How The Jesuits Caused The US Civil War--Huh?

Yesterday I had a long nice talk with a new friend who told me along the way that the Jesuits, the Sociedad de Jesus in Spanish since the Jesuits got started in Spain, had a lot to do with the Civil War breaking out.  I hold the notion that it had more to do with 1) sectional disputes over slavery arising from different ideas about the concept that "all men are created equal" 2) sectional disputes over how much power states had to up and leave the Union 3) a reallllllllly big reaction in the South that its way of life was threatened when Lincoln was elected (which I consider grossly overblown--Lincoln opposed not slavery where it existed but any future expansion into new states), and 4) according to Mary Chestnut, Lincoln's not being wise enough to temporarily back down when South Carolina challenged Fort Sumter.  Chestnut, probably the best writer in North America, or anywhere else, who wrote more than a few serious columns about the war while it was going on, bills herself as a S Carolina "seceder" from the beginning and says:  We in South Carolina hurried out of the Union on our own.  If you had just left us alone out there a while, along with the states that scurried to follow, we might have found our way back in peacefully.  Instead Lincoln hurried to be tough and, per Chestnut who seems to make a potential plausible argument, helped stumble into the conflict he prayed to avoid.

I did some checking.  My friend did show me a post from an ex-priest, I think Chincuy, who wrote in a book that he spoke to Lincoln.  He recorded a long quote from the president that says the Jesuits played a big role in starting the war.  At a glance the quote didn't seem to fit with what I've read of Lincoln over several years.  Google didn't have any more things linking Lincoln and Jesuits that a quick search could locate.  He did blast the Know Nothing party because they were against blacks and Catholics and others, and one Catholic priest blogger says they started the rumor that Jesuits made So. Carolina leave.
I do know of two simple pieces of information that help me think about this. Lincoln once said to the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, something like, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."  Stowe, need I say, was not a Jesuit.  I also know from several sources that the first or at least loudest voice for Southern secession was that of Robert Barnwell Rhett.  he was a candidate for president of the Confederacy.  As a rigid Protestant, he was about as far from a Catholic order as you could be.  I  wonder if my friend would know either of those two names.  I had to look up Rhett's first name myself. Reminds me of the scene in the movie "Jackie," where J. Kennedy asks the driver of the limosine carrying her dead husband, "Do you know the name James Garfield?"  "No, ma'am."  "He was also killed while holding the office of president."

I'm a rank amateur on the Civil War.  I've probably read books about it totaling 2500 pages, so I have a few half-informed notions.  I watched Ken Burns' series on this war twice, and don't recall any historian in that series, including Shelby Foote (who said 1000 intelligent things on the subject), or any person the series quoted who lived during the War, even mentioning the Jesuits.  I looked in the index of the longest book I've read on the subject last night, by Carl Sandberg, and there's no entry for Jesuit or even Society of Jesus.  In Mary Chestnut's Civil War there's no index entry for Jesuits, though Jews get four lines.  It's like somebody just made this up.

Has Dan Browne got it in for the Jesuits?  Anybody wanna help sort rumor mill from decent historical fact? 

General List Made Up From World Around

Germany bare.
 Germany, says Alice Gregory (presumably an American) writing in the NY Times, so it must be true, has a widespread, curious habit of baring all.  Nudity is big, taking in 10 or 15% of the people, especially those over 50 and those in the east, the old Russian piece of Germany.  We understand that nudity on many beaches all over Europe is normal and yawned at.   The American journalist shows up in a bikini but ditches it as no one pays any attention, her relative youth being ignored.  Her act makes her swimsuit seem "lifeless, damp, maybe even diseased."
Yet she fills two pages without a line about going bare as a way to become more comfortable with and accepting of your body.  The notion that baring your body around others who do the same can help you be more comfortable with your body seems kind of self-evident to me, and maybe the best defense of an otherwise questionable practice of naturism.  Being a female writer for the NYT, she seems likely to be friendly to feminism's urges to be less wound up with your physical form, and doesn't seem to have noticed Germany's hobby may help with this.  ??

