A story about knitting needles and warnings

I enjoy all sewing and needlework projects, including knitting and crocheting. I learned how to knit by reading a book my sister in law had, while I was staying at my brother's house on "vacation," but I was really taking care of my baby niece while my brother worked on his PhD and my sister in law taught in elementary school. This was during the summer that the United States landed the first man on the moon, and I watched that event from there on their black and white TV. (I was alone in watching it because they were out for the evening and just not into it anyway). So I was just a young girl.

Anyway, I was already an avid fan of sewing and arts and crafts, so I picked up that book and learned from the instructions and pictures how to knit. Years later I taught myself crochet. I knit and crocheted many of the clothes I wore in high school.

Years later when I was reading about Native American culture I was interested to read a historic event involving knitting needles. (I did a lot of reading of Native American culture, not for the goofy reasons that many did about "mysticism" and "vision quest" by stoned New Agers, but because I spent many years sponsoring Native American children who needed financial help to stay in school. I later considered many of them dear friends and family). So I enjoyed reading about their history, culture and art and traditional beliefs, and even collected some rare books on these subjects.

Many people have heard about the great defeat of General Armstrong Custer by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne alliance at the Battle of Little Big Horn. I read some contemporary accounts of what happened, in my rare book collection. Here is a little gem that I often think about when I buy knitting needles (as I did yesterday). The Lakota had warned Custer not to persecute and attack them, and they warned him most seriously about the dire consequences if he did. But Custer pursued the Indians anyway, and history knows the result, that he and his men were slaughtered in battle.

Some bodies were found with knitting needles stuck in their ears. The explanation was that Indian women stuck them in there after they were dead, to symbolize "the hearing problem" that the soldiers had for not heeding the warning. Hmm.

Background Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Little_Big_Horn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knitting_needles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

Personal story/thoughts re attacks on Catholic church

Just a closing personal recollection to share with you, as I feel I’ve done more than enough blogging for today. I’d do much less but have such a sense of dread and foreboding at the dire condition of religious discourse and the misuse of the word “tolerance” in the world today. For example, Catholics are called intolerant, yet the same accusers would defend any half ass “spiritual system” that drops into a person’s dopey head. Catholics are called “intolerant” for not “allowing” women to be priests, but by the same token by that accusation the critics are basically saying that a faith cannot exist where there is a class of mediators called consecrated priests who must be male. Again, if some half ass New Age spiritual system came along where the only sermon givers could must be gay men, the critics would laud that system and not call it intolerant at all.

Whatever else the critics falsely say about the Catholic Church, they have to admit one thing. The Catholic Church doesn’t sit around writing blogs and documents and books criticizing other faiths. Shouldn’t people think long and hard what THAT means? We don’t make money with pop or “scholarly” books attacking our post Reformation brethren, Muslims, or even New Agers. We keep it focused on the Lord Jesus Christ and God.

So here is the story I want to share with you. The grandfather of one of my sponsored Native American children gave me and my husband a great privilege in the 1980’s. We were able to visit one of his tribe’s kivas, which is their underground place of worship. It was an extremely moving experience, and to this day it remains one of my fondest memories. Now, this tribe believes that their prayer life is an essential component of the survival of the world. In other words, they worry that if they ever die out, that the world will too, because they will be unable to do their native worship of God.

I have enormous respect for this, I relate to it, and I applaud their belief. You don’t find me arguing with them that they need to convert to Christianity. Far from that, I hear the Holy Spirit in his words. It is the sense of responsibility to God, not superstition that motivates this pious man and others like him. His focus is on God, and on their role in continuing to make the world a spiritually worthy place for physical life to continue. I’m not saying to run out and get insurance policies for them, ha, or now proclaim that you have learned a spiritual secret, because there’s no secret to it, as this belief is confessed in classic text books about this tribe. What I am showing you is that “spiritual envy” should not exist in anyone who truly loves God. We came together as colleagues, this medicine man and I. I don’t want to make him a Catholic, and he didn’t want to initiate me into the tribe, but he did pay me a high honor.

