Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
I’ve been rethinking the idea of bliss in Heaven a lot these days. Many of the people who are sure they’re doing all they can to be there ... are exactly the same people I don’t want to spend eternity with.
[51st of 100]. “The dual substance of Christ–the yearning so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God…has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh… and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.” So an epigraph goes quoting Nikos Kazantzakis at the beginning of this 1988 film by Martin Scorsese. (Kazantzakis is also the author of the controversial novel on which this equally controversial film is based on.) As far as I'm concerned the film fulfills the promise of that epigraph, and demonstrates what many might find hard to believe: that this is arguably the most spiritual film ever made of the Jesus story. I've seen most of them, and while there are some I admire for one thing or another, they often reduce the life of Jesus into a conceit that feels more or less cosmetic, or even incidental: as mystical focus in beautiful pageantry [George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told or Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings], as sporadic magical dream being [William Wyler's Ben-Hur], as neorealist martyr [Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew], as comic counterpoint [Terry Jones's Life of Brian], as angst-ridden rock star [Norman Jewison's Jesus Christ Superstar], or as the central figure of extreme anti-Semitic sadism [Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ]. Most of these films are understandably reverent, and so they work as totems while falling flat as movies of discerning spirituality. Jesus films for the longest time did not engage in a deeper way, until Scorsese came along daring to make an adaptation of Kazantzakis' work. And it's no surprise that a man who was supposed to become a priest, and who has dealt with the themes of sin, guilt, and redemption in many of his films would dare take on dangerous material. And needless to say he was publicly crucified for it, with screenings of his film attended to with threats of boycotts and bombs from the religious right. The angry panic stemmed from the story's departure from the Jesus canon: First, its sympathetic depiction of Judas as Jesus' concerned best friend and right hand man who wants a Messiah as a smiter of Rome. Second, its depiction of Jesus as a self-doubting man forever resisting God's call to the point of doing carpentry work as maker of crucifixes to use against Rome's enemies. And third, its depiction of Jesus' chaste but still romantic connection with the prostitute Mary Magdalene, which ends in a near-death fantasy of him possibly succumbing to Satan's titular temptation: give up the burden of the cross and all that it entails, and have a happy future as a married man -- a temptation he ultimately rejects of course, thus ushering in the promise of John 3:16. With my descriptions, I do no justice to the subtle nuances these plot points are actually executed in the film; on paper they do sound scandalous, and that was what drove the religious right to near hysteria in 1988, the film largely unseen by them. If they had only seen it with their own eyes, they would probably marvel at how elegantly draped in faith the film actually is. It's philosophical underpinnings, summed up by that epigraph I've given above, is one for deep contemplation: If Christ is at once fully God and fully man but only one person, then that person is full of doubt, of questioning and uncertainty. Scorsese was able to portray this oscillation and questioning by showing the inner life of Jesus in this film. For me, the film remains an influence because it gave voice to my idea of what it means to be Christian. I use the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with God, in Genesis 32:22-32, in my pursuit of a Christian life. To wrestle, to consider carefully each Christian tenet, to be a good Christian is to weigh everything, especially the spiritual significance of the utterances of “prophets”—because there are too many false ones, alas. [I still remember a pastor advocating that the place women should be relegated to is the bedroom and the kitchen -- and I was horrified to witness the congregation nodding in assent to his sexist sermon. I've since abandoned that church.] To know God is to struggle in the pursuit of knowing. The irony is truth: to have a strong faith, one must question. What's the film?
It is 2018, and it is the second year of the Great Purge. Sebastian hurries down Hibbard Avenue in the dusk, head down low, careful not to cover the Rainbow Badge on his shirt like he and other people like him have been instructed to do. From somewhere, he hears the tolling of the bells. Real news is scarce these days. All the television channels are showing reruns of old episodes of The 700 Club. But the rumours. There are always rumours. People whisper about the concentration camp being built up north, near Canlaon. "People like you will be herded away soon," someone hissed to him earlier that day. Sebastian trembles. He wonders which among his so-called friends -- or even his family -- will be the ones to call the religious police on him. It doesn't really matter. All he can do now is wait. Under his breath, he curses ever so gently: "Love wins." #SpeculativeFictionForTheseTimes
I was chatting with someone a few days ago because I was hoping to enlighten him about the institutional abuses gay men and women have endured over the years, and to illustrate the point, I sent him a photo of gay men about to be hanged in Iran for being gay. "But that's not a Christian country," he replied. I should have sent him this picture: Germany in the Second World War, a "Christian" country, and the men with the pink triangles in concentration camps -- a story about the Holocaust you don't hear too often. It can happen again.
