Laura Knight Jadczyk

Last night I completed a book. I don’t mean I wrote it, though it did involve a lot of writing, what I mean is that I put a lot of stuff between covers and it is now called a book - an album. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Well, let me explain.

A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted to put my book "Amazing Grace" - a story of my early life and awakening - back on the website but I also wanted to include a lot of photos that were not included in the print version because printing photos in a book makes the cost go too high. In order to include selected photos, that meant I needed to go through my photo collection. That presented problems.

You see, for over 30 years, I’ve been collecting photos. Some of these photos are those I have taken myself, but there was a whole LOT of them that I received as collections from various family members now deceased. In some cases, there were large boxes of photos - I mean like 12 x 18 x 10 inch boxes - that’s a LOT of photographs! In other cases, I received albums that were partially complete, with envelopes of photos yet to be included, and the albums themselves were a mess, jumbled and poorly organized. Add to that the many photos I have taken myself since my children were born and we are talking about a box of photographs the size of a sea trunk! Going through it was NOT going to be a one day job!

But, I dragged the huge plastic storage container (so big it has its own wheels!) out of my closet down to the dining room and proceeded to unpack it onto the table. Then I started going through photos quickly, sorting them into piles according to type and family line. I really wish I had taken a photo of this process but… Anyway, I then started sorting them in to sub-piles… getting according to chronology. My children came in to have a look and wanted to go through the photos but I stopped them saying that they couldn’t be messing with my organizational efforts! I then realized that these photos were doing nobody any good at all packed away in a box for years and years and me telling the kids not to look at them because they might disorganize them! So, I resolve to do what I had been telling myself that I WOULD do for years and years and years: put them into albums!

That, of course, delayed the prospect of putting Amazing Grace onto the web! And putting the photos into albums was delayed by having to find appropriate albums and materials that could deal with the collection. I needed big albums of a certain type and certainly particular methods of installing some very old and delicate photos. After a week or so, the albums arrived and I was able to find some good double sided tape tabs and transparent photo corners, and so on.

At this point, a lot of other things were going on and I wasn’t able to get to the project, so the stacks of photos and albums and tools sat on the dining room table waiting for me to "getaminnit" to work on it. Only I knew it wasn’t going to be just a minute! It was going to be a project taking several weeks of daily work! The enormity of the task just overwhelmed me and, in addition to having to do other things, I also was finding excuses to NOT begin! Heck, I didn’t know HOW to begin! How do you organize very old photos from different families that, only later come together? Do you just start putting them in strictly chronologically and hope that the viewer will be able to know who is who and how they connect? For example, I have a copy of a tintype taken in 1874 of the family of my paternal grandmother. Then I have photos of great grandparents on my maternal side, sisters of my great grandmother on my mother’s side, and so on. If I just stick them in together because they are associated in a chronological way, and continue in that manner, the "stream of life" of any one particular family will be lost in the mixing!

So, I decided to modify the plan; what I would do would be to start with my father’s family, proceed chronologically until the point in time when my parents married and then I would switch to my mother’s family and bring them along to the same point. Then I would proceed from there strictly chronologically, mixing photos from the same time periods from both families.

Of course the plan was slightly complicated by the fact that I also had photos from the grandparents families and I had to follow each line chronologically (to some extent) until the grandparents met and married and produced my parents!

Believe me, this was NOT an easy task! Thankfully, at one point in my life, I sat down with my grandmother and boxes of photos and she had me write on the back of each one who was in the photo and the approximate time. Also, thankfully, someone performed a similar service on many other photos in my collection. My maternal grandmother also collected news articles and obituaries of family members, so that was available to provide chronological data. I also had a lot of information in my genealogy program and a big binder with plastic sheet protectors full of birth, marriage, and death certificates for many family members that I had been collecting for the genealogy project that was an obsession some ten or so years ago. Still, there were a certain number of important photographs about which I had little or no information. I had to resort to a tedious and exhausting process of scanning, blowing up and examining photographs for clues to who was in them and what period they came from!

Now, all of the above is just the logistics of this project. No wonder I didn’t want to get started!

But, as it happens, Christmas is coming and we are going to need the dining room table - we can’t eat in the kitchen forever - and I knew that I was NOT going to put all those stacks of photos back in the box after having gone to the trouble of going through them, sorting and organizing them! I knew I had to start. I had painted myself into a corner. So, two weeks ago, I sat down and began.

