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Vibrations of the Third Kind

Well, I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon at the dentist - that makes seven hours in the past two weeks. The first marathon session involved an extraction and the prep work for a permanent bridge, which was installed yesterday, with the surprise inclusion of a root canal treatment. I didn't feel it, so numb was I at that point; all I felt was hammering and the cracking of the temporary bridge as it was removed, and the vibration from the drill. As I've said before here, I really like my dentist so it makes a very unpleasant thing tolerable. He also has a television screen set into the ceiling, so I watched an exciting tennis match and that helped take my mind off what was happening. I have another appointment in a couple more weeks.

Today I can really chew on the left side of my mouth for the first time in ages, and am feeling guardedly optimistic. My teeth are not the best part of my body.

We went out last night for soft Asian food - steamed dumplings and soup - and then woke this morning to incredibly loud drilling that sounded like it was right above our bed: someone in one of the other apartments had a leak in their plumbing and the sound of the repairs was vibrating all the pipes and reverberating throughout the entire building, like a bad joke.

But after getting up, and having a brand new day stretching before me with no appointment to anticipate, I felt like thinking about food again. We went for a shopping run to Adonis, the wonderful Arab supermarket. It was lunchtime when we finished shopping so we stopped at a small Middle Eastern bakery on one of the back streets near Marché Centrale and ordered two of their delicious sandwiches, made somewhat like soft pizza - they're rounds of soft flatbread spread with oil and zaatar, with some cheese, and then baked lightly so they're still pliable enough to roll. You then get to ask for whatever toppings you want: onions, tomatoes, mint, pickled turnips, hot long green peppers, olives - and the whole thing gets rolled up, warmed a little, and wrapped in paper. It's to die for. You can also start with a more pizza-like set of toppings in addition to or instead of the zaatar; I had some sort of spicy chicken, with the same lineup of extras.

Tonight I'm about to read some more in my book of the moment - This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin: the neuroscience of musical processing and perception presented in a way that lay people like me can understand. I'll write more about it when I've finished, but it's one of the more fascinating things I've read lately, and as far vibrations go, I will definitely take musical soundwaves vibrating the frequency-selective hair cells of my inner ear over any of these other less pleasant varieties. Right now I'm enjoying a performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt on the radio, recorded Monday night at Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste - it's vaguely Messiah-like but seems to have more choruses - and it's quite happy.

So...what's worth celebrating in your life? And while we're at it, what's the best thing you've eaten this past week?

Irrational Love

For several years I've been reading The Catholic Radical, the newsletter of the SS. Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester, Mass. This shelter/community is run by Scott and Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, who, in addition to living a life of radical commitment to the poor in the tradition of the Catholic Worker's founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, are some of the most courageous peace activists I know of. Scott has been imprisoned a number of times for his nonviolent opposition to war; I've only met him once, at a slide show he gave about his stay in Palestine as a Christian witness to the destruction of Jenin by the Israeli armed forces. But Scott is also funny, as you'll see. I called him last week and asked if I could reprint this piece from the last issue to share with the readers of this blog, because it was just about the best - and most honest - Lenten reflection I could imagine. It's been too long since I've sent a check to Scott and Claire and I will be doing that today; maybe some of you would be moved to do it too. Their lives and work are entirely supported by donations from people like us.

“You people make me sick!” our guest screamed. “You call yourselves Christians! You’re a bunch of hypocrites! I’ll sue you for throwing me out on the street!”
 
Although it’s our preference to feature the heartwarming stories of guests who are grateful for our hospitality and leave us for a better future, it’s not honest to sugarcoat Catholic Worker reality. Some of those who stay with us have life-long problems we hardly understand, much less resolve. Some are prevented by addiction or mental illness from making healthy choices. Some steal from each other or from us. A very small number, thanks be to God, fly off the handle.
 
