Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Traveling Bible Teachers

A friends writes:
with the bible folks that travel door to door.

A wonderful way to see/feel my growth/understanding since the last visit.
Always interesting to remain steady with that which I no longer believe with honor and respect for my visitors and their present understanding.
I remained longer than usual to see how they fielded my questions and/or responses were received.
I recommend it.
Do you all have these visitors where you now reside?

So I responded:
Friend - We have the Jehovah's Witness here and they are quite active. Also seen a few Mormon boys on bicycles. I've had several extended conversations with one or two Jehovah's. Not good. Helpful to my learning curve. Reading Dorsey helps more. Today for example - "I have grown increasing understanding of any so-called common tongue as necessitating a systematic unconscious self-belittlement in its linguist, thereby necessitating (in protest) an augmenting, systematic unconscious symptom formation in its linguist. By habitually overlooking myself in my wording I become increasingly anaesthetic to the sensation of selfness in my language." This I think is the purpose of institutional, dogmatic religious non-thinking, which Dorsey calls "self-helpfulness." I see all educational organizations, with memberships (common tongue) as self-help groups having limited value to those who join them and severly restricted value to one seeking enlightenment (self-discovery). Margaret encouraged folks to "go back to church" in the 70's as a helpful way to discover no value in the church. peace. Rob

Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Trouble with Religion

The Undiscovered Self


by Anthony de Mello, SJ

Somebody came up to me once during a conference and asked, "What about 'Our Lady of Fatima'?" What do you think of her? When I am asked questions like that, I am reminded of the story of the time they were taking the statue of Our Lady of Fatima on an airplane to a pilgrimage for worship, and as they were flying over the South of France the plane began to wobble and to shake and it looked like it was going to come apart. And the miraculous statue cried out, "Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!" And all was well. Wasn't it wonderful, one "Our Lady" helping another "Our Lady"?



There was also a group of a thousand people who went on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to venerate the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sat down before the statue in protest because the Bishop of the Diocese had declared "Our Lady of Lourdes" patroness of the diocese! They were sure that Our Lady of Guadalupe felt this very much, so they were doing the protest in REPARATION for the offense. That's the trouble with religion, if you don't watch out.