"This is my simple religion," the Dalai Lama once said. "There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." I've had bruises the past few days, so this is going to be difficult. But fine, let's try this tack. The philosophy is kindness.
This is St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of Carcar. And Dumaguete. I like the idea that two cities known for writers would have as a patron saint someone who is entirely fictional. She doesn't exist except in the ecstasy of our mugna, literary and otherwise.
A street in Dumagete is named after her. In her essay "The Streets of Dumaguete," the sociologist Lorna Makil writes: "Calle Santa Catalina was named after Dumaguete’s patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, known as the 'Warrior Saint.' We read that she was chosen to be the town’s patron saint due to the great need for protection against the southern slave raiders. Legends about her courage and physical prowess were narrated by the townsfolk who had observed that her image on certain mornings would carry amor seco (a grass weed) clinging to the hem of her dress, and making them believe that the saint had gone out at night to drive away the pirates."
Every year, around Holy Week, I watch without fail a film that is still officially banned from screening in the Philippines -- Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ [1988], based on the searing and very controversial novel by the Greek writer Nikolas Kazantzakis. What I have always found ironic about the controversies surrounding both texts is that the protests -- always rabid -- seem to come from the camp of fundamentalist Christians who find in Last Temptation the ultimate blasphemy with regards Christianity. (And often they sharpen their knives without even bothering to see the film or read the book. They have only heard about some salacious details -- for example, that the texts show Jesus abandoning the cross and marrying Mary Magdalene, and having a family with her. Sacrilege! But if only they got the point of that pointed deviation from the Gospel.)
And I have always thought that these texts are in themselves the most Christian of all secular attempts to understand God, and every year when I see this film I am reminded again and again about the singular beauty of my faith: that there was Christ who is God made flesh and born in this world; and that there was His bloody sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, "to wash away our sins," as the Bible says.
But we, in all our unquestioning wallowing of dogma, always forget the ultimate dilemma of the Christ: he was part God, part man. The film and the book make us imagine Jesus treading that fine line of his dual nature: he is free from sin -- but that does not mean he is free from all the temptations humans face; he knows he is called to make that final sacrifice -- but why him? why that kind of pain? and for these people? The film's epigraph, taken from Kazantzakis himself, goes: "The dual substance of Christ, the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God... has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."
In the end, on the cross, where the clip above takes us, Jesus is confronted by an ethereal child who calls herself his "guardian angel." This is in fact Satan giving him his final temptation -- to give up the cross, to give up being the Messiah, and to live from henceforth a comfortable life, perhaps with Mary Magdalene, perhaps with family. The child knows how to tempt: that soothing, knowing voice, invoking even Scripture -- it knows the thwarted sacrifice of Abraham, for example; it knows how to coat logic and sentimentality into temptation. The child shows Jesus the kind of life he could have, if he gives up the cross. He is tempted. He is, after all, half-human.
What we don't see in this clip is Jesus' final response: he says "no" to the final temptation, denounces the child as Satan in disguise -- and brings to accomplishment God's mission for him on earth: to die for our sins to give us eternal grace.
What a beautiful message that is, and also something that exquisitely paints for us the agony of the Christ's dual nature. Only the truest Christian, if I may say so, can appreciate something like Last Temptation. And learn from it.
In light of this article in Discovery News about the "rediscovery" of God's forgotten wife Asherah, whose once prominent standing in divinity is found in amulets, figurines, inscriptions and ancient texts, including the Bible -- and is the focus of the now controversial research of University of Exeter's Francesca Stavrakopoulou -- I am unearthing this old essay by William R. Harwood, which dumbfounded me when I first read it in college many years ago, and which I posted in this blog back in 2004.
