catholic (They asked her about kids and she said she "planned" to have some...meaning that she is using birth control)...and she is married to a non Catholic.

The problem?

Unfortunately, Newsweek hasn't discovered there are a lot of Schismatic Catholic churches not affiliated with the Catholic church, and some of them have women clergy...

they also don't seem to know that not all Catholics following the Pope are Roman Catholics...are they stupid, or only anti Catholic?

Then there is the line about Catholics now ordaining married clergy from other churches...Ummm...fellahs, the Eastern Churches have married men ordained as clerty too...maybe not in the US but in Eastern Europe and the Middle East...

Don't these editors bother to "vent" their news for accuracy?

Probably not...they don't care about truth, only about their anti Catholic agenda...

only a magazine who loves to bash catholics would publish

Hitchens Takes on Mother Teresa

The next taboo taken on by Hollywood

beastiality

But the animal molesters are humanized, and the photography even makes them kind of glamorous. The camera slowly pans around, focusing on the poetic imagery of the setting, often shrouding their faces in shadow like characters in a film noir. They meet at a diner and go by their internet handles like "H" and "The Happy Horseman." They could almost be RESERVOIR DOGS, except their crime is a little less understood by society than stealing diamonds and shooting people. They point out that bestiality was not a crime in the state of Washington until after this incident. I think they saw that more as progressive legislation than as an "oh come on, nobody's gonna do that" type loophole. They just see themselves as a bunch of guys who like to hang out together on a farm, make some drinks, talk about their lives, and then maybe on a good night go out and, uh, let the livestock mount them.

It's so non-judgmental, in fact, that one guy, "Coyote," was willing to play himself in the re-enactments. (The horse rescuer and some of the other non-animalfuckers do the same.)

Marriage and the sexual revolution

Those asking for gay marriage seem to ignore the amount of promiscuity in the male gay community.

One guy at "the Corner" mused what would John McCain say do if a man touched his shoes, or accused him of coming on to him. He would initially be clueless and then probably lose his temper.

It's probably similar to the kinky sex bars or pickup lines. Since the sexual revolution, we are hearing that such things should be considered "normal" but the dirty little secret is that the average person is not aware of such things, and does not participate in such things.

I remember when I was giving the Aids education classes to our National Guard units. One of the men in the film stated he probably had fifty partners, a different one every weekend. The unit was stunned. Most had sex with their wives and girlfriends and an occassional prostitute/bar pickup, but every weekend? In our rural area there just wasn't that many promiscuous girls. And when they scoffed about the risk of HIV being one in 600 per encounter, I reminded them that many gays who cruised bars had that many encounters in one year.

When I was in medical school, a promiscuous person was one with more than five partners. Now, teenagers with "only" five partners consider themselves as pure...although much of the teen sexuality is not sleeping around, but with regular boyfriends...serial monogamy, not promiscuity.

But until someone has the nerve to say it out loud, no one will hear.
Gay men assume sex is everywhere...and see signals everywhere. There is a lot of stuff going on, but not as much as HOllywood thinks there is going on. We went from not seeing sexual sin to assuming sex is going on all the time...

When one of my gay patients started explaining all the cues and clues he saw, I could only think of it as a cult. Some people get into religion like this, using words and clues and recognizing their own. Or it reminds me of people who go in for colon washing, or wicca or yoga,or far left conspiracy theories, or hunting, or what ever: Their whole lives assume that everyone does these things since all their friends do it...and it is worse on the left/the promiscuous/the gay, because the media promtes the idea that their cult is "normal", whereas even the most obnoxious Baptist or NRA member knows others don't necessarily agree with him.

So expect more cover up on gay marriage, where no one is discussing the reality of the male homosexual crusing lifestyle, and ditto for "transsexuals". There is a deep disconnect and lack of insight into normalcy that makes their interpretation of "breeders" wrong. And the worst are the transsexuals who want to be 18 year old prom queens, not full women. but who dares tell them this?

Ironically, gay women who marry often include those who were hurt by promiscuity, not just those born gay. My joke is that I support gay marriage for women, not for men...

I'm sorry this is a rant, but when someone explains they "need" sex and friendship, yet their "need" lets them sexually harass their employees, embarass their wives and put their business into jeopardy just for a blow job, it makes me realize that it's not just about sex, it's about a lot of other commandments broken to satisfy lust...

Forced abortion in Cuba

ABC news notices something about infant mortality statistics that I have brought up elsewhere: If a child is premature or dies quickly, they are not counted as neonatal deaths but as stillborn or abortions, so their statistics look better.

But DappledTHings notices this part:" infant mortality rates, doctors have said the data is misleading because when there might be indications of problems with the fetus, there is a widespread practice of forced abortions.

Julio Alfonso said, "We personally used to do 70 to 80 abortions a day." Yanet Sanchez, a Cuban exile, said she was simply told to submit to an abortion. "They told me I should end the pregnancy," said Sanchez. "It was my very first pregnancy. I wanted to have the child."

Diana the myth, Mother Teresa the reality

My husband was watching the memorial service to Princess Diana last night on CNN.

But, of course, the memorial service was more about the myth of Diana than her reality.

Diana the myth was the Cinderella who married a prince; the girl who worked as a nanny who found love. But then the myth changed, and she became the victim, a woman used by a cynical prince to birth his children, left loveless in a court of cold heartless in-laws, and who found the love of her life only to be snatched away by a terrible accident (or a cynical plot to end her life). The other myth is that of “noblesse oblige”, that of the beautiful compassionate princess who cared about poor people, embracing the HIV patient or carrying the poor undernourished black child.

The reality of Diana, with her temper tantrums, bulemia and lovers, is not part of that myth.

So a thousand years from now, will people still remember Diana? Yes and no. I suspect like Guenevir her story will (to use Tolkien’s metaphor) go into the stew of myth and come out different. But yes, the myth of Diana will still be remembered, even if perhaps her story and name change.

But there was another person who died the same weekend as Princess Diana: Mother Teresa.

And unlike Diana, whose rememberance is tearful and fluffy, the stories of Mother Teresa this week were shattering to those who prefer plaster saints and mythological princesses.

Time Magazine’s story revealed the depth of Mother Teresa’s crisis of faith. In Catholic spirituality, this temptation to unbelief is called the Dark Night of the Soul.

When one is new to God, he gives you cookies: you are high on spirituality, and find pleasure in prayer or meditation or cermonies etc. It is the honeymoon period, full of joy.
But then, just like marriage goes through times of trouble as it matures, so too spiritual life must grow up. And part of this is that God removes your crutches of emotional satisfaction and asks: Do you love ME or do you love my gifts?

And during that time of darkness, it is the will, not the emotions, that make the deicision to serve God. This idea might be new to the western media, but is a well known concept in not only Catholicism but in the mystic heritage of Orthodoxy, Buddhism and other Eastern religions.

And the news media, who prefer the myths of Mother Teresa: that of a pious plaster saint helping poor people and mindlessly parroting the mysgynist line of the Vatican , wasn’t sure what to do with a very human woman who had doubts and fears like the rest of us, but nevertheless did her duty and obeyed her calling the best she could.

Better the myth of Diana, the beautiful princess who smiled as she embraced children, than the reality of Mother Teresa, a wrinkled old lady cheerfully cleaning out latrines while suffering from doubt. Plaster saints don’t doubt (or clean latrines for that matter). Horrors: another scandal. A saint having doubts of faith…athiest calls her a hypocrite, psychologist explains her delusions...news at eleven…


Perhaps priest sociologist Andrew Greeley has the best insight into the reality of God and the failure of the press to prefer the myth to the much darker, more complicated reality of sainthood:

Catholics know that doubt and fear are part of the human condition, and absolute certainty is rarely if ever granted, and merits skepticism if it’s offered. St. Teresa of Avila experienced the Dark Night; Juan de la Cruz did, too, and wrote one of the greatest of poems in human literature about it……(Christ’s) Agony in the Garden was quite literally a Dark Night. So was his cry, ‘’Why have you forsaken me?'’….
I suspect that some Catholic source tried to explain these matters to the ABC reporter, but the reporter’s paradigm for all things Catholic is scandal and had been given that paradigm by his news editor, who already had the lead for the story in mind. How could the clip have begun with ‘’Catholic experts on sanctity said today that the revelation of the secret letters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta were simply one more proof that she indeed was a saint and a very great saint at that.'’

And a thousand years from now, those struggling to answer the deeper questions of life will still find comfort in the suffering Teresa as an example to follow during their own dark nights of doubt and fear and despair.
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crossposted bloggernews