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LET’S HEAR IT FROM ST PAUL!!!

MEMO

To: Ted Turner, my mentor

Gordon Jones, my son

Oleg Soloviev, Aleksandr Andreev, friends, Russians & economists

From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com

Date: October 14, 2008

Subject: LET’S HEAR IT FROM ST PAUL!!!

Hey guys! It’s definitely cool to watch history in the making as WE are making it, no?

Gordon called to say that his section of Micron is going to survive – but my suggestion still stands, I’ll try to explain.

I hope you remember my last memo, in which I pointed out --- well, actually, it wasn’t until I was examining my conscience for confession Sunday that it began to hit me full force that what I pointed out is that THE POPE DOESN’T READ THE BIBLE!!! In fact, no Catholics do, their sole concern is to get out interpretations – one bishop in the ongoing Synod is recommending a whole “compendium” to replace the Good Book as is, where is, so that the benighted and ignorant laity will not interpret it on their own. If they did, the laity might, GOD FORBID!!! recognize that their hierarchs, up to and including their Pope, don’t know diddely about Holy Writ.

And that’s how come the Catholics have lost the entirety of the teaching of St. Paul, Christ’s Mouthpiece – which was basically the entirety of Herbert’s teaching, since Herbert, like Paul, was never a speculative type. When, after his repose, Cecilia Mellet sent people out to get info on Herbert’s early days, those who knew him in his New York years, when Communism was all the rage, said Herbert was always saying he didn’t care about any future “worker’s paradise”, he wanted his paradise right here and now. Herbert was Johnny one-note on living in the now, now, NOW; the past is over, the future is not yet, the only reality is NOW. He had no use at all for the 7 Ecumenical Counsels, for instance, or for the Fathers of the Church. In fact he used to say – and not altogether jokingly - that if St. Anthony the Great (known in the tradition as THE Father of Monasticism!) had the kind of ecstatic love of God and one another in God (cf. St Paul: “Now not I live, but Christ lives in me”) that Herbert was teaching us, he wouldn’t have had all those temptations in the desert that he is so famous for!

When I was trying to identify Herbert’s scriptural quotations to counter the absurd charge that he never read the Bible, I – not surprisingly - found in St. Paul many of the things Herbert alone (to my ken – until I found Abp. Paul) taught us. On the reason for the crucifixion, for instance, Herbert never got into any of the “debt” scenarios – as, for instance, the ludicrous notion that since the infinite God was offended by a finite man, only a God/man could make amends!!! As if this led to some kind of parity between God and man – I mean, as if such were even possible!!!

No, Herbert would ask why God would chose such an agonizing death when He could have saved the world any way He wanted to. Herbert would answer that it was to show us the depths to which God would go for our sake. And, sure enough, when I was editing his talks, I found exactly this in St Paul: “He Who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will He not also give us all things with Him?” Rm 8:32

Yet if I would mention this to Catholics, their first reaction would be to condemn me for presuming to ask what God’s motivation was!!! I’m like: But when God Himself TELLS us through His chosen Apostle – shouldn’t we listen ….. and take heed? But, no, Catholics let their Church close them off to the entire series of Pauline letters which – together with the Psalms of David, and also the Song of Songs - instead of presenting the Faith principally in the third person, examine, in the most minute, everyday detail, just how we ourselves, today, here and now, are actually experiencing and actually being at this very moment motivated by it. Therefore, the crucifixion as expressing God’s all forgiving and utterly unbounded mercy, gets replaced in the west by an inherently impossible legislative adjudication.

And so forth and so on. I have a very long (yet still very incomplete, however) list of Pauline passages which were the basis of Herbert’s teaching, and which are still integral to genuine Orthodox teaching (where the Faith has not been seriously diluted within a westernized environment) – such as, for instance, “Members of one another” (Rm 12:5, Eph 4:25), which is the theme of the upcoming OCA 15th ALL-AMERICAN COUNCIL. The words appear in the center of the logo under an outline drawing of the ikon of the Trinity at the top of the banner, with the outline of a city skyline at the bottom. Herbert’s detractors, however, ignorant of the biblical foundation of this mystery, saw in it only an excuse for sexual license!!!

So, Mr. Turner, what we are looking at here is our team taking the lead within the Church to transfigure …… EVERYTHING! I started thinking of all the books we could publish – we can start with my Bible introduction that I put together, and then it came into my head that I have a totally marvelous Bible (English) done by an “Evangelical Jew” – these people trace their tradition back to the earliest Jews of Christ’s own time who accepted Him as Messiah. For several years I used only that Bible, because a lot of stuff that is garbled in our translations comes out clearly in his. And, of course, it would be a good correction for the mistranslations and errors in our Bibles, as well as an important outreach to Jews. Imagine! Jews helping Christians get back to genuine Christianity!

We must make these books BEAUTIFUL, however, because there is something in the North American Christian mentality that positively courts ugliness. I won’t dwell on this, except to say that what we need are the magnificent books you could get, and for next to nothing, in Russia in the first several years after the Church became free in the Millennial Year,1988.

Then I thought: education! We had such a wonderful school at Mt. Hope, when we for the first time did standardized testing because we were taking in children outside our community, our children scored 5 years above their grade level. But the series of books they used at my recommendation (the clincher being that this series started the children doing research in 1st grade) just disappeared, literally. My daughter who is a teacher tried to find 2nd hand copies after they quit using the series in her area, and they must have had an auto da fe to make sure they were all destroyed, because not a single solitary book could she find (and keep in mind, she’s MY daughter!)

In fact, we can re-do everything to make it true and beautiful and conducive to love, not hate. I think it was in that NYTimes thing on you as “Gadfly without portfolio” when you kind of dropped out of the public eye, that they asked what you would do next, and one thing you mentioned was, “make another great fortune!” As you indicated in your April Fools’ Day interview with Danny Rose, it’s not as easy to enter the crowded restaurant market today as it was to corner the cable TV market with CNN back when. Ah, but think of the possibilities for Micron! How can we lose, when it’s the Year of St. Paul – for both Orthodox and Catholics.

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