The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 4 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Easier (as with most matters that require our patience and daily devotion) said than done. How are we of weary eye and soul to transcend sensory experience, to recognize the divine image in its lowliest form? We begin, I think with step one.

• Step 1: Acknowledge that Seymour Glass' Fat Lady is indeed Christ Himself

• Step 2: Acknowledge that there isn't anyone out there who is not Seymour's Fat Lady

• Step 3: Read aloud the following:
• Carlton Farthington is the Fat Lady.
• Don Gilber is the Fat Lady.
• That student who talks over me every single day in class and blatantly disregards all guidance and direction is the Fat Lady.
• Donald Trump is the Fat Lady.
• That person who perpetuates cruelty to our most vulnerable and oppressed is the Fat Lady.
• Hitler, ISIS, and Stalin are all Fat Ladies.
• My inner demon is the Fat Lady.
• I am the Fat Lady.

• Step 4: Repeat Step 3, but with conviction this time.

• Step 5: Acknowledge that each of the aforementioned is, indeed, Christ Himself. Acknowledge this every day.

• Step 6: For instructions on utilizing this mindfulness to combat our daily human propensity to judge our enemies (demonic as they and we may be) with love and mercy, I invoke at long last the luminous Dorothy Day (from a symposium on "Transcendence," sponsored by the Church Society for College Work, 1968):

God made men and women to be happy...yet how can we be happy today? How can we transcend this misery of ours? How can we believe in a transcendent God when the Immanent God seems so powerless within time, when demonic forces seem to be let loose? Certainly our God is a hidden God. I would say there are evidences of transcendence in the striving for community among the poor and destitute among whom we live in city and country. Men and women have persisted in their hope for happiness. They have hoped against hope though all the evidence seemed to point to the fact that human nature could not be changed. Always they have tried to recover Eden, and the history of our own country shows attempts to found communities where people could live together in that happiness which God seemed to have planned for us. (...) But how to love? That is the question.