I thereafter made it to the outskirts of the town of Linden, where I walked quite easily up to the truly beautiful St. Elizabeth’s Church – a deeply peaceful place where I at first thought I might spend the night. And yet everything was closed up tight by the time I arrived and no one was home in the parish next door, and it felt somehow wrong to stay, so onward I hobbled into Linden proper, where its 1^st United Methodist Church turns me away quite coldly, and I am further disturbed by a scene of tragic irony witnessed just outside – a homeless woman rising from her bus-stop ‘home’ to place her hand over her heart and sing along with the Nation Anthem being played over the city’s public loudspeakers; openly pledging her allegiance to the country that was still so blatantly abandoning her …

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little kindness & consideration. In truth , the poverty in the West is a very different and far more deadly kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of the body but also an impoverishment of the community … To believe otherwise is to be willingly blind to truth. Indeed, one believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them – and this is as true in the West as anywhere less imperial; eve more so, in many regards … So do not indoctrinate your children, my friends. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with any overarching authority, and – most importantly of all – to reach out and care for those in need.” ~ inspired by Aldous Huxley & Richard Dawkins

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt