Ramadan begins

I meant to post this at the beginning of Ramadan (also pronounced Ramazan) as I did on Facebook, but got bogged down in a major work project. I'm posting this later in July but back-dating to early July so that it appears when I intended to post it...

To those about to enter the holy month of Ramadan, Ramazan Mubarak!

To those who are not, have a look at the message below the image from Khalvat Dar Anjuman (Ibrahim Baba) about Ramazan with a few thoughts on how to honor and support the observance of Muslim friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and co-workers.

Because the calendar of Islam is a lunar one, Ramazan rotates around the seasons (and thus around the months of the Gregorian calendar). This year in the northern hemisphere, with Ramazan in the summer, the fast from sunrise to sunset, every day for a month, is particularly long and demanding.

We who are not Muslim can learn much from those who are spending this month in the ancient traditions of fasting and prayer, of almsgiving and awareness of common humanity and of the needs of the poor, of gathering for breaking the fast with family and friends, of deepening and re-focusing attention on the All-Merciful, the Creator. Can we, during this month, learn about and from our neighbors? How can we do so without burdening our neighbors, but by taking on some discipline or task ourselves? How can we attune our listening and attention? How will we be challenged to deepen our own walk, our practice, our faith, our ethics? How can we be mindful and compassionate neighbors? How can we learn to be friends on this polyphonic planet Earth?

And here is Ibrahim Baba's message, which I first read on Facebook and which he has given me permission to re-post here. (I have left the lower-case and upper-case spellings as written intentionally by the author.)


on Tuesday, 9 july 2013, many of us will enter into the Sacred Month of Ramazan, the Queen of Months. some of us will be fasting from sunrise to sunset, going about the activities of our day. others will be feeding others as their practice during this sacred time while others will build community in other ways. this is the most precious time of the year for some of us. for some of us it is a time of exceeding joy; for others it is a time of struggle. as any kind of religious time, it brings issues for some, troubling memories or fears of isolation and exclusion. it is also a time of intensifying our efforts for justice, equity, equality, access, accessibility, radical inclusion, etc. through more prayer, more dhikr, more work in our communities, etc.. because we actually have more time as we are not eating throughout the day, lol!

if you are not a muslim and know muslims who are fasting, you can offer to prepare an iftar meal for them at the end of the fasting day or cook something for their pre-dawn meal. or you can invite them to eat somewhere with you. or do something to bring smoothness to their day. for people who work all day during Ramazan, it is nice to not have to worry about their end-of-the fasting day meal (iftar). the iftar meal is often part of a community-gathering, but for some people, certain community-gatherings can be very painful and isolating. so, if you are friends with someone who is fasting and you all are part of a community that is not muslim but which unites and sustains you, perhaps that community could offer an iftar meal in recognition of your friends who are fasting. it is REALLY ROUGH to come home and have an iftar all on your own, especially if you are from a culture or place where Ramazan is a month-long party. If you find out that your friends are lonely and alone, weeping over their dates and a bowl of soup, please see with them what you could do to make some Ramazan community for them.

Greeting: Ramazan mübarek! A blessed Ramazan!
Response: Ramazan karim! A generous Ramazan/a Ramazan of generosity!

and a teaching from Sri Lankan Sufi shaykh, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, from a talk he gave entitled, "What is Ramadan?" http://www.bmf.org/ramadan/ramadan.html

Ethics, anyone?

An excellent resource for both religious and not-so-religious folks in many fields of endeavor, world-wide: Globethics.com, the Global Ethics Network for Applied Ethics. Have a look!


What the network says about itself (from the website):

The aim of Globethics.net is to ensure that people in all regions of the world are empowered to reflect and act on ethical issues. In order to ensure access to knowledge resources in applied ethics, Globethics.net has developed its Globethics.net Library, the leading global digital library on ethics. Globethics.net took this initiative to ensure that persons - especially in Africa, Asia and Latin-America - have access to good quality and up to date knowledge resources. The founding conviction of Globethics.net was that more equal access to knowledge resources in the field of applied ethics will enable persons and institutions from developing and transition economies to become more visible and audible in the global discourse on ethics. There is no cost involved in using the library. Individuals only need to register (free of charge) as participants on the Globethics.net website (www.globethics.net) to get access to all the full text journals, encyclopedias, e-books and other resources in the library.

In addition to the library, Globethics.net also offers participants on its website the opportunity to join or form electronic working groups for purposes of networking or collaborative research. The international secretariat, based in Geneva, currently concentrates on three topics of research: Business and Economic Ethics, Methodologies of Interreligious Ethics and Responsible Leadership. The knowledge produced through the working groups and research finds their way into publications that are also made available in the Globethics.net Library. One of the latest fruits of such collaborative work is the book, Overcoming Fundamentalism (edited by Christoph Stückelberger and Heidi Hadsell, 2009, Geneva: Globethics.net).

I joined initially because of my interest in the Global Digital Library on Theology and Ecumenism (online theological resources for education and ecumenical dialogue) which is housed at Globethics.net and which you can find here.

Christmas 2010: the first day of Christmas

Joyous Christmas, all.

