“He took what is mine in order that He might impart to me what is His.
He took it not to overturn it but to fill it.”
St. Ambrose
(Cades Cove, TN / Julie Cook / 2015)
We must animate ourselves by the thought that God is always with us,
that he only allows this trial for our greater good,
and that we have not necessarily lost his grace because
we have lost the taste and feelings of it.
St. Ignatius of Loyola
“If you are suffering from a bad man’s injustice,
forgive him—lest there be two bad men.”
St. Augustine
(lovely treasures found along a morning walk /Julie Cook / 2021)
Each and every passing day I want to spout off my take on the
latest madness besieging our lives…
The idiocy of man…and woman…all playing out here in the US.
And each and every idiocy deserves its own epistle.
But there simply is no time in which to keep up with the
turning of the surreal wheels.
As soon as I could write about one thing, something else pops up
and the popping just keeps popping.
Critical Race Theory
Woke School Boards
Woke schools
Wokeness in general
US Education
US Representatives and their big ignorant mouths
Race
Political egos
Egos in general
A US president who, for our own saving grace, needs simply to
sail off to the sunset…taking that wife and son with him.
A vice president who is a silly little girl who simply needs
to be taken away…
Borders
Migrants
Immigrants
MS13
A culture hellbent on canceling most of the life we thought
we knew and loved….
The Media which really is no example of what true journalism is all about.
Vaccines and masks—nuff said
Propaganda
Faucism
Posers
Imposters
Lies
falsehoods
Madame Speaker
The Squad of imbeciles
American Flags
Disrespect
alternative history
triggers
emotions
tender feelings
adults being babies
immaturity
whimps
safe zones
feelings…nothing more than feelings…
Crime
More crime
violent crime
riots
protests
laws
what laws?
Help wanted
checks
Welfare state
on and on it goes…
there is no time to start on one topic before another topic
steals the spolight.
and wouldn’t you know it…
The Mayor and Sheriff are coming to spend the majority of the week
with Mom and Da while Mommy and Dada go on a much needed bit of R & R
Which in turn means you must pray for Mom and Da!!!!
Heck…let’s just all pray now–cause prayer is about all any of us
still really have left…
I think I’ll just take my chances with the ensuing heat, humidity
and cicadas—at least those three things are brutally honest
“To love God’s will in consolations is a good love when it is truly
God’s will we love and not the consolation wherein it lies.
Still, it is a love without opposition, repugnance, or effort.
Who would not love so worthy a will in so agreeable a form?
To love God’s will in His commandments, counsels,
and inspirations is the second degree of love and it is much more perfect.
It carries us forward to renounce and give up our own will,
and enables us to abstain from and forbear many pleasures, but not all of them.
To love suffering and affliction out of love for God
is the summit of most holy charity.
In it nothing is pleasant but the divine will alone;
there is great opposition on the part of our nature;
and not only do we forsake all pleasures,
but we embrace torments and labors.”
St. Francis de Sales, p. 76
And there you have the heart of the matter:
‘it isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
Dr. Gavin Ashenden
(the surge of the storm / Julie Cook/ 2020)
The truth isn’t always pretty but it is, in the end, still always the truth.
I just read our dear friend, Dr. Gavin Ashenden’s latest post
“Cancel culture attacks people rather than ideas”
He begins his post by examining the latest brouhaha that has engulfed the famed Harry Potter
author J.K. Rowling along with the quagmire she stepped into when she chose to defend the idea
of biological sex.
This time, Mr. Rowling’s issue is not about witchcraft and anti-Christian rhetoric
but rather it’s all about biology.
Biological sex to be specific—meaning that a male is a male and a female is a female.
It seems that that basic biology lesson is oh so passe in our current culture.
Forget that there are males and females…we are all now one big hodgepodge of this and that.
Who and what ‘this and that’ may be is totally up for grabs.
Say you are a 9-year-old little girl who decides you should be a boy.
Our current culture will say “Great!” “You may get a sex change
(even without parental consent mind you) or, if you prefer,
you can simply call yourself a boy despite being still a girl.”
“It’s all totally up to you. Forget biology!”
And tomorrow if you change your mind, no problem…except that is,
if you went through with the surgery then there’s a bit of a problem.
Oh well…
And yet this is not to say that there is not a tiny percentage of people who actually do
have a disorder known as gender dysphoria where they actually feel trapped in the wrong body.
But that percentage is minuscule compared to the wave of pick and choose we’re currently
witnessing.
In his post, the good doctor examines the bizarre growing trend against biology
along with those who still cling to the obvious notion of male and female.
Something I suspect most of us do.
A notion Ms. Rowlings opted to defend despite her being quite the feminist.
Yet it appears that even feminists are not exempt from the mob.
This current cancel culture mob has proclaimed itself to be the gatekeeper
to all things choice…and if you dare veer from their view, woe be unto you.
Dr. Ashenden explains,
“Cancel culture’ is a new phrase.
It’s only been around two or three years.
It represents something as horrible as it is dangerous.
It involves the mob closing someone down, and taking away either their freedom to speak,
their job or their place in society.
