The Roof Garden At Peachtree-Pine

The Peachtree Pine Community in midtown Atlanta averages 550 homeless people 365 days of the year.  Forty two churches and many other volunteer groups support this haven with food, clothing, services, etc.  One of the super churches comes to celebrate birthdays of some of the residents.  All public funding for this effort has been blocked by the leadership of Atlanta City Hall, Central Atlanta Progress and other powerful Daisy Mae thinking racists who cringe at the thought of 550 Black men “living” on hallowed Peachtree Street.

 

Despite the fact that tortious interference on the part of downtown leadership (public, corporate and “religious”) has succeeded in stopping funding, Peachtree Pine thrives.  Donations from churches and foundations and caring individuals who have not believed the lies spewed by Central Atlanta Progress and CEO’s like Rector Hoare of All Saints Episcopal Church.  Rector Hoare some years ago chose a Super Bowl Sunday to spew from “his” pulpit false attacks about Peachtree Pine.  Go to the All Saints Episcopal web site to read Rector Hoare’s describing The Pine as squalid, a place not fit for humans to live.  All Saints Episcopal Church is not one of the churches that brings food and clothes and medical supplies, and GED teachers and garden supplies and toilet paper and hygiene kits and pampers and water.

 

I must say that one of the most effective volunteer efforts at The Pine is a group of spiritual counselors led by a member of All Saints Episcopal Church.  Thank God for the few parishioners in his flock who take Hoare’s diatribes for what they are, drivel.  I must say again as I have said before, many kind and astute people from the worshipping communities along the Peachtree Corridor come and support the people at The Pine.  They have not been duped by our status quo leadership. 

 

However, in all honesty, the presence at Peachtree Pine of “religious” leaders from churches and synagogues on the Peachtree Corridor is rare if not nonexistent.  Central Atlanta Progress brass years ago referred to Peachtree Street as “the sanitized zone.”  I can understand the hesitancy of church CEO’s not wanting to identify with 500 Black men at The Pine.  I know about Emory President Wagner’s applauding the 3/5 Compromise.  After all this is Atlanta, Miss Daisy.

 

Carl Hartrampf for over a year, as a volunteer, has been the inspiration of the roof garden atop the Peachtree Pine building.  Twenty 4×10 beds are being planted right now.  Farmer D has led a fundraising effort that will be matched by Wholefoods if $2500 comes in.  It has.  By early this morning $2515 had been contributed by 55 donors.  We pray that Debi Starnes and Horace Sibley and Richard Orr formerly of CAP don’t get to Wholefoods, Inc. to block any funding to the Peachtree-Pine Community as they did once before.

I’ll give you a tour of the Roof Garden.  We’ll view 20 beds planted with veggies and the plans for a second 20.  We’ll also look at the tall towers of greed that surround The Pine.  The men in transition and the faithful gardeners from our Resident Volunteer Program look at those towers, smile and ask, “Do the people in those buildings look down on us?” 

 

James Wilson Beaty

Jeremiah 22:16

February 28, 2013

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
February 28, 2013

Pope Celestine V And Benedict XVI

Before Celestine V was elected pope in July of 1294, he lived alone in a cave and slept on a rock.  He wore a hair shirt in order to maintain a level of holiness.  He believed that physical pain protected him from the temptations of the world, especially the sins of the flesh.  The conclave of 13^th century Cardinals charged with electing a new pope could not agree on anybody except the hermit in the cave.  They went to him and told him he was the new pope.  He didn’t last long.

 

He missed his cave and his hair shirt; he never wanted to be pope.  He resigned after having served only five months as the Holy Father.  He resigned before the end of 1294 but not before he wrote into church law that a pope is permitted to resign if he resigns for his spiritual well- being and for the good of the church.

 

The current Pope Benedict  XVI over recent months has made several visits to the tomb of Pope Celestine V,  Most of us had no idea why the present pope would visit the remains of a pope dead for over 600 years.  Nonetheless, following his surprise resignation, the reason for his visits have become more clear.

 

In Canto III, ll. 58-60, of his INFERNO,

Dante writes,

“And after I recognized some of them,

I saw and knew the shade of him

Who, through cowardice, made the great refusal.”

 

Many scholars, including Dante’s son, believe “the shade of him” to be Celestine V.  Others believe this shade to be Pilate who ordered the empire’s execution of Jesus on a Roman cross.  Note that even though Dante recognizes his subject in the vestibule of Hell, he does not dignify him by naming him.

 

In Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the narrator gives the merchant the very same treatment.  Of this member from the business community, the narrator says,

“The estimable Merchant so had set

His wits to work, none knew he was in debt,

He was so stately in negotiation,

Loan, bargain and commercial obligation,

He was an excellent fellow all the same;

To tell the truth I do not know his name.”

 

James Wilson Beaty

Jeremiah 22:16

February 27, 2013

Emory University; What’s In A Name?

Emory University is named for some Methodist saint, a bishop, I think, whose sir name was of course, Emory. A second name considered was another Methodist saint, a Bishop Coke. Those who wanted the great Methodist stronghold of the faith to be Coke University suffered disappointment, surely. The descendants of those disappointed can be consoled by the fact that Emory University has truly become Coke University. And it is the REAL THING.

I wonder what the great John Wesley would think of Emory’s history of “racial wounds?” John Wesley, the methodist, was never a Methodist; he died a priest in the Anglican Church.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
February 25,2013

Is Emory University Five-fifths Racist?

On Saturday, February 23, 2013, THE NEW YORK TIMES ran an article entitled, “Emory University’s Leader Reopens Its Racial Wounds.” Has the ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION published anything on Emory’s “racial wounds?”

The second paragraph of the TIMES’ article states, and I quote,

“All week long, the president of Emory, James W. Wagner, has been trying to control damage done by a column he wrote for the university magazine. In it he praised the 1787 three-fifths compromise, which allowed each slave to be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining how much congressional power the Southern states would have, as an example of how polarized people could have common ground.”

“It was,” Wagner said, “a clumsy and regrettable mistake.”

The homeless residents at the Peachtree Pine Community for years have sporadically been refused service at the food court across the street from the shelter. The food court is Emory Health Care’s facility. African-American men who look like they may be residents at Peachtree-Pine are simply turned around at the door.

Al Blackwelder, while the head man at the Emory Hospital, then Crawford Long, said to Peachtree-Pine staff that he suspected “that YOUR people are coming over here and pissing in OUR frog pond.” The TIMES quotes Wagner as saying, “I know that I personally have a long way to go.” Some of us who endure the plantation mentality and Miss Daisy thinking of Emory administrators believe others at the Coca-Cola U have a long way to go.

Dr. Wagner said, “Emory is a community that airs its laundry.” A better way to say that is, “Emory is a community that puts its shit in the street.” And the beat of the heavily armed TEAM GOLIATH goes on.

James Wilson Beaty
Jeremiah 22:16
February 25, 2013