PPK shares with you, his wounded inner child.

[skyblue1]

Cool, great to still have a gift that carefully picked for you.

And.... How tall are you? 

70" or 178 cm.

 Stop trying to be European, you are 5'10" ! 

strange I always figuered him to be 8 foot tall

[midlifeaspie]

Which one do I bid on?

http://bidopia.auctionflex.com/showlots.ap?co=2&weid=23776

[skyblue1]

How come you doesnt post here anymore

just curious

[P7PSP]

I suppose because it has been over a year since I was asked anything here. 

[skyblue1]

What did you do today?

[McGiver]

Do you believe in god?

[P7PSP]

Stayed up too late, got very little sleep, am now trying to stay up the rest of the day and get up early tomorrow. I have a niece who is visiting from N. Carolina that I will visit tomorrow and see her two little boys.

[P7PSP]

Do you believe in god?

No. I am atheist. I was 7 when I decided all that church merde is not for me.

[McGiver]

Did your parents attend church?
If so, which denomination?

[P7PSP]

No. My grandmother attended Methodist services and took me a few times when I was 6 and 7. After I asked some questions that weren't answered and the Sunday school teacher got mad I went home and told my mother that I didn't believe in god and that I was not going back to church. My grandmother was not happy about that but my mother backed my decision.

['andersom']

A few times I noticed you referring to Taize, how did that community get your attention?

[P7PSP]

A few times I noticed you referring to Taize, how did that community get your attention?

My last full day in London was a Sunday a couple of weeks before Christmas. Shortly after dark in Trafalgar Square in front of the 30' tree that the city of Oslo gives to London every year a choir sung a nice version of Oh Holy Night and wrapped up their performance and headed across the street to St Martin Of The Fields. I followed and because I have an interest in religion went into the church thinking I would be attending an Anglican service.

When one of the assistants came around handing out leaflets I mentioned not being Anglican and asked him if that would be a cause for heartburn. He responded that it was a Taize service and all are welcome. The service was not about condemning non believers to hell or purgatory or any other such shit. The premise of Taize is that god is love and wants people to be kind to one another.

After the service when I got home I looked up more about Taize and found that it had been founded by a Protestant named Frere Roget in 1940. In 1940 he rode a bicycle from Geneva to a town called Taize in the nominally free Vichy Republic where he set up shop and hid jewish and other refugees from the fascist government for two years before the French Gestapo issued a warrant for his arrest. At that point he went back to Switzerland for the duration of the war as his effectiveness had been destroyed and he would have only been a hindrance to the underground.

In 1944 he returned to newly liberated France to again set up the community (the community, not his community, he did not want a cult of personality). The thrust of Taize teachings was and is focused on love and trying to get along. On August 16th 2005 Brother Roget was stabbed to death by a mentally ill Romanian woman. Brother Roger was a man of strong conviction with the balls to risk his own life to help others.  I am not inclined to believe in invisible friends in the sky. If I was I hope I would be part of Taize. http://www.taize.fr/en   

That turned into a long ramble. 

['andersom']

A few times I noticed you referring to Taize, how did that community get your attention?

My last full day in London was a Sunday a couple of weeks before Christmas. Shortly after dark in Trafalgar Square in front of the 30' tree that the city of Oslo gives to London every year a choir sung a nice version of Oh Holy Night and wrapped up their performance and headed across the street to St Martin Of The Fields. I followed and because I have an interest in religion went into the church thinking I would be attending an Anglican service.

When one of the assistants came around handing out leaflets I mentioned not being Anglican and asked him if that would be a cause for heartburn. He responded that it was a Taize service and all are welcome. The service was not about condemning non believers to hell or purgatory or any other such shit. The premise of Taize is that god is love and wants people to be kind to one another.

After the service when I got home I looked up more about Taize and found that it had been founded by a Protestant named Frere Roget in 1940. In 1940 he rode a bicycle from Geneva to a town called Taize in the nominally free Vichy Republic where he set up shop and hid jewish and other refugees from the fascist government for two years before the French Gestapo issued a warrant for his arrest. At that point he went back to Switzerland for the duration of the war as his effectiveness had been destroyed and he would have only been a hindrance to the underground.

In 1944 he returned to newly liberated France to again set up the community (the community, not his community, he did not want a cult of personality). The thrust of Taize teachings was and is focused on love and trying to get along. On August 16th 2005 Brother Roget was stabbed to death by a mentally ill Romanian woman. Brother Roger was a man of strong conviction with the balls to risk his own life to help others.  I am not inclined to believe in invisible friends in the sky. If I was I hope I would be part of Taize. http://www.taize.fr/en   

That turned into a long ramble. 

I do get it. Not a long ramble. I wondered about your interest in the Taizé community for a while. In the years between the great war and WWII two other communities not that dissimilar from Taizé started. One in Scotland, the Iona Community, and one in Finland, IIRC. Never found much information on the Finnish community, but found the Scottish one impressive.

[P7PSP]

I just bookmarked The Iona Community page for later reading. Merci madame.  Seeing that it was founded two years prior to Taize I wonder if there was a common thread of ecumenical thought seeking answers to a rough time in European (and the rest of the world as well) history? In the wake of the Armenian genocide, WWI, Spanish flu pandemic, rise of the Soviet Union, Sparticists rebellion, NSDAP, Rexist League et al it didn't require a genius to figure more shit was on the way. 

['andersom']

Very likely. The great war had a massive impact. Not only on people, families and communities. Also in the way people looked at what enemies were, what evil was, what good was. Ecumenical experiments were bound to happen. After years in the foxholes and trenches, the difference between the foes was brought back to where your cradle had been, not much more than that.

I loved the biography on the founder of the Iona Community. Of course it is written from a very positive POV, but it shows a man with an interesting and far from easy character. A man with a vision though, and a passion for what he thought was right.