It is that attitude that is also behind the Catholic Mass. By that I mean that everyone benefits spiritually from each Catholic Mass celebrated, even if you don’t even know what a Catholic is. The Catholic Mass is the sacramental worship of God. We don’t run out of Mass saying that no one else’s worship is valid. The Catholic Mass is for the benefit of not only all Christians, Catholic or not, but of all people, even those who are infidel, who totally do not believe in God. I’m thrilled when I see packed parking lots at the Baptist church down the street. If people feel moved to have a “home” praise and worship service, more power to them: they are praising and worshipping God. But the Catholic Church, along with the other sacramental churches, such as Orthodox, Anglican and so on, are doing what no one else is doing. They are participating in consecrated sacramental worship of God in the spirit that instructions for consecrated worship was given to the first man, Adam, and throughout the faith history of the Israelites. Why in the world would anyone criticize the Catholic Church for continuing to have consecrated sacramental worship of God that is in the direct footsteps of the original faith as given to Abraham, Moses and their spiritual descendents? Why is there such one sided hostility toward the Catholic Church regarding the structure of their liturgy and the formation of their faith? It is spiritual jealousy and arrogance. I sleep a little better at night knowing these past two decades that I met that medicine man who feels he carries a divine contribution toward the spirituality and indeed survivability of humans, even on behalf of the 99.9 percent of the world who never even heard of their tribe or their beliefs. What kind of person resents the Catholic Church for continuing to celebrate consecrated sacramental worship of God on behalf of everyone for two thousand years, continuing the faith history that existed for even two thousand years before them?

By the fruit you will know the tree. If the fruit is to make a name for oneself, to make money for oneself, or to attempt to erode the faith of a group of people by being hostile to the Catholic Church as a sacred institution, you really have to question how rotten might be that tree, despite their using the sweet name of Jesus.

More about charitable giving / cult delusions

In my previous blog post I explain how a surprising number of people dispense their largess to the little people and call it "charity" according to how they think it will benefit them in their "astrology charts." They don't generally care or are not imaginative enough to think of where the need is truly the greatest, and the most logical. So people with "lots of Leo" will tend to give to "sports and arts" while those with "strong 12Th houses" will tend to "donate" to "hidden places" such as "hospitals and prisons." I wish I was joking but I am not. They tend to choose from a bizarre menu that they feel is "given to them" based on hokum about "karma," what I call "manipulative past lives" (people claim to have them and know what to 'do' about them and worse, abuse others according to their mistaken beliefs). So they honestly do not even think of doing charitable work "around the clock" in areas that are identified through regular normal fact based human kindness and logic.

Here's an example of the difference between me and them. When I first had generous paychecks with money that I could reliably spend on helping others, I decided to do sponsorship of children, like many millions of people do. In these programs you send money on a monthly basis in order to help a specific child stay in school, meet basic school needs, etc. There are many famous programs. I decided to select one that deals exclusively with Native Americans here in the USA. Why? Two reasons. One is that I grew up near a reservation, so to me it's not an exotic far away need but a "local issue." I saw as a child the poverty first hand, since my mother and I would drive to the reservation to buy apples and corn. Charity is best and strongest when you get involved with people and situations that you know something about yourself. The second reason is that there were many scandals during that time about poverty in the USA. The great expose about Appalachia and its hidden, deep poverty was a huge topic during my formation as a future charitable giver. I could not understand giving to international programs without giving even more to solve the poverty situation here in the USA. And so those were the two reasons I researched a number of worthy organizations but quickly chose the one exclusively for Native Americans.

Now, I know, even though no one has ever said this (or anything else honest) to my face that the cultists who stalked me never realized that I selected Native American charity for such a simple reason. They are blinded by their own lenses of stereotyping everything as having hidden motivations. And so my several decades of sponsorship and even more "incriminating" (from their point of view) interest in Indian culture could only mean.... yep, you guessed it, "past lives," "Karma," "the great injustice of the robber baron white man," "where are Injuns in her astrology chart, drool" and all sorts of conclusions that I was "drawn" to the Indians for "spiritual" reasons. Yes, I liked reading about their culture (not so much the history) and also their religious practices. I mean, duh, you know who I am by now. Of course I'd be interested in their religious practices. But that doesn't mean I was going at is as a "questor" who is "trying to find answers" or worse, "endorsing a *said in pretentious tone* P-A-T-H-W-A-Y." Yikes.

And so over the past several decades there have been HORRIBLE cascading events and oppressive decisions made by cultists in control because they were too damn arrogant and stupid to actually ask me, "Why did you choose to select Native American child sponsorship?"