We had just about every type of challenging guest in February. Several got drunk and led to us about it. One got up in the middle of the night to smoke in the bathroom. Another relapsed on drugs. An alcoholic former guest tried to sneak into the house at five in the morning to “use the bathroom.” During a previous restroom stop, he stole a guest’s leather jacket. Several guests lied to us about their income and housing plans. One of them told a story so ridiculous that I felt like saying, “Do yourself a favor. Before you tell me another lie, run it by someone else to see if they would believe you.” It’s disrespectful enough that someone lies to me without treating me like a complete idiot. 

Catholic Worker life can be hard. On the coldest day of the year, I turned up the heat, encouraged everyone to sleep in, made a special dinner, bought snacks, and rented a movie to watch with the guests, only to see everyone stay out late drinking. I didn’t even get a backhanded apology. I had turned down many others who called for hospitality because all our beds were full with ungrateful louts. Part of me wished I had a catapult. When someone came in drunk, I wouldn’t have to ask questions or give a speech, I’d just say, “Please sit here,” flick a switch, and watch them hurtle off into the distance. “Good riddance,” I’d say, with determination to fill their beds with the deserving poor. 

Although tempting, there is just one problem with that approach: it isn’t Christian. Today’s gospel by St. Luke set me straight. In it, Jesus calls us to love those who hate, abuse, and even try to kill us because this irrational love is what God has for all of us. At St. Benedict’s house in Washington, D.C., I learned from Michael Kirwan that the Catholic Worker is more of a love story than a success story. In Loaves and Fishes, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, wrote about a very difficult guest who said on his deathbed, “I have only one possession left in the world – my cane. I want you to have it. Take it – take it and wrap it around the neck of some of these bastards around here.” 

Human beings can be so outrageous at times it’s easier to love them if you laugh than if you let self-centered anger take over. Dorothy went a step further and said, “the only true influence we have on people is through supernatural love. This sanctity (not obnoxious piety) so affects others that they can be saved by it. Even though we seem to increase the delinquency of others…we can do for others, through God’s grace, what no law enforcement officer can do, what no common sense can achieve.” 

And so, when our probably not sober guest screamed at Claire and me, “I HOPE YOU BOTH BURN IN HELL!!” I merely asked him, “Would you like a ride somewhere?” to which he replied in a calm voice, “Sure, I’ll take a ride.” (He’s been by the house twice since then without incident.) 

May this Lent help us all to become better lovers. May this Easter remind us love conquers every problem, even death itself.

Scott Schaeffer-Duffy
SS. Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker
52 Mason Street
Worcester, MA 01610

Anglicans Really Alive

 

Anglicans Really Alive is the name of the new blog and associated website of a group of progressive Montreal Anglicans. Ostensibly, we're concerned about the future of the church in the light of the current international controversy, but most of us are also interested in the future of religion in general. We want to explore how religion and science can not only co-exist in a post-modern world, but how they can inform and enlarge each other. We're interested in new forms, in dialogue between traditions, in personal spirituality and growth, and in outreach and change.

The blog -- directed by the thoughtful, perceptive and often humorous Very Rev. Michael Pitts, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal -- exists for ongoing discussion; the website will contain continually-updated resources on a variety of topics: Institutional Politics; Sexuality; Peace and Justice; the Environment; Theology and Scripture; a Book List; and a weekly "In the Media" page.

I've helped design and launch the two sites and will be maintaining the website for the time being; we hope that some of you will visit and leave a comment or two; and if any readers would consider linking to us or mentioning the existence of these resources on your blogs or to organizations you belong to, we'd appreciate it a lot. In particular, those of us thinking about and working for change in the Canadian church want very much to interact with people in other parts of the world -- Anglicans, Episcopalians, and those of other denominations and traditions -- we look forward to hearing from you!

Do you speak Turkish?

It was decided to transfer him from the E.D. to a room upstairs. There was confusion about exactly which room; he was taken by stretcher to the third floor, and then the fourth, and after he was finally in a bed, in intermediate cardiac care, the chest pain started again.

