As longtime friends know from reading this Blog, my life for the past several years has been a search not just for the cliches, Love and Fame, but also for God, perhaps in itself a cliche. Last Sunday in my panic to find inspiration, or at least the motif for a new novel, I went to Self-Realization on Sunset and walked twice, or thrice as Tommy Thompson would have writ, around the Lake Shrine, willingly suspending Disbelief, and asking for guidance. That night before I went to sleep, I believe I called aloud several times for Help, and asked that God make clear what I should be writing, or, even better, send me an idea.
The next morning I went to my computer, which is my sometimes wont, when I should be doing Yoga or meditating, and Lo! On the e-mail was my answer! So God is into technology, and could, should He/She choose, have an online service. Let let us call it FAITHBOOK.
Anyway, I started the novel and felt good about it, so today, having from the same source found an old Friend, capitalized as I met her in Quaker Meeting, and she told me she was now going to Unity on 14th and Maple, I figured what the heaven. Went there this morning at 9-- and the little children from the Mt.Olive Lutheran Preschool's Choir of Angelic Voices sang their sweet songs, and just before the parson, a woman, began her sermon, one of the mothers, in jeans, took her three-year-old, she must have been, up closer and held her and squatted and the jeans, cut low, went down below the mum's bottom cheeks to reveal quite fully the crack in her ass. And I thought this would be the right church for Britney.
I wanted to write that down but didn't have a pen so prayed for one, and Lo! God sent me a blue one, from the box beside the Hymnal, inviting me to make a donation(didn't.) At that point the parsonette began her talk and it was about Advent which this is the first Sunday of, getting ready for the Coming, and she said, referring to Matthew, that much of it draws on Jewish scriptures, and I thought, as I do from time to time, that is probably where I should be.
There was a minister in Weinheim, the little village in the Bergstrasse where I went to write my novel about neo-Naziism in Germany in the early '90s named Herr Lohrbacher, the only person in the town to admit there was such a thing, a precursor of the publishers who were to reject the book on the same thesis-- no neo-Naziism in Germany-- especially since they had almost all just been bought by Bertelsmann, the powerful German publisher who had never had any connection to Naziism either, until they finally admitted they had. Herr Lohrbacher, a highly intelligent and obviously questing man, had suggested to the local schools not only that they examine the Holocaust-- Weinheim had been one of the three villages where Hitler did his out-of-town tryout for Krystallnacht, on September 22nd, 1940,rounding up the Jews of that village, along with those from Hemsbach and Mannheim, and sending them to Gurs, a leftover Pyrenees prison from the Spanish Civil War, to see if their neighbors would say anything(they didn't)-- but also introduce Jewish studies into the German schools, since he was himself a Lutheran, and felt as the minister did this morning, apparently accurately. that much of Christian gospel came from Jewish scriptures, and, in addition, that there was a morality in Judaism that would be helpful to Germans. After that Herr Lohrbacher got about 85 death threats a day. But there was no neo-Naziism in Germany.
Anyway I left the service with little feeling of uplift, so that one isn't for me. But I did get a chance this afternoon to go see my old(88) friend Betty Garrett perform the songs she had written, abetted by a company of players at Theater West, which included a still radiant Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1954. That year has significance for me which some who read this will understand, but Lee said not to tell anybody, I don't look it, and at Virgin Atlantic Airlines where I have Frequent Flyer Miles, that is the year I was born. In the audience was Connie Sawyer, who is 95, sharp, pretty, still driving, and living at the Motion Picture Home where she entertains at lunch, to which Betty and I will go.
So there is uplift in unexpected places. We have only to be open to it, with hearts full of hope and love, at least on occasion.
In spite of the Stagehands' Union going back to work, I am having trouble striking my Thanksgiving, as I really love my table, all my little Pilgrims sitting on pumpkins and a bed of leaves I keep adding to. Because of the lateness with which Spring came to my block, the trees are still dropping leaves of a wonderful color, as I hope I will, too, in my attenuated Autumn.
