Sri Lanka Guardian

What Does It Mean To Follow Jesus Christ Today?
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2008 LEAVE A COMMENT


by Cory Bushman

(October 19, Washington, Sri Lanka Guardian) “Christ’s teaching to live each day as if it were your last is much smarter than the world’s teaching to get more and more money for the future. Both sides will die, but only one will die prepared and happy. Disciples of Christ will be poor, but that does not mean that they will be sad. It may mean that they will live out on the land or sleep under the stars, that they will be hungry three times a day (just before each meal), that they will be so tired at night that they will fall asleep easily and sleep right through the night, that they will use their time to listen to and help others, and that when they die, their death will have meaning.” --Leo Tolstoy (What I Believe)

Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.
D & C 18:10

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

The late American novelist and humanist Kurt Vonnegut expressed the importance of The Sermon on the Mount in his last work, A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut wrote, “How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not? But if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

In A Man Without A Country, Vonnegut tells of a man by the name of Powers Hapgood who was born to a middle-class family in Indianapolis, Indiana. Hapgood became involved in organizing to gain better pay and safer working conditions for his working-class brothers. Powers Hapgood was arrested in a picket line and brought before a judge. The judge, knowing Hapgood’s history asked, “Mr. Hapgood, here you are, you’re a graduate of Harvard. Why would anyone with your advantages choose to live as you have?” Hapgood answered the judge: “Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

Recently I was given a gift of a small box with the words, “Plans for the Overthrow” wood burned into the top. Inside of the box is a copy of The Sermon on the Mount. These radical words literally tell us exactly what we must do in order to overthrow chains of oppression and follow Christ.

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” (St. Matthew 5:38-48)

Aware of the label of insanity given to those who chose to live the teachings of Christ literally, Tolstoy wrote, “What will sound most crazy in the future will be when they tell how we had a Teacher who showed us clearly and simply what we needed to do to have a better life, and we all said that his rules were too difficult.” We have read, reread, shared and committed to memory the Sermon on the Mount, but has it penetrated our hearts? Has it caused a stirring of the soul and a desire to change the way we live and to obey the teachings Christ? In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma asks us this same question.

“And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?” (Alma 5:26)

THREE SAINTS

Kurt Vonnegut referred to saints as “people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society.” We are surrounded by saints. In Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Gulag, she includes an account of Margarete Buber-Neumann’s arrest and imprisonment at the Butyrka prison. A fellow inmate had been arrested while wearing “a light summer dress which had turned to rags”. Applebaum tells of Margarete and her fellow cell mates determination to make this woman a new dress. They used rough towels, and burnt ends of matches to mark the pattern. Lighted matches took the place of scissors, and the thread used to sew the dress together was removed from existing clothing. Margarete wrote of the finished product; “The towel dress...went from hand to hand and was beautifully embroidered at the neck, the sleeves, and round the bottom of the skirt. When it was finally finished it was dampened down and carefully folded. The fortunate possessor slept on it at night. Believe it or not, but when it was produced in the morning, it was really delightful; it would not have disgraced the window of a fashionable dress shop.”

Emma Goldman, a famous Jewish anarchist and outspoken atheist, had a similar prison experience, which was recorded in her biography, Living My Life. “Christmas was approaching and my companions were in nervous wonderment as to what the day of days would bring them. Nowhere is Christianity so utterly devoid of meaning as in prison.” Due to their circumstances, few of the women had outside family and friends who would remember them on Christmas day, but Goldman stated that her inmates “clung to the hope that the day of their Saviour’s birth would bring them some kindness.” Long before Christmas, Goldman began to ask “family, comrades, and friends” to send her gifts including; bracelets, earrings, necklaces, rings, brooches, and other trinkets. Goldman was allowed to store these items in her cell and on Christmas Eve, while the rest of her prison mates were attending the cinema, the gifts were distributed, with the help of three of her neighbors and the prison matron. Goldman recorded, “When the women returned from the cinema, the cell-block resounded with exclamation of happy astonishment. “Santa Claus’s been here! He’s brung me something grand!” “Me, too! Me, too!” reechoed from cell to cell.” Goldman wrote of that Christmas in the Missouri penitentiary as the Christmas which brought her “greater joy than many previous ones outside.” She continued to express her gratitude for friends who allowed her to “bring a gleam of sunshine into the dark lives of (her) fellow-sufferers.”

