Weeks 26-28: Doorway

Cold Mountain: The Legend of Han Shan and Shih Te, The Original Dharma Bums - Sean Michael Wilson, illustrated by Akiko Shimojima

The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims - Mustafa Akyol

   Here comes the ice cream truck again! As small as our neighborhood is, you'd think we wouldn't get the ice cream truck three times a day. Lots of kids around, though, makes for good business I suppose.
   Jesus the rabbi, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the prophet, Jesus the bodhisattva, Jesus the logos, Jesus the avatar, Jesus the guru. Am I getting out of hand? How can Jesus be the door, gate, way into the love and appreciation of non-Christian religion and practice? Cold Mountain indirectly and Islamic Jesus directly provide examples...

notes
Cold Mountain
-The most glorious warhorse ever sat/ can't match a crippled kitty/ in a race to catch a rat.
-I just clap time for the flowers/as they dance,
-I can remember the taste of that dirt.
-In the summer it's light as winds;/ in the winter it's my quilt./ Winter or summer, of use in both/ year upon year, just this.
-The Tao's a road/ that runs straight through.
-You could try to make it/ to cold moutain
-Sunrise, and the mist would blind a/ hidden dragon
-cloud roads are in empty space

Islamic Jesus
-fearful rumors about secret decision in the West to Christianize and conquer Turkey and other Muslim countries (history of church-politics-military overlap in Christian missions)
 -"the only evidence we possess in the Gospels would suggest that his contemporaries found it impossible to make sense of him..." A.N. Wilson
-"the steep ascent...It is freeing a slave, or feeding on a day of hunger an orphaned relative, or a poor man in the dust. Then to be one of those who have faith, and urge each other to steadfastness and urge each other to compassion" Qur'an
-Qn - believers are "those who have faith and do right actions"
-Jewish Christians and potential influence on early Islam
-parallels between stories in Qur'an and apocryphal Gospels
-Tawrat - Torah, Zabur - Psalms, Injil - Gospel
-are "nasara" the Nazoreans?
-Mary - major character in Qur'an
-rock inscription in Negev, 7th c., "Amen, the Lord of Worlds, the Lord of Moses and Jesus"
-rasul - one who is sent; nabi - news giver
-prophecy of messenger to come - "Ahmad" - person Ahmad, Muhammah, or as adjective "praised"
-Jesus - son of Mary, Word, Spirit, Messiah
-parallels - Kingdom of God/ Caliphate, Halahka/ Sharia, Jesus for Jewish renewal/ Jesus for Islamic renewal

Weeks 22-25 - To Queer

The Fruits of the Spirit - Evelyn Underhill

Jesus and Mary: Finding Our Sacred Center - Henri Nouwen

Alone With God - Dom Jean Leclercq

Queer Theory: A Graphic History - Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele

   So we moved into that house where I spotted Lloyd the groundhog. Turns out he has lots of friends! ...one of which likes to hide under our back porch. I call him Germaine. By the way I don't know male from female woodchucks, so why do I name them as males? 
   We also have plenty of rabbits, squirrels, robins, mocking birds, and starlings. I'm trying to learn the basic backyard bird names. Those house finches must have found a better summer home. Some kind of wren likes to chase insects under the awning, however. I think I saw a woodpecker - a hairy woodpecker? - about the size of a jay, black and white with the little red tuft. A cardinal stopped in the other day, but the robins weren't happy about it. No crows or bigger birds so far. No blue jays like at Richmond Hill.
   About these books...I had no idea "queer" could be a verb! To queer something, according to Barker and Scheele, is to destabilize it, to challenge or test it, to play with it, to send it up, or to tease out its fundamental binaries, so on and so forth, much like "deconstruction" with less French. For real, Jesus did a lot of queering, right? Keep Jesus Weird. Is that a t-shirt already?
   Underhill and Nouwen really know how to keep the reverent tone going, without being too heavy. How do they do that? Rather than take notes I nearly copied word for word these two little books, especially Underhill's. I hope I can read her big book soon.
    Alone with God is a strange book about strange people, hermits. I really enjoyed it. Leclercq summarizes and interprets the writings of Paul Giustiniani, a monk at the hermitage of Camaldoli and founder of a slightly more hermetic association of hermits. Blessed Paul's basic call was to be alone with God in order to "love God in God," which he was convinced would benefit not only himself but the Church, those outside the Church, and all creation. I believe him.



