Prayer Flags Quotes

Author's Prayer If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender. If I speak of them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through the rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?" I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror. Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition and the darkest days must I praise.

Two things I ask of my God today. That my faith be hoisted high like a kite up in the sky and my fear be buried deeply like a carcass into the soil.

The blackness of night is an essential quality of the Divine Feminine. The "black cloak" of Muhammad is very famous. The Sûfîs sing about kali kamaliya vala (the one wrapped in the black blanket) in their qawwalis (spiritual songs). Muhammad's prayer rug was also black, as was the first flag of Islam.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or “desecrating” (literally, making unholy) the flag.

Moses grew weary, and then his friends assisted him. When at any time your prayer flags, let faith support one hand, and let holy hope uplift the other, and prayer seating itself upon the stone of Israel, the rock of our salvation, will persevere and prevail.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

Because this is an urban church in a downtown neighborhood, it is not so easy to avoid the presence of the poor. We see them. I wonder if that is not part of our vocation, to see the poor, to be the Lord's eyes - because the Lord sees the poor, and he loves the poor, and he sends his people to serve the poor. That is a message that pervades the Scriptures from end to end. There is something seriously out of balance in American Christianity. I am personally opposed to abortion, but there is nothing explicit in the Bible about abortion. There is nothing explicit in the Bible about prayer in the public schools; there is nothing explicit in the Bible about the American flag or the right to have a gun. There are, however, thousands of explicit words in the Bible about justice and compassion for the poor. There are thousands of words in the Bible about defending those who are defenseless.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or “desecrating” (literally, making unholy) the flag. Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights.

Owing to the lack of serious and informed popular interest in real issues, we have the current Republican menu of pseudo-issues: abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, prayer in schools, sharia law, and so on. They are simple to grasp and well within the ambit of the average person who does not follow politics.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

If we want to We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan’s gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer’s belly We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognizes the importance of small details We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful!’ We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

So Justo comes to listen. The language always has been the most important act of separation anyway, as the bond is to the words more than to the land. Since nothing on maps reflects their existence, the extent of their “country” is the range of their language. But like the dances, the flag, and the celebrations, the words are banned, making a prayer whispered in Basque as illegal as a call to arms in the public square.

Power deities, for all their strength, are very much like humans, They are subjects to periods of despair and are not free from the crippling consequences of emotions, For over two decades Tibetans were forbidden from holding any religious ceremonies or prayers. No prayer flags, incense or ceremonies were offered to the deities and demi-gods of the region. This neglect broke their hearts and they became bedraggled and weak.

When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities. This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark. Bruce.

Plodding slowly up the last few steps to the summit, I had the sensation of being underwater, of life moving at quarter speed. And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth.

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce—laughable for their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril.

Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best answer but the only one.

The girl looked too frightened to speak. Then she said: “I know you have to give my mother the flag—at the funeral. I know what my mother’s gonna do—when you give her the flag. She said she’s gonna spit on you,” the pregnant sister told Owen. “And I know her—she will!” the girl said. “She’ll spit in your face!” “IT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES,” Owen said.

Lhasa The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

Tibetan Dreams The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

You pledged to cut waste. We now have a Protect-Our-Children Czar, Protect-the-Flag Czar, Fight-for-Prayer Czar, Devil-Music Czar and, as of today, something called a Family-Values Czar. What’s going on here?” “Efficient government is what’s going on!” said Conrad. Staff members along the walls applauded and cheered. “I thought Republicans were against government growth.” “This is completely different,” said Marlon. “How’s that?” “We use the word czar.

Most moving of all was Raymond Massey’s voice, the voice that portrayed Lincoln in Bob Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, reading Stephen Vincent Benét’s Prayer for United Nations,2 which the President himself had once recited on Flag Day: “God of the Free, we pledge our lives and hearts today to the cause of all free mankind…. Grant us brotherhood in hope and union, not only for the space of this bitter war, but for the days to come which shall and must unite all the children of earth.

