Thanks for Noticing:
The Interpretation of Desire
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Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire.
THE SECOND EDITION Examples of comments
on sonnets
with bio-sketches |
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| Thanks to all who have commented on individual
sonnets
without seeing the full text of the revised edition of Their comments do not endorse the entire book. Book Page Design, Symbols, Notes, References |
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#12 KYRIE 12. A Roman Solider circa Anno Domini CCCXXV Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course. Some provinces have snow this time of year although the darkest day we buried, past. The resurrection of the spring ends fear as promises in sky and flame forecast. For Mithra’s feast day, god of light, the sun, the solstice birthing, I slew heretics. Assuming my salvation surely won, I hailed Invictus well with oil-soaked wicks. Now Constantine says Christ is why we fight, not just those we were, who called Sol true god, but if some cherish creeds that are not right though Christian, we must kill, by sword and rod. This Christmas I’ve made holy with my knife. This reign, this new religion, is my life. _________________ Circa Anno Domini CCCXXV, “about 325 in the year of our Lord” is when arguments over the nature of the Christ were voted at the Council of Nicea, convened by the Roman em peror Constantine (272-337; r306/324-) who had become a Christian when, the story goes, he saw a sign of the cross indicating that, with it, he would win the Milvian Bridge battle, 312. The period of Hellenistic religions (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Syrian, etc) was fluid, transformative, and creative. The EPIGRAPH is from W H Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” Christ is why we fight:Resurrection alludes to the claim that Jesus the Christ arose from the dead. Mithra was a sun-god, also called Sol Invictus, the Sun Unconquered, whose birthday was celebrated at the winter solstice, December 25 in the ancient calendar, the date for which was transferred to the Christian observance, Christmas. God: All “gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.” —Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962, p205. Holy with my knife: “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” —Richard Rorty quoted in M J Newby, Eudaimonia: Happiness Is Not Enough, 2011, p128. Religion, in Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade,” is “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” In David Hume’s 1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 8, Philo says, “All religious systems . . . are subject to great and insuperable difficulties. Each [faith] disputant . . . exposes the absurdities, barbarities, and pernicious tenets of his antagonist.” Christianity had been largely pacifist before Constantine embraced Christianity. Rome had been generally tolerant of many faiths practiced in the Republic and Empire — with rare, sporadic, and regional persecutions of Christians. Theodosius I (347-395; r379-), made Nicene Christianity the state church, permitted the destruction of non-Christian temples, and seems to have ended the pagan ritual of the Olympic games, a tradition lasting over a thousand years, not revived until 1896. #12Seat LKSEAT COMMENT Text from the blog, "The View from This Seat." Friday, October 18, 2024 The Calamitous Co-option of Christianity Vern Barnet, PhD, is a gifted man who has long been a prominent person in Kansas City. I am honored to have him not only as a Thinking Friend but also as a personal friend. This blog post was written in response to a request that I received from Vern several weeks ago. Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire is the title of a book of sonnets that Dr Barnet published in 2015. He is now revising that erudite book and is asking friends/acquaintances to make comments arising from some of the sonnets in it. In particular, Vern asked me to comment on “A Roman Soldier,” his 12th sonnet, using it “in some way to develop the Christian ideal of pacifism in contrast to military powers” linked to Christianity from the 4th century to the present. Constantine, the Roman emperor who reigned from 306 to 337, was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. The spark of Constantine’s conversion was struck in 312 when during a military battle he suddenly saw “a bright cross of light emblazoned against the noonday sky and upon it the inscription: ‘In hoc signo vinces’ — ’In this Sign Conquer.’”*1 He then did use the sign of the cross and was victorious. The following year, the Edict of Milan was promulgated. It stated that Christians within the Roman Empire should be treated benevolently, so it gave Christianity legal status and a much-needed reprieve from persecution. Constantine’s vision changed his life—and Christianity as well. Indeed, up until that time the faithful followers of Jesus Christ had been pacifistic, but now for the first time their religion was being used in warfare. That connection has been prevalent in Christianity from then until present times. The subtitle of Barnet’s 12th sonnet is “Circa Anno Domini CCCXXV.” That year, 325, was when the Council of Nicaea (or Nicea) was convened by Constantine. The purpose of that gathering was to settle theological matters, but Constantine’s main desire was to foster unity among his subjects. Constantine did apparently seek to affirm and uphold many of the practices of Christianity and was not just a CINO (Christian in name only). But his continual use of the sword questions his understanding of and/or allegiance to the teachings of Jesus Christ. After 312, Roman soldiers continued to fight, but they did so in the name of a different “god.” The soldier in Barnet’s sonnet “slew heretics” for the sake of Mithra, the sun god. Now, though, “Constantine says Christ is why we fight.” Some in the Anabaptist tradition, which began in 1525, have called Constantine’s conversion the fall of Christianity. As one who identifies with that tradition, I agree with that designation. Thus, I am calling Constantine’s conversion a calamitous co-option of Christianity.*2 Certainly, though, that has not been the last such co-option. Have you noticed Donald Trump’s co-option of Christianity? Of course, the current nominee for POTUS isn’t seeking to become an emperor such as Constantine was, and it is not all of USAmerican Christianity that has been or is being co-opted. To a large extent, though, Trump has co-opted a wide swath of white evangelical Christianity for his political ambitions. Around 80% of such Christians voted for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and recent polls indicate that the percentage this year may be nearly as high. Certainly, evangelical Christian leaders such as Ralph Reed have long sought to gain political influence by cozying up to the Republican Party. Reed is the founder (in 2009) and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition (F&F), and they have held conferences yearly since 2010. Trump has spoken at the F&F conferences repeatedly since 2011. (I attended that conference as a “spy,” and my impression of Trump, whom I then knew little about, was that he seemed like a “lightweight.”) In seeking to be elected POTUS in 2016, he gave a major speech in 2015. In