Bayonne covered.
Move from paunchy white nude Germans to a trim dust-and-debris-covered 28-year-old black legal assistant named Marcy Borders from Bayonne, NJ.  Though she was told "no big deal, keep working," she hurried down 81 floors of the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001.  Out on the street when one tower collapsed, she was knocked down and covered in dust.  She was afraid she might die there and then, but a guy helped her up.  A photographer caught her looking like a white-out--Dust Lady.  Only her facial features and the darkness of her lips hint she is African-American.  She went home, but perhaps the fear of it sucked half the life out of her.  She never went back to work for Bank of America, like the guy who told her to keep working, though we would suspect he followed his own advice and died.  Marcy wouldn't go into Manhattan, stopped talking to people.  Life fell apart for her.  Ten years later she started getting it back together, working for a politician.  Two years ago she had stomach pain, delayed seeing a doc due to no insurance, ended up with stomach cancer.  She wondered whether to blame it on the attack, since, the NY Times tells us, 4000 people who were there later got cancer.  Borders left from this physical realm in 2016 at age 42.  She escaped the building, but not the terror.

Alzheimer's treated?
Alzheimer's has so far been untreatable, with lots of drugs  (200 in 15 years) tested that failed.  Amyloid protein formation is one problem, though lots of us over 60 have amyloid and don't have dementia.  Another protein called "tau" plays some role in the nerve damage, too.  Dr Longo of Stanford is testing a drug called C31.  C31 is said to interfere with "10 of 14"  triggers that lead to disease.  Meanwhile prevention?  In recent years the word "exercise" has become part, perhaps the first part, of the answer to "what do I do to prevent dementia?"  Wanna go for a bike ride?  I did six miles yesterday.  The biking held fun and neighborhood discovery and work and pain all together.

A New Age not relying on astrology.
One type of "New Age" that seems obvious and may have nothing to do with taro card reading.  In 1932 Alice Bailey described a "new age" that makes sense to me (her book:  From Intellect to Intuition, p. 4).    "We are now one people.  The heritage of any race lies open to another; the best thought of the centuries is available for all; and ancient techniques and modern methods must meet and interchange."  I conclude we live in a "new age" in which virtually all the scattered pieces of humankind are in lots of contact with the other pieces.  It's a New Age because it's a global era of interconnection.  In theory we should be able to take from East and West, from new and old, from Jew and Gentile, land and sea, from outer space and a computer's innards (on which I'm writing this), from Mahatma Gandhi, Steven Hawking, and Sandra Day O'Connor.  With all this we may well be able to brainstorm, write out, create, find inspiration to make better lives for more humans on Earth than ever before.
Bailey, says Wikipedia, was one of the first to use the term "new age" to describe our era.  The above lines show, to me, that she articulates a way we are in a new age, better than others.



 

For the Love of Bunny

For the Love of Bunny

Joan loved me and her bunny, and I got to keep the bunny when she went away. I gave it the tricky name of Knuffle, but Joan called it “Bunny.” One time I asked, “Do you remember Bunny's name?”  Joan didn't like the question because to her Bunny's name was obviously Bunny, but she liked to please, so she guessed, "Kerfunkel?"  Bunny and I thought that was hilarious. She was Bunny's mother and didn't know its name. Joan gave things simple names. Her kids are Mary and David. Before Knuffle, I had a stuffed Bengal tiger with no name until one day Joan said, “How's Bengal? That'll be his name. He'll be Bengal the tiger.”

The first two photos are of Joan and the Bunny.
Joan even gave a simple name to herself. Her dad and mother had the easy names of John and Louise, but when they had their first child, mom got creative and blended their names into elaborate “Jonalou.” At seven, Jonalou kicked and whimpered for a normal name like the other kids, and became Joan Louise.

Joan liked kale and lotion and easy names. She used hand lotion and leg lotion and oatmeal lotion, and urged me to follow her example rubbing on goo. She considered it her personal mission to help keep Ulta the cosmetics store in business.
Three years ago I brought a big load of Utah apples to Tucson. They took over my kitchen and Joan helped me put them up. Two years ago I did the same. After a long period of work, I said, “Will you wash up this next box of bottles?”

As she baptized one Mason jar after another in the sink, she laughed, “I was going to ask who your slave was last year, but then I realized. Oh, I was!"   Later she said, "We work in an applesauce factory, and we don't get any breaks.”

