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Velveteen Rabbi: Mourning and redemption

One of the blogs I follow is by Velveteen Rabbi (she of the Passover Haggadah). She has a wonderful post about Tisha b’Av (go read it for an explanation of the day): Mourning and redemption

My theology is built on the assumption that genuine and powerful connection with God is possible from anywhere, not just the Temple Mount, so my observance of Tisha b’Av grieves for the condition of exile from God which we allow to permeate our days. Every tragedy I read about in the news, every murder and rape and famine which we could have prevented but did not, distances us from unity with the All. The bombings sixty years ago at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, commemorated so close to Tisha b’Av, distance us from unity with the All. What continues to unfold in Sudan distances us from unity with the All. And that distance is the real exile which this holiday obligates us to notice. . . .

An observance of Tisha b’Av which focuses only on remembering our collective suffering, without taking that remembrance as a call to change, is incomplete. The day of most powerful grief in the Jewish calendar is not just about eschewing leather and sitting on low mourners’ stools. It’s about opening our eyes to the suffering of the broken world, and recommitting ourselves to doing something to change it. God acts in the world through us, and if we don’t work to heal what’s broken, all God can do is weep. Today the entire world has the capacity to be our Temple, a holy place where God’s presence is made manifest with song and rejoicing, and when we allow the world to remain ruptured by hatred, we are complicit in the continuing destruction which Tisha b’Av reminds us to mourn.

Go read the whole thing.

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Building Harlequin’s Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper

Building Harlequin’s Moon puts me very much in mind of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. Only Niven and Cooper do it in one volume. It’s a very satisfying generation-spanning hard-SF novel. I would quibble that it reads in the beginning like a character-driven book and at the end like a plot-driven book. This did make it feel a little lopsided to me. (On the other hand, I did stay up very late one night over the weekend in order to finish it.)

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Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

It was a delight to reread Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for my reading group. There was a lot that I didn’t remember, and some of her characterizations now strike me as very dated. But that doesn’t negate the good story-telling and provocative social and psychological ideas.

The social/sexual amgibuities are still high among the things that move me in the book. For me, this is very much a love story. As I finished it (crying), I recognized the same feeling from previous reads: that something that I can’t put my finger on resonates at a very deep level for me, specifically as a gay man. Perhaps it has to do with the characters connecting through their differences rather than their similarities (although that moment in the book is presented in a somewhat male/female dichotomy–you need to read it to see the ambiguities and richness in the situation).

At any rate, it continues to rank high among books I recommend to others.

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Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart with Craft

By Susan Gordon Lydon.

I loved Lydon’s The Knitting Sutra. She has a beautiful writing style. But this book just doesn’t do it for me (others, of course will find it just what they need).

Here’s an example of the very best of the writing in the book:

It has occurred to me that I am helping to knit my father out of this world. During the previous weeks, when my father knew he was dying but before he lay insensate in this hospice room, I knitted a black wool men’s sweater with thick cables that I will probably never wear. But it doesn’t seem to matter what I knit, how useless it is or inappropriate for the climate, so long as I just keep knitting.

The quiet motions of my swishing needles and slipping yarn help me sit still and attend this momentous event. It feels as though the thread connects my inner self to the reality now unfolding, which after all is as spiritual as it gets. There is no bigger mystery than life and death. I watch my father metamorphose from his powerful earthly presence to the embryonic being lying silent in the bed. I never knew before how much like birth death is. My father’s skin becomes smooth. His thoughts, his feelings, his fears and concerns are as hidden to us as a baby’s, his energy focused on the coming transformation.

I was quite disappointed at the very low knitting (or needlepoint, the
other craft she practices) content. And I’m not sure about how much
healing there is, either, except for healing her relationship with her
father–only one of three major life events she focuses on. There were
just too many differences in life experience that are reflected in her
writing: addiction, intimacy issues with men, breast cancer. I’ve read
books by women writing about their experience as women that have drawn
me in, but in this one it became more of a barrier.

As I read, I thought over and over, I should really be thinking about writing on the spirituality of handwork for a male audience. Over and over I pick up one of the currently in vogue books about knitting and spirituality and find myself set very firmly on the outside of the intended audience. Lydon never acknowledges the role of men in the history of knitting (unless you count mentioning Kaffe Fassett), prefering instead the kind of new-agey feminine mystical connection that some of the worst neo-pagan writing uses to create a connection between current practice and prehistory: “Groups of women have probably gathered to do needlework together since the dawn of time.”