June of this year, the F&F’s “2024 Road to Majority” conference was held at the Washington Hilton hotel, and the three minute video summarizing that gathering (see here) concludes with a brief clip of Trump’s keynote speech. Trump’s co-option of Christianity is, admittedly not as calamitous as Constantine’s was, but it is, sadly, a major reason why so many younger evangelicals, and others, have turned away from Christianity at this critical time when Jesus Christ’s message of love for all is so badly needed. _____ *1 These words are from the brief and quite positive account of Constantine’s conversion found in a Christian History magazine article (see here). *2 Co-option is the process by which a political leader or organization selects and absorbs some other organization or its ideas/practices into their structure or system in order to expand their strength/influence. Note: The co-option of religion is certainly not limited to Christianity. Consider, for example, the co-option of Shinto by Japanese militarists in the 20th century, of Islam by the Taliban and the Islamic State in the past several decades, Judaism by militaristic Zionists in the last century and since 10/6/23, Hinduism by the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, and Buddhism by militants in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Dr LKSeat * Born in Grant City, Mo., on 8/15/1938 * Graduated from Southwest Baptist College (Bolivar, Mo.) in 1957 (A.A.) * Graduated from William Jewell College (Liberty, Mo.) in 1959 (A.B.) * Graduated from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, Ken.) in 1962 (B.D., equivalent of M.Div.) * Received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in theology from SBTS. * Baptist missionary to Japan from 1966 to 2004. * Full-time faculty member at Seinan Gakuin University (Fukuoka, Japan) from 1968 to 2004. * Chancellor of Seinan Gakuin from 1996 to 2004. * Adjunct professor at Rockhurst University 2006 to 2014. USPS address: 1307 Canterbury Lane, Liberty, MO 64068 Telephone: (301) 442-2263 E-mail: LKSeat@gmail.com #54 (Gloria) TROPARION: ANSALUSIA 54. Barcelona: Scrawl Renunciation is not enough. You must act. Yet action mustn’t dominate you. In the heart of action, you must remain free from all attachment. They told me to take a street-car named Desire, . . . and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields! Desire actually started across the street . . . to hear what Love might have to say. You agonize and call me Krishna; walk three times Las Ramblas. And decide to yield to rouge. Or pride in not. You choose. Such talk, such sin, such vision of the battlefield! Then humble when you held me late that night in my pure yearning bed I now recall, when in us trust and sleep could reunite, now rounded rest, fields feint in this traced scrawl: Like Gaudí’s spires, this troth erects your touch above the ground, though of the ground, the field of faith. I quivered in your sky-filled clutch and wondered how it happened you were healed. O Fields of Being, O Grounds of Praise, O Arrows of Desire, make dance each phrase.  The EPIGRAPH is
from Peter Brook’s production of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata,
of which the Bhagavad Gita is the famous scripture
in which Krishna as god advises
Arjuna entering the field of battle.
E2:
from the Tennessee Williams 1947 play, A Streetcar Named
Desire, Act 1. E3:
from James Baldwin’s 1983? “Guilt, Desire, and Love.” Gaudí
designed Sagrada Familia basilica, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in
Barcelona. Under construction since 1882, the
spires were, I found in 1994, terrifying to ascend. Theologian Paul
Tillich called God the ground of
being; see his 1951 Systematic Theology, v1, p238. A remote physical
analogy is the Higgs field which
gives mass to electrons, protons and some other particles. Las
Ramblas is a Barcelona district of temptations
where rouge cosmetics suggests
prostitution. Feint/faint: feint
means sham; faint means faded, timorous, unfounded, or a swoon. Sin:
In Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, Minnie declares
una suprema verità d’amore: fratelli, non v’è al mondo
peccatore cui non s'apra una via di redenzione! — “a supreme
truth of love: brothers, there is no sinner in the world to whom a path
of redemption does not open!" Quiver is
a pun. Arrows of Desire:
from the Preface to William Blake’s 1804 Milton,
often called “Jerusalem,” sung as a patriotic hymn written in 1916 by
Anglican Hubert Parry. Also think of the arrow in Bernini’s St
Teresa. Σ Q1 Q2 Q3 C field.#54Platter JONATHAN M. PLATTER RESPONSE TO 54. Barcelona: Scrawl A Doubled Doxology In “Barcelona: Scrawl,” the language of tracing, desire, and “fields” are brought together. Initially, desire steps foot onto a “battlefield,” and on a first read, this battlefield is externalized onto the city of Barcelona itself. There is a tension between Las Ramblas and Sagrada Familia basilica, between traveling to an erotic encounter or to a place of worship. And so desire appears initially as conflict, where someone struggles to act, sensing “sin” in every alternative. The invocation of sin-talk raises the possibility that the battleground is an interior struggle, despite the earlier sense that the battlefield is Barcelona itself. Does the first quatrain imply, then, that the battle is a fiction in the mind of the person? Perhaps there is no “sin-free” option, but is that due in part to an interior fixation on avoiding impurity? As we move into the second quatrain, this tension has subsided. The person has relaxed into a more outward focus on their beloved. Is the battlefield gone now that they rest in bed? Or has the battlefield been transformed? The phrase, “fields feint in this traced scrawl,” invites us to imagine that in retracing (rewriting?) the desires, the speaker now sees the “battle”-field as an illusion, a deception. Perhaps the “field” for interpreting and enacting desire is more like a garden than a battleground? This question launches into the third quatrain, where the battle imagery has been entirely left behind (except in the double-entendre, “quivered”) and doxological language has taken over. In the first quatrain, I wondered if the battlefield imagery reflected the tragic interplay between the inward fixation on the (im)possibility of a guiltless course of action and the external city with its temptations to the sin of illicit sex and the sin of pride. By the third quatrain, however, a new possibility appears. The more thoroughly joyful tone of this quatrain suggests that a non-competitive integration of desire has been found. It is non-competitive, because the sacral embrace has not abandoned the sensual—eros and doxology are neither opposed in an either-or deadlock nor left behind for a neutral escape. We encounter something of a “doxological eros” or an “erotic doxology.” This non-competitive climax—which ushers in a doxological crescendo— raises for me a new question about who the speaker is and who the subject being addressed (the “you” addressed throughout the sonnet). In my first readings, I thought of the speaker as the one who experiences the tensions of desire, seemingly engaged in an internal dialogue. On this reading, they speak at times to self, at times to God, and at times to a human lover (these may overlap!). However, by the third quatrain, I wonder whether we might imagine