Gratitude? You Gotta be Kidding!!!!

There is an entry on the fall equinox at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-fall-equinox/

and one on the super moon eclipse at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/the-september-28-2015-super-blood-moon-full-eclipse

I belong to an e-mail survivor support group and one of the members started posting one thing a day that she was grateful for. She also said anybody else could do so if they wanted to.

My first reaction was, “Me? She has to be kidding!! What do I have to be grateful for? They tortured me, prostituted me, and sold me for porn films. They ruined my whole life!!!!! I still suffer from what they did to me!!!! And I am supposed to be grateful??? Gimme a break!!!!!”

I went about my daily life, got showered and dressed, fed the cats, and had breakfast, still fuming and grumbling bitterly. After a while the routine calmed me down enough that it occurred to me that I was over-reacting. Back and white thinking it surely was. Although I had plenty to be ungrateful for, I also had plenty to be very grateful for. My kids who turned out great, my kitties, sunlight and fog, occasional beautiful rain, my faithful thirteen-year-old car, enough to eat, a roof over my head, a garden, no dementia. Most important of all, having escaped from the cult. And the wonderful people I have met in the survivors’ community.

The trigger, obviously, was my friend’s post about gratitude. Now what was the event that caused all those strong feelings?

An image of me as a child siting alone at the dining room table with tomato slices in front of her appeared before my eyes. I had protested that I couldn’t eat them and was told that I would sit there until I finished all of them. They really revolted me because, although I wasn’t aware of the connection at the time, they reminded me of blood and flesh. Sometimes I choked the food down;  other times, I couldn’t and it reappeared at breakfast.

Now here is the connection. I was told I was very ungrateful and I should “think of the starving Armenians.” This was during World War II. They used that phrase often to guilt trip me. It just enraged me. I would have happily done something for the Armenians if I could have, but I was helpless. Armenians had nothing to do with being served food I found revolting.

(As an aside, I have always been drawn to Armenians. I have had quite a few Armenian friends. Their churches are gorgeous and so are their Masses. I love Armenian food and cook it pretty well, if I do say so myself.)

Should I be grateful or ungrateful? You can’t equate the two, you can’t weigh and compare them. One case of maltreatment as a child cannot be wiped out by a lovely event in the present, no matter what it is. A loving mother-figure can’t make up for an ineffective or abusive real mother. Each event, each person, is unique and incomparable.

So I have a lot to resent and my job is to accept the evil in my past and live with it in such a way that it does not take over every minute of the day. And I have a lot to cherish and my job is to accept the good and the beautiful and use them to enhance my life, and others’, too.

My friend had the right idea in sharing with us the good and true and real parts of herself and her life.

The September 28, 2015 Super Blood Moon Full Eclipse

There is a blog entry on Labor Day at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/labor-day/

With a name like that, wouldn’t cult members be just delighted? It calls for a blog entry of its own.

Actually, I should have written about this last year. That’s because this is the last of four full lunar eclipses in a row, two last year and two this year, with no partial eclipses in between them. It’s called a tetrad, meaning four. Tetrads are unusual, but not particularly rare.

There have been sixty-two tetrads from 1 AD to 2100 AD. There were none in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, but there are eight from 2001 to 2100. The dates of the lunar eclipses in this particular tetrad are April 15, 2014, October 8, 2014, April 4, 2015, and September 28, 2015. There are six lunar months between each of the full eclipses.

A Super Moon is a moon that appears 14% larger and 30% brighter than most moons, simply because the moon’s orbit is not exactly circular and super moons are at the point closest to earth. (The closest point is called the perigee and the farthest is called the apogee. Perigee comes from the Greek, perigeion ‘close around the earth,’ via Latin and then French, entering English in the late 16th century.) Super Moon is a catchy modern phrase; astronomers call it a perigee moon.

Blood Moon can refer to two different things.

Moons that appear low in the sky look reddish because light passes through more of our atmosphere before reaching the moon and the atmosphere filters out the blue part of the spectrum. As the moon rises in the sky, it loses its reddish tinge. The oldest usage of the term Blood Moon is in reference to the Hunter’s Moon, which usually appears low in the sky in October. The Hunter’s moon comes right after the Harvest Moon and is the closest full moon to the fall equinox.

People are also calling the eclipsed moon on September 28 a Blood Moon. The light illuminating an eclipsed moon comes from thousands of sunsets and sunrises around the Earth. If the sky is clear for the sunsets and sunrises, the eclipsed moon will be reddish. If it is cloudy, the eclipsed moon will be dark. There is no way of predicting this in advance. So we might or might not have a Blood Moon.

There are three verses in the Bible that refer to Blood Moons.
Joel 2:31 “The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.”
Acts 2:20 “The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord comes.”
Revelations  6:12 “And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.”

These verses form the basis of modern apocalyptic prophesies. A book on this topic, Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change (2013) by John Hagee spent several weeks on the New York Times best seller list. (There is a preview on books.google.com.) If you search for “Blood Moon” and “prophecy,” you will find several Christian sites that explain their beliefs.

The occurrence of the eclipse on the first day of the Jewish festival of Sukkoth lends additional weight to the significance of this Blood Moon. Sukkoth commemorates the end of the forty years of the wandering of the Jews in the desert after fleeing Egypt. The other three eclipses in the tretrad also fell on Jewish holidays: April 15, 2014 – Passover; October 8, 2014 – Sukkoth and April 4, 2015 – Passover.

The eclipse can be seen over the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.  Easy-to-understand maps are at http://www.moongiant.com/Lunar_Eclipse_Calendar.php and http://moonblink.info/Eclipse/eclipse/2015_09_28 Information on when and where the eclipse will be visible is at  http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2015-september-28

So how are Satanists going to mark this event? I have no idea, except it won’t be pretty. I do know that on the West Coast, totality occurs about 7:30 at night, which is an awkward time to hold a ritual. I’m sure they will figure out how to cope with that.