I gave Joan the bunny for Easter the year she went away. I never could think of a good gift, so I asked her what to buy. “Nothing. My place is full and I keep cramming it with new stuff. I don't need your help.”

In the store I looked at an orchid so pretty the day stood still. Then I looked at Joan. ”No orchid,” she said, “I'll just kill it.”   

“But that will get it out of your house,” I said.

She stepped over to stuffed animals on shelves and picked one up.“Let's get it,” I said.  
Photo below is of Joan and me.

She darted away. Next time in the store she made a quick stuffed animal inspection and fled to the lotion aisle. Day before Easter, I went to Target. On top of a pile of stuffed animals was a plump, floppy-eared, cute-eyed, cute everything Bunny. It was plumper, more rounded than real bunnies and those other gangly stuffed bunnies. The roundness made it as cute as a button, not hard since even a gangly bunny is cuter than a button in the first place.

The bunny was good, also, because it was small. It could have fit into Joan's purse. Of course there was never any room for Bunny in Joan's purse. About twice a month--or was it twice a day?--she would lose her car keys or cell phone. After she was ready to scream, I would mine the depths of her purse. If luck held, I would dig out four lotion containers and five tubes of lipstick and find the keys or phone gleaming at the bottom of the mine.

I bought the Target bunny and took it home in a brown paper sack. I slipped the brown sack into Joan's house. She didn’t notice. On Easter morning I handed it to her. “What's this?”

“Merry Easter.”

“I don't need a present,” she took the bag.

She looked in and pulled out the bunny. “Oh, what a fun bunny. Is it for me? Oh, how nice. Where did you get it?”

“I got it from its mother. Her name is Target. There's a whole litter. Since you like it, I'll bring you two more.”

“I don't have any room.”

We watched Charles Osgood interview Mo Willems, who wrote a book named Knuffle Bunny. “We'll name the bunny Knuffle,” I declared.

Much later the Bunny told me by telepathy, "My full name is LongEars Knuffle.because I have such pretty long ears."

Bunny quickly became dear. A couple of days later I noticed that she had taken it to bed. “How's Knuffle?”

“Bunny is sweet,” she said, “I love it. Her. She's a girl.”

A couple of times she brought Bunny along when she came to my place. In the first picture above, stylish Joan sports a yellow shirt, yellow gloves and a yellow hat band, and is goofing off like a good retiree.This retiree rarely smiles for her picture but is happy here to show Bunny off.

I left the Tucson heat for a long trip but Joan wouldn't go unless I went to San Diego. I made a big mistake and went to Utah. She called my answering machine, “I made my doctor's appointment. This darned year has been, uhh, not good, but I'm going to make it better. I know I haven't been much fun because I'm a spoiled brat, but I'm gonna get better. If you're on your way to Salt Lake City, I hope and pray you'll be safe." Then Joan said in a high-pitched slow little voice like a bunny, "The Bunny says to be careful. Pleeeeeeaze be careful.”

A month later Joan stopped answering the phone and lay for two or three days face down on her bed before I got people in to check. The apartment manager smelled a bad smell, saw her lying there dead, and called the big maintenance man, Joan's friend. He, too, could see she was dead. They called medical genius number three, the cop. He saw the dead old lady and waited hours for the coroner. The coroner did something—nobody ever told me what--and Joan moved. That got the paramedics. Joan remembered the ambulance was noisy and knew she had had a stroke, but knew nothing of the time she lay on her bed.

The first day I visited her in the hospital, she couldn't move her left side, but understood every word we said and talked most of the day. “I want my bunny,” she whispered.

Bunny came and stayed loyally at her side. On a fateful early July day I saw Bunny had a better future with me than with her. Joan later told me in a dream, “I had a choice to stay or go, [live or die] and I was fighting to stay with you, but someone came to me and said it was okay to go with them. My body was a lump that couldn't do me any more good. I just popped out of it and stood there and waited. My mother came and I left with her.”

That's how I understand Joan went away. 
In this photo Joan wears classy black and white, and pulls a face for a certain pesky photographer (me) who haunted her.  She poses as the cutest, happiest witch we know.