the speaker to be God. God is called Krishna; God witnesses the person’s turmoil of conscience and choice; God is embraced in the bed that night; God traces (and “scrawls”) those fields, turning them from battle-ground to gardening-ground; God beholds the healing amidst the oddities of arousal and grand architectural feats; God speaks the whole story into a word of praise and integrated desire. Could this all be a word of God? — A testament to the way God traces the body, the way God is an energy stirring in the fields of our existence, the way God draws the tensions and release of desire into a word of praise? Ambiguities remain: If these are all God’s words, does that mean there never was an erotic encounter? If there had been (perhaps between the first and second quatrains), would that have interrupted God’s speech? It’s unclear whether an erotic encounter took place, though certainly erotic desire is positively integrated into the doxological crescendo. However, it seems that the God who here speaks can embrace human erotic love and desire. Human desire does not “interrupt” God’s address. However, the lived experience of the battlefield remains “real”—even if in its retracing it becomes more than that. Finally, if the speaker is God, what do we make of the final couplet, which sounds of prayer? This is the culmination of the reworked ground that appears throughout the sonnet (from battlefield to field of faith; the battle “ground” tilled into gardening “ground”). The non-competitive form of desire worked out in the third quatrain culminates in a non-competitive form of address. Having retraced the tangle of human desire, God no longer speaks alone. God’s own voice is doubled, joined now by the human who is formed from the sonnet’s fields. In the final couplet, God still addresses the human—the one who’s very being is the field we’ve traced throughout the sonnet, the one “of the ground” who grapples after praise, the one who seeks a integrated direction (“arrow”) for desire—and God invites them to give all they are to a dance. And at the same time, the human addresses God: praising God as the Field misidentified with battlefields of opposing desires, as the transcendent “Grounds of Praise,” as the depth-dimension of desire in whom an integrated “Arrow” might be discerned—and, prayerfully, the human asks God to make all this “scrawling” into a coherent dance. By the end of the sonnet, then, we have a doubled doxology. It is neither God alone nor the human alone who speaks. Human and divine speech join together in a shared word, and in this final moment, the person becomes something new. Eros and doxa embrace. -- Jonathan Platter is Associate Professor of Theology, teaching courses in Christian doctrine and ethics. In 2021, he completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation was on divine simplicity and the doctrine of the Trinity, with special reference to the theology of Robert W. Jenson. Jonathan has received several awards for academic writing, notably the Tom Nees Social Justice Award (2013) and the Goodwin Prize for Excellence in Theological Writing (2019). During the Winter of 2021–22, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Munich. His essays have been published in several academic journals, including the Scottish Journal of Theology, the Journal of Theological Interpretation, Pro Ecclesia, and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. His first book, Divine Simplicity and the Triune Identity, was published by de Gruyter in 2021, and he is the co-editor, with Jacob Lett, of Sanctifying TheologyThe Simplicity of God: A Theological Invitation (Cascade) and Christology and the Vision of God (Cambridge University Press). (Pickwick, 2023). Two further books will be published in 2025/6: The Simplicity of God: A Theological Invitation (Cascade) and Christology and the Vision of God (Cambridge University Press). #54Guillot LAWRENCE GUILLOT RESPONSE TO 54. Barcelona: Scrawl Thoughts and Feelings on Reading the Sonnet “Barcelona” I have never been to Barcelona, and although I have seen multiple pictures of Gaudi’s famous church, the title “Barcelona” holds no personal associations for me the way Rome, Paris, or London might. Curious about what this sonnet holds, I am inclined to read the epigraphs closely at the same time that my undisciplined eyes wander over the text and pick up on Krishna’s name. My first emotional reaction was to the epigraph and was a mix of fascination with a wisp of cynicism. I was intrigued to find the awesome Bhagavad Gita alongside contemporary Tennessee Williams, but a bit unhinged to find a call to commitment by action hooked to a qualification that the action must be free from attachment, one of those high level, seemingly contradictory principles of spirituality that only work if you banish dualism from your thinking, a challenge at the heart of a spiritual journey or near the end of a life of endeavor. Then the next line from Tennessee Williams sounds initially like, “take a ride, buddy” but quickly morphs into another paradoxical piece of advice: “Follow your Desire but be ready to shift to life-shaping behavior that will end in eternal happiness.” I thought this was a high road to climb to read a sonnet. I have been acquainted with the author of the sonnet for over thirty years, but I do not know the particulars of what was obviously a searing experience in his life memorialized here in a sensational sonnet. I do remember a time when he encouraged men to sleep in the same bed, not for mutual sex but as a way to overcome certain masculine prejudices and fears held over long periods of time. In this case the experience was decidedly sexual, a bewildering coming together in an experience once in flesh and now as apparition, once feared to be sinful but now grasped as a way to touch divinity, in a re-understanding of human desire not as a streetcar ride to a fatal life but as the entrée to Elysian bliss. I have a deep appreciation for the author and these sonnets precisely because he has arrived at an unusual place in life’s journey, and he has the simultaneous ability to bring together and hold together many of life’s most perplexing dilemmas, usually rational dualisms. He has laid hold of a way to express these experiences by drawing on the world’s treasury of religious traditions where life’s most esteemed spiritual pioneers, warriors, and over-turners of bewildering paradoxes have left a trail. Not principles, not rules, expressions of their experiences. AND he has the audacity to invoke the literary form of the sonnet, in a brash imitation and mastering of that used by no less than that guy Shakespeare to describe his affections and to turn a thought on its head. A key memory in life, translated to a sonnet, tied to a key moment in spiritual development, posted for a friend’s enjoyment and perhaps enlightenment—a high road for a 14-line poem first read in under a minute and then mulled over for days. Barcelona. -- Dr. Lawrence B. Guillot's most recent publication is the tome (more than 700 pages) National Catholic Reporter: Beacon of Justice, Community, and Hope: How NCR Has Sustained Independent Journalism from Vatican II to Pope Francis, Read the Spirit Books, 2024. Guillot lived in Rome when the Second Vatican Council was announced and during two of its four sessions. He has a master's degree in systematic theology and a doctorate in ecumenical theology from the Gregorian University. He has written for The Kansas City Star, the Journal of Ecumenical Affairs, the Ecumenist, and Unity Trends, as well as the Catholic ReporterNational Catholic Reporter. He served 10 years as a Catholic priest but petitioned for and received a dispensation from the clerical state in 1970. He and his wife, Leslie (Weis), a native of St. Louis, live in Kansas City, and have two daughters and four grandchildren. Dr. Guillot refocused his professional life on community service, specializing in the management of not-for-profit service organizations. He was executive director, associate director, or dean of six organizations. He worked as a consultant to organizations for some 15 years. He earned a masters' degree in administration, a national accreditation in human resources management, and certification as a fundraising executive. He served under five boards and on over a dozen boards and advisory committees. He was a member of the adjunct faculty at Park University in the Graduate School of Public Affairs for over 20 years. He has made himself available for ad hoc assignments as well, including preparing an evaluation for the funders of the 2007 pilot program of the National Interfaith Academies. #54Zafar ABDUL BASIT ZAFAR RESPONSE TO 54. Barcelona: Scrawl These threads are stitched together Coming from the “Oriental” tradition—the rubāʿiyyāt of Khayyām and Khusraw—I deeply cherish such sonnets. They speak in a familiar voice, one that knows the human condition, love, yearning, and the void between. I am reminded of al-Ḥallāj’s lament: there is no veil between human and divine—except the veil of desire. The longing to be seen, to be known, to be loved—perhaps that is the human battlefield. What is life, after all, if not a sacred yearning, a motion from being into non-being? Barnet’s work recalls for me the philosophy of Advaita Vedānta—the radical oneness of the self. In our tradition, such unity intoxicated great Sufi masters, bewildering them into ecstasy, and the quadrants are the best expression of such a state of being. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to return to the sonnet, to the rubāʿīyyat—texts that do not merely describe but perform the art of understanding and compassion. The delicate rendering of the dance between the known and the unknown, the pull of the heart’s desires, and the ache of longing transforms into a meditation on desire as a personified self. If sung, I imagine it would carry a different vibration altogether, one that touches the body and breath before it ever reaches the mind. And yet, here I am, bewildered even by the initials of "Barcelona: Scrawl." The work is interwoven with scriptural resonances and philosophical reflections, revealing the soul of someone deeply engaged in the mysteries of life and the art of self-expression. Encountering it now, beneath the silent gaze of Gaudí’s spires, felt like a hushed affirmation, a mirror held up to the paradoxes I’ve long wandered through. The longing for a field of faith—to be held, to be seen, to behold beauty in its fragile unfolding—is itself the state of Dasein, the German philosophical expression for the ‘act of being.’ It is the Art of becoming: a desire that does not dissipate but completes its cycle, like an arrow that finds its mark in the eternal. This is the ultimate pursuit. And yet, in this metaphysical arrival, there pulses a heart still open for presence, for its beloved. Yet there is a heart that longs for fulfillment, for union—how beautifully these threads are stitched together to express the paradox of being. -- Dr. Abdul Basit Zafar holds the position of Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues (CTSI) at the University of Bonn. His research interests encompass, but are not limited to, Comparative Gender Theologies, Digital Theology, and Meta-Confessional Eschatology. His scholarly proficiency is grounded in Islamic Theology (Kalam), with a specific emphasis on Mu‘tazilite Cosmology and Anthropology. He possesses a Doctorate from Ankara University, where his dissertation focused on "The Theological Anthropology of Qadi Abdul Jabbar: The Problem of Human Essence." Dr. Zafar has been awarded several esteemed grants, including the Volkswagen Stiftung Open Up Grant. He has authored numerous publications on subjects including theological anthropology, interfaith dialogue, and reformist movements within Islam. Proficient in several languages, he actively participates in international conferences, seminars, and community initiatives, promoting dialogue and enhancing scholarship in the realms of global religious and theological discourse. #54Neas PATRICK NEAS COMMENT ON 54. "Barcelona: Scrawl" The Glory of the Gita, Gaudí and God Liberated Vern Barnet, who has expanded my mind in so many ways over the years, has been especially enlightening when it comes to the concepts of NeoBaroque and Postmodernism. Vern’s collection of sonnets, Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire, provides rich examples of both. My reading of Postmodern philosophy is limited, and my knowledge of its concepts is very basic. My impression is that it is skeptical of accepted truths and of the distinctions between so-called high and low art. Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony, which depicts various episodes in Superman’s life, seems to me to be a Postmodern work, with its combination of lowbrow comic strip and highbrow symphony. I thought that Postmodernism doesn’t make judgments about works of art; but when I asked Vern about this, he said this is incorrect. “Postmodernists are willing to make judgments, but they always say these judgments are not free of cultural prejudice or disposition,” Vern told me. “And the difference between the Postmodernist and the Modernist is that the modernist thinks that you can make a judgment free of cultural predisposition.” The way Vern sets so many disparate cultural references side by side in prolific footnotes strikes me as Postmodern, but Vern disagrees. “I think that's just modern,” he said. “Think about T.S. Elliot, who's certainly a Modernist. In 'The Wasteland,' his early poem of fame, he draws upon all sorts of things, Greek, Latin, German, Sanskrit. But he's definitely a Modernist. So Modernists are not always bad guys. Modernists do recognize diversity.” The first thing that comes to mind when I think of NeoBaroque is Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella, which is his Modernist arrangement of music by various Italian Baroque composers. I think of NeoBaroque as being ornamental and curlicue in matters of design and thought, like the films of Federico Fellini or the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. Likewise, the lavish and engrossing footnotes which Vern provides for Thanks for Noticing have a baroque extravagance. “The elaborate apparatus of epigraphs and glosses could easily be considered rather dense ornamentation of the sonnet itself,” Vern pointed out. “Shakespeare, a Renaissance writer, displays characteristics of the Baroque. He sometimes ornaments his sonnets with the repetition of a word in various forms in each part of the sonnet, each of the three quatrains and the couplet. This sonnet of mine plays with various forms of the word field within the same four-part placement: battlefield, field's, field, Fields. Part of the pleasure of NeoBaroque