Ongoing Contributor Francis Hamit Points Out: Hegseth's Ideological War on Truth and Military Education Damages the Nation!

 

Francis Hamit

Author, playwright and award-winning screenwriter shares current interests and more than 50 years of writing.

Hegseth's ideological war on truth and military education damages the nation.

I grew up in the Army. My father, Colonel Harold F. Hamit MD, FACS, was drafted in World War Two. He was a medical student at NYU and ordered to stay and complete his degree. He was very smart, published some scientific papers before the Army drafted him, and knew how to do research. He got a taste of combat as the Regimental Surgeon for the 12th Philippine Scouts at the end of the war, and afterwards was part of the Occupation Forces in Japan.

This was after I was born. Mother had to give up her own nursing career. This was part of the morals of the time.

Having no money to buy a medical practice, Dad stayed in the Army and began a series of surgical residencies at various Army hospitals. We moved from post to post every two to three years, a traumatic event for my mother, my sister, and me, every time, because we had to always start over in a new place. The needs of the service came first. Dad served in Korea as Commanding Officer of the 1st M.A.S.H. Yeah, the one they made the funny movie and television series about, based on a book written by one of his fellow doctors.

It wasn’t funny for him. He came back a changed man. Looking at my own PTSD symptoms, I believe he was also a sufferer but could not admit it. In the 1950s any suggestion of mental illness would have been career ending. So would have been any political activity. Army officers served the nation, but they didn’t vote and expressed no political opinions. Dad became impatient, quick to anger, demanding, and a bully. His free time was consumed by a series of research papers. He drew and lettered his own charts and graphs, a painstaking process. During his surgical residency in Denver, the Army tasked him to get a Masters degree in biochemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder. We then transferred to Washington DC, where he was assigned to the Army Surgeon General’s office to administer research contracts. He had quite a few, and traveled a lot to projects at various universities and corporations that made medical gear and developed new medicines and therapies.

Two of these projects stand out. They had major impacts upon not just American but global society. The first was a method for treating heart attacks at the moment they happened. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR — quickly adapted worldwide, saving millions of lives. The second was for “bone glue”, originally intended as a quick fix for fractures, and then discovered to stick anything back together with amazing speed and strength, including soft tissue. Thus was born Superglue! A very useful product. And created with a few thousand dollars of government money.

Dad’s part was to approve the payments. Nothing more. But it was the combination of surgical residency and his Masters in Biochemistry that gave him the knowledge to supervise that research.

Let me depart from my family history, and explore some examples from military history. Army involvement in scientific and technological research goes back to the days of Thomas Edison. Officers with advanced degrees are commonplace, and becoming a General now requires a Doctorate or multiple Masters or both. We have the most educated, intellectual military in the World. It is part of our soft power. This is part of what our very insecure and jealous Secretary of Defense seeks to undermine.

In 1942, a Lt. Col. named Jimmie Doolittle planned a daring raid on Japan with B-24 bombers flying from an aircraft carrier. It was a daring demonstration, but one based in science and engineering. Doolittle had a PhD in aeronautical engineering from M.I.T. He was a famous aviator in the 1930s and helped design the new generation of bombers. He knew it could be done. He’d done the math. But it was his military education, discipline, and leadership that got it done, and propelled him up to General’s stars on his shoulders.

Few officers are selected to study at civilian universities. The Defense Department has its own schools in abundance, many of which offer advanced degrees in topics seldom taught elsewhere. Strategy, Logistics, and Intelligence are some of them, although a few civilian institutions now also offer such degrees to satisfy an increasing demand. A high-tech military needs high-tech leaders, both military and civilian.

After the Vietnam War, General William E. DePuy determined that we lost that war because many of our officers simply didn’t have the smarts that went with advanced education to win it. Yes, we won every battle, but still lost the war. Why? Because we underestimated the enemy, because we did not know him. We had a distorted primitive view of his culture, resolve, and political will. We didn’t understand the situation. and that started with Westmoreland himself, trapped in his own nostalgia for the big battles of World War Two.

