Best wishes for 31. December...

...for a peaceful New Years Eve

"Hope is being able to see that there is light

 despite all of the darkness."  

Desmond Tutu

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Chistmas Greetings

Wishing you all a very peaceful

MERRY  CHRISTMAS

FROHE  WEIHNACHTEN

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JOYEUX  NOEL

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MERRY  CHRISTMAS !

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"in preparation for Christmas..."

...in the "Still Life mood...."

 

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Our "Sacred Bamboo"

with its red berries - just right in time...
...as every year.

...and tomorrow is CHRISTMAS....

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth105087.html

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WORLD MATTERS

WORLD MATTERS: 

The Brexit sorrow of an Anglo-German couple


By Uwe Siemon-Netto for World Tribune on June 24, 2016

“Oh dear, I’d better stay in bed,” groaned my English wife, Gillian,
when I woke her on Friday morning with the sad news 
that her compatriots had voted to leave the European Union. 
Before pulling the blanket over her head she said, 
“Life will never be the same again.”

Four hours later, she rose, showered, dressed in black and
went out with three elderly, black-clad Englishwomen to have lunch 
in the restaurant “La Lavalette” in our little market town 
of Villebois-Lavalette in the Charente region of France.
 
All four have had reasons to mourn. As for Gillian, her reason was evident.
 
Indeed! More than half a century ago, 
we fulfilled for our part the vision of conciliation Winston Churchill 
had confided to his wife, Clementine, shortly after World War II: 
“If only I were ten years younger, 
I could perhaps become the first president of the United States of Europe.”
 
We wanted to leave our gruesome wartime memories behind us.
We had both lost our homes to bombings, 
Gillian in Southampton and I in Leipzig, Germany. 
We had stood before smoldering piles of rubble 
knowing that they contained the shredded corpses of people we loved. 
I was eight years old when my family buried my aunt Martha’s right hand, 
the only recognizable part of her body; 
it was identified by the wedding band on her ring finger.

We had witnessed the bloody consequences of hatred and vowed
to never let that sentiment enter our lives again, 
but now we note with sadness, disgust and fury that the next generation
succumbed to demons we believed exorcized once and forever.
When we met and married in 1962, 
we were so full of hope and buoyancy, 
dancing the Twist in the Saddle Room on Park Lane, London’s first discotheque.

Like many other young Europeans at that time, we just wanted to
love each other, and we kept our marriage vows for 54 years so
far, eleven years longer than the United Kingdom managed to
persevere in the European Union where by all logical measures,
economic, political and otherwise UK should have remained,
especially with the world around us in turmoil.

Yes, we are angry beyond measure because we have seen, 
heard and read the gradual buildup of bigotry 
that was the handiwork of narrowminded ideologues and 
– I state this based on my 60 years in international journalism – 
contemptible tabloid reporters and editors, 
notably those working for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and his now defunct News of the World.

I myself was the managing editor of a German tabloid once composing wicked headlines. 
But never – and I also can say for all my competitors in Germany – 
never ever were these intended to stir hatred against the people of other nations. 
This much we had learned from our dreadful past. 
In fact there exists no equivalent in the German language for “Hun” and “Kraut” (German), 
“Frog” (Frenchman) and “Wop” (Italian), invectives denigrating England’s European neighbors.
As a journalist, I may borrow a line from Emila Zola: “J’accuse”! 
I accuse irresponsible poseurs in my noble craft of devoting decades 
to undoing gratuitously the conciliatory work Winston Churchill, a former journalist, 
had started when he initiated the process of reconciliation by suggesting 
the formation of the United States of Europe in his Zurich speech of September 19, 1946:

As a journalist, I accuse those who fraudulently call themselves
journalists of helping to create an atmosphere of odium that might
well have contributed to the murder of Jo Cox, 

a pro-EU memberof parliament and mother of two children. 

Oh, you had nothing to do with this, you say? 

Pray dive into those cesspools ofcontemporary online journalism, 

those venomous readers’ blogs
under your repulsive diatribes against the European Union and its
British advocates; plumb the spirit in which they were written: 

This wasn’t the spirit of Winston Churchill; it was the spirit of Joseph Goebbels!