art is discovering such repetitions." The role of the viewer is important in both PostModernism and NeoBaroque, as in Thanks for Noticing. “My sonnets, like many poems, require the reader's engagement to construct the reader's own experience and interpretation; but unlike many poems, the demands (or various opportunities) I make are extraordinary in their complexity,” Vern said. For a trivia hound like myself who loves going down Wikipedia rabbit holes, Vern’s footnotes are a veritable treasure trove. He says the notes and epigraphs are meant to be like the program notes at a classical concert, which help set the music in historical context and shed light on its composition. “Reading one of these sonnets is like meeting a stranger with a friend,” Vern says. “If you want, you can skip the friend's introduction, the epigraphs, and meet the stranger directly by speaking the sonnet aloud. But if you want to know the stranger's background, consider the notes and the glosses that follow. There are people who have read my stuff and like to read the notes first, which is sort of getting a bio before you meet the new person.” The notes for all of Vern’s sonnets are replete with wide-ranging cultural references. For "Barcelona: Scrawl," the notes reference Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia basilica, the Bhagavad Gita, a Tennessee Williams play, and an opera by Puccini. If, as Vern says, this is an introduction to a new friend, it is a highly cultured and spiritual friend. The sonnet opens with three epigraphs, the first a quotation from the Bhaghavad Gita about renunciation. They are words that the charioteer Lord Krishna spoke to Pandava Prince Arjuna on the battlefield just as the Kurukshetra war between the Pandavas and Kauravas was about to break out. “The advice that Krishna gives Arjuna is to act without attachment to the fruit of the act,” Vern says. “And what that means is that all we can do is what is set before us, given the circumstances, to do our duty, but not worry about the consequences. And the reason that's important is we never can know what the ultimate consequences of what we do is going to be anyhow. We're not in ultimate control. Krishna or God or the universe is ultimately going to determine that; we do not bear the weight of the universe on our shoulders. All we can do is the best we can do.” For Vern, as for me, the other highlight of the Gita is when Prince Arjuna requests that Krishna allow him to see Krishna’s universal form as the cosmic universe. “Arjuna receives a manifestation of the full nature of Krishna,” Vern said. “And there's this awe inspiring -- one might even say horrible -- revelation of the way the universe works, which includes the horrors of wars and disasters as well as the delights of love and beauty. All of that is part of the universe.” Vern says that this God is a revelation of the universe and the way things work, and that's very unlike the Western notion of an all-loving God. “This revelation is both beautiful, awesome, and horrible,” Vern says. “And learning to accept that, and loving the opportunity to be alive in all of its agony and bliss makes for a full life of affirmation.” It’s curious, and maybe even a little jarring that "Barcelona" Vern opens with one of the most important Hindu scriptures, but then the second epigraph is taken from A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ steamy play about Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Also injecting a note of eroticism is the reference to Las Ramblas (La Rambla in Catalan), Barcelona’s most important thoroughfare filled with shops and religious institutions, but near the harbor end of the street, a red light district. “So you have this place of sexual temptation in one part of the city and in another part of the city, you have this world heritage site of Sagrada Familia,” Vern said. “You have a tremendous contrast in Barcelona and that feeds into the background for the sonnet. I think some people, especially with the reference to Las Ramblas and the contrast with the sweetness of the experience of the companions together in bed, might see it as a contest between temptation of sexual attraction with a love imbued with a kind of transcendent loyalty.” The third epigram, from James Baldwin, makes this match between desire and love explicit. Vern has structured Thanks for Noticing after the liturgy of the Mass. "Barcelona," which Vern calls a “sonnet of bliss,” is, appropriately, in the Gloria section of the book. Although "Barcelona" seems to be based on personal experience, Vern says the sonnet does not necessarily depict an actual event. “In my view, poetry is a revelation of an experience, not a news report,” Vern says. “So this is not a literal transcription of an event. It's more important for the poem to expose something transcendent rather than to record an incident. I'm not just fudging, I’m staking out a principle of interpreting poetry.” Whether referencing the Gita, Tennessee Williams, or Baldwin, or causing us to ponder our place in the cosmos, Thanks for Noticing has a mind-blowing richness that, like the best writing, will reward rereading and contemplation. -- Patrick Neas For more than 20 years, Patrick Neas was program director and morning show host for Kansas City’s classical radio station, KXTR. Since 2009, he has written the weekly Classical Beat column for The Kansas City Star. His work appears in Classical Post, KC Studio and other publications. He also writes program notes for Guarneri Hall in Chicago and is proud to have been editorial assistant for Binding Us Together: A Civil Rights Activist Reflects on a Lifetime of Community and Public Service by Alvin L. Brooks. #54Blackmer GENEVA BLACKMER COMMENT ON 54. Barcelona: Scrawl Liberated from Judgments In “Barcelona: Scrawl,” Barnet invites us to abandon all dualistic thoughts and attachments that inevitably hinder us from encountering both our beloved and the Divine. These socially constructed divisions, entangled with false notions of the self, act as barriers to the most basic desire to know and be known. Barnet dances with the futility of such efforts, as the subject of the sonnet considers the consequences of yielding to temptations, observing that one cannot be liberated from consequence, only from judgments. As the speaker later finds oneself in a bed of “pure yearning,” Barnet seems to point to the yearning of a mystic -- the type of yearning which unites the sacred and the sexual in a moment of transcendence beyond the ordinary possibilities of our finite reality. Eliminating attachments around desire allows for the act to become a mirror; it is in this space alone that the mystic finds perfect union with the Divine. This “troth,” arising from both temptation and the bed, points now “above the ground, though of the ground, the field of faith.” For Paul Tillich, the “ground of being” is not a state which is confined by time and space, but rather encompasses the entire structure of meaning and aim of existence. Humanity’s ultimate concern is the ultimate to which it belongs, cannot be separated from, and continually longs for, but is disrupted by time and space. This “ground” can move between cause and substance because it transcends both. In the end, the sonnet inevitably arrives at the natural conclusion of transcendent experience -- a hymn of praise. Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire offers a profound invitation to immerse ourselves more deeply and intimately in love, in ourselves, our relationships, God, and the world. It challenges the separatism of the sacred in the West, revealing the Divine in even the most ordinary of human experiences. I would argue that the fate of humanity deeply rests in our willingness to embark on this journey; how fortunate for us, that Barnet has opened the door and illuminated the path. -- Geneva Backmer Geneva Blackmer, MA, MESt, writes from the University of Bonn where she is a research assistant in the Department of Intercultural Theology. In 2025, she receives her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Theology at Amridge University. Internationally, she is a Global Council Trustee, North America, for the United Religions Initiative. Her work in this country includes an internship with CRES, and positions with the North American Interfaith Network, The Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, The Interfaith Center at Miami University, and several other local and regional faith organizations. She is the founder of The Kansas City Interfaith History Project. #75 (Gloria) TROPARION: INCIDENTS 75. New York Stile Nisus et Euryalus primi,/ Euryalus forma insignis viridique iuventa,/ Nisus amore pio pueri. Look down, you gods, And on this couple drop a blessed crown! “Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” So the seen couple’s togetherness shall bear Truth to the beauty each in the other sought. Now tight. So turn the subway (touch!) ride very public, private-like. You tally arm around him, hung. He flairs; you both are merry passengers tracked and torqued. You splash your charm. I’d seen your matched greed, waiting for the train, your tabs and furtive brush in interlude between your bodies whole engorged in pain, starvation’s pleasure in arriving food. Beyond erotic, you enlist luxe spells: I glimpse them as your fluids chase and hide within each other’s swollen streams and wells; I spy them in ablutions as we ride. Bless you, cadets, and all who Christ sets free. Splash each pious passage as you’ve splashed me. _________________________ The first EPIGRAPH is from The Aeneid, 5:294-6, “First appears Nisus and Euryalus: Euryalus conspicuously handsome and flourishing youth, Nisus distinguished by pious love for him.” Byron paraphrased their story in his “The Episode of Nisus and Euryalus” in his 1807 Hours of Idleness. E2: from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 5, 1. E3: from James Baldwin’s 1956/2001 Giovanni’s Room, p62. E4: from Fernando Pessoa, 35 Sonnets, 1918, XIX. An ablution is a religious ritual cleansing, usually with water. Eyes: “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — / Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” —Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” with paronomasias I, aye, eye. >«Nineteen». Free: “For the yoke of their burden . . . you have broken” —Isaiah 9:4. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” —Galatians 5:1. Δ Speak line 1 as if going through the turnstile. #75Harrison DONN HARRISON COMMENT Subway Moments I think there is something so wonderful about a love that ignores the rest of the world. Our first reaction when we are close to a couple in a moment of intimacy is to look away. Give them the privacy they didn’t ask for, but deserve. A love that draws each other closer with no regard for others around. In this sonnet you feel the love these two share. The disregard for time for the bustle of a New York subway. It all boils down to love. Love in its purest form. As we ride with these two lovers we are allowed into their love. We get to share in their intimacy. What a wonderful experience we are allowed. Old ladies with clutched purses and rigid ideas of public expressions would scoff at such moments. But with a side-eyed stare they too share this privilege. Is the love they share something we have in our lives? Who would we embrace as these two do? To forget the world and celebrate each other’s love is a relationship in full bloom. We need to love just as this couple does, carefree and unapologetically. Donn Harrison (he him) Donn Harrison grew up in St Louis and moved to Cameron, MO to teach kindergarten. Don is a proud graduate of Central Methodist University and Northwestern Missouri State University. Thirty years later he and his wife enjoy traveling, and being with their two kids and two sheepadoodles. #84 CREDO 84. Postmodern Faith: What is Truth? My God, is this a dagger that I see? Am I observing actors in a play? Is this a dream or film of tragedy? or just computer games where I’m to slay with it? Perhaps I’m high on LSD or wearing VR glasses that display an archetype if not a snickersnee. Is this getik, menok, or Judgment Day? Oh no, no dagger but Christ’s cross, that tree which bares illusions in one Truth, one Yea! It tears and it repairs reality and wakes us to attend and watch and pray. I know the Gospel is a pious tale, but who grabs facts when worship cannot fail? Pilate put the question to Jesus; John 18:38. Perhaps anticipated by the ancient Jain teaching of anekantavada, the doctrine of multiple viewpoints, Jean-François Lyotard described Postmodernism as “incredulity toward meta-narratives” such as theological systems or myths regarded as literal reality. In the 1957 Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, p163, Wallace Stevens wrote, “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction, and that you believe it willingly.” W H Auden wrote, “It is as meaningless to ask whether one believes or disbelieves in Aphrodite or Ares as to ask whether one believes in a character in a novel; one can only say that one finds them true or untrue to life. To believe in Aphrodite and Ares merely means that one believes that the poetic myths about them do justice to the forces of sex and aggression as human beings experience them in nature and in their own lives.” The client following a therapist’s suggestion to “place your father in this chair and tell him how you feel” may appear little different from one who prays. Religion is more about commitment than certainty. Perhaps Vico (1710) anticipated Postmodernism with his Verum factum principle: truth is not observed; it is constructed. The first line derives from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, 2, 1, “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” An exquisite example of the problem of distinguishing dream from reality is portrayed in the Illustration to the Second Prose Poem on the Red Cliff by Qiao Zhongchang (Northern Song Dynasty, 960-1127) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. LSD is a psychedelic or entheogenic drug. VR is Virtual Reality. Key terms from pre-Islamic Iranian thought reinterpreted in the epistemology of Suhrawardi (1155-1191), “Sheikh al-Ishraq,” the Master of Illumination, are getik (the ordinary world) and menok (a heavenly realm, perhaps akin to Plato’s realm of forms, or archetypes as in the New Testament’s Hebrews). Judgment Day cf «Love Locket». The Christian Gospel includes the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, a figure paralleled in other religious traditions. A snickersnee is a large knife that can be used for fighting. Tree: cf «Barren Golgotha». Facts: “We are poor passing facts” —Robert Lowell, “Epilogue,” Day by Day, 1977. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817 Biographia Literaria, XVI: wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This sonnet uses only three end-rimes. #84comment JACOBS COMMENT on 84. Postmodern Faith: What is Truth? On Knives: Vern Barnet’s ‘Postmodern Faith: What is Truth?’ Knives…. Dr. Vern Barnet’s sonnet titled, “Postmodern Faith: What is Truth?” plays with metaphors of the knife. It begins with a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “My God, 'is this a dagger that I see?'” Raising questions pertinent to perception and conception, from LSD to VR (that might mirror archetypes), Barnet wonders if a snickersnee is displayed. Towards the conclusion of the sonnet, he takes us to “Christ’s cross” as no dagger but nevertheless as an instrument that “tears and…repairs reality,” thus waking “us to attend and watch and pray.” Every seeing is a seeing from some angle, and for human becomings, that is always and unavoidably conditioned by time and place in history and culture. One of postmodernism’s patron saints is Friedrich Nietzsche (Cahoone calls him “the godfather of postmodernism”), who argued that there are no facts, only interpretations, and that perspectivism is the only way to see. “Henceforth, my dear philosophers,” writes Nietzsche, “let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself’: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense.” When we seek to freeze life in this manner, argues Nietzsche, it is a type of revenge on life. In other words, the quest for the one, pure, objective, correct, absolute, incontestable truth—metanarrative––a quest characterizing the history of much of Western philosophy, religion, and more—is a fool’s quest. Lyotard’s concern reflected the historical atrocities, which social critics from the Frankfurt School to postmodern thinkers saw as culturally rooted in the West’s drive for the one perfect, timeless, and unchallengeable truth, a drive that went on secular steroids during and after the Enlightenment in dialectical relationship with the priorities of capitalism’s instrumental reason. As Lyotard states, “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience.” As I have written elsewhere, “Postmodernism is a highly varied movement of the last sixty years that promotes the idea that all human knowledge is relative to its historical and cultural context, and that modernism’s attempts to find the one true and rational blueprint for organizing human life has been misguided and contributed to some of the horrors of the twentieth century.” If I understand the argument of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the dialectic of Enlightenment on the cultural level between secular reason, on the one hand, and religious faith and mythology, on the other, resulted in the demise of religious mythology and its bastardization into fundamentalism and consequently to the disenchantment of life, the world, and the universe. However, that very triumph of Enlightenment reason in service to the alienating structures of bourgeois priorities resulted in a new mythological faith with a legitimation of domination and alienation. This has resulted in a dehumanizing world in which individuals measure themselves according to their monetary worth, while feeling controlled by powers of which no one appears in charge. Among the results are increased vulnerability to the resentments thereof which make fertile ground for fascism. Another intellectual development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with some likeness to postmodernism was carried, primarily first, by the pioneer anthropologists and then deeply cultivated by what I’d call the metamythologists. These are the likes of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, William Irwin Thompson, to a lesser extent Carl Jung and followers, and many others. Their cross-cultural investigations and correlations of humanity’s mythologies have helped us get away from the narrow and sometimes violent provincialisms and dogmatisms of so much of the world’s religions to appreciate the challenging and liberating aspects of nature’s and culture’s marks of transcendence. “An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience,” writes Karen Armstrong, and she echoes Campbell when she writes, “A myth…is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information.” In a footnote for a different sonnet, Barnet writes that “a myth is a story that reveals the nature and structure of sacred reality.” It might not be wrong to suggest that the metamythologists and postmodernists, each in their way in their respective venues in modernity’s alienated cultural segmentations, have been doing much the same thing. They have sought to contribute to the liberation of souls and bodies from the unnecessary spiritual and material brutalities of the societies of human becomings. These are not minor objectives. Barnet has fruitfully mined the canons of the metamythologists, whom he cites regularly, even having studied under Eliade. They serve him well for his, if you will, sonnetical remythologizing of human desire, including its erotic and mystical drives that, I think he suggests and, if so, I agree, cannot be separated. They come to us as two-edged swords, though, as mystics and lovers have always discovered. The ecstasies of human love and of mystical union are always shadowed by their opposites—whatever you want to call them at any given time—heartbreak, tragedy, loss, alienation, dark night, fear, anxiety, terror. Which brings us back to the dagger of Christ’s cross. “Indeed,” writes the unknown author of the Christian epistle to the Hebrews, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” At their best, so it seems to me, that is the project of the metamythologists and postmodernists alike. They exegete and deconstruct and interrogate to tear and repair human existence and open up to us the authentic realities of the thoughts and intentions of our hearts; and, perhaps, in the process, alongside the Gospel’s “pious tale,” waking “us to attend and watch and pray.” The cornerstone, still, of any discussion of postmodernism, and which Barnet cites in a footnote, is Jean-François Lyotard’s statement, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives.” However, the common core of postmodern sentiment is the insight that there really is no escape from an angle of seeing. Ironically or paradoxically, this insight at the center of postmodern thought is true of postmodernism itself. Defining postmodernism is near impossible, which the leading postmodern advocates acknowledge and probably embrace. Postmodernism is “contested terrain between moderate and extreme postmodernists,” notes Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, referring to complete ultraskeptics and relativists, on the one hand, and, on the other, to those still in pursuit of constructs on which to do philosophy and social critique in light of that understanding that we cannot stand nowhere. Simply stated, there is no ultimately objective and infallible blueprint that can be imposed on reality or society without violence and atrocity. Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Barnet, Vern. Thanks
for Noticing: The Interpretation of
Desire. Kansas City, MO: Best, Steven, and
Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York
& London: Lawrence Cahoone,
ed. From Modernism to Postmodernism.
