HAITI ORPHANAGE UPDATE

Several years ago a group of us who attend St. Mary Convent services here on the bluff raised money to aid the Sisters of the Community of St. Mary in their mission to the Faith-Hope-Love Rescue orphanage in Port au Prince, Haiti. With the funds raised, the Sisters bought and took a water purifier to the orphanage and supplied medical items, refurbished some of the orphanage rooms, and made repairs where needed. A year later, we began to raise funds for a second mission; however, when the earthquake struck, the Sisters immediately sent their funds to the Episcopal Relief Fund to help victims of the earthquake.

Since that time, we have had several updates about the orphanage, the most hopeful one being that the children in this orphanage survived the disaster. The latest news came a few days ago from the director of the orphanage, along with a plea for supplies and help. The children at the orphanage have chicken pox! Almost half of the children there, a nanny’s daughter, and their cook have had chicken pox. One of the young girls, Rosa, has HIV, and the case of pox was more severe for her. She still has not fully recovered. On July 4, other children broke out with the disease, and the director asked for our prayers.

On the more positive side, the orphanage received a new generator from Somebody Cares America and Union County Baptist Association in South Carolina. The orphanage also acquired a new double cab, 4WD, diesel truck and new beds for the children.

Alas, both refrigerators in the orphanage stopped working, and the director was forced to use food money to buy acyclovir. Care for thirty children always brings new demands, and Dorothy Pearce, the director, reports that current needs include:

• Pediasure (the formula designed to be the sole food for a tube-fed child)
• Infant formula, milk based with iron
• Hand sanitizers
• Whole house water filtration system to filter water as it leaves the cistern and before it reaches the faucets to supply fifteen to twenty gallons of water per day
• Erythromycin suspension to treat an outbreak of staph infections
• Acyclovir for children with chickenpox
• A propane refrigerator

For those of you who attended the poetry reading in New Iberia, LA that featured children from the orphanage, Gertie and Lovensky images, while Darrell Bourque and I read poems dedicated to them, the news is that Gertie (Darrell’s poem featured her) is now back with her family, and Lovensky (about whom I read a poem) died.

Children in Haiti still need help, and if you'd like to make a donation for the orphanage’s needs, Sister Miriam says that the Sisters of St. Mary and a group of volunteers will be returning there in November or March of the following year when they have raised enough funds.

Thank you for your support of this project during the past two years. The pictures in the blog were supplied by Director Dorothy Pearce. The first one is of Rosa who is suffering from chicken pox, and the other is of a worker holding one of the infants in the orphanage. Most of the children at the orphanage are sick or dying.

SNIPING

I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of snipes, a member of the wader family who are close relatives to the woodcock. They have a long slender bill that they use like a sewing machine to catch their invertebrate prey and look like they could scissor anything that comes into their view into tiny bits. If you’ve ever been the victim of a human sniper, you can draw close parallels to the behavior of this wading bird.

A few days ago, a good friend of mine became the object of the kind of human sniper who fits the definition: “to criticize adversely a person or persons from a position of security; to make underhand remarks or attacks.” Such a “bird” with the long sharp bill also uses innuendo to achieve his/her purposes and is very adept at doing this from a distant or concealed place.

Human snipers who attack with malice are the antithesis of those who practice civility, often masquerading behind the secure title of “Christian” while they point out perceived flaws in other persons, and when challenged, claim “it’s the other person’s fault.” Narcissists are a variation of the sniper species and are very adept at sniping, bombarding people with little bursts of criticism in short, precise blasts so that victims frequently don’t know what hit them.

Sniping is prevalent in the media, amidst politicians, church-goers, and in the workplace where the art of civility, which I have written about before, has almost become defunct. Snipers don’t anger mature people so much as they unjustly hurt sensitive feelings, and they have an uncanny sense of knowing certain persons’ vulnerability. Their game is called “gotcha,” and it’s an old game that persists in select clannish cultures that prize sarcasm and ridicule, and whose members use people to their advantage.

I once read Scott Peck’s book entitled THE PEOPLE OF THE LIE, a treatise on human evil, and came across the statement that most of us can tell when a person is genuinely evil by the repulsion we feel when someone like a sniper approaches. The advice he gave is akin to the advice that I shared with my injured friend: “Run like hell.” However, in my personal theology, there’s no shame in speaking the truth. Most snipers use non-sequiturs to divert victims from delivering the truth to them.