I am going to try to start blogging again. Today I do not have words of my own, except for the ones I wrote yesterday on Facebook (where you can find me if you miss me here, though it is a very different kind of writing and presence) and which are below in blue. I have also posted a Nativity image (scroll down a couple of posts), a song, and a link to last year's Christmas post.

Greetings to my friends
who are Jewish, Muslim,
Buddhist, Humanist
and
of many other traditions.
As Christians celebrate these holy days
(in my tradition Christmas is 12 days long),
I remember
that we often have wounded
and killed,
physically and otherwise,
in the name of the one we call
Prince of Peace.
May we in celebrating him
also honor you
and your integrity
and remember that you too
walk in paths of wisdom and truth.

September 11, 2010: reflection for a student-initiated "interfaith solidarity" gathering

In light of recent events and less recent ones, some students at Guilford College, where I teach, organized a gathering for reflection and meditation. The event was simple and included readings from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy scriptures followed by Quaker-style silence with opportunity for anyone to speak. It began with a spoken reflection by a faculty member, who happened to be your friendly Acts of Hope blogger.

Here is the reflection. Bear in mind that

1) it was addressed to a particular audience --in this case, mostly "adult-escent" students and one or two faculty, including a variety of religious, non-religious, I'm-not-religious-but-I'm-spiritual, and other folks, so "pitching it" was tricky;

2) it has some repetitions and will seem a little rambling in places, with questionable sentence structure. I wrote it to be spoken aloud, slowly and somewhat meditatively.

In spite of this, perhaps some of this reflection will be useful to you.

As you may surmise from the words below, I've been teaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothee Soelle, Diana Eck, and Eboo Patel these days. And the early centuries of the Christian church.

Shalom. Salaam aleikum. Peace be with you.

Reflections on Interreligious Solidarity
Today and in the Long Haul

We welcome each other to this gathering
to which we come in peace
with both our common humanity
and our profound differences.

I always smile and take a deep breath
when someone says to me
“Well, all religions are the same.”
Actually, they are not.

Our gathering today
is an invitation to open our hearts and minds
and (as Thomas said in his invitation letter) our arms
to those who are
not us.

To learn:
Allah is worshipped by Muslims,
as all-merciful and compassionate.

To learn:
There was a Muslim nonviolent leader
Kahn Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as Badshah Khan)
in what is now Pakistan
in the same era as the Hindu nonviolent leader
Mohandas Gandhi
(known as Mahatma Gandhi).

To learn:
Jewish law is not a set of rules
but a path of life.

To learn:
The Torah and the whole Tanakh
and Judaism
are not just a prelude to Christianity.

To learn:
Jesus was not a Christian.

To learn:
Orthodox Christians who venerate icons
of Jesus, Mary, and the saints
are not worshiping idols.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have killed in the name of God.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have lived together and learned from each other.
Cordoba. Sarajevo. New York.

To learn:
Muslims worshiped peacefully
on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center
and were among the dead 9 years ago
along with Christians, Jews, Buddhists,
humanists, agnostics, atheists, and
many people whose faith we will never know.

To learn:
On that day,
an openly gay Franciscan Catholic priest
was one of the people who died
not because he was working in the twin towers
but because he rushed over there
and went in
to help care for and pray for
the wounded and the dead.

To learn:
Long before 2001,
September the 11th was the day in 1973
that a coalition of military generals
toppled the democratically elected government in Chile
and established a dictatorship that ruled with terror
for 16 years, banned trade unions,
exiled 200,000 dissenters
killed thousands of others,
and used its laws against a million native people,
the Mapuche.
The U.S. government, except during the Carter era,
supported the dictatorship.

Now,
having said all this,
let me make something clear.

Knowledge alone will not save or heal the world.
Higher learning will not guarantee justice
or alone teach compassion.

That would be to say
that only educated people can be holy
and that all educated people are righteous.

That is not true.

The Nazi doctors had lots of education.
They had medical degrees
from distinguished universities
and they used their knowledge
to torture and kill other human beings
both children and adults.
And then they went home
and listened to classical music.

Education is important
and truth and accuracy do matter.

but I want to raise the question for us today
of what kind of education we need.

More specifically,
I want to ask
what practices
–I’d like to call them spiritual practices
and I hope this is a phrase that has meaning
to all or most of you—
I want to ask what spiritual practices
we need to cultivate
in order to live as compassionate neighbors
in this conflicted world.

The world in which we live
is dangerous as well as beautiful.

The hate which we have witnessed in so many ways
--poverty that kills,
violence that kills,
cultural violence,
the threat of burning scriptures, the Qur’an, in Florida,
the burning of bodies in New York and Washington (and Pennsylvania),
the bodies maimed and raped and murdered in wars
right now
in so many countries,
the hasty language in the comments on news websites,
the swastika that showed up on someone's door
in Binford dorm the other day, right here on campus—
all that hate is not going to go away.

The hate is not going away,
though the good news is that there are
many people and groups
from many religions and places and cultures
who do the work of love,
who embody solidarity,
who exercise humility and who labor for justice.