Once I challenged a star columnist of the Daily Telegraph, another EU-hating London paper, 

after reading one of his habitual broadsides against our community of nations,

 which included one the British Europhobes’ constant allusions to World War II. 

Not that I would ever deny how annoyingly the E.U. is often run, 

but for all its shortcomings it has contributed strongly to the prosperity
and peace Gillian’s and my generation desired so fervently.
But explaining this to him in an email, I gave him an opportunity to dig into his treasure of clichés. 

“You just proved again that Germans have no sense of humor,” he wrote back.

“My father was blinded in World War I,” I answered. 

“My wife and I spend our childhood in air raid shelters fearing for our lives night after night. 

When it was over I experienced a legacy of shame, 

I caught tuberculosis I was only allowed 700 calories a day. 

Given all that, I am not ashamed of being called a humorless Hun after
responding to flippant remarks about the war.”

To his credit, he apologized. 

But this didn’t stop his anti-European polemics.

In the eyes of my generation of reporters, 

an alien new tribe of journalists has shaped half of British public opinion on the subject of Europe 

(and, I hasten to add, American opinion as well, to wit Peggy Noonan’s inanely one-sided 

“Declarations” in the Wall Street Journal on the weekend before the Brexit vote). 

When I was a war correspondent in Vietnam and the Middle East 

I always traveled in the company of splendid British colleagues, 

and we teased each other mercilessly, but always in a self-deprecating manner. 

One of my most amusing friends in the trade was Donald Wise of the Daily Mirror, 

a former major in the British commandos with the looks of David Niven.

Once following the Six-Day War in 1967, which I had covered from
the Arab side, Donald and I met on the banks of the Jordan River. 

Israel had just opened the Allenby Bridge allowing Palestinian refugees
to return from Amman back to their homes on the occupied West Bank. 

I accompanied them to the checkpoint. Donald stood on the
other side of the Jordan surrounded by comely Israeli women soldiers.

“Hey, Uwe, you old Nazi, see what you are getting for being such
an old Nazi,” he shouted pointing at the veiled women I was with.
 

“And see what I’ve got for not being an old Nazi,” he continued
squeezing two delicious wenches in mini-skirted uniforms.

The Israeli soldiers hissed and threatening to lob rock against me.
“Stop this,” Donald commanded them with a crisp British officer’s voice. 

“This chap is no Nazi. He is my best friend. 

Don’t you dopey birds have a sense of humor?”

It is the staggering lack of this sense of self-irony combined with
an absence of generosity among the current agitprop types posing
as journalists Gillian I lament so much. Je les accuse! 

I accuse them of shamelessly conspiring with demagogues such as 

Boris Johnson, the Europhobic former mayor of London whose willful
muddling of truths and facts in the Brexit campaign fits the
unkempt way he presents himself in public: 

like an unmade bed. 

I charge them with two unforgivable offenses:

Firstly, they led the British electorate astray at a time when in the
face of Vladimir Putin’s Russian menace, the huge international
refugee crisis and the apocalyptic war declared on all of us
nothing could be more important than European and transatlantic unity.

Secondly they persuaded the muddle-brained generation that
followed Gillian’s and mine to vote against their very children who
according to every poll fervently desired to be proudly British 

but committed Europeans. 

I wonder if they will ever forgive their parents.

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With great thanks to my dear friend Uwe for this article

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also thanks

to Karen from  Pas Grand-Chose  for her post:

"To Europe with love"
here 

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A bientôt....

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Every comment is very much appreciated and any opinion will be respected.

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Remark:

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United
Press International, has been an international journalist for 60
years, covering the U.K., North America, Vietnam, the Middle East
and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto is the
founder and director emeritus of the League of Faithful Masks and
Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Capistrano Beach, California.

Books by Uwe Siemon-Netto: 

Triumph of the Absurd: 

A Reporter's Love for the Abandoned People of Vietnam

available at Amazon     here

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The Fabricated Luther  -  available at Amazon  here

 

A BLACK FRIDAY for EUROPE....

 ...the Brits have voted to move out of the "European House", the EU.

 Devastating 

I'm almost in tears.

In Europe, the vote is already being called an earthquake in the politics, 
and economies, of Britain and the continent. 
Political unionists fear the end of the "European project",
another status qou.

