Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
http://raenergy.igc.org/bio.html
Blog
http://raenergy.blogspot.com/

There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo

Now Casting a Global Village Reality:

The whole worlds' a stage and all the men and women will be the players and the audience.

The Abrahamic bible has a few thousand dividian affiliates attempting to proceed with the teaching _ 'We should transcend from what is to what ought'. The distractions and temptations that have stymied the experiment are merely the proofs needed to show the emerging civilization that we can go nowhere without the Archetype of Fairness. Fairness demands that force should not be the transcending vehicle. The hint was the meek shall inherit the Earth.

We are only one people, we are one and the same,
we are all one spirit, we are all one name.
http://raenergy.igc.org/onepeople.html

THE TENT OF ABRAHAM, HAGAR, & SARAH: :A Multireligious call for Peacemaking

http://www.shalomctr.org/index.cfm/action/read/section/IsPal/article/article637.html

CONTENTS:
Ramadan Meets Rosh Hashanah & Assisi
Torah for Today: Come to Pharaoh, where "I" am
Renewing the Year, Renewing The Shalom Center
Dr. King Speaks Out Today: When Silence Is Betrayal

Ramadan Meets Rosh Hashanah & Assisi

Next fall, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish holy month of Tishrei (which begins with Rosh Hashanah) will coincide.

They will begin on or about October 3, and the saint's day for Francis of Assisi falls on October 4.

This confluence offers us an extraordinary moment for interweaving our celebrations in these three traditions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The families of Abraham.

We have nine months to prepare -- time to conceive, gestate, and bring to birth this joyful moment.

Nine months to create open hearts where now there are clenched teeth, to share tears with each other where now we shed each other's blood.

We are tottering on the precipice of religious and civilizational war. GOD HAS GIVEN US A SPECIAL GIFT to help us step away from the cliff.

THE GIFT OF TIME. Time to help us walk hand-in-hand, listening to the Spirit alongside each other.

A few possible ways to share:

o     Congregations can agree to share dinner after nightfall on any of the evenings of Ramadan, and carefully shape the dinner as a spiritual meal with prayer, meditation, story-telling.

Perhaps groups of six - including two people from each tradition - could share the stories of important moments in their own spiritual journeys.

Perhaps groups of three congregations - a church, a synagogue, a mosque - could each host one meal during the month for members of all three.

o     Churches could invite Jews and Muslims to join in learning about and celebrating Francis of Assisi. (He was one of the few Christian saints who learned in a serious way from Muslim teachers.)

o     Jews could invite Muslims and Christians into the "sukkah."

o     Muslims could invite Jews and Christians to join in celebrating some aspects of Eid el-Fitr

o     Synagogues could invite Muslim scholars and spiritual leaders to teach in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah how it is that Muslims understand the story of Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael (The biblical version of the story is part of the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah.). Then there could be open discussion of the differences, the similarities, the wisdom held in each of the versions of the story.

o     Together, rabbis, priests, nuns, ministers, and imams -- perhaps with their congregants -- could take some action for human rights, for healing of the earth, for peace in the whole region where Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah sojourned.

WE WELCOME YOUR SUGGESTIONS FOR SHARING PRAYER, LEARNING, EMOTIONAL CONNECTION, SOCIAL ACTION, AND FOOD DURING AND BEYOND THIS TIME WE WILL BE SHARING.

We hope you will begin NOW to plan with others of the Abrahamic faiths in your own city or neighborhood.

For more information on this, please read the Weblog and the articles on our website.

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Torah for Today: Come to Pharaoh, where "I" am

The Torah portion read in synagogues this week begins with facing Pharaoh. It invites us to face this question:

How can we face the Pharaohs in our own lives?

Maybe we are most conscious of the Pharaohs that bring plagues of climate catastrophe ("hail") and undrinkable water ("blood") on the earth, send modern chariots to bloody war, kill children, torture prisoners.

Or the Pharaohs at our workplace -- cutting wages and benefits, outsourcing jobs, harassing secretaries

Or the Pharaohs in our own religious organizations -- sexually abusing children, harassing congregants, scorning gay people, expelling lesbian ministers, cutting off discussion of war and injustice becuase they are not "religious" issues and might be "divisive."

Or the Pharaohs within ourselves, the habits and addictions that have us by the throat, enslaving us. Killing us.

