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03/11/2025

Today’s blog

Lynn Murphy Mark

Good vs evil

Today wasn’t supposed to be a blog day, but then I did my first things first readings of Richard Rohr’s meditation and Heather Cox Richardson’s letter. They both touched me so that I thought I would borrow their words and add a few of my own. 

First I read Richard Rohr’s piece and feel serene and in touch with the Universe. Then I ruin it by reading Heather Cox Richardson’s stark views on reality, and there goes serenity. I try really hard to hang on to my basic belief that God is in the details of life and in every living thing. I try really hard to visualize 47 and president musk and the spineless members of congress as children of the living God. That gets harder every day.

Theologian Serene Jones offered this:

God does not stay at a distance from us but constantly seeks to transform our lives by asking us to awaken to the divine presence. God is a mysterious, creative, sustaining life force.… God is there all the time. The challenge for us is to open our eyes, ears, hands, minds, and hearts to receive the truth of God’s real, persistent presence, God’s grace. When we open ourselves to it, we are changed by it. The way we perceive the world shifts, like a radically refocused camera lens, and we experience life differently. You see everything around you as suffused with God’s love. You see God’s grace everywhere, saturating all existence. This process of awakening to what is already true, but you haven’t previously seen it, is called conversion—a word that literally means “to see anew.” 

I try really hard to look for the good in this new administration. So far I’m stumped. Our economy appears to be tanking and we are told that we must expect an adjustment before we are enriched by new policies. People at my level of society are not the intended beneficiaries of the “adjustment”. Anyone who believes that is delusional. I really really want to ask a few of the people I know who voted for all this if “this” is what they were expecting. Jan did try to engage one of our trumpian friends about this and got the answer that checks and balances would take care of any problems. 

I guess I’ll move on to Heather Cox Richardson, and the paragraph from her letter that sent my serenity packing:

That is, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a legal resident for expressing an opinion that Trump officials don’t like, likely using Khalil to launch this extraordinary attack on the First Amendment because they don’t expect Americans to care deeply about his fate. Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters, though, officials will use it to silence opposition broadly. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted just after noon. “We know there are more students at Columbia who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Mr. Khalil, who has done nothing more than exercise his first amendment rights, is detained somewhere in Louisiana away from his home and his pregnant wife in New York City. He is a Legal Permanent Resident, holding a green card. His rights as a green card holder who has been arrested for a “crime” are that he be given a hearing before an immigration judge. The law states that he cannot be deported without due process. I will be following him and his unlawful seizure to see where this goes. 

We should all be very concerned by the stark abuse of power that seems to be everywhere. And republicans who took an oath to be in charge of following the Constitution are cowering in their lavish offices in Washington DC. If only God’s grace, available to all, would guide them to do the next right thing. I want to believe that it can.