Oh, Lord! I didn’t know it was going to hurt so much to organize the lives of my family! With each photograph I placed in the album, I knew I had to write a description so that my children could sit down and look at the album and know the details even if I am no longer there to describe who is who and what they are doing and why the photo was taken and what was going on in their lives in the background. And so, there was a LOT of writing going on. Some album pages are half text.

When I came to the photo of Aunt Minnie - my grandmother’s aunt and my great aunt - as a young girl, I had to decide what to write about her. There she was with her kind, sort of clueless, face. She didn’t know that she was going to marry an older man, that they would then have their only child later in life, that he would die soon after the child was born, and that the child would later be in an accident that transformed a laughing dancing little girl into a quadriplegic who lived that way for 40 years. Aunt Minnie didn’t know that she was going to devote her life to caring for her invalid daughter.

Then, there was Aunt Lizzie - sister of Minnie - who the whole family knew as "Evil Aunt Lizzie." Was I going to write some text telling why she was considered to be an evil, manipulative bitch? Don’t people say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead? Well, I’m not afraid of the dead coming back to haunt me so I thought it was proper to tell the story of Aunt Lizzie and how her only child finally escaped her clutches only to die at a young age from a heart attack - probably because his mother made him feel endlessly guilty. (This woman dressed that boy as a girl until he was almost 5 years old! You should see the photos of him with his long ringlets!)

Then, there was my great-grandmother Laura, after whom I am named, the most beautiful of the sisters and the one that suffered the most, too. She didn’t know that, when she married Mr. Reed in 1925 after 20 years being a widow, that two years later he would murder her! And the photos of my grandmother and her new husband and infant children (including my mother) did not give any evidence of this impending tragedy, though all the photos afterward are grim and unsmiling. It was a blow from which the family did not recover - even to this day. I felt obliged to explain what happened and to include the news article about the murder as well as copies of the marriage certificate in chronological order. How else to explain the "after" photos, their character, the faces, the obvious withdrawal of my grandmother from being photographed at all for almost 25 years.

There was a photograph of my father smiling impishly in his sailor suit before WW II. How to explain that his twin went on to have an illustrious military career, but that my father was so badly injured in an auto accident that he almost lost his arm (he did lose parts of it!) and was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons. There were photos of him before and after… and ever after, with one or two exceptions, when he was photographed it was with his left arm (the injured one), held jauntily in his pocket so that the fact that this arm was now several inches shorter than the other would not be noticed. Than certainly needed explaining!

And so on… I think you have the idea. It is a rare page in this album that only has a name and date under it; most of them have entire paragraphs of text beside each photo! So, it was a long process.

Anyway, last night I finally made it to 1949 and the end of the album. In a 150 page album, there were only 2 1/2 pages left blank at the end and I haven’t even been born yet! (I also did not include a LOT of photos that were not of people because they simply aren’t relevant to the story of the people!)

I took the finished First Album into the kitchen where everyone was having dinner to show that it was actually done, that we would soon be able to eat in the dining room! The kids pronounced the book to be similar to the book of Genesis in the Bible - the family history - but I could only say that it was more like Tragedy and Hope. It was the remembering and re-living the family history that was more the ordeal than the actual doing of the task. So much Hope followed by so much Tragedy, and then hope again. In the end, what is the lesson? What can we really learn from an accurate history?

Over and over again, when I consider this family history, I see that Hope is based on people just trying to do what is right according to their own understanding but the Tragedy comes in because their understanding is based on illusions or delusions; lack of accurate knowledge and sharing of information. Hope that is based on emotion based illusion seems to inevitably lead to tragedy. The evidence is right there in that 150 page photo album that displays the lives and times of a dozen or so families. And that reminds me of the saying of Santayana: Those that do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. This is true not only in a large, social sense, it is true in the context of families. We need to really know our history, know how we have been influenced by events of the past through our family members, and know their histories and what their choices led them to, so that if we don’t like their history, we can find a way to change it in our own lives. As Gurdjieff wrote:

Faith of consciousness is freedom

Faith of feeling is weakness

Faith of body is stupidity.