This is the hospital's idea of nondenominational." She points around the chapel. There is a crucifix mounted on the wall, a flag of a cross draped over the lectern, and a few paintings of the Madonna and Child hanging in the back."We have a token Star of David," she says, gesturing to the six-pointed star on the wall. "But what about the Muslims? No prayer rugs or symbol to show which way is east towards Mecca? And what about the Buddhists? Couldn't they spring for a gong? I mean there are probably more Buddhists than Jews in Portland anyway.

The Lama of the Crystal Monastery appears to be a very happy man, and yet I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because of his legs, may never leave again. Since Jang-bu seems uncomfortable with the Lama or with himself or perhaps with us, I tell him not to inquire on this point if it seems to him impertinent, but after a moment Jang-bu does so. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang-bu’s question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, 'Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!' In its wholehearted acceptance of what is, this is just what Soen Roshi might have said: I Feel as if he had struck me in the chest. I thank him, bow, go softly down the mountain: under my parka, the folded prayer flag glows. Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow - it's quite enough! Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. It is unending. I heave myself over the final lip and strain to pull myself clear of the edge. I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating. Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air. I unclip off the rope while still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up. I get to my feet and start staggering onward. I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags semisubmerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit--the place of dreams. I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me. It is adrenaline coursing around my veins and muscles. I have never felt so strong--and yet so weak--all at the same time. Intermittent waves of adrenaline and fatigue come and go as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments. I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope. A sweeping curve--curling along the crest of the ridge toward the summit. Thank God. It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up onto the roof of the world. I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused. I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask. However many of these pathetically slow shuffles I take, this place never seems to get any closer. But it is. Slowly the summit is looming a little nearer. I can feel my eyes welling up with tears. I start to cry and cry inside my mask. Emotions held in for so long. I can’t hold them back any longer. I stagger on.

Reading all the healing stories together, I now detect in the Gospels a kind of “ladder of faith.” At the top of the ladder stand those people who impressed Jesus with bold, unshakable faith: a centurion, an impertinent blind beggar, a persistent Canaanite woman. These stories of gristly faith threaten me, because seldom do I have such faith. I am easily discouraged by the silence of God. When my prayers are not answered, I am tempted to give up and not ask again. For this reason, I look down the ladder to find people of lesser faith, and it heartens me to learn that Jesus seemed willing to work with whatever tiny glimmer of faith came to light. I cling to the tender accounts of how Jesus treated the disciples who forsook and then doubted him. The same Jesus who praised the bold faith of those high up the ladder also gently quickened the flagging faith of his disciples.

SMALLER, BUT I CAN STILL SEE YOU!” said Owen Meany. Then he left us; he was gone. I could tell by his almost cheerful expression that he was at least as high as the palm trees. Major Rawls saw to it that Owen Meany got a medal. I was asked to make an eyewitness report, but Major Rawls was instrumental in pushing the proper paperwork through the military chain of command. Owen Meany was awarded the so-called Soldier’s Medal: “For heroism that involves the voluntary risk of life under conditions other than those of conflict with an opposing armed force.” According to Major Rawls, the Soldier’s Medal rates above the Bronze Star but below the Legion of Merit. Naturally, it didn’t matter very much to me—exactly where the medal was rated—but I think Rawls was right in assuming that the medal mattered to Owen Meany. Major Rawls did not attend Owen’s funeral. When I spoke on the telephone with him, Rawls was apologetic about not making the trip to New Hampshire; but I assured him that I completely understood his feelings. Major Rawls had seen his share of flag-draped caskets;

I know what the cynics will say. I know how the scoffers will sneer. I know the non-dreamers believing only in the brutal ways of force will laugh me off as impossibly naive. But I don’t care. I’ve grown immune to their strain of unbelief. I’ve turned a corner. I believe that what Isaiah dreamed of, Jesus died for. I believe that what Isaiah said would come to pass in the last days, Jesus inaugurated in his resurrection. I’ve caught a glimpse of the better world that can be—a world that Jesus came to give and continues to offer us. I believe the world of peace is possible in Christ. I won’t let the doomsday preppers with their Armageddon obsession talk me out of it. Jesus has already spoken the first word of a new world—the word peace. So things have changed. I have changed. I’ve prayed my last war prayer and preached my last war sermon. I’ve given up bellicose flag waving and singing lustily about bombs bursting in air. I’ve bid a final farewell to Mars. From now on I follow the Prince of Peace. I know others will come with me. Maybe you will be one of them. I hope so.