notes - Underhill

• Thou when thou prayest, enter into thy closet - and shut the door...Nearly every one pulls it to and leaves it slightly ajar
• coming downstairs
• that constant struggle with distracting thoughts, that humiliating sense of deadness and incapacity, which always accompany spiritual growth and teach us humility...
• Joy is a fruit of the Spirit, not of our gratified emotions.
• Just because of the vastness of the journey and mighty surrounding forces, there is no hurry, no fuss...
• ...you do not know where those born of the spirit have come from and you do not know where they are going. The path on which they are moving to an appointed end, like the wind's path, is unseen by you...
• patience with ourselves is a duty for Christians and the only real humility
• the fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on
• Do not entertain the notion that you ought to advance in prayer
• Spirit of truth present in all places and filling all things
• that loving and absolute trust in God which is the heart of religion
• "dexterity in casting all thy care on Him" K
• But religion at its full span transcends all these parochial and self-interested ideas, and admits us to a 'world that is unwalled.'
• ...men and women who seem to have no special gift, but the one great gift of the love of God 
• There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian's prayer - an absolute dependence on the self-giving charity of God. "As dew shall our God descend on us."
• humble, eager, expectant attitude toward God

Nouwen

• School of Mary
• Behold your mother (to us)
• the false adulthood of our age
• Spirit speaks to Spirit
• Jesus the door to the mystical life which is the life in communion with God
• Stabat Mater
• taken, blessed, broken, given
• who is innocent in front of the innocent one?
• "Jesus makes us descend with him in the tomb, in the weakness, in the darkness, in everything that seems dead in our heart, but always to rectify us, to purify us, to liberate us."
• But here before the rolled away stone, a simple center from which hope radiates, all is very simple.
• Before I am sinful, I am innocent...I have to claim that innocence in me...the place where Jesus chose to live...fashioned in secret and molded in the depths of the earth
• I remember Mother Teresa's words to me twelve years ago: "Write simply," she said, "very simply. People need simple words."

Where'd they go?

   We had a couple of these little house finches building a nest inside a U-shaped metal joist for our back porch awning. Actually only the female worked, gathering and arranging twigs and such. The male just sat there and sang! Seems like as soon as they filled in the whole space they disappeared.

Weeks 19-21 - What's so funny about Jesus?

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore

   You know that foggy, where-am-I feeling you get after driving on the interstate for way too long, or after cramming all night for an exam? I've felt like that constantly for the past couple months! Very frustrating. At the end of the day, I'm never quite sure what I've done, how I've done it, or how I feel about it. How long have I been driving? Did I miss the exit? Get me to a Waffle House quick. I mean I'm kinda busy but I'm not that busy.

   Lamb is charming and overdone, in that order. The first third, by far the best part, covers Joshua (Jesus) and Biff's childhood escapades. In the second part Josh and Biff travel east to find and learn from the wise men. The final section retells the Gospels - Joshua's public ministry as the Messiah.
   My overall impression was that Moore had the most fun with the first two sections, but he felt obligated to tell the whole story, so he just muscled it out. I wish he'd done like Anne Rice and focused on a short boyhood time frame, one to three years - some kind of Huckleberry Finn adventure, with plenty of foreshadowing. I think that would have better served his comedic gifts. In any case, this is the funniest book about Jesus ever written!

Week 18 - Holy Extended Family

Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt - Anne Rice


It's hard to read or think or write! I'm in a slump.

   My favorite part of this book is the portrait of an "ordinary" 1st century Jewish extended family (when I read "household" in the NT, should I think of this type of family life?). Of course this holy family receives a difficult and mysterious calling, which they all, including Jesus, struggle to understand and respond to.

   The two major plot devices: travel - from Egypt to Judea, then Galilee, then to and from Jerusalem again - and secrets - Jesus' family has kept the full story of his miraculous birth from him and others.

   This book isn't as piercing as The Last Temptation or as potent as Jesus Christ Son of Man, but it is as earnest as those other two. It bears up under the weight of Rice's love.

   All three Jesus novels have highlighted the landscape, or Jesus' interaction with the landscape. How important is the landscape in the Gospels as compared with other ancient biographies?

Week 17 - 2-D or 3-D Jesus?

The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis

  I've been in a complaining mood lately, so don't take my whining too seriously. 

  This book and the one I paired it with in my head - Gibran's Jesus The Son of Man - are beautiful, inventive, devotional. For both Gibran and Kazantzakis Jesus is the great Romantic Hero: striving, yearning, strong and sympathetic, a misunderstood poet, working outside institutions, overcoming worldly cares, a lover of nature and beauty, tragic yet triumphant. At the least, Jesus is our best self. Jesus fully integrates heaven and earth, in his existence and/or through his words and deeds. 
   Gibran's Jesus leans more towards the sage and mystic, and Kazantzakis' Jesus more towards the fear and trembling, existentialist kind of hero. I hope they got to read each other's work. Two wonderful writers, spiritually devoted to Jesus, sailing into his life with paper sails and a pen as rudder. 
   So...why are their Jesus's such dead characters? Maybe dead isn't the right word. Forced. We could chalk it up as another instance of the uninteresting-hero-in-an-interesting-cast-or-story problem, which I think is one of the great unsolved problems in the history of the universe. 
   You can tell as you read that Gibran and Kazantzakis both love Jesus very much, so perhaps they were trying too hard to get it right. It's as if they took a beloved icon, in all its two dimensional profundity, and tried to add perspective, make it 3-D, while still keeping the basic style of the icon. Jesus looks like a cartoon character on a live set. Who framed Roger Rabbit? Kazantzakis' Jesus is more human, Gibran's more divine, but they're stuck in a similar contortion - a mix-up of 2-D and 3-D conventions.
   Another complaint - they both pin Paul as a power hungry fanatic. Also their female characters hang on the male characters, not just socially (mother, potential mother, wife, potential wife, servant) but spiritually: women's spirituality is portrayed mostly as sensuality - in relationship to a husband or child. One more gripe: Gibran paints a bleak picture of Jewish religion; Kazantzakis's is more lively, thankfully.
 