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response

Love of feeling evokes the opposite

Love of body depends on type and polarity.

Hope of consciousness is strength

Hope of feeling is slavery

Hope of body is disease.

My family album - "Genesis" as we will now call it - is evidence that these words are so true. And with the knowledge that I have - and have now put into a form that can be passed on to my children - I hope that we can all become free of false faith, love and hope.

It has been quite a long time since I’ve actually written a post here or, for that matter, anywhere else. The quick answer to those of you who have written to inquire is that I had major surgery to rebuild my right shoulder back in April and went into a serious health decline after, probably due to stress and years of neglecting my health. By mid-July, I knew I had to either give it up or do something serious and I started a program of rejuvenation on August 2nd which has been remarkably successful. After one month of following the program, I felt like I had dropped 15 years! After being in pain most of my life (I developed arthritis at the age of 9), it is great to go through most days pain free!

For the past few years I have been, little by little, handing over many of my website responsibilities to others. Signs of the Times has been in the hands of its international editors for some time now, so that by the time I went into the hospital, there wasn’t much to worry about in that respect. Of course, there was the Higher Balance Institute/Eric Pepin lawsuit (and that is still running in the background) and that produced a certain amount of stress, mainly because it has been so extraordinarily costly. But, as I have pointed out, if I caved in to that silly temper tantrum, it would just encourage other, similar tantrums by other petty tyrants all over the internet. It IS about free speech and the right to comment on news and products and the people behind them, and letting Pepin and his gang get away with their nonsense would set a dangerous precedent for others.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. As it happens, during my convalescence, I was able to turn my attention back to my real loves: psychology, history and history of religion. (Believe it or not, my only real interest in politics is that it is history in real time!) I have been just glutting myself with reading and watching videos while in therapy.

Some months ago I pre-ordered (from amazon.com), Niels Peter Lemche’s new book "The Old Testament Between Theology and History." After reading all the available books by Thomas L. Thompson, Philip R. Davies, Garbini, Mack, Cryer, Cline, Whitelam, Van Seters and others, I was anxiously awaiting the release of this volume. It arrived yesterday morning. For me, it was like being a child with a new pair of patent leather shoes! I actually took it to bed with me even though I wasn’t going to read last night. (My husband, Ark, and I have been watching the old Perry Mason series every night - we find it to be very relaxing before going to sleep and with the new health kick I’m on, I’m all about relaxing at bedtime!)

This morning, I was up at 6:30 to get in some quiet reading time. At breakfast, (eggs laid this morning by our free range chickens!), Ark asked me what the new book was about. I told him that it was the new volume by one of my favorite scholars/authors and that the topic was the history of religion. He asked me if Lemche wrote "without mercy", (he knows what I like!) and I said, "yes, indeed! And that’s why he’s one of my favorite people!" Ark understood what I meant: I admire people who can be ruthless with themselves and constantly strive for my own personal objectivity. I don’t always succeed, but I consider it a virtue to not be self-deceived as so many people are who want only to live without conscience.

What is interesting in the introduction to this book is that Lemche outlines briefly the development of his views of the Old Testament. In 1984, his book "Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society" was published and it was quite a new thing in this particular field of study, being a synthesis of Israelite history and religion written from the perspective of social anthropology. The main thesis of this book was:

• Israel emerged as the result of a social development within Canaanite society in Palestine in the last half of the second millennium BCE. It was not a consequence of an "Israelite" migration from the desert.
• Israelite religion was "originally" a Canaanite religion. Only toward the middle of the first millennium did it assume the particular characteristics normally considered "Jewish" monotheism.
• The Old Testament includes practiccally no historical sources older than, say, the sevent-sixth centuries BCE. It is accordingly not possible on the basis of the narratives in the Old Testament to reconstruct any Israelite history dating back before 1000 BCE. If such a history can be constructed, it demands the inclusion of written and archaeological sources not found in the Old Testament.
• The idea of history in the Old Testament arose as a consequence of political catastrophes that hit the historical Israel toward the middle of the first millennium BCE.

It is interesting to me to note that this book was adopted by theological students and was translated into English in 1988. At that time, some scholars even thought that some of the ideas were obsolete! That means that there are a lot of theological types out there who are fully aware of this view of the Old Testament, but somehow that does not translate into knowledge generally disseminated among the "believers" - at least, certainly not in the large majority of American churches.