Christ himself was deeply angered at snipers, those Pharisees and Sadducees who played the “gotcha” game with him. He didn’t excuse the behavior, drip syrupy platitudes into their vicious game playing, but answered them back pretty strongly: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! .For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faith. …you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate but inside are full of greed and self-indulgence…”

I told my friend not to feel badly if she acted defensively and directed pertinent questions to the offender. Sniping is an unjust game and it wasn’t my friend’s fault that she felt the same kind of irritation and indignation that the “One Whom None Can Hinder” experienced while he was dealing with those unjust Pharisees he called “vipers.”

Viper…sniper…they’re one and the same.

ABOUT HEALING…

A few days ago, I received a request for 75 copies of a young adult book that I wrote about a healer, aka a traiteur, who was the main character in MARTIN’S QUEST, and I was dismayed to find that there were only nineteen copies in the inventory, which was not nearly enough to provide for a supplemental social studies text in a parish of southwest Louisiana. More copies of MARTIN’S QUEST have been sold than  any of my published books because, in south Louisiana, traiteurs abound and practice folk medicine.

Healing has always been a subject that fascinated me, and two Sundays ago, I preached on the Gospel story about the man with many demons whom Christ healed by sending the demons into a herd of pigs. The afternoon before I finished the sermon, Ruth Allen, a friend here at Sewanee, dropped by to share her manuscript, which is being readied for publication. It's entitled THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE SPIRIT OF REIKI: ONE SOURCE, ONE SPIRIT and is a firsthand account of her call to the healing ministry of Reiki (Reiki has been condemned as a method of alternative healing by the Roman Catholic Church although it’s based primarily on the Holy Spirit and prayer). Ruth’s call and subsequent spiritual journey took her to the apex of graduation from the seminary here at Sewanee, and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, she was able to form her personal synthesis of the Holy Spirit and Reiki that became material for a thesis. From that material, she has formed a book that should be welcomed by all readers interested in the subject of healing, particularly healing through touch and the medium of prayer.

John Killinger tells us that in a world where energy is the basis for all life, prayer transmits energy through the medium of God’s Spirit to the person in need of that energy, regardless of how far away from us he or she may be. It’s called non-local prayer, and when you pray you are lending your willful energy to God for that person’s use. The important thing for us to learn about prayer is that we can make our own energies available to God on behalf of other persons who need them. The manifestation of God’s power to heal in our lives is sometimes reflected in the world as action by clergypersons, Reiki masters, even wounded people who have learned to use their pain by turning it into a vessel for healing others.

In my sermon, I was tempted to include some of Ruth’s anecdotal passages about the healings of which she has been a part, but decided I wouldn’t scoop her book in a sermon. However, I did quote a few reflections from the book because I thought they were such powerful illustrations of the Holy Spirit influencing Ruth to further develop her ability as a Reiki Master.

She writes: “Christians who practice Reiki place themselves in the presence of God by aligning their deepest desires for healing and wholeness with God’s deepest desires for healing and wholeness for the world. If we listen, in the silence we can hear God’s gentle voice of guidance, inspiration, and empowerment. Silence awakens our awareness of the ‘inner light,’ the Holy Spirit, whose power can energize our spirits and inspire us more fully to become God’s mediators of healing…Each person has been given a gift(s) of the Spirit, which is directly connected to his/her call. These gifts endow us with what we need to answer our call and fulfill it. Regardless of what God is calling you to do with your life, the following prayer attributed to St. Theresa of Avila, a Spanish mystic of the 16th century, portrays Jesus’ plea to each of us. ‘You are Christ’s hands. /Christ has no body now on earth but yours. /no hands but yours, no feet but yours. /Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s /compassion is to look upon the world. /Yours are the feet with which God is to go about doing good. /Yours are the hands through which God is to /bless men and women now.”

I conveyed all of this in a sermon and added a few lighter anecdotes, then talked about the ministry of presence. The essence of that healing ministry is for a person to be a quiet presence for a suffering person and to heed Aelred’s words. “Here we are, you and I, and, I hope, a third, Christ, in our midst.’”

I don’t usually include sermon excerpts in a blog, but I felt inspired to disseminate Ruth’s message and am among many here on The Mountain who wish her well with the publication of her book about Reiki and the Holy Spirit.