Gods, Goddesses, and Bibles: The Canonization of Misogyny
By William R. Harwood
In October 1984, America’s National Council of Chinches issued a new translation of passages of the Judeo-Christian Bible that the Council felt were marred by “male bias.” Words that were masculine gender in the original language were converted to common gender in English (for example: king became ruler; God’s son became God’s child), passages that ignored women were altered to rectify the omission (The God of Abraham became The God of Abraham and Sarah), and references to the head of the Christian pantheon as God the Father were amended to God the Father and Mother. While all but the culturally Schlaflyed [1] applauded the attempt to drag religion into the twentieth century, even at the price of altering “revealed truth,” what nobody seems to have realized is that a translation of the Judeo-Christian Bible that does not offend women is analogous to a translation of Mein Kampf [2] that does not offend Jews.
In a male-dominated world, popes, caliphs, ayatollahs, prophets, messiahs, priests, and rabbis tend to be male; but that was not always so. From humankind’s creation of the first goddess thirty thousand years ago until the retaliatory invention of male gods more than twenty thousand years later, women held the same ruling-caste status presently enjoyed by men. There was a good reason for this: just as Cro-Magnon humans were able to recognize that the cow was their superior because she sustained them with her milk (thus the cow-goddess Hera and the status of cows in Hinduism), so did they recognize that woman was man’s superior because she produced the children who ensured the species’s continued survival.
Almost from their conception, gods were perceived as the givers of life. Since only females could give life, it inevitably followed that the gods must he female. And in a world ruled by female divinities, those humans created in the Mother’s image naturally far outranked the male humans whose prime functions were fighting wars and providing their female overlords with sexual recreation.
As it was in the skies, so it was on earth. Goddesses ruled the metaphysical world; women ruled the physical. Priestesses reigned for life, often accepting homage (the original meaning of worship) as goddesses-on-earth. In an orderly world hatched from the egg of the goddess and run by her mirror image, men accepted that they had no rights and did as they were ordered (just as in the modern world there are women so conditioned to the belief that they are hereditary slaves that they give speeches urging state legislatures to refuse to ratify a constitutional amendment granting full human status to women). It is doubtful, however, that men were ever exploited by women prior to the Male Revolution of 3500 BCE [3] in the manner in which women since that date have been oppressed and dehumanized by men. There was never, for example, a female-absolutist equivalent of the sixth-century CE synod of Macon, at which Christian bishops earnestly debated whether women were human beings, possessed of “souls,” or simply soulless breeding stock whom the chief male god had given man to use as he saw fit.
Men were never private property, owned by one woman and arbitrarily forbidden from providing sexual recreation to any woman but herself. At least, they were not in the days of goddess-rule. Men accept such a designation today (or pretend to) as the price they must pay for imposing similar private ownership on their breeding women; but this, too, is a consequence of the Male Revolution. When the idea began to evolve that monogamy was either right or wrong, the ruling males declared, in effect, “We won’t annul your sexual slavery — but we’ll agree to share your captivity by submitting to the same exclusivity.”
Then came the Big Discovery.
The Big Discovery did not occur everywhere at the same time. Among the Aborigines of Melville Island to the north of Australia, it was not made until the nineteenth century CE. In some places, it may well have taken place much earlier than 3500 BCE, which is the best available estimate of the approximate date at which it became widespread. To persons who have grown up in a society in which such knowledge is taken for granted, it is difficult to convey the tremendous significance for future history of the first discovery by men that the weapon with which they pleasured their mistresses also made babies. The Big Discovery meant that women were no longer the sole purveyors of life—and therefore neither were goddesses! From being the reproducers of life, women found themselves reduced to the level of incubators, of no more relevance to the birth process than the dirt in which an ear of corn grew into an adult plant.
Men were physically stronger than women. That fact had long been known and rationalized to fit a female-dominant theology, and only men’s acceptance of their insignificance in the divine order kept them from taking over the world much sooner. Following the Big Discovery, nothing could stop them and nothing did stop them. However, the takeover did not occur right away. Compared to the Male Revolution, the Industrial Revolution was accomplished overnight. Before the mind could conceive of any change in the social structure of human society, it had first to postulate a similar change in the sky. Thus, before there could be any king reigning on earth, there had to be created a King of Heaven, a God the Father, who was the Mother’s superior and by whose impregnation she produced her children.