Week 16 - Built in Bethlehem 1961

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness - Alice Walker

   Leaving Richmond Hill this afternoon I spy our latest, most frequent cat visitor crossing the street, honoring the pavement with his royal paws. Confidence is a cat walking away.

   There goes a crow with a forked twig in its mouth. I've heard that if you feed and make friends with crows they will leave gifts on your porch - bottle caps, tinfoil burger wrappers, shiny ribbon.

  Huffle puff puffle huff up and down Libbie Hill steps. Don't mind me Mr Skink! A skink for every crevice, or a crevice for every skink? Here's a big one poking his head out into a sunny spot. 

  The other day when we toured the house with the inspector, I held open the door of the breaker box while he analyzed its contents. Through the back window I saw a well-grown groundhog poking his head through a broken down spot in the back fence. If we get the house I'm gonna call him Lloyd. If we don't get the house I guess I'll call him Lloyd anyway. I'm already calling him Lloyd.

  What do you call the sound your shoes make walking along a gravel path?
  
  Two men, who look to be father and son, silently fish off Chapel Island, sipping 24 ounce Natural Light. The fish are jumping after flies, just not their flies. Contentment is father-son fishing, luke-warm beer, lots of shade, little talking, few fish.

   Farther down the path a tree is full of tiny birds (I don't know a stork from a sparrow), quietly playing musical twigs. They don't seem to be eating or talking. Why do they keep trading places?

   Who is that goose honking at?

   Passenger train on the elevated track. All that shaking but the ducks in the canal aren't worried, dipping their heads after something ducks eat. The trestle "bent" (the load bearing frame between the spans) reads "Built in Bethlehem 1961" (or is it 1967?). According to Billy Joel out in Bethlehem they're killing time, filling out forms, standing in line. 

   Time to go home and clean some bathrooms.

   Check it out! An excited eight legged huntress in the bottom of a trashcan. Don't tell anyone, I'm turning it loose in the hall.

notes

• ...so well hidden has the act of birth become
• until the last moment I could not believe that a baby would be the result of what I was seeing
• only when these other children are safe in the world will your grandchildren be safe
• from the moment I saw that a plum grew out of a brown-colored, dry-looking branch, and a watermelon came from a green stem attached to a plant that was rooted in the dark earth, "heaven" as described by the pastor of our church became irrelevant...
• "relative, shift your teepee, Mother Earth needs sunlight"
• wisdom, however, requests a pause
• "No whirlwind, no reply; no burning/ Just a bare winter bush./ This is God, too.
• It is like/ sitting on/ a sunny pier/ wondering whether/ to swing/ your feet
• during the pause is the ideal time to listen to stories. but only after you have inhabited Silence for long enough to find it comfortable
• The distaste for hesitation. The absolute hatred of spending time in emptiness, what Buddhists refer to as groundlessness.
• it is hard to bear our own human thickness
• To be cared for. I said to my friend: it is possible for everyone on earth to have this.
• At this time in history, we are to take nothing/ personally/ least of all, ourselves
• If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found
• it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love
• I cherish the study and practice of Buddhism because it is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the world of healing our ancestors...they can only be healed inside us
• I see the Christ spirit in all those who cannot be bought away from their love of humanity
• To enumerate the crimes committed against the Mother of Humanity would drive the sanest person mad
• When I read these letters and poems and viewed the drawings, I was connected to those of our ancestors who first experienced the wrenching devastation of the destruction of their families. I felt in my own body the long centuries of slavery
• He was someone who, in a sense, was living, consciously, toward his death...Which is how we black southerners felt. MLK was not the only one who thought he wouldn't survive.
• Love your country/ by loving/ Americans
• Generosity toward those less fortunate is the way of the future, if a future exists
• tell them: I welcome you here
• I firmly believe that the only punishment that works is love
• "The only thing worthy of you is compassion"
• The beings we kill become, somehow, ours for life. Ironically, we become responsible for them in death as we were not in life.