DePuy was part of the “never again, no more Vietnams” faction in the Defense Department that thought the next war would begin with a Soviet Invasion of Western Europe though the Fulda Gap. I served in Frankfurt then, and that was the thinking. The Soviets had better tanks and more of them.

In 1973, DePuy created the Training and Doctrine Command or TRADOC. It became the largest university in the world, incorporating courses from many civilian institutions. This only makes sense. Why create a MBA degree when Harvard has the best one in the World? Forget about “woke” or political considerations. You want your logistics officers, all of whom interact with the civilian sector, to walk the same walk and talk the same talk. It saves time and money, and provides new careers for retiring officers and NCOs. It puts everyone on the same page.

A comfortable retirement is the goal of almost every American military officer intent on a career. Those multiple assignments are building blocks to acquire knowledge and expertise. They test people and gradually weed out the ones less able or less willing. Career decisions are family affairs. I’ve known officers to leave mid-career when their spouse said, “enough, it’s me or your career.” The usual tour is two or three years, before you move on to a new assignment and make room for someone else. The maximum is five years. My father had that as Chief of Surgery at Brooke Army General Hospital in San Antonio near the end of his 26-year career. He was a Colonel by then. Before that, he worked on a research project at Baylor University Medical School with famous surgeons Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley. He was their equal then, and teaching other doctors the delicate art of surgery.

This carefully planned system of education and practical knowledge acquired over 20 or more years is what Hegseth messed with when he blocked four promotions from Colonel to Brigadier General. Two are Black and two are women. Hegseth’s overreach is based on his well-known bigotry. It is “command interference”. Way below his pay grade. There is an informal rule in our military. You don’t break another man’s (or woman’s) rice bowl. Not without certain cause, based upon violations of trust or the regulations.

Stopping a career because of prejudice disrupts military planning. It makes the organization less intelligent, and reinforces bigotry that the US military has been trying to eliminate since 1948. Sentimental appeals of “heritage” based upon the Lost Cause mythology of Neo-Confederates, and the desire to keep women “barefoot and pregnant” at a time when human capital is at a premium, is another part of the Christian Nationalist agenda being advanced at every level of society. Hegseth glories in this identity.

He fired the top Army chaplain not just because he is Black and a Baptist, but because he resisted Hegseth’s interference in matters of Faith. Like politics, religion is supposed to be free of command interference. The firing of the leader of the Training Command is another effort to impose ideology on the force. Hegseth’s culture war extends to military dependents’ high school libraries. He has done the same for those at other military schools. He has been sued for violating the civil rights of children. An ignominious first. The goal is to suppress thought and discourse at a time when our soldier scholars are rethinking tactics, strategy and the military of the future. Hegseth seems to have no idea about this. He postures and he preaches, but he does not lead.

Hegseth’s public religious services and prayers are obscene, and seek to override decades of military culture and law. He is already a probable war criminal, and his excuse that he is just following policy set out by President Trump simply puts our Criminal-in-Chief in the dock with him.

Hegseth wants to turn back the clock to a hundred years ago when Jim Crow laws and terrorism ruled many communities. Suppression of Civil Rights deprived the nation of many talented workers in both our military and civilian workforce.