Men did gain political power. But power that was not hereditary was meaningless. Just as mothers had always been able to identify their daughters, now fathers wanted to be able to identify their sons. It was for that reason that men imposed upon women a logical extension of the private-property concept, the chattel-slavery that came to be known as marriage. And with marriage came the first sexual taboo: you are not to commit adultery.
Adultery was a crime against property. A woman, owned by one man, who allowed herself to be impregnated by another, thereby robbed her husband’s true heir of the inheritance that could conceivably be usurped by her lover’s “bastard” (another new concept). Had the discovery that sexual recreation causes pregnancy been coupled with the realization that births can be positively traced to those couplings that occurred roughly nine months earlier, the adultery taboo would never have been so severe. As it was, the taboo was based upon the assumption that a woman’s child could have been fathered by any previous lover, regardless of whether the coupling had occurred five months or twenty years before its birth.
Since adultery was a crime against the adulteress’s husband, an attempt to rob him of his right to pass on his property and power to his lawfully conceived sons, it followed that an act of recreation involving an unmarried woman did not constitute adultery. The generalization of adultery to include recreation between married men and unmarried women did not occur until after Siddhartha Gautama’s [4] creation of the belief that abstinence from recreation, deemed a sin by the Talmud (Nazir 19a), could somehow be virtuous in itself.
Adultery was for many centuries the only sexual taboo. Without any concept of wrong-doing, women freely grew up copulating with brothers and cousins and neighbors. At the age of eleven or twelve, those that had not been sold to husbands would take adult lovers, usually their closest relative, and recreate diligently until such time as they could demonstrate their fertility by becoming pregnant. Women who, although nubile, had never produced a live infant, and who therefore were bad breeding risks, were stigmatized by the pejorative label, virgin.
Once a woman had given birth, an event that often did not occur until the age of fifteen or sixteen, her chances of being purchased as a wife increased significantly. Men wanted good breeders, and a woman who had demonstrated not only fertility but also the ability to survive the childbirth could expect a wide range of suitors, all of whom would share her favors until such time as her father accepted the highest bid. The first child of the marriage, regardless of how many years might have elapsed before its birth, being of doubtful parentage, would be sacrificed to Molokh or Baal or Yahweh or Allah or whichever other god had the local baby-burning concession. Following the birth and sacrifice, the wife would observe an adultery taboo. All future children could then be attributed with absolute certainty to her legal owner.
It was the abolition of infant sacrifice that led to the imposition of cradle-to-marriage joy-deprivation on half of the human race. All societies eventually recognized that, with women dying in childbirth faster than men could kill each other m war, live births were too rare to be wasted and infant sacrifice must be abolished. That meant that some new method had to be found whereby a man could be certain that the first child born to his new bride was of his own begetting. The solution was to deny unmarried girls the opportunity to bring to the marriage bed a womb that might already be carrying seed that could one day produce a cuckoo’s chick. [5] Women were informed that henceforth they were to practice total premarital joy-rejection, and that any woman who failed to spill hymenal blood on the marriage blanket could expect to he promptly executed (Deut. 22:13-21). Thus from sheer ignorance concerning the duration of pregnancy and the durability of sperm, men stole from women the basic right to decide for themselves whether an offer of sexual activity should be accepted or rejected—a right that only the recent perfection of dependable contraceptive techniques has enabled them to reclaim.
The final step in the degradation of women was not taken until perhaps two thousand years after their reduction to slave status as men’s “wives” following the Big Discovery. Not content with denying women their ancient role in creation and salvation by making the post-Discovery creator and savior both male, the phallusocracy now came up with the myth that male gods had created a perfect world which women had subsequently rendered imperfect by their culpable inadequacy. In Greek god-mythology, the first woman was Pandora, whom Zeus gave to Prometheus to be his wife as a punishment for giving man fire. Pandora was endowed with a scaled box (the sexual symbolism of which should need no explanation) and warned never to open it. She disobeyed Zeus’s admonition, and out of her box leaped disease, famine, and all of the other evils with which man has since been punished for woman’s crime.
