"WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"

Read Rmj's latest post at Adventus on the words of the new guvna of Alabama, Robert Bentley, as to who are his "brothers and sisters".

MEET LINDA

From the Thibodaux Daily Comet:

Some mornings, she woke to the rural din of crowing roosters and the happy chatter of playing children. On others, the silence was broken by wailing women accompanying one of the funeral processions that ran through the small village almost daily. And at night, the vast sky was a sea of brilliant stars unmuted by earthbound electric light and dominated by the Southern Cross, a constellation only visible below the equator.

Linda Lahme, 64, has spent the past month lying in a bed at Maison De'Ville, a Houma nursing home.

“They tell me I'm dying of cancer,” she said, “but I don't feel very dead.”

In her heart and her head, she still lives in Luapula Province, Zambia, the poverty- and disease-stricken southern-African nation where she spent the past 10 years working to ensure orphaned children had a chance to go to school and eat three meals a day.

“It is the focal point of my life now,” she said. “It's one of the poorest countries in Africa.”
....

Lahme, a retired nurse who spent most of her adult life in Thibodaux, joined the Peace Corps in 2000, three years after her second husband, Winfried Lahme, died of cancer. “I was grieving very much for my husband. It was a very difficult time for me, and I just wanted to get away,” she said. “There was a humanitarian element to that, but my primary purpose was to just reinvent my life somehow.”

She was offered a posting in Zambia working on HIV prevention and education. For two years, her home was a mud hut with a dirt floor and a grass roof that was prone to leaks.

“It was overwhelming,” she said. “I've never been in such a primitive environment in my life.”

Within two years, she had started the Luapula Foundation, which now works to promote sustainable farming, schooling for thousands of orphaned children and educates communities about how HIV spreads and kills.

“It was the need I saw,” she said. “My heart just went out to the children. They would come to me crying and begging not only for food but just for the opportunity to make something of themselves.”

Lahme's latest project is a Christmas fundraiser to buy goats for families in the province, organized through St. John Episcopal Church in Thibodaux. The animals provide milk for direct consumption or making cheese, their waste can be used as fertilizer, and they can survive what can be a harsh climate — hot and dry about half the year and soaking wet during rainy seasons.

“That's my last push before I die from cancer,” she said. “They told me I'm dying. I don't believe them, but that's what they said.”

In church this past Sunday, Linda announced that she will be returning to Zambia next month. Medicaid will no longer pay for her to stay in the nursing home unless she first uses the money she has put aside for her adopted daughter's education to pay the fees at the facility. Linda says, "That is not an option." I asked Linda if she was content to return to Zambia, thinking there might be something we could do to help her stay if she wanted to stay, and she said, "Yes. I want to go." And so she will return to Zambia, where her heart is.

At the same time that I accept that Linda wishes to return to Africa, I am ashamed that our health care system insists that Linda spend her daughter's education funds on her own care before she is able to receive help. Something is very wrong here.

Moses Zulu was working as a environmental-health technician at a rural health center in Luapula when he was introduced to Lahme, who he called “the most compassionate lady in Luapula Province.”

What Moses says is true. And Linda is one of the bravest people I know.

“I still have my round-trip ticket. I did not come here to stay,” she said. “I truly came here believing I would go home. It's expiring in March. We'll see if I'm healed by March. … My doctor tells me I'll be dead by then. Who knows? I sure don't feel like it.”

WANT TO HELP?

To purchase a goat for a Zambian family, send a check for $25, made out to Luapula Foundation to:

Luapula Foundation
c/o St. John's Espiscopal Church
718 Jackson St.
Thibodaux, LA 70301

IF MEN GOT PREGNANT. . .

* Maternity leave would last for two years . . . with full pay.

* There'd be a cure for stretch marks.

* Natural childbirth would become obsolete.

* Morning sickness would rank as the nation's number-one health
problem.

* All methods of birth control would be improved to 100 percent effectiveness.

* Children would be kept in the hospital until they were toilet trained.

* Men would be eager to talk about commitment.

* They wouldn't think twins were quite so cute.

* Fathers would demand that their sons be home from dates by 10:00 p.m.

* Men could use THEIR briefcases as diaper bags.

* They'd have to stop saying, "I'm afraid I'll drop him."

* They'd stay in bed for the entire nine months.

* Menus at most restaurants would list ice cream and pickles as an entree.

* Paternity suits would be a line of clothes.


Cheers,

Paul (A.)

Thanks, Paul. You should know. :-)

GOOD NEWS FROM THE SUPREMES

From the AP:

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from opponents of same-sex marriage who want to overturn the District of Columbia's gay marriage law.

The court did not comment Tuesday in turning away a challenge from a Maryland pastor and others who are trying to get a measure on the ballot to allow Washingtonians to vote on a measure that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Good news on rulings by the US Supreme Court is rare these days.

H/T to Ann Fontaine at The Lead.