Here, allow me to digress a moment. The selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate in the US presidential contest was a revelation. Before this "dark horse" appeared on the scene, many people - myself included - were simply not aware of the Dominionists and their evil Fascist agenda to take over the world and initiate the Eschaton, so to say. Those people are delusional and quite simply crazy as bedbugs. Unfortunately, the DSM-IV does not list religious convictions - no matter how crazy they are - as pathological. At least not the version I read last, the DSM-III. This version defines delusions as "false belief based on an incorrect inference about external reality." A delusion is an idea that is firmly sustained, despite "incontrovertible proof to the contrary." The "belief" that one interacts with "spirits" is defined as a "delusion of being controlled, in which feelings, impulses, thoughs or actions are experienced as being not one’s own, as being imposed by some external force." (Never mind the reams of evidence that people do, in fact, interact with spirits quite often while there is no evidence that anyone ever interacts with "god"!)

Well, to me, that sounds like someone who’s "got religion." But "religious context" is pointedly EXCLUDED from this diagnosis! The DSM-III went on to say: "This does not include the mere conviction that one is acting as an agent of God." That’s Sarah Palin and her Dominionist crazies, alright. I always thought it was a bizarre contradiction that psychiatrists (as they express themselves in the DSM volumes) consider it acceptable to be deluded by religion but that it is pathological in any other context.

Anyway, back to Lemche. He goes on to explain the evolution of his thinking on the subject of the Old Testament and how, by the time of the fourth edition of his book some of the theses of the first edition had morphed into:

• The concept of "Israel" appeared as the result of an ideological reorientation among the people who were deported from Palestine to Mesopotamia in connection with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the state of Judah.
• Jewish monotheism came into being in the postexilic period, in competition with other contemporary religious currents that confronted Jewish Yahwism both in Palestine and in the exile. The "old" polytheistic religion did not disappear with the exile but continued to exist down into the postexilic period.
• The historiography of the Old Testament is hardly to be dated to the seventh or sixth century BCE. It is most likely a product of the postexilic period.

His changing perspectives were the result of the constant development of Old Testament studies including his own researches and examination of the wealth of material being brought to light through various scientific and soft-science disciplines. But this is an ongoing process. As Lemche notes, the theses above did not survive for long either! In 1997 he reformulated his views as follows:

• "Ancient Israel" is an ideological concept created by modern historians and students of the Bible. It has only a peripheral relationship to the historical states of Israel and Judah in Palestine in the Iron Age.
• Israelite religion as found in the Old Testament is already interpreted in the light of Judaism. Judaism appeared as a monotheistic movement among several other similar movements in the first millennium BCE. When it appeared, Judaism was able to construct a history of Israel as its national foundation myth.
• Old Testament writings are mostly to be dated to the Hellenistic period. As a concept and as a canonical collection, the Old Testament hardly predates the appearance of Christianity.

Wow! Lemche made some serious leaps there! And he now says that if he were to present a new edition of his 1984 book, he would have to re-write 90% of it!

Well, anyway, this is what I talked about with my husband at breakfast this morning. I also talked about the fact that I really understand the progress Lemche made because my own emergence from Christianity has followed a similar pattern. In the beginning, I studied the Bible to have a "closer relationship" with the origins of my religion. As time went by, my love for truth trumped blind belief and, little by little I was compelled by merciless objectivity to admit the obvious: it was all a big fraud likely created and perpetrated and perpetuated by pathological individuals.

I really admire people like astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who could apply his scientific brain to the problem of religion at the age of about 14 and conclude that it was only sensible that religion should be subjected to the same standards of proof as anything else in our world, and was then able to blithely discard it as an issue. That was a special case, I think. More problematical are the people who are able to discard the "mysterious" in our world without even a backward glance and take up skepticism as their religion. You have to wonder what lack of emotional depth or soul animates such people.

It wasn’t easy for me to come to many of the views I hold today regarding religions, the consensus reality that is inured in those religious beliefs, and True Reality which can only be seen by subjecting beliefs to the same kinds of tests and challenges that any hypothesis requires. Sometimes giving up our warm, comforting beliefs is a painful, protracted process; but then, so is growing up.