Tues, May 15, our hallway PA made some announcement. I did not pay attention. I would have to go out into the hall to really hear it. The announcement called for a meeting of residents in the Activity Center.

Wed. May 16 every resident got 2 pages from manager Mary Dowling, as follows:

On Fri. June 8, 2012, from 2 pm to 5 pm representatives from Wesley Senior Living will be here to conduct a meeting with residents & answer any questions you might have. This is bound to be an informative meeting & a good opportunity for you to meet the new property owners, so please be sure to come! If you have any questions before June 8, please feel free to call me & if I can answer them I will. Thank you!

Mary Dowling, Manager

I e-mailed Wesley Senior Living referring to this blog, MemphisRumi – St Peter Manor.   At 4 pm I got a phone call from Jim Nasso (who was on the road from St Louis) who said he’d like to converse with me. (No indication he read my blog.) I am impressed that I was  contacted so quickly. This gives me hope that WSL is willing to listen to a resident of 3 years.

Attached to the manager’s letter was a letter from the Diocese of Memphis Housing Corporation Properties, which mentioned:

…there will be no changes in this property as relates to you & your apartment. Your rent will remain the same. You will not be evicted without cause. The staff will remain the same.

signed: Debbie Currie

About 10 days ago I e-mailed Cherry Brooks, the Diocesan Director of Housing, who oversees St Peter Manor. I mentioned the rumors about the diocese selling SPM. She never did respond, even after my second e-mail. Simple courtesy would have expected a reply. What are we to make of this snub?

Basically it seems to me that I do not warrant any kind of respect. I’m only an elderly resident of SPM. I pay my rent faithfully (the past 3 years). I respect property. I respect my fellow residents. I help others when the occasion arises.

When and if SPM is sold, I have many ideas I will share with the new owners. The chief idea I have is to consider the almost 300 residents as human beings, equal to any human beings, including the employees. I think that attitude is basic to relating to the elderly here.

The rumor arises periodically. But today three different residents spoke it. They said the Catholic Diocese can’t afford to keep the Manor. So it is for sale.

I have no idea whether this is a valid rumor. I know it does upset folks. When an elderly person makes the decision to retire here, this being their last earthly address, it is disturbing to hear such a rumor.

The Management has said nothing. But communications is dreadfully lacking here. Of late we’ve been hearing that there is a budget crunch. We must cut corners and save money. Why the residents haven’t been brought into the process of saving money I do not know.

If anyone reading this knows the truth, please let me know ASAP. Thanks.

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I visited the Brooks Museum today, just a few blocks from St Peter Manor. Free Family Day! So there were lots of young couples with small children: 3-4-5 year olds. Many holding shields, swords, helmets and breastplates they made at the various stations located throughout the exhibit.

The exhibit showed various swords, knives, shields, axes, spears, maces, helmets, suits of armor, pistols, rifles. Many of these weapons were beautifully ornamented. Apparently they were prized as pieces of art as well as weapons.

I found it creepy to see the little children play with their homemade weapons, And outside there were grown men in medieval armor  fighting one another with the same kinds of weapons on display inside the museum. I wanted to ask the young parents how they explained that violence to their children. And how they taught their children to use the weapons they had made. And if they were Christian, how that factor influenced how they taught their children.

When children are  taught, directly or indirectly, that  they live in a violent world that demands this violence be met with equal or greater violence, they are unconsciously prepared to use violence when threatened. We are preparing  troops for our next war.

I think the Catholic bishops will rue the day they drew a line in the sand over Obamacare and birth control. They say having to provide insurance for their employees that includes contraceptives, sterilizations and abortions violates their freedom of religion. They want those  services to be excluded from the insurance they provide their employees, even though the employees may be non Catholic. And even though the service(s) may never actually be used.

Back in 1968 the special Vatican commission to study birth control, which included laity, unanimously articulated the ethical approval of artificial contraception. Nevertheless  Pope Paul VI declared artificial birth control to be immoral/sinful. However the faithful laity don’t see it that way.  98% of fertile Catholics use artificial birth control. And I’m sure they also receive Holy Communion. There are also situations where abortion and sterilization are ethical. The bishops know this but do not teach it. Better to leave the laity in the dark I guess.

I highly recommend the book  A BRIEF, LIBERAL, CATHOLIC DEFENSE OF ABORTION.

