RE: Passing The Torch

2011-MAR-31

Hi Rodney,

No attachment.  I guess you fell asleep.

Errol

Re: Passing The Torch

Hello Errol,

It look so , boy.

I'll ask Marjorie to send it  from her laptop.

Rodney

RE: Passing The Torch

Hello Errol,

Here it is.

Rodney

”WHAT DOES PASSING THE TORCH MEAN TO ME?

PASSING THE TORCH implies that we are light-bearers and that we must not only “let our light shine before me”.  We have a duty to transmit light, to shed light wherever we go, and to pass it on.

Pass it on so that others, especially future generations may see their way, back in time and into the future.

Pass it on so that others may not lose their way, nor lose their focus.

It also implies that life is a journey, a race that we have to run, but that we cannot run forever.  One day, one day we must finish our race and our course, we must let it go and Let God take over.  We must pass on to our successors the best that we have received, our light, our spark, and we must pass it on while it is hot, vital, vibrant, radiant, and not when it is cold and soggy.

It also implies personal hand to hand, face to face encounter, contact, interfacing. Flesh must touch flesh when we are passing on our legacy.

What are some of the best things we must pass on and how?   Among the things to be passed on are our faith, our values, the things that make us tick, our spirit.

We do this by the way we live, by our contact with others, living not to ourselves nor for ourselves, but communicating, interfacing, interceding for others so that on departing, we shall leave “footprints in the sands of time”.

After departing, others will do things “in remembrance of us”

The Jews have understood extremely well what it means to pass the torch.

They have understood and practiced to a fine degree home education and training, they have realized that it is a sacred, parental privilege and duty to teach their children their faith, their salvation history.  If you have any doubts about the secret of Jewish persistence and intellectual ascendancy, read (Deuteronomy 11 verses 19-21, 25, and Psalm 78 verses 1-8).

When and how we teach – around the dining table, around the wash tub  -  that’s where my mom taught me to sing many of the hymns  I still know by heart, hymns that gave me sound theology in verse.

Where else and where else – as you plait and braid the children’s hair – you instill virtues of patience, long-suffering, kindness,  beauty.  In the parang band, grandpa passes on to the grandson the love of music, the art of playing instruments, the practice of visiting and home hospitality and the theology of the incarnation, the Virgin birth, the simple caring family man- Joseph.

Yes, pass it on we must.  What we do not pass on we can’t take with us when we leave this world.  To pass on the torch is to invest in succession planning.

Daphne  G.  Cuffie.”

Rodney Foster