Hegseth’s military career ended because his bigotry labeled him an insider threat and cancelled his security clearance. It denied him higher rank. In his own words, the Army “spit him out”. Trump’s selection of him as Secretary of Defense was a bad joke, except no one is laughing. Hegseth is advocating war crimes and creating a quiet mutiny among the flag rank officers he despises.

~~~~

Tens of Billions of Dollars has been spent for a war that was not approved by anyone that is responsible for such military actions...

Nothing that has happened has been legally done!

Once again U.S. Citizens have been betrayed!

May God Be With Us

Gabby

Peniel E. Joseph's Freedom Season: How 1963 transformed American's civil rights - An Essential Text - Reviewed by Francis Hamit - Ongoing Contributor

 

Peniel E. Joseph's Freedom Season - An Essential Text

In 1963 the Civil Rights struggle came alive

Francis Hamit

Publisher: Basic Books, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group
467 pages with notes, bibliography, acknowledgments and index
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7589-6

1963 was the year I graduated high school in Marin County, California. It was in Mill Valley at Tamalpais High school, considered the toughest high school in the county because we had Black students. The farther you went North in Marin, the more you encountered the Jim Crow prejudices of the deep South. But at Tam High we were down with the Struggle. In the Drama Department our teacher, Dan Caldwell, did something very brave and subversive. Rather than another Broadway musical, he chose Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” as our class play. The play is a not-so-subtle push back against the excesses of the McCarthy era, the early 1950s.

Parents objected to the theme and some of Miller’s language. Dan pointed to the language in the Samuel French contract that forbade us from changing a line of the play. His defiance taught us more than dramatic art: it was a lesson in courage, Of not giving in to political or cultural bullies. He put his job on the line and won. He taught there for more than 30 years. The theater is named after him.

We were very aware of Civil Rights. Some of us also participated in demonstrations and protests. The Vietnam War was already on the horizon. As were the Hippies and Timothy Leary’s poison promotion of the drug culture. But in that moment it was Civil Rights. White kids wanted to help. We had been too young to be Freedom Riders. It was our time.

Peniel E. Joseph’s “Freedom Season” is a narrative history of that year, filled with hope, but also murder and tragedy, as Jim Crow terrorists tried to preserve the political system that had served them so well for almost a century. Jim Crow infected the North as well.

The primary change agent in 1963 was the author James Baldwin. His novels and essays were lyrical and their critical reception paved the way for the Struggle. He became a best-selling author, read by the larger white community. These days, military and intelligence strategists talk about seizing the narrative and dominating the Information Space. That is what Baldwin did for Civil Rights in 1963. He was not so much a leader as an influencer. He raised our consciousness.

As Joseph details in this even-handed and thoroughly researched account, he was not the only one. The Black Civil Rights movement had its “Old Guard” and they resented upstarts such as Martin Luther King. Jr. and Malcolm X. There were rivalries and internal dissension. Joseph details it all. Voters’ registration in Mississippi, the Birmingham March, The initial reluctance of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to get involved. The courageous activism and murder of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing that killed four innocent Black girls and the assassination of JFK himself . All one story like a novel.

These events resonate down the corridors of time to the present day. This is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand today’s politics, especially in the face of the Trump Administration’s efforts to erase history and create a new Jim Crow order.

Highly recommended. *****

Link to Amazon page

What If They Are Wrong? Prophecy Whisperers, Armageddon Theology and the Souls of American Soldiers by Michael A. Smith, Ongoing Contributor

 

WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG?

Prophecy Whisperers, Armageddon Theology, and the Souls of American Soldiers



Michael Smith




WHAT IF THEY ARE WRONG?

There is a question that ought to be reverberating through every church, every seminary, every Pentagon briefing room, and every chamber of the United States Congress right now, and it is not being asked nearly loudly enough: What if they are wrong?

What if the men and women who have convinced themselves — and, far more dangerously, convinced the President of the United States and the commanders of the American military--that we are living inside the last chapters of the Book of Revelation--have simply gotten it catastrophically, irreversibly wrong?

The reports now surfacing in the aftermath of American and Israeli strikes against Iran are not merely troubling. They are, to anyone who takes both theology and democratic governance seriously, a five-alarm crisis. According to multiple accounts, American military commanders read to their troops on the eve of the attack a message framing their mission not in terms of national security, not in terms of international law, not even in terms of alliance obligations--but in terms of cosmic destiny. The soldiers cheered. They were told they were fighting a righteous battle to hasten the return of King Jesus.