No country has ever left the EU, but Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders
 immediately called for a referendum, 
and France's National Front leader Marine Le Pen, 
who will run for president next year, hailed the result.

So, what comes next?

Nexit (Netherlands)?  Frexit (Fance)?  Poxit (Poland)?
Öxit (Österreich/Austria)?  or Huxit (Hungary)? .....?

It is frightening.

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QUO  VADIS  Europe ? 

 Dear European friends, wherever you live,
please keep in mind: 
only together we are strong.

Only together can we build up a sense of a joint nationhood.

Don't let the right-wing populists win.
Their policies and rethoric are considered a provocation to our democratic culture. 

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I'll keep up hope for a peaceful cohabitation in an united Europe.

 

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BREXIT

"An EU without Britain would be like tea without milk. Bitter."

In mainland Europe, voices encouraging Britain to leave the EU are hard to find:

  

Germany: “Please don’t go!”

Der Spiegel, Germany’s biggest news magazine, wrote the following in a special bilingual issue:

“Britain is a bridge between Europe and the US. If Britain leaves the EU on this side of the Atlantic while Donald Trump becomes president on the other, then seemingly permanent alliances will wobble, and a weakened Europe would end up alone, helpless amid myriad global crises.

“If the right-wing populists grow stronger, because Europe suddenly weakens and shrinks just as they are on the rise, what will remain of the ideal of tolerant and progressive cooperation that defines the west?

“So if Britain is clever, it will realise that it is not a world power on its own, that it will lose much with a yes to Brexit on June 23, and gain nothing but a brief moment of pride…

“The day after the vote, the British should understand that they themselves helped create this detested Europe that they were so close to leaving, and start building a better one.”

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France: “The country which cornered Napoleon cannot succumb to Nigel Farage.”

In an editorial written in English, Le Monde compared Brexit to France’s experience of defeat at the Battle of Waterloo:

“Defeat does not come easily to a proud nation. On June 18th, 1815, France did not only lose thousands of its brave soldiers on the gory fields of Belgium. It lost an Emperor, whom the English then took into permanent exile on the desolate island of St Helena; it also lost its dream of hegemony…

“Messieurs les Anglais, don’t let the sirens of a fake independence pull you away from the continent. Just as in 1815, your future is in Europe.”

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The Netherlands:

"A letter to our beloved Britons"

“Hello Britain, this is your neighbour calling. Please don’t leave us. Of course, there will always be a Great Britain, anchored only 20 miles from the continent. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we feel at ease in your amazing country. Since our King William III (of Orange) married your Queen Mary II (of England) we have been related anyway.

“Nobody in Britain appreciates your culture more than we do. The Beatles, Bridget Jones, One Direction, Eastenders, Brideshead Revisited, we love it all. Many of us know Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch by heart. We admire your stiff upper lip. And every year we remember, with the greatest respect, all those who have fallen to liberate our country.

“Now you are thinking of leaving us. Sailing out your floating country towards distant shores, so says your largest newspaper, The Sun. Talking to a Dutch uncle, we have to tell you this is not a good idea. We not only love you, we need you. Who else supports us in keeping some common sense on this turbulent continent of ours. An EU without the UK would be like tea without milk. Bitter.

“So please stay. Stay with us. 
Best wishes, your neighbours.”

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read more here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/heres-what-european-newspapers-are-saying-about-the-eu-refer?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&utm_term=.kf9qNdb7j#.edQq4Q2yo 

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Whitsun Greetings

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Johann Sebastian Bach's Whitsun Cantatas

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Portrait of Bach, aged 61, by E. G. Haussmann, 1748

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Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He enriched established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms, and textures from abroad, particularly from Italy and France. Bach's compositions include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Mass in B minor, two Passions, and over three hundred cantatas of which around two hundred survive. His music is revered for its technical command, artistic beauty, and intellectual depth.

Bach's abilities as an organist were highly respected during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognised as a great composer until a revival of interest in and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century. He is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Reflection - Good Friday 2016 - Karfreitag

"I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes. 

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there. 

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?"

"Lines of Early Spring"

By William Wordsworth

7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850

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Despite the present circumstances in Brussel, 
in Europe... Middle East... Far East....and...
in the whole world....

We wish this world a peaceful Easter,
as peaceful as it can be.

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