When God sends Moses to face Pharaoh (Exod 10: 1), the Torah text says, "Bo el Pharaoh." Most English translations say, "Go to Pharaoh." But "Bo" means "come," not "go."

"Come to Pharaoh!"

How can God be saying "Come!" unless God is already there? -- Already within Pharaoh, saying, "Come toward Me!"

And God continues: "Hikhbad'ti libo." That is usually translated, "I have made his [Pharaoh's] heart heavy, hard.") But the Hebrew root KVD can mean heavy, or glorious, or honorable, or radiant. So the phrase can be read as: "I, God, have put My radiance in his, Pharaoh's, heart."

In other words: "Come to Me -- the Me who lives hidden inside Pharaoh. Don't be afraid of Pharaoh, and don't be swallowed up by rage against Pharaoh. For what looks like HIS radiance, HIS glory, is really MY radiance, MY glory."

Come with both courage and compassion.

Together they make up what today we call nonviolent resistance.

[More on Facing Pharaoh]

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Renewing the Year, Renewing The Shalom Center

From the beginning, The Shalom Center has been a pioneering organization, opening new orientations rooted in Jewish religious and spiritual wisdom in areas of public life that had been rarely addressed in Jewish life.

There have been four major (overlapping) periods in this pioneering history, dealing with four different areas of change.

For an explanation of the four periods click here.

Now we have crystallized our learning by asking ourselves what are the greatest dangers to the world, and what can we do about them.

We think the greatest dangers are:

o     The collisions of right-wing versions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with each other, moving toward a long and lethal war between the US and Islam in which millions would be killed or reduced to misery, and most creative cultural and spiritual life would be squeezed into oblivion.

o     The worsening of the global scorching that is already under way into climate catastrophe -- as the US especially and other societies as well, continue to pour CO2 into the atmosphere.

o     War upon war and waves of economic disaster as the world reaches "peak oil" (when the available reserves of oil begin to dwindle), demand for oil increases, and conflicts over control of oil worsen.

Likely results: US-China confrontations in the Middle East and Africa, long and lethal occupations of (and guerrilla uprisings in) oil-rich countries like Iraq, Colombia, and Venezuela, and various economic disasters as the price of oil spirals upward.

The most basic change we need is a spiritual transformation that can make a difference in the world of actions and society. A PRACTICAL sense of planetary community. A sense that all species (and life-forms like the ozone layer and the oxygen level) as well as all human cultures and communities are interwoven strands of the One.

What can The Shalom Center do to help bring that about?

We have decided to focus on two efforts.

One we are calling the Tent of Abraham, bringing together Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Twelve of us met during the weekend of the third anniversary of 9/11, and will meet again at the end of January. Click here for a description and report.

This effort also led to a "Call to Peacemaking: The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, & Sarah," which (God willing, inshallah, im yirtzeh hashem), will be published as a full-page ad in the NY Times in the next ten days. Read the text here.

The other is called "Beyond Oil." It addresses -

The lethal dangers arising out of our society's oiloholic addiction, from asthma to war to political corruption to global scorching;

The problem of unaccountable top-down power in Big Oil and its political cronies

Most important -- how to create the alternatives that would free us from our addiction. How to get our religious institutions to invest in wind power. How to get clergy to persuade congregants to buy hybrid cars instead of SUV's. How to fill our prayers and ceremonies not only with conscious passion and compassion for peace and for the earth, but with conscious commitment to dissolve Pharaoh's power.

Back to contents

Dr. King Speaks Out Today: When Silence Is Betrayal

Dr. King was co-chair of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, which met at
Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967 (exactly one year before he was killed). His speech there, the most profound and radical of his life, called for resistance to the Vietnam War. And it went beyond that to analyze racism, militarism, and materialism as the triplets of great danger to American freedom.

As he looked into the future, he spoke:

"Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American
spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves
organizing Clergy and Laymen Concerned committees for the next
generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru
...Thailand and Cambodia... Mozambique and South Africa. We will be
marching for these and dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy."

[Read the entire speech]

The excerpt that follows can strengthen us in our own struggle today against exactly the kind of war that he prophesied. - AW

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men [sic] do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." A nation that continues year and year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves in the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
http://raenergy.igc.org/bio.html
Blog
http://raenergy.blogspot.com/

Call to Action blog a virtual seminar for change
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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - - Margaret Mead