Reformation and Chocolate Eyeballs

RantWoman must spare her readers the various excursions in her own spiritual life and the life of her Meeting that have summoned possibly unfinished or recycling Sudoku conversations back to RantWoman's consciousness. Perhaps there is somehow a shortage of scariness about despite the holiday and the midterm elections. Somewhere in here maybe there are some "let us see what love can do" moments, but there are also chocolate eyeballs, memorials in RantWoman's memorials tag to which she means at somepoint to add a ramble about mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, and reverberations from Meeting for Worship.

Dear everyone in RantWoman's Meeting who cannot handle RantWoman's (QUIET) Sudoku in Meeting for Worship habit, How about instead I jot down notes in Braille?????? If anyone asks, for instance about the noise, RantWoman is likely to say DEAL WITH IT. RantWoman also promises not to poke out a rewrite of War and Peace during Meeting for Worship, but DEAL WITH IT! RantWoman has a whole lot of practice dealing with eyeball topics and for some reason she feels called sometimes to share the wealth. Deal with it!

(RantWoman's eyeballs regretably seem not to be up to Sudoku anyway right now but that is a different problem. Sigh.)

RantWoman found herself really glad her orange turtleneck was clean. It's the perfect thing to celebrate the collision of many occasions on the calendar: Samwain, which RantWoman knows of only vaguely, the Day of the Dead with a lot of gooey sugary skulls and skeletons, Halloween with its orgy of orange and black sugar, goblin children, and this year electoral scariness, and Reformation Sunday with screeds for All Saints Day visit to the church reliquary which RantWoman will feed somehow into Barclay-induced examination of early Quaker history.

RantWoman can probably think of some other worlds in collision besides a certain spell of political activism which always seems vivid to RantWoman in the fall but RantWoman's knowledge of history runs more toward works of classical music, who was paying whom to compose them and scientific discoveries than toward nuanced commentary about politics, economics, philosophical concepts.... Maybe it is sufficient also to say RantWoman's experience of the Divine is pretty insistent sense of divine presence, but lacking in some dimensions of depth. For instance, in the Rant Family household of RantWoman's childhood, what would pass for nuanced conflict resolution would be a circumstance, entirely external of course, like the very Catholic concertmistress in the symphony of RantWoman's youth consenting to perform the Reformation Symphony.

For now, RantWoman is going to leave to guesswork where she is headed with the above thoughts. Instead, with chocolate eyeballs on her mind from a little pouch of Halloween candy RantMom gave RantWoman, RantWoman is off to Meeting for Worship.

RantWoman admits to a serious bout of eye-rolling about one Friend's vision of disassembling the Meetinghouse plank by plank and building a path to Afghanistan to bring about peace. If funding for the bombs starts in the US, why do we have to go all the way to Afghanistan?

The next message somehow got from a Catholic childhood to eternal life and then there was radical reconciliation with some conflict resolution involving victim and perpetrator years after some horrible politically-motivated mass killing, the sort of occasion that is supposed, perhaps, to make one grateful for only high volume shrieking in election commercials.

Next a young man came to live with his grandmother and changed schools in the middle of the year. For his trouble he got bullied mercilessly until his grandmother admitted he might have to fight back. The next day the boy told the worst bully that they would have to fight, at his house after school, but first they would have to have milk and cookies. This message was from Seriously Weighty Friend, whom RantWoman completely loves with total affection and humility and reverence for his unending groundedness. Probably this Friend could talk about the phone book and something weighty would come out.

At this point, after all the words about vision and the rest, RantWoman was seasoning a clear message about things where reconciliation is not really the point like wonky eyeballs that cannot just be fixed. RantWoman was all about just embrace and eal with it and have some chocolate eyeballs for Halloween. Instead along came a message about two cases of breast cancer, one that was fatal and one gone two years after, about the whys of this being all about God. Breast Cancer Friend, the survivor typically offers messages at the end of the hour; RantWoman was still seasoning the chocolate eyeballs message when someone closed Meeting. RantWoman decided the breast cancer thoughts were not a terrible stand-in and that chocolate eyeballs would have to be private chocolate eyeballs or blogosphere chocolate eyeballs, at least for now.