In the Semitic version of the same myth, the humanized goddess Eve first yielded to a serpent goddess’s invitation to worship her by eating the vulva-shaped fruit that was her sacramental body and blood, in defiance of the ruling male god’s instruction to worship him alone. She then corrupted the man she had been created to serve. That only a chronic misogynist could have imposed such a fable is obvious enough. That only a misogynist culture could believe it should be no less obvious.
A religion in which all first- and second-ranking gods are male is misogynous by definition. Christianity, for example, admits females only as third-ranking immortals (“saints”), and many at its third-ranking gods, prior to their pumpkinification, [6] were themselves vicious misogynists. Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, described women as “a tool of Satan and a pathway to Hell,” while Ambrose and Augustine contributed to the world the pious belief that someone as clean as Jesus could not have come out of something as dirty as a female recreational orifice but instead magically appeared outside of third-level goddess Mary’s body without the necessity of utilizing her birth canal. While not even popes claim to he speaking inerrant truth at all times, and otherwise good humans can still he bigots, it is nonetheless significant that the views expressed by those men have never been repudiated by the Church that canonized them.
It is, however, not in the writings of “saints” but in canonized Scriptures that one must look for proof that a religion officially categorizes women as subhuman. Judaism’s position is clearly spelled out in the prayer in the Talmud that reads, “Yahweh, I thank you who have not made me a woman, an idiot, or an infidel.” Christianity’s inspired apologist for misogyny was Paul of Tarsus:
Women, submit yourselves to your men as to his Lordship. For the man is his woman’s head. Just as the community is subject to the Messiah, so are women to their men in all things. (Eph. 5:22— 24)
Women in the community are to remain silent. They are required to be obedient, as even the Torah commands. (I Cor. 14:34)
The man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man. (I Cor. 11:9)
Paul’s misogyny has begun to he rejected in the secular world, but in Christian churches women’s demands for full membership in the human race continue to be ignored.
The misogyny of Islam’s fanatic present-day leaders is widely known. Less known perhaps is that misogyny is unambiguously endorsed by Muhammad’s Koran:
Has your Lord blessed you with sons and himself adopted daughters from among the angels? A monstrous blasphemy is that which you utter. (17:40)
Men have a status above women. (2:228)
Call in two male witnesses from among you, but if two men cannot he found, then one man and two women. (2:282)
Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other.... Good women are obedient.... As for those from whom you fear disobedience... beat them. (4:34)
Not only did Muhammad’s male chauvinist god deem men superior to women, he declared it a blasphemy to suggest otherwise.
And how did the National Council of Churches respond to Paul’s sexism in their common-gender Bible translation? Very easily: they simply left it out.
NOTES
1. An allusion to Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-women’s-rights activist who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s.
2. “My Battle” (1924-1926), the book by Adolf Hitler in which he explained Nazi programs and doctrines including Nazi anti-Semitism.
3. Before the common era; same as BC, before Christ. CE signifies “of the common era”; same as AD, anno domini, in the year of the dominion (of Christ).
4. Founder of Buddhism (563—483 BC); also known as Buddha.
5. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other species of birds, which rear the cuckoo’s young.
6. Harwood seems to be referring here to the fairy tale Cinderella in which a pumpkin is transformed into a golden coach.
“… [T]he first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”
2:49 AM |
Calling for the Great Condom Buy-In of 2011
There’s a way to respond to the ridiculousness that is Ayala Alabang’s condom debacle. (For those not in the know, the neighborhood just made it a requirement that all buyers of condoms must register.) The answer: respond with equal ridiculousness. So they want registration every time one buys condoms? Pwes. Calling for the Great Condom Buy-in of 2011! All RH Bill supporters — all the thousands of you — go march right now to the neighborhood Mercury Drug and buy condoms at the same time, clamor to be served and fast, and crowd the place out to limit other traffic to the store — and proceed to watch the the entire store frantically list down everybody.
4:04 PM |
Live in the Now Instead of the After-Life
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous—not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful… The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
~ Ann Druyan, talking about the late scientist Carl Sagan
In her radio show, Dr. Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance.