What is so odd about it is that we have become sharply concerned as a society
about hate and bullying.
You would think that if there was any consistency around,
anything that acted as a weapon for bullying and hatred would be found repulsive and rejected?
But the opposite has happened.
A lot of small vulnerable people have been ‘canceled’.
They have lost their jobs, and had their reputations as decent people trashed.
No one seems to have been willing to stand up against this politically correct bullying,
until they targeted JK Rowling.
It’s just possible she is rich enough and powerful enough and admired enough to see off
the mob, but it’s not guaranteed.
Amazon is full of fake hate reviews trying to trash her latest book and stop it being read.
He continues:
But I found myself asking how we got here?
Just in case there is any chance of escaping from this cultural mob violence
in which no one is safe.
A psychologist called Jonathan Haidt found himself asking the same questions and wrote
a very perceptive book about it.
‘The Coddling of the American Mind.”
He suggested that three very well-intentioned but utterly disastrous attitudes
had been slipped into the education system in America and the anglophile world.
The first was about suffering and took the form of
‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
The second was about the relationship between feelings and thoughts or analysis;
and became “whatever you really feel is really true.”
The third was that the world was made up not of good and bad ideas,
but good and bad people, and you had to destroy the bad people to be made safe.
So we now have a generation who are terrified of suffering and feeling hurt in any way.
In fact Haidt felt that the constant catastrophizing in the media,
was bringing a generation close to a state of almost clinical mental illness.
One of the most powerful antidotes to depression has been found to be
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, CBT.
At its center lies the skill of recalibrating feelings so they come second to a more
sane and well-judged mental analysis.
If that’s true, you can see what emotional paralysis we face by being unable to
discipline or re-inform raw feelings in a counseling obsessed culture where getting
in touch with feelings has become paramount, and trumps everything else.
Most mature philosophical and religious traditions recognise that it’s ideas rather
than the people who hold them, who are good or perverse.
So you fight the ideas, and try to change peoples’ minds.
But cancel culture settles very happily for destroying the people.
How do we escape these three disastrous attitudes?
We may need to find a philosophy or religious tradition with deep roots that exposes
them for dangerous charlatans they are.
If schools and universities won’t or aren’t doing it, that just leaves the churches.
It may be that the sanity of our civilisation depends on a group we have spent the last
century ridiculing; to our cost.
Naming but not shaming. Fighting back against ‘Cancel Culture’.
And so there we have it.
The cure for our ailing society and the antidote for our failing educational system…
It all goes back to the teaching of The Chruch.
Back to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The very One our culture continues to attempt to cancel.
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral,
sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake
that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
Revelation 21:8
“The act of writing itself is like an act of love.
There is contact.
There is exchange too.
We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page,
or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping,
the ink merely giving them colour.”
Georges Rodenbach
(image the web)
In yesterday’s oh so long and convoluted post, I told you that I would share
the letter I had written to my birth mother, had the agency found her
and found her willing to be contacted, she would have received the letter.
However, as we know, they did find her but she made it clear, through an attorney’s
office, that there is to be no contact whatsoever.
And therefore, no shared letter.
She is 83 as I am soon to turn 60.
Yet there is no room for contact.
Odd given our ages.
I thought I’d simply post the letter here because maybe, one day,
it might make its way to her…or maybe even better, it might
make its way to someone else who may need to read it.
You may ask why would I even bother, especially when my birth mother is so emphatic
as to not wanting to have anything to do with me or that part of her past.
There is currently an odd phenomenon sweeping our nation.
State after state is voting on and passing right to life bills or heartbeat bills.
Bills that “infringe” upon open abortions.
Something I am finding hope in.
Hollywood is going nuts over all of it—clamoring to boycott Georgia
if our state’s bill stands.
What is it about the making of movies that has anything to do with abortions or not
to have abortions???
This knowledge simply eludes me
Yet the Hollywood scene seems to think it very much does affect movie making…who knew?!
It seems there is a real fear among many progressive liberals and members
or this culture of death, that has its grasp around our nation’s neck,
that the legal manifestation of abortions, Roe v Wade, will be overturned.
That, in the minds of many with a henny penny doomsday verbiage, will send us all stepping
back into the dark ages of coat hangers and hidden alleys should such a thing actually happen.
And yet state after state is voting, Governors are signing and change is in the air.
And so I was intrigued when I read of the tit for tat between two our Supreme Court
Justices…Justices Ginsberg and Thomas.
Thomas has made it clear that it is time that we as a nation and court revisit Roe v Wade,
while Ginsberg is openly opposed.
With Thomas being the conservative while Ginsberg is the liberal, their positions
are not surprising.
The fact that the late Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsberg were on polar opposite
positions on many court proceedings, but were still dear friends, was oddly a comfort.
People who couldn’t agree politically or legally yet who could still be civil and enjoy
one another’s company was a sign that we could still hold onto human decency, discourse
and civility despite our feelings or views.
We had hope in that alone for our humanity.
