Hagar

My previous post led me to delve into the life of Shelly Finson, a friend who passed away in 2008, a renown feminist, lesbian and Professor at the Atlantic School of Theology here in Halifax.  In one of these searches I discovered this excerpt from an article (Here)

 In this audio clip, Finson talks about Friends of Hagar, a feminist consciousness raising group that began among women employees of Canadian churches in the mid 1970s but grew to include many lay womena as well, and eventually took on more overt and externally focused public education activities.

I decided to try and locate the group and so googled "Hagar".  What I arrived at was a wiki site re http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagar, a biblical character.  I quickly perused the article for any leads and came to the following:

The novel The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence has a protagonist named Hagar married to a man named Bram, whose life story loosely imitates that of the biblical Hagar. 

Note the following from Margaret Laurence's wiki page:

Jean Margaret Laurence, CC (née Wemyss) (18 July 1926 – 5 January 1987)

January 5 is an addition to the "Targeting Family Birthdays" pattern-cluster... which you will discover more about when reading my recent "Dog Gone Dawgs" series of posts of the last few days.  And then perusing Hagar's wiki page further I noted the following :

 Hagar is mentioned briefly in Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verse

This stood out because one of the crypto quotes that I completed this morning was:

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.Salman Rushdie Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/salman_rushdie.html#3BAqEV4xOidR5xHf.99

The following excerpt from his wiki page stood out:

The outrage among some Muslims resulted in a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. 

February 14th is Valentines Day... a day that cropped up in my earlier post today.

Note the etymology of Hagar:

Possibly means "flight" in Hebrew, though it could also be of unknown Egyptian origin. In the Old Testament she is the concubine ofAbraham and the mother of Ishmael, the founder of the Arab people. After Abraham's wife Sarah finally gave birth to a child, she had Hagar and Ishmael expelled into the desert. However, God heard their crying and saved them. 

As to the origin of Hagar meaning "flight", it appears that indeed, Hagar did take flight and hence the birth of the Arab Peoples... and so the question remains, is the story of Hagar symbolic and/or an historic account.  I believe that it's more important to view any ancient text with a grain of salt, keeping in mind that much of what has become written down was previously passed down by word of mouth... and we all know what that is capable of doing.   There is a strong case for these ancient religions to be "symbolically" based for the simple fact that a picture can say a thousand words.  We do ourselves a disservice then when this ancient means of communication is not fully utilized, a censorship in its own right.  And even then, these should be recognized as a means by which ancient peoples were trying to understand the world and universe... and God/Goddess/Nature.  Religion needs to grow as we need to grow otherwise it stagnates, and so as our understanding of nature grows ... as it does with ongoing investigation ie: recent genetic finding of "Tetragametic Human Chimera's"-- evidence that we are far more than what we ever realized... our subconscious mind is not "ours" as we have long perceived it to be, it is that of our inner twin.  This blog offers another form of proof-- revealing a means by which the inner twin world are opening the doors of communication to us and our parallel outer world... this is their coming out.  It is also their declaration of war against our world, and because they have the power and means to bring us to our knees, we need to wake up so we can then begin the process of negotiating peace and enjoy the benefits, the most important of which is a future.