It had had a fragrant element, reminding him of a regular childhood experience, a memory that reverberated like the chimes of a prayer bell inside his head. For a few moments, he pictured the old Orthodox church that had dominated his remote Russian village. The bearded priest was swinging the elaborate incense-burner, suspended from gold-plated chains. It had been the same odour. Hadn’t it? He blinked, shook his head. He couldn’t make sense of that. He decided, with an odd lack of enthusiasm, that he’d imagined it. The effects of the war played tricks of the mind, of the senses. Looking over his shoulder, he counted all seven of his men as they emerged from the remnants of the four-storey civic office building. A few muddied documents were scattered on the ground, stamped with the official Nazi Party eagle, its head turned to the left, and an emblem he failed to recognize, but which looked to him like a decorative wheel, with a geometrical design of squares at its centre. Even a blackened flag had survived the bomb damage. Hanging beneath a crumbling windowsill, the swastika flapped against the bullet-ridden façade, the movement both panicky and defiant, Pavel thought. His men were conscripts. A few still wore their padded khaki jackets and mustard-yellow blouses. Most, their green field tunics and forage caps. All the clothing was lice-ridden and smeared with soft ash. Months of exposure to frozen winds had darkened their skins and narrowed their eyes. They’d been engaged in hazardous reconnaissance missions. They’d slept rough and had existed on a diet of raw husks and dried horsemeat. Haggard and weary now, he reckoned they’d aged well beyond their years.

Steve loved showing off his new son. When we brought him home, all the zoo staff welcomed the new arrival. We have always had a good relationship with a group of Buddhist monks from Tibet. They had blessed Bindi when she was a newborn. As Robert celebrated his one-month birthday, we decided to hold a fund-raiser for a Buddhist nun’s convent where the well had dried up. A new well would cost forty thousand dollars. We felt that amount might be achievable in a series of fund-raising events. We invited the nuns to stay at Australia Zoo and planned to hold a fund-raiser at our brand-new Crocoseum, doing our part to help raise some money for the new well. The nuns wished to know if we wanted them to bless the animals while they were at the zoo. “Would you please bless Robert?” we asked. Bindi had been blessed along with the crocodiles when she was a month old. Now we would do the same for Robert. The nuns came into the Crocoseum for the ceremony. I brought a sleepy little Robert, adorned with his prayer flag and a scarf. We invited press to help publicize the plight of the nuns. Robert was very peaceful. The nuns sang, chanted, and gave him their special blessing. The ceremony was over, and the croc show was about to begin. Steve wanted to share Robert’s first crocodile show with everyone at the Crocoseum, as he was going to feed Murray the crocodile. Just as we had done with Bindi at this age, we brought Robert out for the show. Steve talked to the visitors about how proud he was of his son. He pointed out the crocodile to Baby Bob. Although Robert had been in with the crocodiles before, and would be again, this was an event where we could share the moment with everybody. When the croc show was over, Steve brought Robert back underneath the Crocoseum and I put him in his stroller. His eyes were big and he was waving his arms. This event would mark the beginning of a lifetime of working with his father as a wildlife warrior. Steve and Bindi were regulars during the croc shows, and now it looked as though Robert would be joining in as well.

The text we shall consider this morning,” he said clearly and with a cutting edge to his voice, “is found in the twenty-first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, in the thirteenth verse. ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.’” A gasp went over the auditorium as if a quick wind had stirred through dry leaves. He turned and his big hand pointed above the banks of massed flags to the shining slenderness of the Crucifix, high before the people’s eyes. In a clarion tone he cried: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Then his voice sank to solemnity.