Yet sadly now…opposition rarely, if ever, will be civil or cordial, let alone sit at
the same table and commune with opposing human beings.
It is part and parcel of their manifesto…and yes, it is a manifesto.
Thomas and Ginsberg are currently in a bit of a war of words…
and it has to do with the use of a single word– “mother”
When Thomas stated in a lengthy response regarding states and the
rise in these “right to life” bills while using wording that “a pregnant woman or mother” etc…
Ginsberg bristled back not over the point being made but rather over the single word…
that a pregnant woman is NOT a “mother”.
I find that lone word to be a crucial concern and the pivotal lynchpin in all of this
current hysteria.
The concern that many people can view a woman as pregnant…as in yes, a mother to be…
compared to those in opposition who want to divorce the idea of mothering from pregnancy.
For years, we have heard that just because a man could help make a baby did not
necessarily make him a “father”—as in, impregnating didn’t go hand in hand with parenting…
We see that, do we not, in the hundred’s of thousands of single women households.
The lack of male role models in the lives of so many children.
And so now we’re looking at pregnancy as a condition of burden and inconvenience
rather than one of hope and anticipation.
And it is in this vein of motherhood, that I am reminded that pregnancy
is about mothers and fathers and children…end of sentence…
no matter how we try to redefine it…
And so I wrote a letter to a woman who was once a mother…and chances are
was a mother later on in life…
A letter from a child to a mother
A letter from a woman to another woman…
Maybe my non-delivered letter will provide a little comfort to someone else who
is finding themselves at a perplexing crossroad…because God can see
the bigger picture that I cannot see…and so I yield to the Holy Spirit and share…
More on this Roe v Wade and heartbeat bills later…
Hi, My name is Julie Cook—-but you most likely know me as Sylvia Kay—-
as that is the name that I learned was on my original birth certificate.
I have been told by the Family First Adoption Reunion Registry that I must first include a letter
written to “my birth mother” prior to any formal contact made by the agency.
The form asks me to include 10 questions that I am most interested in having answered….
When I initially thought to begin this search,
I felt more of a disconnect from such questions and very generic in my approach…
but throughout the past several weeks that I have known that the agency has been searching for you,
I have found my thoughts and feelings shifting to some degree.
Firstly and foremost, I do want you to know that I “turned’ out ok—-
I am happy, healthy and well adjusted.
As I will be turning 60 in November, I can look back and say, yes, this has
been a very good life.
I taught for 31 years at Carrollton High School.
I was the Visual Arts Instructor as well as the Dept. Chair of Fine Arts.
It was a very fulfilling career —-one that I “retired” from in 2012 in order to begin
more focused care for Dad who had been diagnosed with dementia and was beginning to really struggle.
When I moved to Carrollton from Atlanta following my graduation from the University of Georgia,
I met my husband on a blind date.
We married in 1983.
We have one son, your grandson, who is now 30 and a father himself.
He has a 13-month-old daughter and their son James is to arrive around the end of April/
the first of May.
Of which makes you a great grandmother—but of which you may already be.
I have always considered my adoptive parents as my parents.
My mother died at age 53 from lung cancer…I was 26.
Dad basically fell apart at that point and I found myself in the role of parent.
He eventually re-married 10 years later following mother’s death,
but that was not an ideal union.
Dad passed away in 2017 from cancer.
I had always told myself that I would not “search” for my birth parents until
Dad had passed away as I never wanted to hurt his feelings…
I never wanted him to feel that he could possibly lose me.
And of course he wouldn’t——but it was just something I had always told myself——
that if following his death, there remained a possibility, I would then, and only then,
peruse such a quest.
Always being a part of a loving and accepting family never,
however, made me forget that I had another family somewhere “out there.”
I was a history major before I ventured into education.
History has always been very important to me.
And the funny thing was/is that I never truly knew my own history.
Once I became a grandmother, I knew that I wanted my grandchildren to know their
true genealogy.
Where they came from?
Where were their true roots?
As well as what was their real medical history?
That is also something I’ve also wanted for my son.
Doctors have always asked me about my health history and yet I could never
definitively answer,
I am a deeply committed Christian and I have a very strong faith.
So I want you to know that I have no regrets or animosity regarding your decision of
having put me up for adoption.
Questions, yes, but regrets, no.
There is, of course, the natural curiosity and those ‘whys’ can be nagging.
I’ve always told myself that I have been a good person and was the type of child
that anyone would love to have had…I’m just sorry you missed that.
And yet I also know that God’s hand has always been leading my life, leading me,
even when I never truly realized it.
I don’t know if you will ever agree to open your heart or life to me, and that’s ok.
That will be your decision.
And I will honor that decision.
I am certainly not looking for some sort of fairytale Oprah type of moment.
I would, however, love to meet you—the person who carried me for nine months and made a very
selfless decision to offer me my life…with the best possible way you knew.
I have pictures I would love to share with you—-pictures of me as a baby, shortly after
leaving you, then pictures throughout the years as well as pictures of your grandson
and now great-granddaughter.
I look forward to possibly meeting you.
With love—-Julie (Sylvia Kay)
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