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Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

Happy Father’s Day!

Empathies and condolences to those whose dads have died or disappeared, and to those have, or had, or are, or must deal with “difficult” fathers.

If Father’s Day brings you pain, this post is for you. If it’s Father’s Day, and there’s no father, or it’s Father’s Day, but there just isn’t a card you could possibly give your father, or it’s Father’s Day, but you’re struggling to play double as a single mom, or it’s Father’s Day but… whatever emotional dynamics make this day non-celebratory for you, there are other things you can do!

For fathers as for mothers, as for humans – all of can use a very ancient method to find a path to celebration.

Try letting go of the literal. CELEBRATE the fatherly qualities that you love as they are expressed through the people you know. There are great dads and great men all around you. There are! If you don’t see any, you need to get out more!

Focus on the qualities that you really, truly, most authentically admire and find worthy when you see them. These are habits and attitudes and actions and values and all sorts of other things that you would sincerely wish to see in play more often (in your world and in the worlds of others).

Imitate those things! Start doing those things or appreciating these things when you see them! Enjoy them! Mimic them! Repeat them! Celebrate them!

This method survives in the religious paths that aim to follow/imitate the person or journey of the Christ, and even in its watered-down version, the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) camp. But perhaps religion is part of why you’re not enjoying Father’s Day? Or perhaps the text-based, variously-interpreted Jesus doesn’t actually seem all that great either sometimes, especially through the lens of some of the uses to which it’s been put?

Some people think that you have to project a father into the sky, but that’s only a metaphor for the divinity – one among others, even in the most patriarchic traditions. It’s a way for us to connect with the idea of God by imagining that our own idea of a father is made perfect and loving and all-knowing, to compensate, to make us feel protected and loved. It’s a great idea, and a great feeling, but the divine can also be imagined as a mother, an animal, an idea. The divine isn’t limited. Only our imagination is limited. While I love to imagine the most wonderful of fathers is watching over me and guiding me and loving me, I don’t tend to get very literal about it and then turn around and worship him. Why? Because when I do that, I also can’t help but remember some of the less wonderful stuff, the father of pride and violence and manipulations, the father of unreasonable and conflicting demands – and commands, the father that can sometimes lack kindness or fairness. And these things then get tied up into the divine as well – as we see from our mythologies, and from our social histories.

What’s beautiful here to me is that whether you view this as a spiritual method or a practical method doesn’t really matter. If we all have a spark of the divine – then it’s already within us, and we will be attuned – if we pay attention. And if we don’t have a spark of the divine, we still have a character that continues to develop via questionings and habits and experiences, and we will notice things – if we pay attention.

No-one else is you! You will not admire everything about anyone, nor should you!

Instead, find the something here, and there…

People talk about role models, but I don’t think it’s productive or realistic to imitate or “worship” a person in their entirety – that’s just idolatry or something like that. I’m also not talking about any sort of colonial or predatory form of assimilation like a slash-and-burn cyborg here, and it doesn’t work when it’s in the mode of “should-ing” all over yourself because you feel that you don’t “measure up” in some way either.

It’s much more modest than that.

Just start to incorporate (incarnate?) what you really can’t help but see as a better thing, a sweet thing, a loving thing, a beautiful thing, a true thing, and helpful thing, a wise thing.

The trick here is to really learn to notice and to feel when you just truly admire or enjoy something – however small or fleeting it might be – about another person. You can’t really plan it, or calculate how it’s going to happen, but when you pay attention, you’ll start seeing. And when you start seeing, after a while you can’t believe that you didn’t see those things before.

Learn how to sense what’s real to you, and to follow your own heart and soul, by paying attention, through recognition, and by creative reconstruction, alignment, and re-alliance.

It’s too easy to stay in the realm of ideas on this, through some vision or articulation of a universal ideal. Instead, try really to focus in and allow the force of the galvanic singularities to affect you. Notice aspects and facets of the real people in your life, their ways of being and their actions, and their stories, and the little things that make them who they are. Of these, try picking up just one detail, the very best thing you know and love about that person, the thing you’d mention at their funeral if you had to speak about who they really were.

When you invite these little gems to activate within you, guess what happens? The very thing that you mimic, and re-present, and try to assimilate – transforms! It becomes a unique thing to you, because it can never repeat in exactly the same way when it’s filtered through the YOUness. Maybe there is no “real thing” but instead a chain of variations – sameness within difference, difference within sameness. I don’t know. I wish I did.

But this I can say with some confidence: However loosely bundled your heaps of self might be, it’s always great to pull in stuff that you know (that you intuit, that you feel, that you sense) is just better, truer, and/or more beautiful! Need some inspiration for starters? Try Atticus Finch!

On Father’s Day, I hope that YOU celebrate all those wonderful fatherly sparkles that are blooming here and there, through everyone, all over.

Happy Father’s Day, you dear, wonderful fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who father others in spirit!
Happy Father’s Day, you who inspire better ways to be a father!
Happy Father’s Day, you children who invoke love in the hearts of fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you mothers loving fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who are fathers to the next generation, and the next!
Happy Father’s Day – everyone!

Girl Scouts, hmmm

Girl Scouts, hmmm

So the U.S. Girl Scouts are offering membership to Muslim girls as a “chance to fit in“?