The promotional material for Fourth Island is far more lavish and not at all defensive. From the Permanent Living Reenactment of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima to the Rockets’ Red Glare Four-Hour Fireworks Display every night, from the United We Stand Steak House by way of the statue-lined Avenue of the Presidents to the Under God Indivisible Prayer Chapel, it is all on a grand scale, and every last piece of it is red, white, blue, striped, and starred. The Great Joy Corporation is evidently expecting or receiving patriotic visitors in great numbers. Interactive displays of the Museum of Our Heroes, the Gun Show, and the All-American Victory Gardens (salvia, lobelia, candytuft) feature large on the Web site, where one can also at all times recite the Pledge of Allegiance interactively with a chorus

The months of June and July passed. The monsoons were tardy this year—the nights hinted rain constantly with an aroma in the air, a cooling on the skin, soundless lightning across skies. But when morning came, the sun rose strong again, mocking Agra and its inhabitants. And the days crawled by, brazenly hot, when every breath was an effort, every movement a struggle, every night sweat-stewed. In temples, incantations were offered, the muezzins called the faithful to prayers, their voices melodious and pleading, and the bells of the Jesuit churches chimed. But the gods seemed indifferent. The rice paddies lay ploughed after the pre-monsoon rains, awaiting the seedlings; too long a wait and the ground would grow hard again. A few people moved torpidly in the streets of Agra; only the direst of emergencies had called them from their cool, stone-flagged homes. Even the normally frantic pariah dogs lay panting on doorsteps, too exhausted to yelp when passing urchins pelted them with stones. The bazaars were barren too, shopfronts pulled down, shopkeepers too tired to haggle with buyers. Custom could wait for cooler times. The whole city seemed to have slowed to a halt. The imperial palaces and courtyards were hushed in the night, the corridors empty of footsteps. Slaves and eunuchs plied iridescent peacock feather fans, wiping their perspiring faces with one hand. The ladies of the harem slept under the intermittent breeze of the fans, goblets of cold sherbets flavoured with khus and ginger resting by their sides. Every now and then, a slave would refresh the goblet, bringing in another one filled with new shards of ice. When her mistress awoke, and wake she would many times during the night, her drink would be ready. The ice, carved in huge chunks from the Himalayan mountains, covered with gunnysacks and brought down to the plains in bullock carts, was a blessing for everyone, nobles and commoners alike. But in this heat, ice melted all too soon, disappearing into a puddle of warm water under sawdust and jute. In Emperor Jahangir’s apartments, music floated through the courtyard, stopping and tripping in the still night air as the musicians’ slick fingers slipped on the strings of the sitar.

When prayer flags flutter and the prayers inscribed on them blend into the wind, the surroundings sing. Hope soars, compassion spills. May those feelings guide us all through the day.

Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I agree. I’ll sign us up to a Buddhist prayer retreat in Sikkim first thing.’ Three days of that, vegetarianism and chanting and dead bodies decaying on the hillside and prayer flags fluttering in the fucking wind, and he’d be begging to go back.

Without traditions, fixed people sense the possibility that society could quickly become unmoored. The unfamiliar is an inherent danger until it proves otherwise. This makes it easy to understand why the slogan “Make America Great Again” had such resonance among those with a fixed worldview. It harks back to a time when prayer was commonplace in public schools, children respected their elders and unquestioningly pledged allegiance to the flag “under God,” and gender roles were strictly defined by traditional norms.

Most Americans were stunned by the carnage they observed in the nation's capital on January 6, 2021. And many were startled by the visuals shown by the insurrectionists: a wooden cross and wooden gallows; "Jesus saves" and "Don't Tread on Me;" Christian flags and Confederate flags; even a prayer in Jesus' name after storming the Senate chamber.

Tibet The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

I have hoisted prayer-flags For the good luck of my beloved. Forest keeper, Ajo Shelngo, Do not trample her good luck flags

Up north, where the air is cooler and crisper, quaint hill stations give way to snowcapped peaks. From Ladakh to Sikkim, the cultural influences came not from the coasts but via mountain passes. Tibetan Buddhism thrives, and multilayered monasteries emerge from the forest or steep cliffs as vividly and poetically as the sun rises over Khangchendzonga. Weathered prayer flags flutter in the wind, the soothing sound of monks chanting reverberates in meditation halls, and locals abound with holy offerings, all in the shadow of the mighty Himalaya.

