ELEVEN O'Clock AM ET on ELEVENTH November (9 PM Pakistan) - A Time to MOURN

To Grieve, To Pray, To hold one anothers' hands and feel one anothers' hearts around the world

REPOSTING with Note:

All who can pause for some quiet or collective moments of grieving for all the bloody fields our military and mercenary and militant groups have likewise made of so many sacred and beautiful lands where masses now are without homeland.

Suggested below is the hour 11 AM ET or 9 PM in Pakistan. And to this timely plea, add the apparent death for now of any new peace-plans in Palestine Israel per Wall Writings. GO here

Without time to grieve, beginning anew and healing will later be much more difficult and many more will attempt to exchange a heart of flesh with a heart of stone.

Perhaps come back and make a COMMENT here below this post on how such a pause for GRIEVING affected you in the confusing scheme of the violence all around us?

Be at peace and well beyond all understanding - in "training" for the challenges in this day and the days ahead...

Connie, oneheart blogger

Grief:

Armistice Day Today, Wednesday November 11th

Ft Hood. & the Burial of Abraham

Dear Shalom-seekers,

When I was a kid, at 11 a..m. on November 11, in every school and workplace in America (and Canada, France, England, elsewhere) everybody paused. We took a silent minute or two to remember the dead of World War I and to honor the Armistice that went into effect and stopped the killing at that moment on 11/11/1918.

Even during World War II, we did this --and teachers mentioned the hope that it would have been "the war to end all wars." I don't recall honoring just the American and Allied dead; I think the terrible slaughters of Germans, Russians, Austrians, were also part of it.

This week, the Torah reading includes the story (Gen 25) of how Ishmael & Isaac, Abraham's two long-estranged sons, came together to bury him -- though, or because, he had endangered both their lives. By mourning him together, they dissolved their hostility, and came to live together at the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me.

This week we have been mourning the American soldiers killed by another American soldier at Fort Hood, and sorrowing for their families. Elsewhere in the world, other folks are mourning Afghans and Pakistanis who were celebrating weddings when they were killed by US Predators flinging lightning bolts of death from the sky.

Could we bear to mourn their dead as well as "our own"? Could they bear to mourn our dead as well as "their own"? In Israel & Palestine, there is actually a Circle of Bereaved Families who do exactly that.

What difference might it make? If each "side" mourns only "its own," it is likely that rage and hatred at "the others" will increase. If we can mourn all our dead, perhaps we can make an Armistice. Or even Peace.

So I propose that at 11 am today, 11/ 11, 91 years after the end of the war to end all wars, we pause to mourn the dead of Fort Hood, of the Pashtun lands, of all the bloodied battle fields.

(If you don't get this note till after 11 a.m, it won't hurt to take some quiet time later in the day.)

And if opening yourself to this sharing of grief moves you to want to end this war we are in right now, you might let US Senators (and leaders in your own nations) know by clicking to:

here

For background information on the US war in Afghanistan & Pakistan, see -
here, (oneheart blogger's note: Read also many other places - The Nation- , Bill of Rights Defense Committee for the war and constitutional crimes, and see also Pakistani news for the pulse of the Pakistani people - Try "Dawn" and try also many Pakistani blogs and other media sources we seldom see. Read what Jeremy Scahill knows about the mercenaries)

The Shalom Center's FaceBook page: GO here


Shalom, salaam, peace -- Arthur