Let that settle for a moment. The armed forces of the secular constitutional republic of the United States of America — a republic whose First Amendment was written precisely to prevent the entanglement of governmental power with religious conviction--went to war in the Middle East, at least in part because some of their leaders believe they are instruments of biblical prophecy.

The Prophecy Whisperers in the Oval Office

I have spent nearly four decades inside American evangelical Christianity. I know this world from the inside out--its extraordinary generosity, its genuine piety, its remarkable capacity for community and compassion. I also know its shadow side, and nowhere does that shadow fall more darkly than in the world of charismatic prophecy that has encircled Donald Trump since at least 2015.

There is a community of self-styled prophets--figures prominent in charismatic and New Apostolic Reformation circles--who have been whispering into Trump’s ear a narrative of singular destiny. Chief among them is Paula White-Cain, the televangelist prosperity gospel preacher who served as Trump’s official White House faith advisor and who has publicly declared that opposition to Trump is, in her words, opposition to God himself. White-Cain is not a fringe figure operating at the edges of this movement. She held a government title. She led prayer at his inauguration. She has functioned as Trump’s primary ecclesiastical interpreter, the person who translates the language of charismatic prophecy into terms a president can absorb and act upon. The narrative she and her fellow travelers have consistently pressed runs roughly as follows: God spared Donald Trump from assassination not once but twice because he is divinely chosen. He is a Cyrus figure, an instrument of God’s sovereign will, appointed to serve as the vehicle through which the prophetic clock of the end times is finally moved to midnight. The strikes against Iran are not geopolitical decisions. They are the opening movements of Armageddon — the gathering of the nations for the final battle, the very conflict that will compel the visible, physical return of Jesus Christ to the earth as conquering King.

I want to pause here and speak directly to those among my readers who hold dispensationalist convictions themselves--who have read Revelation through the premillennial grid, who find the Rapture a meaningful and scripturally grounded hope, and who may feel that what follows is an attack on their faith. It is not. Sincere, intelligent Christians have held versions of these prophetic views for generations, and the personal hope of Christ’s return is woven through the New Testament in ways no serious reader can dismiss. My concern is not with private eschatological belief. It is with something categorically different: the weaponization of that belief system as a justification for war, the use of prophetic language to override constitutional deliberation, and the subordination of democratic accountability to a theological timetable that no human being — not Paula White-Cain, not any self-appointed prophet — has the authority to set.

This is not a fringe interpretation whispered in obscure corners of the internet. It is being preached from prominent pulpits, broadcast across the largest Christian media networks in America, and — if the reports about pre-combat briefings are accurate — delivered to American troops in the field. The premillennial dispensationalist framework that underlies this thinking has been a staple of American popular Christianity since the publication of John Nelson Darby’s theology in the nineteenth century and its mass popularization through the Scofield Reference Bible and, later, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. Tens of millions of American Christians have absorbed this interpretive grid as though it were Scripture itself, when in fact it is a relatively recent theological invention with no consensus support in the history of Christian doctrine.

Netanyahu’s Calculation

Benjamin Netanyahu is many things, but he is not a fool, and he is certainly not a premillennial dispensationalist. Polling consistently shows that approximately 93 percent of Israeli Jews identify as secular or only loosely religious. The eschatological dreams of American evangelicals--in which the Jewish people are finally converted to Christianity at the climax of the tribulation period — are, to put it gently, not a vision that most Israelis find flattering or compelling.

Netanyahu uses American evangelical theology the way a skilled contractor uses a borrowed tool: effectively, efficiently, and with no particular emotional attachment to the implement itself. What Netanyahu wants is American political cover, American weaponry, American diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and American acquiescence to Israeli regional ambitions. The evangelical prophecy machine provides the domestic political pressure that delivers those things. The transaction is cynical on one side and sincere on the other, which is precisely what makes it so durable and so dangerous.