When my luck was good I hoisted auspicious prayer-flags And the young lady of noble birth Hosted me at her home

Aamir, recalling back to the idyllic days of his college youth, pictured himself once again sitting quietly on a familiar neighbourhood rooftop. He often enjoyed relaxing there, alone or with friends, while watching the colourful fluttering prayer flags on rooftop poles, especially in the warmth of an early evening breeze, as wispy clouds drifted against the jagged Himalayan backdrop. He has oft times wondered, ever since his childhood, if the prayers to the spirits of the dead, flying out from those slowly tattering rags, will ever really be answered. Perhaps it will be in another place, in another time, when we’re living another life that we shall finally know. Aamir had calmly thought at the time. He was that sort of philosophical guy.

I know I’m not the only one whose life is a conditional clause hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my phone. I’m not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.

One Nation Under God rebellious gritty outlaw country [Verse] In the heart of these small-town roads, where the story's old but true, We used to bow our heads in prayer, we’d pledge allegiance too. Now the lights are flickering, the signs all point to fall, Where’d that spirit go that used to stand so tall? [Verse 2] Factory stands are empty, schools don’t teach no more, Folks drive by the church, like it's something to ignore. We used to hold our ground, with hands together tight, But the unity we had has vanished in the night. [Chorus] This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell? What once was one nation under God has disappeared. We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand, It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land. [Verse 3] We got preachers out on Main Street, shouting at the skies, But nobody’s listening, too busy with the lies. The family dinners cold now, faith broke at the seams, It’s high time to awake and chase those old dreams. [Verse 4] The fields are overgrown, tractors left to rust, Where’s the honor and the pride, the values that we trust? Cemeteries filled with souls who knew the way it was, We need to reawaken and fix this just because. [Chorus] This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell? What once was one nation under God has disappeared. We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand, It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.

One Nation Under God rebellious gritty outlaw country Profile avatar ProgressiveEncoder337 July 27, 2024 at 10:39 AM [Verse] In the heart of these small-town roads, where the story's old but true, We used to bow our heads in prayer, we’d pledge allegiance too. Now the lights are flickering, the signs all point to fall, Where’d that spirit go that used to stand so tall? [Verse 2] Factory stands are empty, schools don’t teach no more, Folks drive by the church, like it's something to ignore. We used to hold our ground, with hands together tight, But the unity we had has vanished in the night. [Chorus] This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell? What once was one nation under God has disappeared. We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand, It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land. [Verse 3] We got preachers out on Main Street, shouting at the skies, But nobody’s listening, too busy with the lies. The family dinners cold now, faith broke at the seams, It’s high time to awake and chase those old dreams. [Verse 4] The fields are overgrown, tractors left to rust, Where’s the honor and the pride, the values that we trust? Cemeteries filled with souls who knew the way it was, We need to reawaken and fix this just because. [Chorus] This country’s going to hell, can’t you hear the warning bell? What once was one nation under God has disappeared. We the people will soon be no more if we don’t take a stand, It’s time to raise that flag and put God back in this land.

Ayesha, whose nineteen-year-old son had died after eighteen months in service, is one of many who attested to the policing of affect by men, in this case her husband. She explained that “they did not take me to the graveyard. Women normally don’t go, but when someone is a shaheed, women will go along to watch the parade. His [the dead son’s] father did not take me. He said to me, ‘A woman can bear less, for she is weak.’ He said to me, ‘You say namaz (funeral prayer), [but] the shaheed has a high status; you can’t cry for this death.’” She stopped and then added, perhaps to further explain to me why her husband didn’t think it was wise to take her, “I looked at the flag on the coffin, and I felt okha (uneasy). I still feel that way when I see the flag.” 175/378

I followed him into the supermarket. Blasts of color, layers of oceanic sound. We walked under a bright banner announcing a raffle to raise money for some incurable disease. The wording seemed to indicate that the winner would get the disease. Murray likened the banner to a Tibetan prayer flag.

