Saturday, November 5, 2011

Not to fear, friends, the post-traumatic will not soon go away

AVAILABLE NOW on Amazon
The Apostle Paul and Post-Traumatic Stress,
From Woundedness to Wholeness 
  
Being able to get it right on Amazonbooks.com has been a frustration for all concerned. Last week it appeared as “out of print” and yesterday listed as books of similar interest. The publisher called today and he and the other person on line thought they had identified the problem. As a techie said to me once, “Oh, Bob, it’s just a machine!”

The book is getting shared, of course; this week the publisher responded to a large veterans’ group request for three copies. Annelie and I also had lunch with a former colleague and were told that an adult education leader of a church with whom she had shared the book was proposing a discussion group after the first of the year. Annelie and I have been putting together our presentation on a couple of Sundays for our own church school group.  If anyone has an interest, my son-of-greater-knowledge put together what he termed a “fan page,” to be found under the above book title.

Actually, one of the things about retirement is not only to find greater joy in writing, but also having more time to think about what one is doing. For instance, we had this book in process for about four years. Yet it had never occurred to me, until working on Sunday’s presentation, just why Saul rebelled against Moses. Saul caught himself identifying with Moses, both had killed; it was a personal flight from a now painful association, not just theological. Then there was this thing on Cyprus. The (now) Paul hurled a curse on the head of his adversary, a Jewish magician and advisor to the governor. It was of blindness, very similar to that of the (then) Saul at Damascus. As he wrote, was Luke deliberately drawing a parallel and, if so, for what purpose? On one level “The Acts of the Apostles” is sounding similar to a presidential campaign statement; not a “put down,” simply an observation. It is impossible for any of us to get away from being human, isn’t it?

I was checking the statistics on the blog for the week and, whether I do a lot for you, you do a lot for me. There were the hits (I am tempted to write, “of course”) from Germany, France, Russia, and the Ukraine. Then there were the new ones, Myanmar, Japan, and Malaysia. Annelie and I are reasonably well traveled, but in the forty somewhere numbers of hits from various countries, you have us looking at the travel books again. We don’t just “listen” to the international news anymore, we feel about it. Just as a coincident, I suppose, but with that hit from Myanmar, Annelie had just taken some things down to the Catholic place where they are working with the Burmese – we do have the largest settlement of Burmese in Fort Wayne outside that country.

I was reading a news paper columnist this week; he was announcing that we of the West can have nothing in common with peoples of the Mid East in terms of democracy – philosophically the grounding is too different. Every time I check this blog I come up with a bigger and better reason to wish we could all reach out to one another. We are all so human, so needy, so deep in our common humanness, so rich in potential compassion.

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