“It is kind of cool to say that you are a girl scout,” Asma said. “It is good to have something to associate yourself with other Americans. I don’t want people to think that I am a hermit, that I live in a cave, isolated and afraid of change. I like to be part of society. I like being able to say that I am a girl scout just like any other normal girl.”


Hitler Youth Uniform originally
uploaded by NeueDeutsche

Hmmm….

The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have always been so welcoming to non-white, non-christian people, haven’t they?

I mean, this is great, I guess, if you want to be a girl scout… I never did.

They weren’t as creepy as the Boy Scouts, but I just never felt any attraction.

In college, I felt the same way about sororities…

The Girl Scout Promise
On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

The troop leader said that she could not join the group because of her disabilities. In tears, Marika signed, “Please, Mommy, tell her I’ll be good. Tell her I’ll be quiet.

The Girl Scouts settled a human rights complaint this week that accused them of excluding a 9-year-old girl from at least five troops in upstate New York because she was infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. The Scouts admitted no wrongdoing but agreed not to bar girls like her in the future.

In Chicago, Winkler & Poloncarz filed suit in federal court challenging the City of Chicago’s operation of scout troops affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America. The suit alleged that the City’s policy excludes participants from City-operated scouting programs based on religious belief and sexual orientation. The City eventually entered into a binding agreement in which it formally ended all support for scouting programs as long as the Boy Scouts of America continue to discriminate on the basis of religious belief and sexual orientation. The case is still ongoing, against the federal defendants.

John Scalise and his son, Benjamin, filed suit alleging the Huron Council of the Boy Scouts violated their religious freedom by requiring an affirmation of belief in God. Scalise and his son are atheists. Scalise also alleged that because Mt. Pleasant Public Schools are partnered with BSA, the district is violating its own nondiscrimination policy.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget those unhealthy cookies…

The Girl Scouts ignored the trans fat issue for many years, refusing to remove the unhealthful oil from their cookies. Now that the whole country is aware of the health dangers of trans fats, the Girl Scouts still doesn’t eliminate the fat from their cookies, even while their food label claims zero grams.

Any idea where the money from cookie sales actually goes? Who owns the Girl Scouts?

On the other side, some feel that the Girl Scouts are unacceptably “politically correct” and implore righteous parents to sign their wee girls up with the “American Heritage Girls” for a welcoming christ-centered scouting organization:

In a recent column for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, Rick Mercier criticized President Bush for having visited last month’s patriotic Boy Scout Jamboree. “Isn’t there something nightmarish about our misleader swooping down on a steaming pit of sweat and testosterone and whipping a throng of brown-shirted youths into a nationalistic frenzy?” he asks.

The Philadelphia Daily News compared the Boy Scouts to the Taliban in 2003, and it isn’t difficult to find websites that liken the Scouts to the Ku Klux Klan.

While all this is going on, the Girl Scouts are quietly immune from these sorts of attacks. And the reason – one that many Americans have yet to realize – is very simple: the Girl Scouts are the epitome of institutional political correctness.

Next month, the Girl Scouts USA national convention will be held in Atlanta. It will be a gathering of radical feminists, lesbians, and cookie peddlers with an agenda far removed from the classical image of Girl Scouting and from many local Girl Scout troops. (spokesman for the Scouting Legal Defense Fund)




American Heritage Girls

Originally uploaded by YeOleImposter.

For those to whom the Girl Scouts are insufficiently devotional or submission-oriented, for those who deem the Girl Scouts to be a haven for anti-abortion freaks, for those who want to recombine church and patriotism outside the cumbersome settings of U.S. law, meet the American Heritage Girls – they charter with churches. American Heritage Girls is a Christ-centered scouting ministry “building women of integrity through service to God, family, community and country.”

“I promise to love God,
Cherish my family,
Honor my country,
and Serve in my community.”

Meetings begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, recitation of the AHG oath and creed, prayer, and devotions.

The following Statement of Faith applies to all American Heritage Girls Charter Organizations, Adult Members and Adult Leaders.

We believe that there is One Triune God – Father, Jesus Christ His one and only Son, and the Holy Spirit – Creator of the universe and eternally existent. We believe the Holy Scriptures (Old/New Testament) to be the inspired and authoritative Word of God. We believe each person is created in His image for the purpose of communing with and worshipping God. We believe in the ministry of the Holy Spirit who enables us to live a Godly life. We believe that each individual is called to love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength; and to love their neighbors as themselves. We believe that each individual is called to live a life of purity, service, stewardship and integrity.

Clarity is further provided to the following terms:

Purity – An AHG member is called to live a life of holiness, being pure of heart, mind, word and deed, reserving sexual activity for the sanctity of marriage; marriage being a lifelong commitment before God between a man and a woman.

Service – An AHG member is called to become a responsible member of their community and the world through selfless acts, which contribute to the welfare of others.

Stewardship – An AHG member is called to use their God given time, talents and money wisely.

Integrity – An AHG member is called to live a moral life, demonstrating the inward motivation to do what is right, regardless of the cost.

Sheesh.

I’m really, really glad that Ben has no interest whatsoever in any uniforms (besides those of superheroes). We don’t need any more Pseudochristian Youth (Everyone knows… get ’em while they’re young).