Oh Muslims! Just think what the Europeans reduced you to after they escaped from the clutches of the Bible, to master the sciences that are beneficial for our times. You were pushed out of Spain, you were subjected to massacres, and you were crushed in Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. Your control over Mughal India was snatched away. They are ruling you in Arabia, Mesopotamia, Iraq and Syria. Just as our [Hindu] yajnas, prayers, Vedas, holy books, penances, curses could not harm the Europeans, so too will your Quran, martyrdoms, namaz, religious lockets make no difference to them. Just as the maulvis sent armies to war in the belief that the men who fought under the banner of Allah would never lose, so did our pundits peacefully sit back to repeat the name of Rama a million times. But none of this prevented the Europeans. With their advanced weapons, they not only decimated the Muslim armies, but they even toyed with the fallen flag of Allah.

Oh Muslims! Just think what the Europeans reduced you to after they escaped from the clutches of the Bible, to master the sciences that are beneficial for our times. You were pushed out of Spain, you were subjected to massacres, and you were crushed in Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. Your control over Mughal India was snatched away. They are ruling you in Arabia, Mesopotamia, Iraq and Syria. Just as our [Hindu] yajnas, prayers, Vedas, holy books, penances, curses could not harm the Europeans, so too will your Quran, martyrdoms, namaz, religious lockets make no difference to them. Just as the maulvis sent armies to war in the belief that the men who fought under the banner of Allah would never lose, so did our pundits peacefully sit back to repeat the name of Rama a million times. But none of this prevented the Europeans. With their advanced weapons, they not only decimated the Muslim armies, but they even toyed with the fallen flag of Allah.

But there was some surprising tenderness as well. Forbidden from shooting any birds or animals while in Tibet, the climbers were as amazed by the different kinds of avian life—magpies, linnets, and finches, Brahminy ducks, bar-headed geese, and crazily crowned hoopoes—as they were by the birds’ curiosity and lack of fear of humans. “It is an never-ending joy to find the birds of Tibet so tame,” Hugh Ruttledge wrote. “The place is a paradise for the ornithologist.” Even wild goats would approach them without fear. And on many of the high passes, they found “a little forest of prayer flags,” Frank Smythe recalled, “with their stiff, dry rustling.” Here was a land of harsh but surprising beauty,

Antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials “SS” were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a host of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more “un-American” after the great anti-Nazi war. Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti–Wall Street, pro–soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. Today a “politics of resentment” rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same “internal enemies” once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and “degenerate” artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had “stabbed them in the back.” Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists. The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

It was dim inside, the only light filtering in through small windows. For a moment I hesitated, and said a prayer, inaudible, inarticulate, yet real. Then I looked around. That scene will remain with me forever. Each casket was draped with a beautiful American flag. Never before had the flag seemed to have such sublime significance and beauty. About the walls were other flags, American and French; flower petals had been scattered over the floor, and outside I could hear the band playing a hymn.

Back then, atomic power stations were the future. I gave talks, spread the word. I visited one. It was very quiet and imposing, clean. Red flags and pennants. In the corner: ‘Victor in Socialist Competition’. Our future. We lived in a fortunate country. We were told we were happy, and we were. I was a free man. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would consider my freedom was unfreedom.

When we reached the prayer flags and a pile of rocks that marked the highest point on the pass, the view was brilliant. There was hardly a cloud in the sky. To the south we could see rolling foothills: the gentle ups and downs that we’d walked through. Some of the hillsides were red or purple with rhododendron blossoms. To the west and east there was a muddle of ridges and spurs. To the north, there were several mighty snow-capped himals. The real Himalayan giants were mostly east of where we stood. We were a very long way from anywhere. We were a very long way from help.