A good that I see coming from the bishops’ crusade is the dialog that will come from it. More people will be discussing it. Hopefully the bishops will see this. (But they will not see a way of compromise, certainly not reversal.)

Last night President Obama gave his State of the Union address.  A yearly theatrical event. More significant this year because he is running for a second term. (With the sorry bunch the Republicans are running, he will probably be re-elected.)

He started off bragging about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, claiming “we are safer and more respected around the world.”  He is ignorant of the bad will we manifested by our unwarranted, illegal and immoral attack, invasion and occupation of that poor nation! Thousands of people marched in the U.S. and Europe opposing that operation. Pres. Bush went ahead anyway. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. Christian soldiers in 9 years killed hundreds of thousands of Moslems in their own country.

He  implied that Afghanistan was responsible for the 9/11 attack. He also bragged about murdering Osama bin Laden. He is just as much a warmonger as George Bush.

This month of January we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. He was bold enough to criticize the U.S. role in Vietnam. He saw that war as taking food out of the mouths of children and purchasing weapons that killed Vietnamese children. The billions spent on our two wars (occupations) have also robbed our children of basic human needs. I wish our black president had the same spirit and faith as MLK!

Obama also reaffirmed our alliance with Israel, implying we would use military force against Iran, implying Iran is making a nuclear weapon. Our own Secretary of Defense (War) and the Israeli prime minister both have said Iran has no plans to make a nuclear weapon. But the Mainstream Media keeps saying they have such a program. And the public swallows such gossip.

Monday Jan. 16 Martin Luther King Jr Day. In our monthly newsletter there was to be a celebration at 3 pm. In the morning over the PA system it was announced the celebration would be at 1 pm – then almost immediately it was corrected to 1:30 pm. (This can be very confusing to an elderly population! And how many had already planned to attend at 3 pm?)

I attended at 1:30. Service Coordinator Dwight “Headphones” Haley was in charge. (He did not have his headphones on today; he had only his earbud – letting us know he would not be giving us his full attention.)

The ladies of Madonna Circle were providing us with snackfood. Dwight Haley started things off with trivia questions, e.g. what date was MLK made pastor, what date  did he receive  the Nobel Peace Prize, etc. I did not find that very educative.

He  then asked for volunteers to share their memories of Dr King at the mike. I decided to speak as the 6th one. I mentioned his opposition to the Vietnam War. I felt we needed, as Christians, to continue to oppose war since it hurt needy people with funds spent on WMDs instead of people’s needs.

There were about 25 folks attending: 5 white, the rest black. Sad. Poor planning and communication.

The Maya computed the length of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun to within a thousandth of a decimal point of the calculations of modern science. This, we are endlessly told, they did without our precision instruments. Not only that, but they kept calendars of the lunation and eclipse cycles; and even more, they maintained calendars recording synodical revolutions and synchronizations of the cycles of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And, on certain of their monuments, we find the recordings of dates and/or events occurring as much as 400,000,000 years in the past. All this they did with a unique and incredibly simple yet flexible numerical system that counted by twenties (instead of tens) and used only three notational symbols.

- Jose Arguelles

…Maya is a key Hindu philosophical term meaning “origin of the world.” and “world of illusion.” The word Maya in Sanskrit is further related to concepts meaning “great” “measure’ ‘mind” “magic” & “mother.” Not surprisingly we find that Maya is the name of the mother of the Buddha. And in the Vedic classic, The Mahabharata, we read that Maya was the name of a noted astrologer-astronomer, magician & architect, as well as the name of a great wandering tribe of navigators.

Not only in ancient India, home of high metaphysics & spiritual adventure, do we find the name Maya, but also farther to the west. The treasurer of the renowned boy-king of Egypt, Tutankhamen, was named Maya, while in Egyptian philosophy we find the termMayet, meaning universal world order. In Greek mythology, the seven Pleiades, daughters  of Atlas & Pleione & sisters of the Hyades, number among them one called Maia, also known as the brightest star of the constellation Pleiades. And finally, we know that our month of May is derived from the name of the Roman goddess, Maia, “the great one,” the goddess of spring, daughter of Faunus & wife of Vulcan.

Returning to the Maya of Central America, we find that their name is derived from the word Mayab, the term given to describe the Yucatan Peninsula, key area of the Mayan bioregional home base.

Jose Arguilles THE MAYAN FACTOR  (1987)  p.17