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 Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were not only a global power couple but also best friends and life mates

By the time he was at the U.S. Naval Academy, Ruth was working as matchmaker. Rosalynn said she first “fell in love with Jimmy's picture” hung in Ruth's bedroom. Then in the summer of 1945, when he was home from Annapolis, Jimmy agreed to a picnic with his sister and her friend, then a date with Rosalynn. Jimmy kissed her after a movie and the next morning told his mother he would marry Rosalynn Smith. 

“I had never had a boy kiss me on a first date,” Rosalynn recalled.

Yet she saw seeds of something deeper than teenage romance. Usually shy, she found she “could talk to him, actually talk to him.” Teasing and flirting became letters to and from Annapolis, then his proposal. She rejected it, telling him she promised her father, who had died in 1940, that she would finish college.

After both graduated, they were married on July 7, 1946.

Jimmy Carter was a smitten newlywed, writing in poetry that his wife's beauty struck songbirds into silence. But he didn't view her as a true equal yet, decades later attributing that attitude to the social and religious mores of the era.

‘I NEVER FELT PUT UPON’

Rosalynn Carter had dreams of becoming an architect but saw her husband's Navy career as a way to escape rural life. Neither had intentions of returning to Plains, but when James Earl Carter Sr. died in 1953, his namesake son resigned his commission to move his family back to Georgia, where he took over the family farm. Jimmy Carter did not ask his wife. He remembered six decades later how “cool” she was to him for months. The dynamic did not thaw completely until she asserted herself as an indispensable business partner. 

The future president still did not consult his wife when he launched his first political campaign. In that instance, however, she was on board and excited about his prospects. After he took his state Senate seat in Atlanta, she recognized the nature of their pairing.

“I was more of a political partner than a political wife, and I never felt put upon,” she said of staying behind in Plains to run the business and care for their children. “I only had to call him home once, when one of our old brick warehouses collapsed, dumping several hundred tons of peanuts into the street.”

As her husband ran for governor, she reported back to him what voters were telling her, the beginning of her half-century of advocacy for better mental health treatment in America.

On the presidential trail, she could guide him more effectively than his aides. “Jimmy, don’t go into so much detail and use such big words,” she would tell him. “Just explain it to them the way you do to me.” 

White House adviser Stuart Eizenstat said the former first lady had “uncanny political instincts.”

‘HOW MANY DID SHE CATCH?’

The peaks of their political life forged what family and close friends remember as a bond that thrived not just on mutual respect but competitiveness.

“My grandparents were notoriously competitive about everything,” said eldest grandson Jason Carter, now Carter Center board chairman.

They raced to finish writing their next books or best the other in tennis, skiing or any other pursuit in their later years. Jason Carter laughed about fish mounts at the family’s mountain cabin as one flaunted their superior catch, only to be outdone by the other.

“‘How many did she catch? How big were they?’” Stuckey recalled the former president asking her one day as she bounced between the two on the edges of their pond in Plains. “I’d go back to Rosalynn, and she’d say, ‘What'd he say? How many does he have?'”

For the former first lady, it was all part of any healthy marriage.

“Jimmy and I are always looking for things to do together,” she told AP at age 93, but “each (person) should have some space. That’s really important.”

‘FINISH EACH OTHER'S SENTENCES’

As their global footprint narrowed first to the U.S., then to The Carter Center campus in Atlanta, and finally to their home and surrounding town, even that friendly competition gave way to two nonagenarians trying to take care of each other.

“They could finish each other's sentences,” Stuckey said of her many Saturday night meals at the Carters' table or with them at hers.

Chip Carter, the couple's son who spent much of the recent months with his parents, told The Washington Post after his mother's death that as she declined rapidly in her final days, his father asked to be alone with his partner of nearly eight decades. First, Jimmy Carter sat at her bedside in his wheelchair. Later, hospice aides moved his bed to the foot of hers.

He remained there until she was gone, then asked to be with his once-shy bride one more time, just Jimmy and Rosalynn.

“They were never alone, really, during their time on this earth,” Jason Carter said. “They always had each other.” 

Story by By BILL BARROW, Associated Press 

The Human Condition  - Contemplation and the Divine Therapy-6

None of us knows until we have been through difficult problems and tragedies what we do in a challenging situation. Once I attended a panel discussion of people who had suffered during the Holocaust and other barbaric oppressions of this century. one woman on the panel had survived the Holocaust, but her parents had been killed.

She had started a humanitarian organization to prevent such horrors from being repeated and mentioned casually, "You know, I couldn't have started that organization unless I knew that, with the situation just a little different, I could have done the same things that the Nazis did to my parents and the others in the concentration camps." This woman, it seems to me, possessed true humility-the knowledge of one's self that clearly perceives that with just a little change of circumstancs, one is capable of any evil.

The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story, It is a series of humiliations of the false self that becomes more and more profound. These make room inside us for the Holy Spirit to come in and heal. What prevents us from being unavailable to God is gradually evacuated.
We keep getting closer and closer to our center . Every now and then God lifts a corner of the veil and enters into our awareness through the various channels, as if to say, " Here I am. Where are you? Come and join me."

In the Near East, centuries ago successive cultures built new cities on top of the last ones. For some reason, people didn't bother using new space; they just burned down what was there when they defeated an enemy and built something new. The ruins of these ancient cities built one on top of the other are called "tells." The spiritual journey is like an archaeological dig through the various stages of our lives, from where we are now back through the midlife crisis, adult life, adolescence, puberty, early childhood, infancy. What happens if we allow that archaeological dig to continue? We feel that we are getting worse; we are just finding out how bad off we always were.