I suppose I shouldn’t blame her for the absence of men in her writing, since it’s clear from early in the book that she has one, maybe two healthy close relationships with men–one her godson, only ten, and her gay brother. So after spending a long paragraph listing all the women who helped her through the horrors of breast cancer, she writes, “Not to shortchange my male friends, either, because they showed up to help in solid numbers.” But of course, she has just shortchanged her male friends.

I do hope this book reaches the audience who will be receptive to it, which I am sure exists. I just wish there was a book in this genre for which I am the audience.

 

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Harry Potter, part 1

Just last night I completed a re-read of the first five Harry Potter books, in preparation for The Half-Blood Prince. As a fan of both fantasy in general and the series in particular, I think they hold up rather well to re-reading. There were several bits in each volume that I hadn’t remembered, and the clever and funny bits were still clever and funny.

The versions I was reading are the UK editions, and there are a few differences in vocabulary. Points to those who can identify these terms:

  • bogies
  • trainers
  • jumper
  • skiving
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A liberal Israeli take on disengagement

This from Ha’aretz:

In a step seen as a watershed moment in his disengagement plan, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Wednesday morning ordered the Gaza Strip closed to Israeli visitors, declaring it a closed military area in order to blunt plans by anti-pullout activists to flood the Strip with protesters.

The article also samples the expected quotes accusing Sharon of destroying Israel.

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A mother’s lament

More bombing coverage in the Guardian: Marie Fatayi-Williams’s plea to know what has happened to her son Anthony. Her speech is the second half of the article. Here are a couple of pieces:

Which cause has been served? Certainly not the cause of God, not the cause of Allah because God Almighty only gives life and is full of mercy. Anyone who has been misled, or is being misled to believe that by killing innocent people he or she is serving God should think again because it’s not true.Terrorism is not the way, terrorism is not the way. It doesn’t beget peace. We can’t deliver peace by terrorism, never can we deliver peace by killing people. Throughout history, those people who have changed the world have done so without violence, they have [won] people to their cause through peaceful protest. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, their discipline, their self-sacrifice, their conviction made people turn towards them, to follow them. What inspiration can senseless slaughter provide? Death and destruction of young people in their prime as well as old and helpless can never be the foundations for building society.

My son Anthony is my first son, my only son, the head of my family. In African society, we hold on to sons. He has dreams and hopes and I, his mother, must fight to protect them. This is now the fifth day, five days on, and we are waiting to know what happened to him and I, his mother, I need to know what happened to Anthony. His young sisters need to know what happened, his uncles and aunties need to know what happened to Anthony, his father needs to know what happened to Anthony. Millions of my friends back home in Nigeria need to know what happened to Anthony. His friends surrounding me here, who have put this together, need to know what has happened to Anthony. I need to know, I want to protect him. I’m his mother, I will fight till I die to protect him. To protect his values and to protect his memory.

Innocent blood will always cry to God Almighty for reparation. How much blood must be spilled? How many tears shall we cry? How many mothers’ hearts must be maimed? My heart is maimed. I pray I will see my son, Anthony. Why? I need to know, Anthony needs to know, Anthony needs to know, so do many others unaccounted for innocent victims, they need to know.

Amen.

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Karen Armstrong on religious labels

Great commentary in the Guardian Unlimited by Karen Armstrong. She argues that we must find a better label than “Islamic terrorists.” Here’s a quote that puts the matter into high perspective.

We rarely, if ever, called the IRA bombings “Catholic” terrorism because we knew enough to realise that this was not essentially a religious campaign. Indeed, like the Irish republican movement, many fundamentalist movements worldwide are simply new forms of nationalism in a highly unorthodox religious guise.

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How others see us

How’s this for a lead headline from England: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush says: I put US interests first.

George Bush sounds a warning today to those hoping for a significant deal on Africa and climate change at Wednesday’s G8 summit, making clear that when he arrives at Gleneagles he will dedicate his efforts to putting America’s interests first. . . .

“I go to the G8 not really trying to make [Tony Blair] look bad or good; but I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country.”

While Bush is, after all, the president of the United States and should be expected to promote the interests of the US, this makes it sound like the G8 meeting (and the concerns raised at Live8) boil down to his relationship to Blair.

What should happen when US self-interest is in conflict with our responsibility as humans? What about when US self-interest is in conflict with the demands of justice?

And how is it that Bush can suggest that ending global poverty and fighting AIDS isn’t in the best interests of the United States? (And as a notoriously “Christian” man, how can he put a nation’s self-interest above the admonition of Jesus to care for “the least of these”?)