Another saint, who was caught “behaving decently in a strikingly indecent society” was President Spencer W. Kimball. During one of his many layovers at an airport, he noticed a young pregnant woman with a small child standing in a long line. The woman had been advised by her doctor not to pick up her child unless it was absolutely necessary, which caused onlookers to criticize her parenting skills. President Kimball, then an Apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was the first to ask the woman if she needed assistance. President Kimball not only arranged a flight for the woman and encouraged others in line to assist her, but he also took the time to pick up the child and calm her. When all was made right, President Kimball moved on.

This is an experience that President Kimball most likely did not remember, until he received a letter years later from a returned missionary. The letter told the story of the airport, that he was the baby that the expectant mother gave birth to, and that through President Kimball’s kindness and example, the family became acquainted with the LDS church. Mother Teresa said that, “following Jesus is simple, but not easy. Love until it hurts and then love more.”

The women of Butyrka prison, Emma Goldman and her cellmates, and our beloved Prophet Spencer W. Kimball are all great examples of saints. It is important to note that their actions, their great acts of service, are all things that each one of us are capable of. We can all behave decently in a strikingly indecent society.

ENTERTAIN STRANGERS

In Hebrews 13:2 it reads, “Be not fearful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” In September of 2003, I saw a young boy sitting on the sidewalk, in the shadows of the Salt Lake Temple, holding a sign which read, “talk to me.” The boy wasn’t accepting food or money, just conversation. I was struck by the loneliness and isolation that the world offers, that would cause one to beg for human interaction on the street.

On moving into an apartment in a populated area, I was given a packet of community information. Included in the packet was a pamphlet discouraging residents to give to panhandlers. I was struck by the information found in the pamphlet, and immediately my thoughts turned to The Sermon on the Mount and what the Savior would think of the promotion of neglecting His children. Mother Teresa stated that “In the poor we meet Jesus in the most distressing disguises.” It is easy to help those who we feel deserve help or who we can relate to, but that is not what Christ has asked us to do. Catholic Worker Dorothy Day wrote, “The true atheist is the one who denies God’s image in the ‘least of these.’”

DEATH WITH MEANING

Leon Gieco urgently wrote, “All I ask of God is that I not be indifferent to suffering, that parched death does not find me empty and alone without having done enough.” We should all have such fear, fear that we will not do all that God has asked of us, that we will not relieve the suffering of the world, that we will find ourselves having not done enough. We will all die. We are all mortal beings. Each of us must make the choice to live a life that will give our death meaning. It is that simple. There is a Russian peasant saying which states, “If you drink, you’ll die, and if you don’t drink, you’ll die. Better drink and die.” This is what it means to follow Christ today, to drink of life, to walk in the path of Christ, and to live a life which will give death meaning. We must learn to live lives of meaning, lives that not even death can destroy. Tolstoy said that if Christ were here today he would plead, “For thousands of years you have been doing it your way. Now try my way.”

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down. —Oscar Romero.

Sri Lanka Guardian

The Work of Nicole Christensen

YOU'RE IT

God
Disguised
As a myriad of things and
Playing a game
Of tag

Has kissed you and said,
"You're it--

I mean you're Really IT!"

Now
It does not matter
What you believe or feel

For something wonderful,

Major-league Wonderful
Is someday going
To

Happen.

--Hafiz

Kitezh

October 2, 2008
Kaluga Region Journal
In a Fairy-Tale Village, Russian Orphans Thrive
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

KALUGA REGION, Russia — Standing in a row, sweating in the bright sun, a group of boys hammered on the outer wall of a partially built log cabin. Nearby, two others painted a picnic table while another pack of children scurried by dressed in green tunics, wooden swords drawn for a play battle.

Work and play often commingle in Kitezh, an experimental orphan community about 190 miles southwest of Moscow that combines features of an orphanage with those of foster care. With its colorful wooden cottages, Kitezh appears as distant from the cruelty of the children’s frequently alcoholic and abusive parents as it is from the stale, often crowded government institutions where many Russian orphans still live.

“If we can, we try to create the atmosphere of a fairy tale,” said Mikhail S. Shchurav, who has lived at Kitezh for three years and has an adopted son. “Fairy tales help these kids forget what they’ve been through.”