PLEASE VOTE FOR MATT'S TREES EVERY DAY

The folks at Matt's Trees are not sitting around waiting to see if they win the Pepsi Refresh Project contest. Check out their website.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE....

From Doug:

A couple of limmericks...the first is clean :>)

Now the limericks. The first is my favorite clean one.

There was a young lady from Clyde
Who ate a green apple and died
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.

Sorry, folks, you're only getting the clean limerick. :>)

From Ann:



From Suzanne:

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR - JANUARY 15, 1929-APRIL 4, 1968

Martin Luther King, Jr in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965

CHURCH OF ENGLAND GENERAL SYNOD TO DEBATE 2/3 MAJORITY FOR ADOPTION OF COVENANT

From the Church of England website on the meeting of General Synod in February 2011:

The Business Committee has also scheduled for debate the following motion from Mr John Ward that was not debated at the November Synod during the discussions on the Anglican Communion Covenant, for lack of time. The motion seeks to specify two-thirds majorities (rather than simple majorities) in the House of Bishops, the House of Clergy and the House of Laity at the Final Approval Stage for the draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant. The Covenant was referred to dioceses in December and is expected to return to the General Synod in 2012.

H/T to Peter Owen at Thinking Anglicans.

UPDATE: Jim Naughton comments at The Lead:

It seems incongruous to argue, as supporters of the Covenant do, that it is exceedingly significant document that is required to save the Anglican Communion, but that it pass only the most minimal test a democracy allows.

JEAN-CLAUDE (BABY DOC) DUVALIER RETURNS TO HAITI

From Yahoo News:

Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier returned Sunday to Haiti after nearly 25 years in exile, a surprising and perplexing move that comes as his country struggles with a political crisis and the stalled effort to recover from last year's devastating earthquake.

Duvalier, wearing a dark suit and tie, arrived on an Air France jet to hugs from supporters at the Port-au-Prince airport. He was calm as he was led into the immigration office. He left the airport without making a statement to journalists, waving to a crowd of more than 200 supporters as he got into an SUV.

"He is happy to be back in this country, back in his home," said Mona Beruaveau, a candidate for Senate in a Duvalierist party who spoke to the former dictator inside the immigration office. "He is tired after a long trip."

Beruaveau said he would give a news conference on Monday.

Pray for Haiti.

H/T to Mark Harris at Preludium, and please read Mark's post.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ORDINARIATE - "HISTORIC, BREATHTAKING"

The three former bishops, (from left) John Broadhurst, Keith Newton and Andrew Burnham, after the ceremony. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

From Peter Stanford at the Guardian:

In its 100-plus years Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of English Catholicism, will have seen few stranger sights than Saturday's procession of three Anglican bishops' wives, in matching beige coats, one with an outsized brown hat, going up on to the high altar to embrace their husbands, all newly ordained as Catholic priests. Catholicism isn't that keen on women on the altar – to the pain of the demonstrators from the Catholic Women's Ordination movement protesting outside the cathedral's doors – and it doesn't usually countenance priests having wives.

But this was no ordinary ceremony. Almost everyone who spoke during it used the word "historic" to describe the ordination as Catholic priests of John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton, all formerly Anglican bishops.

"...matching beige coats"? Coordinated before the ceremony as a proper color for Roman Catholic clergy wives?

I dunno. The reporter sounds breathless beyond what the event would warrant. The powers can pack the altar with 80 Roman Catholic priests and say, "Historic!" over and over, but, to me. the ordinariates seem much ado about not much. The stream of Anglicans flowing to Rome is nothing new. The stream that flows the other way, from Rome to Anglicanism, is nothing new either.

What is breathtaking about the whole initiative is the speed at which 550 years of post-Reformation practice is being overturned. Until two weeks ago Broadhurst, Burnham and Newton were still Anglican bishops. In the space of 14 days, they have completed a journey that usually takes other converts seven years: 12 months to go through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults to become a Catholic, and six years in a seminary.

So. The three bishops who, according to Rome, were never, ever bishops or even priests were ordained Roman Catholic priests with extraordinary speed. The former Bishop of Richborough, Keith Newton, who was chosen to be the first ordinary, comes right out of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' own diocese. Those years of faux ordinations and faux Eucharists must count for something to have put the "bishops" on the fast track to become RC priests.

I pray for and wish the members of the new Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham well. I crossed over the other way myself, from Roman Catholicism to the Episcopal Church, and I appreciated the prayers and good wishes of my Roman Catholic friends when they were offered. May God bless them all.

UPDATE: The editorial in the Observer brings a different perspective to the story than the breathlessness of the reporter.

In the face of poverty, climate change, natural disasters and all the other challenges facing our planet for religious institutions to be consumed in bickering about whether women can be priests is the stuff of satire.

It is only institutional religion that continues to regard women as second-class citizens. If Catholicism believes that recruiting a handful of renegade Anglicans who share its institutional misogyny will buttress its position it is mistaken.

Read it all.