Our nation treats victory not as an event but a process. Life is a battle. That’s where our great love of floods, fires and earthquakes comes from. We need a stage for our ‘displays of courage and heroism’. Somewhere to hoist the flag. The political officer read us news items on the ‘high level of political awareness and efficient organization’, on how, within a few days of the accident, the red flag was flying over Reactor No. 4. There it proudly fluttered, until a few months later it was ravaged by the tremendous radiation. So they raised a new flag. And another. The old one was kept as a souvenir. They ripped it into shreds and shoved it under their jackets next to their hearts. Then they took the rags back home, showed them off proudly to their children. They preserved them. Heroic lunacy!

I’m going to show you fate maps.” Despite myself, I was mesmerized by these huge pictures of fertilized eggs, so zoomed in, I could practically see the DNA strands waving like Tibetan prayer flags in the wind. Only these weren’t imprinted with prayers, but with prophecies. What would mine say? She’ll be great at snowshoeing. Shy in front of crowds. Obsessed with maps, yet perpetually lost. Stricken with wanderlust, but never allowed to go anywhere. (My parents considered Seattle, five hours away, an exotic locale.) “Weird, isn’t it? Someone’s destiny, right here?” Karin murmured to me. “. . . the genome mapping project will unlock DNA,” said Dr. Holladay, her face glowing with the promise of scientific discovery. “One day, we’ll be able to ascertain the genetic markers . . . for every disease.” But all maps lie, I wanted to tell Karin and the rest of the class and especially this geneticist. Even the best maps distort the truth. Something’s got to give when you take our three-dimensional world and flatten it down to a two-dimensional piece of paper: Greenland balloons; Africa stretches.

There is not a man in the army, officer or private that does not have from a Battalion to a Brigade of Body lice on him,” wrote one Reb in 1863; and others dubbed the pests with such military names as “graybacks,” “Zouaves,” “tigers,” and “Bragg’s body-guard.” Killing lice was referred to as fighting under the black flag; throwing away an infested shirt was called giving the vermin a parole; and evading them by turning a garment wrong side out became “the execution of a flank movement.” One sardonic Reb when about to go to bed was seen to assume a prayerful pose and to recite: Now I lay me down to sleep, While gray-backs o’er my body creep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord their jaws to break.

There are twin challenges that seek to curtail man's advances. Their combination paralyzes meaningful efforts, scuttles dreams and ambitions, and dims the light of hope. FEAR cripples. COMPLACENCY kills advances. FEAR is behind the flagging zeal of many. FEAR suggests a retreat and dampens enthusiasm. What we call lethargy is actually the FEAR of the unknown, and particularly of failure. FEAR lets us imagine the shame of failure long before we make a move and strongly suggests that we play safe. True, a ship is safe in the harbour; but is that what a ship is created for? Isn't a ship meant for a sojourn- troubled and dangerous as it may be? Each time we overcome our FEARS, we break new grounds. Every successful man or woman knows the joy of triumphing over their FEARS. FEAR stands by cowardly as they walk to the success podium. It is the turn of FEAR to fear. But soon after, COMPLACENCY makes its move on the successful man or woman. It softly but tenaciously asserts: What else is there to achieve? You might not be lucky the next time around, you know. Why not dwell safely on this mountain? COMPLACENCY kills ambitions softly. So, if you desire is to be the best God has ordained you to be, you must run against your FEARS prayerfully and tenaciously until you win. And when you have won, don't let COMPLACENCY force you to sit back and watch your trophies; just keep running. Run, baby! Run!

I have no expression in my face or eyes. I can already tell what Endicott plans for me. It will be hard and long, and when he finishes there will nothing left of me except rags and pieces of things nobody will recognize. “I surrender, Captain John,” I say. “You ain’t got to hurt nobody. I’m gonna do whatever you want. Suh, please don’t hurt Pierre’s horse.” I’m looking up into his face now. Then I say what may be the last prayer I ever send Upstairs: It’s Friday and t’ree o’clock, Lord. I know no matter what I do, You ain’t gonna put me in hell. Like Hannah says, we’re already inside the kingdom. I just want to protect my man and that li’l boy yonder in the arms of a crazy woman. Thank you, Suh, for helping me do what I need to do. It might get kind of rough. Amen.