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Monday, August 31, 2015

BEAUTIFUL WEDDING - PRAYER FOR CREATION


Our youngest daughter, beautiful Bridget, got married this past weekend, to Graydon, a young man of strong character and generous heart.   They were celebrated in church ceremony and reception hall by so many friends and family from so many diverse directions and backgrounds, it was wonderful overwhelming.  There were representatives from almost every job and school, neighborhood and family connection each of them had ever been part of.  Testimony to their welcoming natures.

Bridget and Graydon, we were all lifted up and blessed by your spirit and promise.   God continue to bless you and keep you close.

World Day of Prayer for Care of Creation is tomorrow, Sept. 1st



Photos by Twin Shutterbug Studios

Monday, August 24, 2015

PAKISTAN—YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR



“U.S. Threatens to Withhold Pakistan [Military] Aid,” states a headline in a recent WSJ articleWhat is the world coming to?   They have been our allies in the Afghanistan region since well before the 911 terrorist attacks against us in 2001.   Pakistan was our supply route to fight the Russians by proxy supporting Mujahedeen terrorist extremists to help kick the Russians out of Afghanistan.  The Russians had invaded there in 1979, leading President Jimmy Carter to call a boycott of the Olympics to be held in Russia.  That was how outraged we were that Russia would invade a country that bordered them and was in chaos.  That chaos then engaged the Russian occupiers for almost a decade, depleting their national treasury, humiliating their army, and contributing to the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Now we have repeated their tragic mistake, trusting in our military might to conquer Afgahnistan, this third world nation that nurtured Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and many terrorist factions [that we armed in our proxy war with Russia].  Pakistan, the neighbor country we’ve used as a forward base & supply line for our army’s invasion of Afghanistan post 911, is no longer cooperating.  What will become of our current attempts to destroy these Taliban and other militant groups we once supported?  It would certainly compromise our army, Special Forces, and drones operations.
Drone activity in 2010
Pakistan was never enthusiastic, is friendly also to Taliban on its side of the border, and its courts are now pressing charges against U.S. CIA officials that have run the drones program secretly from their territory.  “American drone strikes are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, where they are viewed as a breach of the country’s sovereignty…”  They are also viewed by their common people as shameful, cowardly ways to fight by remote control.


Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are predominantly Muslim nations.  They are much closer to each other than to the United States.   After more than a decade of our Afghanistan invasion and occupation, and continued “pinpoint strikes” against insurgents, there is no end to the chaos.  The refugees and displaced number in the millions, billions of U.S. military dollars are spent, civilian casualties are at an all-time high, poppy-heroin production is at record levels, and the two countries at times even attack each other.
Another member of our U.S. arsenal

Our military aid to Pakistan will most likely continue, if they fight the enemies we direct them to [so intimates the WSJ article].  Recent history teaches that this only promises the bitter fruit of persistent war.  Better to invest in peacemaking, as in the attempts of President Eisenhower’s’ road and irrigation projects in Afghanistan, and Central Asia Institute’s school building in Pakistan.  You get what you pay for: terrible in war, never easy but positive in peace.

A better use of poppies--Ande's, on our garden path

Please visit our parish webpage for some of the true service opportunities that can help cultivate world peace.

References



Monday, August 17, 2015

VIOLENCE JUSTIFIED IS TRUE PEACE DENIED


Section of recent wall art by Ande Gaines McCarthy--from American indigenous theme


I have an ongoing dialogue with friends.  Is one obligated to take up violence as last resort in defense of friends, family, or country—or should one fully embrace pacifism, nonviolence?
I believe in the second, and to be precise, active confrontational prophetic (inspired) pacifism is not passive.  It’s not from that root word, but from Pace – “Peace be with you.”  An opposite sense to all that is apathetic and complacent.  It strikes at the root of the lie that is violent activism.

The New Evangelization we talk about in our church now will prosper only if we return to the full Gospel message of Jesus, how he taught and lives an unconditional nonviolent merciful love for all of us.  As the scriptural scholar {whose text was our guide in the scripture class I took as a seminarian in 1965} has said, “If we cannot know from the New Testament that Christ totally rejects violence, then we can know nothing of His person or message.  It is the clearest of teachings.”  -- Fr. John L. McKenzie S.J.


We must be about teaching and ministering to God’s merciful nonviolent love of friends, and yes, enemies.  We should be working and praying for our young people to never be involved in war, in the military science of killing people.   Instead, well-prepared national and international and mission service should be a requirement for all faithful citizens, but we must begin to put away the sword as Jesus told us when He took up His cross.  Out-violencing the enemy never brings peace.

There is a craziness, anti-god inside every person on earth’s brain, ready to take over.  Its name is fear.  Feed it, and it will.  Feed mercy, and the true God is always with you.

Christian heroism is to not engage in the violent fight, but to create and offer healing remedy of the conflict.  Undeniably there is often great physical risk in not seeking instead the most powerful weapons.  Yet this is the spiritual path promised, to the salvation that conquers death. 

From Ande's backyard garden

Jesus never justified violence as His way.  In recent gospel readings He is Eucharist with us, the sustaining bread of life.  He walks body and soul with us.  Incorporating Him moment to moment we can meet all life’s conflicts and challenges without resorting to that ultimate human tragedy—killing another.  Neither war, nor abortion, will end, nor evangelization succeed until we, with our Savior, renounce justified violence.

The Last Supper- by Bohdan Piasecki



Monday, August 3, 2015

CALL FOR SUB SUPPORT & HIROSHIMA CANDLELIGHTS ON WATER

Second Biannual Request for Support Subscriptions –-- Rather than monetizing the space with disruptive ads, this is a request for support subscriptions of $10 per year made by check sent to this address—Michael McCarthy, Faith Perspective on War & Peace, 2714 Stone St., Port Huron, MI  48060 [checks to my name with FPWP in the memo].   Thank you.


Working independently and without staff since inception on Faith Perspective on War & Peace these past five plus years leads me to attempt a new business model. Writing and working for peace should have some hope of making a small profit in our society. But incomes have thus far been significantly smaller than expenses. I’d like to now merge an old technology with this new one.  Money by mail, for these messages by internet.

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At seventy years since these exploded into our world, its time to banish these demons.  They generate total disrespect for all life.   We nations that have them, possess many times over the number sufficient to end all the biologically advanced life on this planet.  What a blasphemy against our creator God, and a violation of the First Commandment, as they are certainly "strange gods" we entrust our lives to.
Instead---
Candle lantern commemoration of ancestors, and the first atomic bombing--Hiroshima
photo by Kim Kung Hoon, Reuters
From a Pax Christi Austin, TX 2007 ceremony
From an earlier Port Huron ceremony

An invitation, during our parish Franz Jagerstatter Prayer Novena for the End of War
CANDLELIGHTS ON THE RIVER
FOR PEACE AND DISARMAMENT
Thursday, August 6th, Year 2015
A prayer vigil in commemoration of all those who have died in all wars
For our ancestors, our children, and even our enemies
To commit ourselves to put an end to war
On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
So that future generations may live in peace
Come down to the river to pray
For conversion from the arms race, on the banks of the St. Clair River, at the new River Walk in Port Huron {midway down the walk at the sturgeon sculpture reef barriers}

At 9:15 PM, Thursday, August 6, 2015

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of is scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"After the passage of nearly four [now seven] decades and a concomitant growth in our understanding of the ever growing horror of nuclear war, we must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945. Without that sorrow, there is no possibility of finding a way to repudiate future use of nuclear weapons…"
The U. S. Catholic Bishops, "The Challenge of Peace" pastoral letter of 1983 [Sec 302]