The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, written by a U.S. man, and posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination ... End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15: 19-24). The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there "degrees" of abomination?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev. 24:10-16). Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your adoring fan.
James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus, Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia
P.S.
It would be a damn shame if we couldn't own a Canadian.
In the best of times and in the worst of times, I return to Christian music to remind me that the finality of all things is in God. (This will come as a surprise perhaps to quite a few who think they know me, and have labeled me -- what was that? -- an "unhappy lost sheep.")
Music such as this is perfect during meditative afternoons, especially weekends, when things slow to a crawl, and the quiet makes you turn inward, towards everything that lay in silent bursting in your heart.
Like King Saul of the Old Testament, I know that the perfect cure for the vexed soul is time spent immersed in song and careful, whispered prayers. He had the young David play the harp for him, and from the Bible we read: "Whenever the spirit from God came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him" (1 Samuel 16:23).
My own personal David is Sandi Patti, she of the golden voice and a sometime tattered life that belies much of what I find hypocritical in fundamentalism. (That calls for a totally separate post -- but let it be said that this is part of my many reasons why I don't go to church anymore. It is not because I have stopped being Christian. Far from it. It is simply because when you come to realize that you're in a pen with wolves dressed as sheep, you'd rather really pursue God in beautiful solitude.)
When the vexing days descend, it is through Sandi Patti's music that I find entrance to divine comfort. She has sang so many Christian standards, it is impossible to find one that describes everything about her music.
But I've always loved "The Stage is Bare" from The Finest Moments, and I finally realized that it may be because it captures, so perfectly, the way I live my faith. She sings:
The stage is bare, The crowds are gone, The love we shared still lingers on. We sang and played, and we laughed and cried, And in our tumbling way we tried To say what only hearts can know. And all too soon we had to go. But now, here in this darkened room, Just empty seats, There’s just me and you.
It was so easy to call you Lord When a thousand voices sang your praise. But there’s no one to hear me now, So hear me now, be near me now.
The stage is bare, The crowds are gone. Lord, now's the time I need Your song To give me joy and certainty When no one else is watching me. I need you more than words can say, Tomorrow’s such a daily day. And I so need to feel you then, Holding my hand, Please hold me then.
I need you, Lord.
I like that. I like that honesty. I like how it burns into me the beauty of talking to God in solitude. Because it is so easy to proclaim God in the full limelight -- in church worship, in prayer rallies and Bible study sessions, in text messages, in Facebook, in blogs, in whatever platform -- to convince everybody else of the righteousness we hold ourselves in. And I see that a lot, especially from people who only use His name to cover up festering lies, who find strange comfort in public holiness.
Ultimately it is in solitude -- with only you and your God -- that one can recognize the truthfulness of your bond with the divine.
A simple look at history -- and a cursory look at current events -- would reveal that millions upon millions of people have died or have suffered because of religion. And now, religious fanatics say that I -- and thousands of people like me -- am the end of civilization as we know it? You have got to be kidding.
I've seen the notorious YouTube video which began circulating around since Oprah Winfrey backed Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency.* And this morning, I just got another online invitation to view the whole thing all over again -- and what can I say.... This time, it threw for a loop, because the sender is one of my most favoritest persons in the whole wide world. (He still is.) But I'm very skeptical about the whole "controversy." It's so easy to make videos like this, edited to make a particular slant. Hell, anybody can take several footages of Mother Teresa and edit them to make it look like she's the biggest ho in Calcutta. I mean, come on, haven't you ever seen that mock trailer of Stanley Kubrick's classic horror movie The Shining made to look like it was a touching father-and-son bonding story or as a romantic comedy? That one is available in YouTube, too.