Ambassador Huckabee and the Covenant He Did Not Read Carefully Enough

Which brings us to a moment of extraordinary theological carelessness that occurred this week on national television. Mike Huckabee — ordained Baptist minister, former governor of Arkansas, and current United States Ambassador to Israel — appeared on Sean Hannity’s program and declared that God’s covenant promise to Abraham in the book of Genesis establishes Israel’s divine right to possess all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, encompassing much of present-day Iraq and Iran.

One would expect a man who has spent his adult life in the Christian ministry to have read Genesis with slightly more care.

Here is the problem with Huckabee’s interpretation, and it is not a minor exegetical quibble — it is a foundational error that unravels the entire argument. When God made the covenant promise recorded in Genesis 12, 15, and 17, Abraham had no children. None. Isaac, through whom the nation of Israel would descend by way of his son Jacob, had not yet been born. Neither had Ishmael, through whom the Arab nations would trace their lineage. Neither had the six sons Abraham would later father with his wife Keturah after Sarah’s death. The text of Genesis is unambiguous: the promise was made to Abraham’s seed--all of Abraham’s seed--before any of that seed existed.

By Huckabee’s own logic--that the land belongs to the descendants of Abraham--the Arabs have as legitimate a biblical claim to that territory as the Israelis do. Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn son. The covenant was made before Isaac was conceived. An honest reading of the text does not support the exclusive territorial claim Huckabee asserted on national television. It supports, at minimum, a recognition that the children of Abraham are a far larger family than the Christian nationalist narrative conveniently acknowledges.

This is not merely an academic point. The United States Ambassador to Israel publicly invoked a misread biblical text to justify territorial claims that, if acted upon, would require the displacement or conquest of millions of people across multiple sovereign nations. The theological carelessness has geopolitical consequences of the gravest possible magnitude.

The Question That Must Be Asked

I want to speak now not as a political commentator but as someone who has read the New Testament carefully and takes its warnings seriously.

The same Bible that contains the prophetic passages these movements cite also contains repeated, emphatic warnings about false prophecy. Jesus himself warned, in the Olivet Discourse recorded in Matthew 24, that “false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” The Apostle Paul warned the church at Thessalonica against those who would generate a “strong delusion"-- a phrase with terrifying implications when one considers what kind of delusion could cause otherwise decent people to cheer for war in the name of bringing back Jesus.

The tradition of Christian theology has always maintained that not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. The First Epistle of John commands believers to “test the spirits” precisely because the landscape of religious experience is populated by spirits that are not holy, that do not speak truth, and that lead their followers toward destruction while wearing the costume of divine revelation. What are the fruits of this particular prophetic movement? Soldiers going to war with eschatological fervor rather than constitutional clarity. A president whose catastrophic decisions are validated by men claiming to speak for God. An ambassador rewriting Genesis on cable television. A democracy steadily subordinating its secular governance to a theological framework that most Christians throughout history--Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant--have never accepted.

What if the prophecy whisperers are simply wrong? What if they are not hearing from God but from their own ambitions, their own fears, their own intoxication with proximity to power? What if the soldiers who cheered — young Americans who deserve leaders who will never send them into battle for anything less than a constitutionally legitimate cause--were misled by commanders who had themselves been misled by a theological system that has no more claim to biblical certainty than a hundred other interpretive frameworks that history has generated and discarded?

The men and women who go to war carrying the conviction that God has personally appointed their mission do not doubt. They cannot afford to doubt. Doubt is not compatible with the certainty required to pull a trigger. But the rest of us--those of us watching from a distance, those of us who are not in the grip of an eschatological timetable--have not only the right but the obligation to ask the question they cannot ask themselves.

The Responsibility of the Rest of Us

I am aware that my readers grow weary of this subject. I understand the fatigue. There is only so much alarm a person can sustain before alarm itself becomes noise. But I am asking you to resist that fatigue for a few moments longer, because what is happening right now is not a recycled argument about the separation of church and state. It is something qualitatively different and substantially more dangerous.

