"THIS WEEK FOR HOLY WEEK, I HOPE THESE WORDS WILL RING IN YOUR SOUL..in your ears...and in your hearts. THE HUMANITY OF A CHRIST THAT AT EVERY TURN in that last week showed with his attention and love, and PRESENCE that he would NOT TURN AWAY! Even in asking for the bitter cup to be removed, he was yet, unwilling to remove himself from the task and take it, head on, courageously. NEVER WERE BETTER HEROS. ANd the beauty in their relationship--him knowing she wouldn’t turn away, and SHE knowing the same about him--That’s love. That’s dyadic power. And that is our opportunity--to go forward, with conviction and faith. LOVE AND LIGHT in this particular endeavor this week.
TRAVEL OPPORTUNITIES:
ISRAEL--FALL, Nov, 9-21, 2021 With LEGACY TOURS and TRAVEL.
EGYPT, OCT 15-27, 2021, and JAN 7-19, 2022
with FORBIDDEN ADVENTURE, this Tuesday at 7, on ZOOM, for link visit:
PRESERVE THE MANTI TEMPLE
Please email: JTBecerra@ChurchofJesusChrist.org to have your comments shared in a report to the First Presidency.
"He said that anyone who writes him on this topic will have their message included in the report to the first presidency. Please take a few minutes to write him an email. Consider including some of the following points:
The Manti temple interior is a priceless part of our heritage.
Merely photographing or scanning the paintings is not enough, the originals should be preserved in place.
Efficiency concerns do not justify the renovation, if a newer temple style is needed, another temple can be built.
Films can be shown in the existing rooms without demolishing or renovating the interior.
The church, and the first presidency have a duty to preserve rather than destroy our heritage and holy temples.
Please write the first presidency at:
JTBecerra@ChurchofJesusChrist.org"
And send a copy by post to:
Church Office Building
Public Affairs
50 East North Temple
Salt Lake City, Utah
84150
Then, call 801-240-1000 and ask for Tom Owen.
There is hope!!
"If management must reflect the corporate image in tasteless, trendy new buildings, down come the fine old pioneer monuments."
Hugh Nibley
Leaders and Managers August 19, 1983
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
by Lois Lowry
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
by Lois Lowry
"(I happen to be a great fan of W. H. Auden. Once, in fact, at a dinner party, the talk turned to poetry, and a man sitting on my left—a complete stranger, someone I had never met before that night—asked me what my favorite line from all of poetry was. I replied, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm” and he looked absolutely terrified and quickly turned to the person on his other side).
HOW EVERYTHING TURNS AWAY.
It’s true, I think, that we turn away from things. We turn away sometimes because it is too painful, and we don’t want to face it (I have a close friend, a dear and honorable man, who cannot go to the Holocaust Museum); and sometimes we turn away simply because it is too hard, and asks more of us than we have to give.
And sometimes we are simply not paying attention.
The poem by Auden from which the line comes is called “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the final stanza speaks of an actual painting that hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels.
....In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I had quoted it back in 1990, in accepting the Newbery Medal for Number the Stars a book set in Europe in 1943, a time when too many people turned away...
First, because we don’t have the painting in front of us, let me describe the scene: It is actually called “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and it’s a complex landscape. A farmer wearing a bright crimson shirt is guiding a plough behind a horse in the foreground, and beyond him, past a border of shrubbery, another man, a shepherd, stands beside his dog while his sheep graze nearby. Behind him, across a vast bay, a great city rises, and surrounding the bay, jagged cliffs and mountains emerge. Several sailing vessels are moving through the turquoise water; and all of it is bathed in a golden light from the low sun beyond.
In the lower right hand corner of the painting, in a place where the sea is dark, shadowed by one of the ships, two bare legs are visible in the water. You can almost hear the thrashing sounds and feel the anguish of the drowning boy. And it’s not just a drowning boy; it’s a colossal tragedy. He has flown! Up to the sun! His attempt is amazing, and his failure is monumental; he has flown higher and he has fallen farther than any human ever has.
And no one is noticing.
They’re too busy, maybe. They’re in a hurry, perhaps. They have somewhere to get to. Or perhaps it is just too demanding, too scary, too sad.
And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on...
'I read the book The Giver when I was about 18 years old and I really identified with the message of how ... when we become so afraid of experiencing pain and difficulty,we become afraid of life itself.
She went on to tell me things about her experiences and about decisions she had made based on what she had learned from reading that book years before. Her decisions had to do with facing pain. She had, in essence, chosen not to turn away...'
It is 1948. I have just finished sixth grade, and my father...the career military man...has now moved his family to post-war Japan. We go by ship from New York, down through Panama, across the Pacific, a journey of many weeks, and my father is waiting for us in Japan, and the green bike is waiting there for me, too.
He moves us into an American style house (to my disappointment, because I had envisioned a house with sliding walls and straw-matted floors) surrounded by other Western- style houses and all of it encircled by a wall.
But the bike is my freedom. I ride the green bike again and again through the gate of the compound’s wall into the bustling section of Tokyo called Shibuya.
I slow my bike when I discover a school, and I linger there, watching, when the children in their dark blue uniforms play in the schoolyard. One boy, just about my age, stares back at me. We look intently at each other.
Then I mount my bike again and ride away...
Finally, there is the girl on the bike. She left Japan when she was fourteen. She grew up here and there, went to college, married, had children, eventually grandchildren. She became a writer.
It’s not true to say that I thought often about the Japanese boy, the one from whom I had turned away, to whom I had been afraid to say hello. But from time to time, remembering my childhood, his face, his solemn look, swam into my memory.
In 1994, when “The Giver” was awarded the Newbery Medal, a picture book called “Grandfather’s Journey” was awarded the Caldecott. Its author/illustrator was Allen Say. Allen is Japanese, though he has lived in the USA since he was a young man.
He gave me a copy of “Grandfather’s Journey” and inscribed it to me. In return, I signed “The Giver” to him, writing my name in Japanese below my usual signature. He chuckled, looking at it, and asked me how I happened to be able to do that.
You can picture the ensuing conversation.
“I lived in Japan when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” I explain.
“What years?” asks Allen Say. “1948,49,50. I was born in 1937.”
Lois Lowry 24 University of Richmond
March 2005
“Me too. We’re the same age. Where did you live?” “Tokyo,” I tell him.
“Me too,” he says. “What part?”
“Shibuya.”
“So did I! Where do you go to school?” Allen asks me. “Meguro. I went by bus each day.”
“I went to school in Shibuya.”
“I remember a school there,” I tell him. “I used to ride
my bike past it.”
Silence. Then: “Were you the girl on the green bike?”
Allen and I are close friends now. But we had lost 57 years of friendship because we had both turned away. To do otherwise—in that place and that time—would have been too hard."
"THIS WEEK FOR HOLY WEEK, I HOPE THESE WORDS WILL RING IN YOUR SOUL..in your ears...and in your hearts. THE HUMANITY OF A CHRIST THAT AT EVERY TURN in that last week showed with his attentntion and love, and PRESENCE that he would NOT TURN AWAY! Even in asking for the bitter cup to be removed, he was yet, unwilling to remove himself from the task and take it, head on, courageously. NEVER WERE BETTER HEROS. ANd the beauty in their relationship--him knowing she wouldn’t turn away, and SHE knowing the same about him--That’s love. That’s dyadic power. And that is our opportunity--to go forward, with conviction and faith. LOVE AND LIGHT in this particular endeavor this week.
Mandy