More medication was administered, and he became more comfortable. It was about 1:00 am. A nurse came in and told him they were going to give him an EKG. He didn't understand. She said, “Well, whenever anyone has chest pain in our section our procedure is to do an EKG.”

He looked at us, looked at her, and said, dryly, "Excuse me, could you say that in Turkish?" The nurse looked baffled; my father-in-law grinned sideways at us. She tried again, explaining as if he were a child: “We’re going to use a special kind of a machine that draws a picture of your heart and its rhythm.” He looked at her face and didn’t reply.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“He can’t hear you,” I said, from the foot of the bed.

“When I can’t hear, I just say ‘yes.’” he told her.

She repeated the same thing, louder.

“Yes,” he said. She looked over at my husband, helplessly.

A technician in a green uniform came in with the portable EKG machine and bent over him, putting electrodes on his chest. “What are you doing now?” he asked.

“I’m settin’ you up for an EKG, we’ll be done in no time,” he said.

My father-in-law looked at him, expressionless, and said, “Do you speak Chinese?”

When the medical personnel had left he sighed and asked us, "What is it about our culture that everything has to be shortened, reduced to letter abbreviations? ‘Tell me what you’re doing, in English!’” He reflected for a minute and said, “I preferred the people down there.” (He meant in the emergency department) “They were a lot faster. They really knew what they were doing! Up here everyone is very nice, very kind, but…they seem much slower.” He shut his eyes and opened them again with a sigh. “Oh well! C’est la vie. I’m sure they know what they’re doing.” He waved his fingers in our direction. “Go home now, you look tired. It must be late! I’ll be all right. Go on!”

“Totally Lost”

"The Young Man Meets the Old Hermit," by an unknown artist, Moraqqa’ 1638, Golestan Palace, from an exhibition of masterpieces of Persian painting at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, spring 2005

After lunch we went back to his room. It hadn’t been a good day so far; his legs ached; he’d pushed the two halves of the ham-and-cheese croissant around on his plate, dismissed the French onion soup as “no good,” and finally eaten a bowl of cottage cheese with picked beets and onions on top. Back in his own chair in his own room, he sighed with relief. I fished around for a subject that would engage him. “Did you ever read Persian poetry when you were a student in Syria?” I asked.

He said no, that they had only read Arabic poetry. “I’ve tried to read Persian, and I can make out a few words but it’s quite different from Arabic,” he said. “They’ve borrowed a lot of Arabic words, and we have some of their words too. All these languages borrowed from each other; it was inevitable because of the trade and travel.”

I told him about an article I’d read recently, someone in Qatar was complaining that the students now all spoke in dialect and none of them were learning classical Arabic because it was never spoken in the home; the journalist asked where the homes were where classical Arabic had been spoken for decades – this was nothing new, he said. My father-in-law brightened. “That’s my next project!” he said. “Of course, after we raise a million dollars for my scholarship fund. I want to endow a department at AUB" (American University at Beirut - he is a graduate and used to teach there) "that will be devoted to the study of classical Arabic language and literature. Imagine! All the focus now is on studying the west. They’re turning out little Americans. Arabs should be studying their own culture and this long wonderful tradition. But maybe no one is interested. And we have a long way to go on the million dollars.”

“How are you coming on your poem?” I asked. For the past year or so, he's been writing a poem in Arabic that he says encapsulates everything he's learned about the heart of religion. I don't think he's written anything down for months, and what he recited to us before wasn't long - but it is epic in his mind and in concept.

“I have most of it written down in Arabic, but not in English,” he said. “I need two weeks of uninterrupted time, but I never get it. People come and bother me. I’ve told you about my project that it came out of, haven’t I? About the twelve people I studied, people who have had ‘epiphanies?’ I wanted to know what they had in common, what they had discovered in common.”

“Tell me again who the twelve were.”

“Let’s see…” He shut his eyes. “Abraham. Moses. Isaiah – the second one, the one who wrote ‘beat your swords..”

“… into ploughshares.”