American military power is being directed, at least in part, by a theology. That theology rests on a specific interpretation of biblical prophecy that is contested, relatively recent, and not universally held even within evangelical Christianity. It is being promoted by self-styled prophets whose credentials are self-issued and whose track record of fulfilled predictions is, to put it charitably, unimpressive. It is being carried into combat by soldiers who were told, on the eve of battle, that they were warriors of the Apocalypse.

History has seen this before. It does not end well. The Crusades were launched on similar convictions, prosecuted with similar certainty, and left a trail of devastation across centuries and cultures that the Christian church is still reckoning with today. The difference is that the Crusaders did not have stealth aircraft, precision munitions, and the capacity to trigger a regional conflict involving nuclear-armed states.

The American republic was built on a foundational principle: that no man, no movement, and no theological system has the right to govern the conscience or direct the sword of a free people by claiming divine authority. That principle is not under slow erosion. It is under direct assault by people who are entirely sincere, often genuinely devout, and catastrophically, dangerously wrong.

We owe it to those soldiers--and to every citizen of the republic they serve--to keep asking the question: What if they are wrong? And to keep asking it until someone in a position of authority is finally compelled to answer.

___

Dr. Michael A. Smith is a historian, scholar, and independent writer with nearly four decades of pastoral ministry experience. He is the author of From Christian Fundamentalism to Christian Nationalism: A Primer Detailing the Danger to America (2024) and is completing a doctoral dissertation at Liberty University. He has published in The Christian Century and Christian Daily International.

Thank you Dr. Mike for sharing this important response to major actions by our Secretary of War, et al...

Gabby

Poet John Herlihy Brings Finding Permanence in Transience, The Nearness of Distance, and What the Lord Has Lent Me - Enjoy!

 

Finding Permanence in Transience

by John Herlihy

We step every morning into the pearly dawn,

That dwells within the mind as a timid fawn.

A fragmentary moment within an air of transience,

Greeting us every morning with an air of permanence.

The ordinances of nature

 all display a sense of regularity,

The sun shines on orbiting earth

 as a matter of practicality.

Its beauty contains a mystery

 in those very rays of light,

Permanence amid transience

 as the day slays the night.

We stand in silhouette against

 burnished, shimmering sky,

As twilight bids us a melancholy farewell

 with its single cry.

Half the globe in pitch darkness,

 the earth lost in slumber,

While all the inhabitants rest secure

 in this nocturnal wonder.

We know nothing stays the same

 amid perpetual change,

Perpetual being the key word

 our transience to arrange.

The bud blushes as rose

 to enjoy its brief, limited history,

Its perfume, beauty,

 perfection freely share their intimacy.

The dragon of despair slays

 the evanescent specter of hope,

From a deep well of despair

 we climb up on the divine rope.

What more permanent

 than the rays of hope’s bright sun,

What could be more lasting

 than the relief slowly to be won.

We accept the idea of change

 because some things last forever,

Change but worldly elements

 that will take their leave never.

The river will always flow onward

 and never stays the same,

Carving pathways thru grand canyons,

 all in His glorious name.

Through a telescope,

 far distant objects now appear up close,

Losing one’s breath then finding it

 in this near scene grandiose.

As if capturing an eyeful of permanence

 in that glimmering star,

As if partaking in a wisdom

 that is so freely offered from afar.

An eye sees far distance

 while a solitary finger touches the heart,

A moment of permanence

 that will never take leave and depart.

The sun rays flood the night sky

 with dawn’s infant, dewy light,

All the while its smiling face

 lies below the horizon out of sight.

And so these hints of permanence

 take their leave and fade away,

The earth continues to turn

 with a permanence no poem can sway.

The universe wrapped up as a gift

 in this cocoon of sweet mystery,

All in salutation to the beauty and mystery

 of the Divine Reality.

- - - - -

Copyright © John Herlihy

The Nearness of Distance

by John Herlihy

Miraculous the feelings aroused

 by the nearness of distance,

Feelings overwhelming

 that lay upon us with persistence.

Feelings remarkable that fill the mind

 and heart with joy,

Feelings despicable

 that only the mind and heart annoy.

The treachery now in the distant past

 still feels near,

The betrayal by a good friend

still feels close, held dear.

Sadly held recollections

 that still feel like a bee sting,

Callous rejection as sad lament

 that still in the heart sings.

The secret mystery

 the stars bring to the night’s firmament,

The exquisite design found

 in the spider's web and its filament.

All of nature's artifacts

 lend their probing mystery from afar,

The nearness of incredible distance

 found in the light of the star.

What's nearer than sad longings

 of a loved one sorely missed,

A presence still in the mind and heart

 as a sentiment blessed.