And I know very well the panic-inducing tendency behind this effort since I grew up with a very typically Christian fundamentalist environment. I was a devoted Sunday School kid and teenager with such loyalty to Calvary Chapel, back when it had great and compassionate pastors. When I was a kid, I used to write Jack T. Chick Publications for free copies of their comics and tracts (especially The Crusaders series -- I had the whole set), all of which tried to make all of the world -- Africa, the old U.S.S.R., India, evolution, Islam, Mormonism, the Catholic Church, Bible scholarship, rock music, the New Age movement, hitchhiking -- into grotesques masks of overpowering evil. And fundamentalists are often the most gullible people I know -- they swallow everything their pastors tell them. In one church meeting I attended, one guest pastor was shouting at the congregation with a conviction that all women should go back to the kitchen and the bedroom where they belong. I was so aghast at that message and wanted to walk out, but when I looked around, people were nodding and nodding. And in one recent luncheon with my own family, I found my blood boiling when I found most of them running their conversations (gossip was more like it) this way: "So-and-so is this. Is he Christian?" or "So-and-so just passed the Board. Is she Christian?" or "So you're friends with so-and-so. I hope they're Christian." That kitid-thinking drove me absolutely nuts. (In Church parlance, ni-backslide ko. I don't mind that ostracism, because I am still secure in my Christianity naman. You really don't need any gossip-swinging, judgment-bearing church to be Christian.)
But back to that Oprah video, which I won't even link here. It is so sad how earnestly "Christian" people try to bring other good people down, especially those who are trying to make something good out in the world. Look, I don't even like A New Earth, the Eckhart Tolle book she loves, but loving the book and being enthusiastic about it doesn't make Oprah a bad person with the intention of "making" an anti-God Church. The idea itself is so preposterous and absurd, I can't believe people actually believe in it. She is not the Anti-Christ. (Patrick Buchanan is, hahaha!)
*Do you smell a manufactured controversy to blindside fence-sitting conservatives for the election? I do.
The DVD of The Golden Compass is soon coming our way, and I think it's fair to say -- after all these months -- that when I saw the movie on the big screen last year, I tried to like it so much (because I love the book) but it kinda ... underwhelmed. It was boring, actually. I loved individual touches of it, but the whole thing just did not work. I remember leaving the theater in Greenbelt with Mark, and we were all so silent, trying hard to mask our disappointment. "It was okay," we said. Which is bad. I think the movie went wrong in pre-production when the makers tried to tailor it to follow all the marketing expectations of too many people, especially people they didn't want to offend, thereby pushing the entire story towards a territory where it would lose its bite, and its magic. They virtually did away with Philip Pullman's anti-Christianity angle, hoping the rabid Evangelicals would not picket, and still go ahead and see the movie. Hell, they still didn't go anyway, and the movie only earned $70 million in North America (but grossed more worldwide). I wish they went ahead and stayed true to the spirit of the book. It would have been a better movie. The rabid dogs would have howled, of course, but at least there would have have been something salvageable in the film.
Will they film The Subtle Knife? Here's crossing our fingers...
You know, of course, how they joke about many fundamentalists's all-too-obsessive regard of "immorality" (especially in matters of sexuality). It's quite unhealthy. What's more, it can be taken to be a perfect reflection of their own secret depravities -- hidden carnalities they try to exorcise by jumping on anyone and everyone, and tearing them apart in full righteous mode. So here's this one young preacher dude talking about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, and then -- in perfect Freudian slip -- reveals the obsession that lies beneath his blond hair...
There you go, tit-man. I mean, "pinching his tits" for "pitching his tents"? Yay. That's gotta be worth three sessions with a shrink. Funny how he makes mention of two things in the end: First, "I hope this isn't on videotape... I have no job now." Whoops! There goes YouTube for you. And second, "What I'm saying is... sometimes... God has to be filled with justice." And to that, I say, "Amen. You sure got it, moralist."
Ahhhh, the Jack T. Chick Comics. I grew up with these, collected them all with such passion (including the tracts), and considered all of them gospel truth (pardon the pun) when I was a kid in the most Christian fundamentalist of environments.
I had a strange childhood.
And oh, according to Bookslut, they have a new comic, this time aimed at Mormonism. Exciting.
A Spanish fraile, Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala, was stationed in the Philippines during colonial times, and is now set for beatification by the Catholic Church. Problem is, he willingly participated in a torture of a Filipino priest while here. From the National Catholic Reporter:
... one of the 498 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War set for beatification in Rome on Oct. 28 [is] Augustinian Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala, who was among 98 Augustinian priests and seminarians executed by Republican forces from 1936 to 1939.
In a nutshell, the charge is that during a much earlier period in his life, when he was a young missionary in the Philippines, Olaso was guilty of torture.