“Yes. That Isaiah. Let’s see…Mohammad. Al-Hallaj – you know him, he’s the Muslim philosopher who was executed because he ran out into the street crying “I am God!” – they didn’t like that!’ I love him, I've spent a lot of time with Al-Hallaj…St. Francis of Assisi. How many is that?”

“Six. If we're going chronologically I think you forgot Jesus…?”

“Of course. Jesus. Paul. And I think I put the Buddha in there too, for some reason.”

“We’re still missing three.”

“Hmm. Who isn’t there?” he repeated the list, counting them off on his fingers and looking puzzled. “Oh!” he said, brightening up suddenly. “Of course – how stupid! I forgot the Greeks: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” He looked relieved.

“Great,” I said. “That’s your twelve.”

“So these were what I call ‘the originators of religion’ and most of them went to the desert or some such place to meditate on the core of existence and that’s where they got their epiphanies. In Arabic we call it al-din al-hanif: literally, ‘the religion of the faucet, of the tap.’ My father would say, ‘go fetch a glass of water from the hanif’ – the faucet in the courtyard. The hanifa are a sect of Islam – it means “straight from the stream.” That’s what these men were looking for: the pure thing, straight from the source."*

“So what did you discover they had in common?”

“It all has to do with wrapping yourself in love. And from that, seeking self-esteem, justice, truth, goodness, beauty and excellence. This is all there is. Then, of course, the priests come and make it into a system! I call it ‘churchianity!’ Because I am always looking for mischievous things, I find them!”

He sat back and laughed, shaking his big head at priests and the people who follow them.

"You see,"he continued, "the most important verse in the Bible is 'God is Love.' There are so many words in Arabic to express ‘love.’ Do you know there are over a thousand words for camel? A lot of words for ‘sword.’ But I have no time anymore to pursue these things…

In Arabic we say, “When I love, I am no more.” It means to be lost in love, in the sense of ‘being’-- for one’s self to be annihilated. The verb is waliha – to be non-existent. ‘Ana walhad’ – ‘I’m totally lost.’ That’s what we say when someone is in love. That’s what love is. That’s what they were all getting at."

* My research tells me that hanif, in Arabic scholarship, was used to refer to the "original religion" - the original monotheists, of whom Abraham is the archetype. This pure monotheistic religion is considered by Muslims to have been corrupted in Judaism and Christianity; the Qu'ran states that Islam follows "..the religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, the Muslim.." As a capitalized word, it is a proper name that means "true believer."

--

We left a little while after that. In the evening, after we’d gone to bed, the phone rang. My sister-in-law said that she was with her father at the hospital; he’d been taken there at 10:00 pm after suffering chest pain that his “little white pills” wouldn’t relieve. His blood pressure had also been very high. They were in the emergency department and she expected him to be admitted. Fortunately, we were in Vermont, so we got dressed and went over. We stayed with him until 1:30 am, when he had been moved upstairs to intermediate cardiac care, and was settled in a room. That was Wednesday night. They've had him on a nitrogycerin drip and are changing some of his medications. He seems to be stable now, and has been in excellent spirits throughout. At his insistence, we’ve returned to Montreal; we expect him to be released tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more about the hospital stay in the next post.

Yesterday

South of St. Anne-de-Sabrevois, Québec. What you can't hear is the howling of the wind; what you can't see is how fast the snow was moving across the flats.

It was not pleasant outside the car. We stopped twice so that J. could take pictures (I took these from inside!) In places where the plowed snowbanks were higher - around the height of the car - the snow was blowing off the top of the bank in a swirl that went up and over us and the other cars on the road like a huge wave. Although I've lived in snow-country all my life, and have had to deal with blowing and drifting conditions, I've never seen anything quite as dramatic as what we saw yesterday, on the vast flats of cornfields in southern Quebec. It was like a movie of a sandstorm in the Sahara.