Falling a great distance down

 into the will of cavernous despair,

Whispered on a trembling tongue

 hopeful treaties of prayer.

What could be more distant

 than the things lost and never found,

The sensation of loss as a wave without shore, cresting profound.

What could be nearer than the kiss

 of those precious soft lips,

Nectar drawn from a distant flower

 savored with meager sips.

No, let no one tell you of the distance

 found in the near distance,

For in the distance lies a nearness

 that echoes with persistence.

The distant horizon of heaven and earth

 marked by a fine line,

Drawn as a near horizon of the soul 

with its message sublime.

- - - - -

Copyright © John Herlihy

What the Lord Has Lent Me

by John Herlihy

What the Lord has lent me,
I can only gratefully reply.
What the Lord has sent me,
I can only gracefully sigh.

Whether weakness or fortitude,
Never more than I can bear.
Whether blessing and beatitude,
I will bow my head in prayer.

Some days right, some days wrong,
Decisions in the making whither I go.
Some days confused, some days strong,
When the time comes, I hope to know.

Some days I no doubt stumble and fall,
To lay my head gently upon the ground.
I will pick myself up again, standing tall,
In the distance I see a symbol profound.

A simple line separating heaven and earth,
The divine presence watching us here below.
A simple sign lent to everyone at birth,
Showing us the way how to prosper and grow.
- - - - -
Copyright © John Herlihy

Thank you John for sharing your words across the world here at Book Readers Heaven~

Your poetry became deeper in thought this time and, together, provided much for readers to ponder and enjoy... And, of course, I love finding complementary music to enhance the sense of peace we find...

May God continue to Bless Your Writing!

 Gabby

Ongoing Contributor Diana Raab, PhD - Memoirist - Poet - Thought Leader - October Newsletter: Fight Breast Cancer and More!

 

October Newsletter "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."  ~ Robert Frost I always equate October with Halloween. Of course this goes all the way back to childhood. Marcel Proust wrote about “Madeleine Moments,” and I always have those when eating a chocolate bar. Madeleine moments are moments when we do something today that reminds us of something we did years ago. These types of moments also elicit wonderful poems. I’ve been in an anti-submission slump, which is why I don’t have much in the section, “Recently Published Works.” As writers know, submitting to publications takes a lot of energy and one really has to be in the mood. I’ve been writing and scribbling in my journal and walking my puppy, Rumi (copper mini poodle). October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and as a two-time breast cancer survivor, I’d like to urge all women to make sure to get their annual mammograms. They saved me twice as my tumors were not palpable in my self-breast exams. Breast cancer also happens to men and a good friend of mine was affected. It’s more rare but possible. Any unusual symptoms should always be reported. Here's to your health!                                                                ~~~~ October Writing Prompts Write about the status of your health. Write about a medical issue that runs in your family. Write about your favorite Halloween costume as a child. Write about what you want to let go of this fall. ~~~ Recently Published Works! “The First Kiss.” (essay). Big City Lit. Summer 2025. “16 Danger Signs for Seniors to Be Aware of This National Suicide Prevention Month.” (essay). Sixty and Me. September 8, 2025. “My Grandchildren’s Eyes.” (poem). Modern Artist. September 19, 2025. "Love, Grief, and Everything In Between." Medium. September 19, 2025. “Love, Grief, and Everything In Between.” Sixty and Me. September 23, 2025. Recommended Book! Quietly Wild: Poems, Photographs, and Rituals to Mark the Seasons   by Alix Klingenberg I am not one who spends a lot of time on social media; however, I discovered Alix on IG a little while ago and have been following her with joy. This recently published book is a sheer delight which I read in one sitting. Alix’s poetry is short, sweet, and inspiring. This is an annual guide to flowing with nature’s cycles. Included in the collection are stunning photographs and thoughtful suggestions for creative seasonal practices. She refers to “fall” as the season for “Ritual of Letting Go and Calling In” (Mabon/Autumn Equinox). As an exercise, she suggests making two columns then writing down what you’d like to let go of what you want to call in. The ritual also includes lighting a candle. One of the poems in this section is called, “Autumn’s Altar” and it goes like this:   “We begin with a ritual,   on a threshold   of light and dark,   day and night.   We rest our heads on the altar   of autumn   and come back into balance with   our whole selves.” I have earmarked so many pages in this collection that resonate with me, and for good measure, I keep it on my bedside table. So wonderful and highly recommended! ~~~ https://www.dianaraab.com You’re receiving this newsletter because somewhere on this life's journey, our paths have crossed. Sign up to receive your own copy... here's more info about her writing classes! It's Autumn, one of my favorite seasons--the other is Spring... Stay as long as you like here and listen to restful music... God Bless Gabby