From a vertical point of view, our conversation begins at the place we are now in our relationship to God. First we clear off the the brush, stones, and debris at the top of our interior "tell ". Our agreement with the divine therapist is to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us to the truth about ourselves. This initial period of conversation corresponds to the springtime of the spiritual life, when prayer is easy, and we have great energy in pursuing practices of self-denial, various forms of prayer, ministry, and other forms of social service. As we begin to trust God more, we enjoy a certain freedom form our vices and may often experience great satisfaction in our spiritual endeavors.

When God decides we are ready, he invites us to a new level of self-knowledge. God withdraws the inital consolations of conversation, and we are plunged in darkness, spiritual dryness, and confusion. We think that God has abondened us. Because we don't enjoy the same emotional experiences as before, we think that God must have departed for the next universe and couldn't care less about us.

This is especially poignant for people who have felt rejection in early life; now they feel they have been rejected by God, and that is the ultimate rejection. The dark nights are especially tough on them. But if they can weight them out, they will be completely healted of their sense of rejection for good when they rediscover God at a deeper level of faith.

This is especially poignant for people who have felt rejection in early life; now they feel they have been rejected by God, and that is the ultimate rejection. The dark nights are especially tough on them. But if they can weight them out, they will be completely healted of their sense of rejection for good when they rediscover God at a deeper level of faith. Instead of going away , God simply moves downstairs, so to speak, and waits for us to come and join him. Perhaps God wonders what the grumbling is all about. What makes us think God has gone away? The divine presence can't go away. God is existence and fills everything that exists (St.Thomas Aquinas). The Gospel teaches us that Christ is present in the storm, not just emerging from the storm.

Some films are like the parables in the Gospel; they bring out our attention moral. social and spiritual issues that we wouldn't otherwise learn about through the medium of ordinary words. I remember seeing the movie Love Story and for three days afterwards, I was in tears. The plot is simple enough. It concerns a young man and woman who are totally in love with one another, live for each other, and are everything to each other. Then she is diagnosed with an inoperable cance and in a few months is dead. The whole meaning of his life is wiped out.
Reference: The Human Condition : Thomas Keating.

The remarkable South London woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Ancient Egyptian priestess whose 'past life memories' left historians stunned

London has been the birthplace of countless people who have gone on to make their mark on the world, but not many can be said to be as remarkable as one woman who hailed from South London.

Dorothy Eady was born in Blackheath, South East London, in 1904. Born to a religious family, she was the only child of Reuben Ernest Eady, a master tailor born in Woolwich, and her mother, Caroline Mary Eady.

Life was pretty normal for Dorothy until one fateful day in 1907, when she was just three years old. She took a terrible tumble down a flight of stairs and hit her head badly - so bad that she was declared dead before being miraculously revived. After this incident, she began to have vivid dreams and visions of ancient Egypt.

According to some accounts, when she came to, Dorothy began speaking with a foreign accent and often spoke at length about ‘going home’.

Not long after her close encounter with death, her parents took her to the British Museum where she saw a photograph of the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt.

She immediately recognised the temple and felt a strong connection to it, but felt disappointed by its appearance. On seeing the photograph, she is said to have asked: "Where are the trees? Where are the gardens?"

When her parents decided to get a psychiatrist to help her, Dorothy began identifying as an Ancient Egyptian priestess named Bentreshyt and claimed to have been a mistress of Seti I, a pharaoh of Ancient Egypt who was notably the father of Ramses the Great. 

See the ancient columns of Karnak temple in Luxor city© Getty Images

She also claimed to have become pregnant with Seti I’s baby, which went against the laws of the Temple of Isis which she said she served. Instead of waiting around for her punishment, she claimed to have taken her own life.

In 1931, she travelled to Egypt and eventually settled in the village of Abydos, where she worked as a secretary and translator for the Egypt Exploration Society.

Eady spent the rest of her life in Egypt, living in a small house near the temple of Seti I. She changed her name to Omm Sety, which means "mother of Sety" in Arabic, in honour of the pharaoh who had built the temple she believed she had served in her past life.

She became a respected expert on ancient Egypt and authored several books on the subject. While some people were sceptical of Eady's claims, others believed that she had a genuine connection to the ancient world.

Her unique insights into Ancient Egypt helped scholars uncover a treasure trove of historical information they previously did not have access to. During one excavation at the Temple of Seti I, she helped archaeologists find the ruins of the lost garden she had described when she was a child. 

Dorothy was often spotted offering sacrifices to the Sphinx© Getty Images

To test her credibility, the chief inspector from Egypt's Antiquities Department decided to take Dorothy into the temple and asked her to locate a series of wall paintings that hadn’t been seen in thousands of years, and she managed to find every single one of them!

Dorothy’s understanding of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was also considered preternatural, which helped Egyptologists working with her in ways that cannot be measured. 

But locals were fearful of her. In her life she was regularly spotted by the Pyramids of Giza at night, making religious offers of sacrifice beneath the sphinx. When she died aged 77, neither Muslims nor Christians would accept to bury her in their cemeteries, so instead she was buried in an unmarked grave in Abydos.

To this day, experts are still baffled by the claims she made in her life. While many will dismiss it as pure conspiracy, the contributions Dorothy made to Egyptology are unquestionable. 

Reference: My London: Story by Ertan Karpazli