The founders of Kitezh hope that their village can be a model of reform for Russia’s decrepit child welfare system, little changed since Soviet days. Though perhaps hard to replicate on a large scale, Kitezh still stands as one of the few largely successful alternatives here to institutional care for orphans.

Russia’s orphan problem stretches back for most of the last century: wars, revolution, Stalin’s purges, famine and disease all thinned the adult population. Even now, as Russian wealth accumulates, alcoholism and social decay prompted by the Soviet collapse continue to plague the countryside, destroying families.

Russia’s Education Ministry has classified about 750,000 children today as orphans. Most have been abandoned or taken from their parents because of neglect or abuse. Thousands more are homeless, living in the dank, freezing train stations and fetid stairwells of Russia’s cities.

Foster care, widespread in the United States and Europe, has been slow in coming to Russia. About 510,000 children cycled through foster care in the United States in 2006, and it took an average of 28 months for them to be adopted, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. While increasing numbers of orphaned Russian children are entering foster care, 200,000 are still housed in orphanages — often living there until age 18 — and thousands more enter the institutions each year.

Kitezh was named for a mythical Russian city that escaped decimation by an invading army by disappearing, leaving only the peal of church bells behind.

Dmitri Morozov, a former radio talk-show host, founded Kitezh in 1992 as a kind of orphan collective, building it with the help of volunteers and adoptive parents on a rural plot donated by the Kaluga Region government. Today, there are about half a dozen houses built in Russian-folk style, a school, a communal dining hall and a small Orthodox church.

The 30 or so children who live there study, work and eat together, and live in private homes with their adoptive parents, who are also trained teachers, psychologists and medical personnel.

“We are trying out the latest methods in psychological therapies: play therapy, art therapy, drama therapy,” Mr. Shchurav said. “We even play economic games. No one in Russia has tried what we are doing with these children.”

The experiment has yielded notable results. Of the 40 or so children who have graduated from Kitezh, about 60 percent have gone on to higher education and all have found good jobs, parents in the village said.

Vasily V. Burdin spent four years in an orphanage after his parents died from complications related to alcohol abuse when he was 4. He said he was treated fairly well there, but gained “an understanding of the world” only when he moved to Kitezh.

With almost fluent English picked up from British students who at times volunteer in the village, Mr. Burdin, now 18 and enrolled in a Moscow law university, described his struggle to overcome his past, and — something few Russian orphans have — his hopes for the future.

“I will proceed with law for my business, for my career,” he said. “But after I have stability, I will do something with music — maybe open my studio. It’s a dream.”

Maxim Tarasenko, 7, the village’s youngest resident, described his life before Kitezh as “very bad.”

“My parents were very drunk, and didn’t understand anything,” he said. “They didn’t understand that you’re not allowed to drink only vodka and that you’re not allowed to smoke.”

At first he was antisocial and picked fights, said Tamara B. Pichugina, his adoptive mother. But after a year in Kitezh, he has become something of a social butterfly, fluttering about and chatting with whoever will listen.

Despite the successes, few have been able or willing to follow Kitezh’s example.

“Our experience is not being put to use because it requires that adults receive a significant amount of training,” said Mr. Morozov, the founder. It also requires a strict allegiance to the collective that can be at odds with Russia’s new materialistic and individualistic ethos.

But the government has begun to revamp child welfare services, promoting adoption to ease the strain on orphanages.

Government funds allotted to adoptive families, including the parents at Kitezh, increased by 28.2 percent in 2007, and about 120,000 orphans left state institutions to join foster families, an increase of 7,000 over 2006, according to the Education Ministry.

Still, those removed from orphanages were replaced by some 120,000 new orphans registered by the ministry last year. Adoptive parents also give back thousands of children each year.

Most of the adults and children at Kitezh said they hoped their project could be replicated throughout the country. Mr. Morozov collected enough donations this year to begin building a new orphan village about two hours from the original.

During a lunch break from his internship in Moscow at the American law firm Baker Botts, a large Kitezh sponsor, Mr. Burdin said he was considering starting a business with Mr. Morozov, his adopted father, to help finance Kitezh’s development.

“I think Kitezh is like a fairy tale,” he said, adding, “You need to work to hold this beauty.”

http://www.ecologia.org.uk/