If they had asked me this question, they would have learned not only the truth about many things (there is no such thing as reincarnation, it is always a good time to be charitable, and the best charity is where the need is the greatest when the need is the greatest) but they also would have learned another essential thing about me. They would have learned that I am vehemently against abortion and that by investing in the Native American families who I sponsored, many of whom oppose birth control because of their understandable genocidal concerns, I was expressing in the pragmatic dollars and cents way my support of large families that use neither birth control nor condone abortions. My conversations with them were very informative of my previously held belief that the way to fight abortion is to coalition with people who love children and who want to have large families, it's as simple as that. By coalition I mean to make it financially and otherwise feasible for those who might feel pressure to abort to be able to have their child, even if it means subsidizing them. Yes, I told you, I'm a liberal, in the proud, not dirty, sense of the tradition. As I've blogged before I believe that if society organized around charities in order to help surprise pregnancies result in live births instead of abortions, through money and educational/job alternatives and a strong system of adoption and orphanages, we'd not have seen the murder of millions of preborn babies in this country. My long term commitment to the Native Americans was the amount that I could personally afford of expressing support based on this set of values and how I felt practical help is better than confrontation or ignoring when it comes to the scourge of abortion in this country.

Now, my families were not ever thinking of abortion, as I said, they told me this is a dire reminder of genocidal times and against their pro-life values (though this of course is changing as the pro aborts and secular society target the poor young Indian youth). So I'm not saying that my sponsorship was necessary for them to have their children, as they would have done so anyway. But my point is that my sponsorship was my way to glorify and support those who were so determined to be pro-life and produce large, loving families. I did so as long as I could, until the cultists caught up with me and cost me my career, my means of earning a living, and my home. I had to stop sponsorship then, and it's been more than a decade since I've been able to participate in that way. There's worse to this story, but no reason to go into it now, except to say, use your imagination about what people who think that I'm interested in Native Americans because of their stupid, mean, ignorant and craven "past life" and "karma" would do (imitate me but with an ugly twist, since there's the assumption of that light and dark "war" that they live in delusion of, and also, well, think about casinos and so forth). They would assume to be "charitable" where there is lots of money and "luck" involved too. Also, since the cultists did not recognize my Catholicism and my authority to speak to its everlasting truth (even though the evidence was no secret and right in front of them), they assumed all sorts of conclusions about divinity and faith matters on sometimes "evidence" as weak as whatever dorky book about Indian lore I might decide to peruse or to buy. I've explained in previous blog postings that like the Buddhist search for "reincarnated lamas," these unfunny clowns stalk what people read and buy, to see "what objects" they are attracted to because they "tell you about what they are *said in pretentious tone of voice* D-R-A-W-N to spiritually." Cultists would manipulate which children were assigned to me for sponsorship, what would happen to them at work and in school (what opportunities they got, for example), and "study" how "lucky" or "not" my "involvement" was with these different kids and their families and then either infiltrate the families on their own for their own "spiritual benefit" or conclude that "bad karma" was being "worked out" and terminate relationships. It's an ugly, ugly, UGLY problem and one that they think I'm too stupid to know how pervasive it is, but I know, oh Lord, do I know. More importantly, though, they forget that God knows all along and does not depend on human witness, deduction or clues. He knows even when these pathetic thoughts of the cultists were formed in their deluded and sick minds.

So much that is simple and good has been ruined.

Poem about Indian legend, written today

A wise Indian woman said,
"It's turtles all the way down,"
But the man never asked her,
Why the turtles don't drown.

If turtles hold up the earth,
While floating in space,
Where's the water that keeps them
Afloat, not down faced?

Perhaps God keeps the turtle,
Safe in His palm,
The sweat of his brow,
Ensures all of the calm.

Love of Children *Daily Dosage*

Here's a cute story about a Navajo family that I know. When I first visited them in the 1980's on the reservation, the husband and wife had six children. They were all delightful and never once resented living in a crowded 3 room house, where money was always a struggle, despite both parents working hard. We were sitting in the living room and the mom pointed to the couch and said, "I had all the children on that couch." As I listened slack jawed with admiration, she told me how funny it was that after she had each baby, they'd drive to the hospital (50 miles away) to have the post natal care, and the hospital folks would joke, "You always come to us after the baby is born." LOL! The oldest child, a boy, told me, "Yeah, I was so disappointed that I missed the youngest one's birth because I was over at the neighbors!" The family was so warm and loving and if there was a Pulitzer Prize for parents, I think my friends should win. And each child loved his or her sibling. If one got a special present of say, $5.00, they'd never spend it on just themselves, they would buy juices for their brothers or sisters out of their small gift. Like most Native Americans of that generation that I know, they would never consider not having a child, no matter what the sacrifice. Anyway, I wanted to share that story about the couch; I still smile when I think about it :-)