East comes to meet West in Yogananda

India and, to some extent, other parts of Asia, have historically produced relatively large numbers of so-called holy men, sages, gurus, or "enlightened masters."  These devoted creatures go back further than Buddha, who left his family to find God about 2500 years ago, and succeeded, one could argue.  His family is said indeed to have argued against his crazy idea.  He had a wife and child.

The Vedanta line of religious gurus and followers that has temples in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara claims to be from a tradition 4,000 years old.  Often these holy men (I don't know of any women allowed in the guru club until recently) have dropped all mundane concerns to pursue their calling, sometimes becoming monks, ascetics, beggars who felt it wrong to labor for food and asked others to provide it so they could better focus on finding God.

In our century, beginning in 1920, one of these said he was sent by his teacher on a divine errand to share yoga, or the search for God, with the United States.  He started out in Boston, and made limited inroads, but New England was overall too hardheaded and Puritan to be really receptive, so he tried Los Angeles, where the place sort of went wild over his version of holiness and devotion, and he established headquarters, retreats, and temples, all enjoying year-round mild weather.  Was this group forerunner of the counter-culture?  Apparently.  Named Mukunda from near Calcutta, this man from his young days was drawn to the holy life, and sluffed a lot of university to be with his guru, according to his own account in the widely-spread book, Autobiography of a Yogi.  In due time he found a holy man to guide his search for God.  Having some success in this pursuit, his teacher had him choose a new name, and he picked Yogananda, which is more of a title than a name.  It means "bliss (ananda) through union with God (yoga)".) (Autobiography of a Yogi, p. 230)   So we learn "yoga" is something more than a gentle exercise class that tends to make you feel quite a bit better if you keep at it at least twice a week.  Calling yoga exercise looks like a bastardization of the tradition. Yoga is a way of life.

Yogananda's tradition claims that Jesus Christ is one of its great spiritual masters, perhaps the greatest.  There is no doubt that this yogi considers Jesus to be the Son of God, and/or God in the flesh.  Nor did Jesus get included in his line of deities as some kind of afterthought to make his Hinduism more tasty to western tongues.  The book and the Self-Realization Fellowship that Yogananda started appear very consistent, very integral in espousing a belief system in which no being could do what Jesus did without the very power of God fully active in him.

Yet Jesus has no exclusive position; he is not The One Redeemer of Christianity.  Yogananda calls the founder of his own holy line, Babaji, "the yogi-Christ of India."  Since Jesus is not the One Savior in SRF's eyes, even if he is the spiritually greatest or one of the greatest humans, SRF is not at all what Christianity has historically been, nor does it claim to be.  It is a form of new-age Christianity.  For those of us inclined to believe in spiritual powers invisible to the ordinary senses of man and his machines, yet weary of the old-age Christianity, this may have some appeal, or be the most cockamamie scheme imaginable.  Take your pick.  I have held both opinions in this lifetime, with the first option my current choice--I think Yogananda talks and acts, to my sight, as a man empowered by devotion to and pursuit of the divine.

One Christian writer calls Yogananda's system a form of new-age Hinduism in Christian garb, and it was this crack that got me writing here.   Naah.   Yogananda's Hindu garb is so obvious and his Christian "dressing" so light as to be a sort of new-age Christianity in Hindu garb.  The Self-Realization Fellowship has no real active use for Jesus' apostles as spiritual leaders, though they would honor them as they would any holy people/leaders, nor for the historical church of Rome and Constantinople.  At least I find no mention of them, with this exception:  both Yogananda and his guru wrote books on how Bible scripture comes from above, and can be given added light by using Hindu wisdom to interpret it.  It offers its own set of enlightened leaders guided by God.

It seems that the two mainstays of finding God in this tradition are right and proper living (not exactly a new idea), and diligent, regular meditation.  Some meditation lasts, say, 20 minutes, and some could last for hours, as you get more advanced.  SRF supplies details.  Both the right living and the meditation help still the mind from its many wandering impulses of thought, which tends to open the spirit to divine guidance, and to miracles, all kinds.

I feel like happening upon Yogananda's followers and his book are adding a wonderful new light to my life in 2016.