According to written testimony from the victim, Olaso participated in the 1896 torture of a Filipino priest named Fr. Mariano Dacanay, who was suspected of sympathy for anti-Spanish revolutionaries. Dacanay's own account asserts that Olaso and a handful of other Augustinians encouraged guards who were administering the torture, and that at one point Olaso himself kicked Dacanay in the head, hard enough to leave the suffering priest semi-conscious.
Historians generally regard Dacanay's testimony as credible.
So if he eventually becomes a saint, will he be the patron saint of torturers? I just watched Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, and it is times like these that you simply have to wonder where the Church is going...
I am a Christian, a lapsed Protestant, and I would like to make a stand about the difference between my personal faith and that of a fundamentalist's. I come from a fundamentalist background -- that veritable holier-than-thou breeding ground of righteous vipers -- and God knows the Perrin example can be the real deal for many people I once knew in church. (I remember an incident a long time ago when my soon-to-be sister-in-law Efeb joined my family in church-going, and someone in our old church went to "lay her hands" over her, to pray for her "as a sinner," and then went on to claim that she saw a frog jump out of Efeb's mouth. Frogs, if you must know Christian symbolism, represent greed, particularly for money. When Efeb -- who is one of the sweetest and most generous person I know -- was told that, she was totally offended and disgusted, and never came back with us for church ever. I don't blame her. Many years later, I, too, bowed out, and so did many of my brothers. Christians call us "backsliders." Care ko.)
This is the video...
... and feel the fundamentalist Christian's love for the world.
6:15 AM |
Favorite Songs No. 13 : Because of Who You Are
After a battle with crippling depression, you realize two things: first, it is best to let some things take its course to heal, because anything else -- like a false sense of finish, foolishly declaring to the world, "I am all right!" -- is denying how the heart and mind really heal; and second, you find that life afterwards is still the same, with its disappointments and hard edges, but you get to see clear sign posts now, which give you ample warning over the next bump in the road. (You also learn to avoid the cause of your worries, like the plague.) Oh, and one more thing: there's always some particular choice of music that you realize is your favored healing tune. For me, it was Sandi Patty and her brilliant rendition of "Because of Who You Are."
Which is strange, if you know who I am. I am nowhere near being an evangelical, so this is a surprising choice really. But Ms. Patty's music reminds me of the idylls of my childhood when my mother used to play Christian music all day long -- when Christian music meant the heartfelt and intelligent catalog of Ms. Patty, the original Maranatha singers, Petra, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Steve Green, and Scott Wesley Thomas, and none of the curiously bland community singing of Don Moen. (Ugh, ugh.)
Music is the great Prozac. My choice of "Because of Who You Are" may spring from an early Sunday School memory with the story of King Saul and David from the Old Testament. In 1 Samuel 16:14-23, the King is troubled by evil spirits sent by God, and to soothe himself, he sends for the boy David to play harp music in his presence. Maybe that's why I play Christian music when I, too, get depressed. To battle with the demons, Sandi Patty is handy as the nearest voice that captures the divinity of harps.
10:23 AM |
Bliss in Heaven
The DVD of The Golden Compass is soon coming our way, and I think it's fair to say -- after all these months -- that when I saw the movie on the big screen last year, I tried to like it so much (because I love the book) but it kinda ... underwhelmed. It was boring, actually. I loved individual touches of it, but the whole thing just did not work. I remember leaving the theater in Greenbelt with Mark, and we were all so silent, trying hard to mask our disappointment. "It was okay," we said. Which is bad. I think the movie went wrong in pre-production when the makers tried to tailor it to follow all the marketing expectations of too many people, especially people they didn't want to offend, thereby pushing the entire story towards a territory where it would lose its bite, and its magic. They virtually did away with Philip Pullman's anti-Christianity angle, hoping the rabid Evangelicals would not picket, and still go ahead and see the movie. Hell, they still didn't go anyway, and the movie only earned $70 million in North America (but grossed more worldwide). I wish they went ahead and stayed true to the spirit of the book. It would have been a better movie. The rabid dogs would have howled, of course, but at least there would have have been something salvageable in the film.