The second time, not far from the border, a police car drew up beside us within five minutes. In polite French they asked J. to please move on because it was "too dangerous." They were right that the whiteout conditions were dangerous, but they were also predictable and local: if you parked, as we had, where there was a house or barn or a row of tall, old poplars to break the wind, the snow wasn't drifting and blowing - and the wind was absolutely  steady from the west, so it wasn't going to swirl around and change directions. But that was OK; we were happy enough to move, and as the police car took off ahead of us, we watched it fishtail down the road. The windows were dark in the school windows, and we passed several local roads that were in the process of being closed.

Across the border, we stopped for coffee in St. Albans. An older man in a snowmobile suit was gesturing excitedly to anyone who would listen in the line of people filling up their mugs with Green Mountain coffee at 8:30 am: "The worst conditions all winter!" he exclaimed. "You should see it out there on the back roads!"I wondered if the ice-fishing shanties on Lake Champlain were all blowing across the frozen surface, with fellows like this one slipping and sliding after them, balancing an armload of pails and tip-ups and six-packs of beer.

Cassandra is Four Today

It's hard to believe, but there you have it.

Enough water under the bridge that I can actually look back with nostalgia! I was thinking the other day about the bloggers who encouraged me when I was getting started -- Language Hat, Mark of Wood s Lot, James at consumptive.org, and other companions from the same time who have continued to blog just as long, like Maria of Alembic; Nancy Gandhi of Under the Fire Star; Joerg of Conscientious (blogging was different back then, don't you think?) -- and then about more recent writing-friends like Chris Clarke, Dale, the elusive Teju Cole, Tom Montag, Jean, and my trusty copain at qarrtsiluni, Dave Bonta -- and that's just a tiny list from among so many people I'd like to name. Every blog in my blogroll has been important to me during these years of nearly-daily writing. I'm grateful to all of those writers, photographers, artists, and thinkers who enrich my days and challenge me to be creative, but even more, to the readers who've kept coming here. Blogging would merely be journaling without you; you make it a whole lot more fun and more rewarding.

In honor of this blogday, I did a little work on the sidebar. For one thing, you'll find a picture and a link to my new author's website. My plan is to add some links soon to "favorites", such as the collected posts about my father-in-law, the family history from last November, and maybe some book reviews. (But then I notice that on my last blogday I resolved to write one post a month in French...uh...did I manage to do 2? or only 1?)

This particular year has had some pretty big heights and pretty low depths; so I've been especially glad to have this space in which to share my life and reflections with you, and grateful for what I've received back.  Madeleines and cappuchino for everyone!

Rachmaninoff and Brioches de Carème

We didn't make it to church this morning. We glanced, one-eyed, at the clock at 7:30; rolled over and went back to sleep; did it again at 8:45. At 9:30 it was too late. A few minutes later I got up, put on my robe and went out to the kitchen to put the teakettle on and turn up the heat. When I went back to the bedroom a voice from under the duvet asked if it was blue outside. I cracked open the blinds: "Bright. Some new snow."

J. usually gets up first to make his coffee, and brings me a cup of tea with milk in bed; I stay there and meditate for a few minutes, trying to face the day in what are, to me, its worst moments. Last night I'd kept him awake, tossing and turning from pain in my jaw - I've been having a lot of dental work and a temporary bridge has screwed up my bite - finally I got up and took a tylenol and was able to go back to sleep.

I went into the living room and turned on the radio: it was the Rachmaninoff Vespers. Perfect. Back in the kitchen I poured the water over the coffee grounds in the French press, made myself some green tea for a change, put two brioches du carème - lit, Lent brioches, or hot cross buns - into the toaster oven, prepared a basket-tray with a red plate for the buns, a small bowl of clementines and strawberries. The deep bass voices filled the apartment with Russian that sounded like smell of the coffee. I picked up the tray and walked carefully back into the bedroom: Good morning, I said. He rolled over with only a small groan, and smiled.

Eclectic

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Well, what can I say?

Tonight

Parc Lafontaine in the fog