2nd ed. Horkheimer, Max,
and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Jacobs, Anton K.
“Postmodernism.”
In The Sage Encyclopedia of the Sociology
of Religion, vol. 2. Edited by Adam Possamai and
Anthony J. Blasi, 598-599.
Lyotard, Jean-François.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich.
Twilight of the Idols and The
Anti-Christ. Translated by Nietzsche, Friedrich.
On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by
Walter Kaufmann Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Will to Power. Translated by Walter
Kaufmann and Henry Regnery Co., 1973. --Anton K. Jacobs,
Ph.D.,
Instructor, Kansas City Art Institute Author of
Religion and the Critical Mind; My
Country, My Faith, & Me; and a few other
things.
#86 CREDO 86. Interbeing Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it. The world is one, namely many. A lion and a butterfly are one when Paradox will pounce and fly in song as with love’s pleasant arrow we are stung and what is right is showing what is wrong. We cannot see the sun except through screen or else our eyes will blister, burn, and blind; the film or veil is what reveals the scene as circumstance displays what’s in the mind. The world’s components make no sense, nor fit; injustice and dire lack too often rule. Yet from this mess the fire to serve is lit, the sacred singular discerned from dual. When vision clears, each nod and node reveals how in each jot the universe congeals. ________________________ The title comes from Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022). Hua-yen Buddhism embraces paradox to convey a vision of integrated, interpenetrating, interdependent totality, pratitya-samutpada,from which Zen arises. Nagarjuna (150?–250?) taught that “things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.” In De Docta Ignorantia, 1440, Cusa cites Anaxagoras (?500–?428 BCE): Each thing is in each thing. E2: Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945) almost sounds like William James (1842-1910). Are Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and the EPIGRAPH from John D Barrow’s 1990 The World Within the World similar in some profound way? Such a perspective is illumined in Douglas Hofstad ter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979. In his Confessions, Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) accesses a spiritual form of the paradox of interbeing: “And finding that in all things there was evil and good, as well in the elements as in the creatures, and that it went as well in this world with the wicked as with the virtuous, honest and godly; also that the barbarous people had the best countries in their possession, and that they had more prosperity in their ways than the virtuous, honest and godly had; I was thereupon very melancholy, perplexed and exceedingly troubled . . . . Yet when in this affliction and trouble I elevated my spirit . . . , as with a great storm or onset, wrapping up my whole heart and mind . . . whereby I might understand his will and be rid of my sadness. And then the Spirit did break through.” Perhaps above all Muslim mystics, Ibn ʿArabī (1165-1240) taught a subtle version of wahdat al-wujûd, the unity of being or perhaps the ground of being out of which all things are manifest. The hand and the nose are distinct features of a united body, but the hand is not the nose. Veil: >«Just Try To Kiss Me». Δ For a 4-verse Sursum Corda text (10.10.10.10.), add: “Injustice makes the Cross routinely real; all rent, its hidden beauty bursts to heal.” This sonnet is paired with the preceding one. #86Harritt IRA HARRITT Reflections on Sonnet 86: Interbeing As a student of Universal Sufism, seeking to experience oneness, the reality that there is only God, the state of unity or Interbeing with all, is the ultimate goal. As a student of nature I know that all life is interconnected and interdependent. As expressed in a recent workshop I attended given by Dr. Daniel Wildcat, the land, the water, the air, all life are relatives not resources. And after a career as a peace activist, I sought to remember the core Quaker belief that there is that of God in every person. However, in this world of duality, experiencing unity is elusive.As Vern Barnet states, “The world’s components make no sense” to the ego, the small self, which feeds on separation, division and drama. The “I” of the individual, obscures the “I“ of the One. And even working for a “good” can increase separation and duality. So how does one work for peace when there is only one and no other? How does one work for justice, without creating an "equal and opposite reaction" of injustice, echoing Newton’s law of Motion. An aspect of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha, his philosophy and practice of nonviolence translated as “truth force,” speaks to this paradox. It focuses the goal of nonviolent resistance on converting the oppressor, the oppressed and oneself to truth. It seeks to convert the oppressor, while being willing to be converted oneself. In a world where societal change comes through coercion, rather than conversion and truth seeking, the lines of Vern Barnet’s Sonnet 86, “Yet from this mess the fire to serve is lit,speaks to the inspiration to service and peacemaking in a world of duality, but also of the potential to use “this mess” to clear the “vision” and to stop and listen to the other, to recognize the other as self, and achieve a remembrance of our unity in the process. Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi offer wisdom on this topic, in his poems: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,In this world of duality, in our “fire to serve” we can, with intention, inspiration and grace, in Sufi terms, “polish the rust from our hearts.” We can listen and recognizing all beings as our relatives, seek the truth of the other and remember our unity with all beings. We can, rather than separate and divide, work in ways that unite and remind us that we are one human family, sharing and shaping this beautiful universe together. Ira Harritt Ira Sirkar Harritt served as the program coordinator of the Kansas City Office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker peace and justice organization, for over 30 years. In that capacity, he organized campaigns and programs to promote peace, social and economic justice, nonviolent conflict resolution, youth empowerment, and increased community connectedness and understanding. He is an experienced workshop facilitator, organizer, mediator and coalition builder. He has served as the Sufi representative on the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council from 2011 to the present. He has a Masters Degree in Conflict Resolution from the McGregor School, Antioch University, Yellow Springs, Ohio. He joined the Abrahamic Reunion Board in March, 2021, knowing that AR’s work helps create the foundations which are essential for peace in Israel and Palestine and that peace often only comes when the peoples involved see themselves in the other and demand peace from their leaders. He is happily married and lives and gardens with his wife, Leila, in Kansas City, Missouri. |
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