In this world
you will be asked to stand up
for the same values and sentiments
for which you stand today
here in this circle.

You will need to do so
in hostile environments.

Will you be ready?

How will you prepare yourself?

How are you preparing now, while you are in school,
for the kind of witness we give today?

On what (or on whom)
will you draw to help you?

Let me use a word
that will not have a benevolent meaning
to all of you;
it is the word "tradition."
Thank you for bearing with me.

What tradition
or traditions
will you drawn on?

You see, we have company here.

We have company in the way of peace:
in religious peacemaking
and in secular groups devoted to peace.

We have to forge new paths
but we do not have to reinvent the wheel.

People have been here before us.

This is part of today’s good news.
We are not alone, here in our little group.

Both the dead and the living
walk with us and teach us and encourage us
if we will only listen.

We can’t do this work
without community.

And we are not the first.

Our particular community
may be a community of faith and practice,
or a humanist community.
Our communities may be
communities of struggle,
communities of peacemakers,
long established
or fairly new groups
(like the Interfaith Youth Core).


Some of us here
believe that our way
and our community’s way
is the best and the holiest.

Others
are not sure what we believe
or where the way is for us.

Whether we are one or the other
or somewhere in between,
encountering the other
is part of our work in the classroom.

It is also our work everywhere else.
Everywhere.

Think of how often
you –let me say “we” here
since of course I do it too.
Think how often we
respond hastily,
inwardly or outwardly,
jump to conclusions,
think first of our own good.

Especially those of us who are privileged
by virtue of our education,
our race, our gender,
and yes, our religion,
if we are members of the majority religion.

Others
are our teachers.

The poor and the uneducated will teach you.

The one you fear will teach you.

Your own fear will teach you.

We have to school ourselves
for solidarity.

It is hard for all of us.

Those of us who are older,
who have some experience and perhaps some wisdom
can lock ourselves inside that experience
and wall off new insight.
We need to remember that wisdom will come
from those half our age
and from territory
where we have not ventured
over the years
out of fear
or habit
or laziness.

Those of us who are younger
who are still figuring out who we are,
building our egos,
shoring them up,
and in the process resisting and reacting,
which is good and part of the journey,
may find out we need to ease up
to let wisdom in.


Solidarity:
this will cost you.
This will cost us.

Wherever we draw our inspiration and our strength,
whatever our primary community,
of faith
or blood
or friendship
there will be a cost.

So again,
ask yourselves:

Given the state of the world,
given the misunderstanding, the bias, the hatred,
and given the hope and vision that others
here and elsewhere
have shared with me,
how will I spend these college years?

I urge you,
spend these years equipping yourselves.

And do remind us who teach
that we need to equip ourselves
and school ourselves as well
for the path of peace.

Solidarity is not just today.

Solidarity is a long road.

Learning about each other takes time.

The Torah and the rest of the Tanakh,
the Christian Bible,
the Holy Qur’an:
the riches in them,
the commentaries on them
the disagreements about them
take years to study.

The traditions of the children of Abraham
take years to understand.

So do the traditions of the children of Sarah,
of Hajar (her Muslim name – Jews and Christians call her Hagar),
of Mary, who is also Mariam and Miriam.

Some traditions are written, others not.
They are also part of our collective story
and may take even more discernment and insight
to learn and understand.

Can we take the time for this?

Can we learn
not to make assumptions
about why someone covers her head with a scarf?
Can we learn not to make fun of people
who live by a different calendar from ours
or won’t do business one day a week?
Or of people who lay a mat on the floor to pray
or fall into the joyous ecstasy of Pentecostal Christian worship
or use images in prayer?

Can we learn not to make haste?

How do we learn to discern
when to choose holy patience
and when to choose holy impatience?

How do we learn to listen?

All this requires practice.

Daily.

More than daily.

Zen Buddhists would call some of this
the practice of mindfulness.

How do we take a breath
and not rush to reaction?

Can we learn
what gives the other person sorrow
but also what gives this person joy?

Can we try to understand
the whole person before us?

Will we also learn to understand systems and communities?

Can we acquire understanding of how
the many media and modes of communication
work
and of how they shape our perceptions?

Can we learn to understand
our own emotions and reactions?

We can’t do this alone.

We can’t do this without community.

It starts right here.

Third U.S. Sikh-Catholic Dialogue Retreat

Really!

I get all kinds of ecumenical and interreligious news in the (e-)mail every day and this was one of the more interesting articles to hit the inbox. No, I don't read them all, but I like to receive them nevertheless. I am a religious news pack-rat.

So here is the article on the Sikh-Catholic retreat.

I knew Francis Tiso, the head of the Catholic delegation to the retreat, because we overlapped at Harvard Divinity School for a year during our M.Div. studies. Back then he went by "Frank" and he wasn't anywhere near getting ordained. He went to a contemplative community with Brother David Steindl-Rast after graduation, not as a monk, but as part of an experiment in contemplative living. Interestingly, he is a priest of an Italian diocese. He also did doctoral work in Buddhist studies.

Francis Tiso and I also overlapped when I was in the Bay Area and I had no idea we did. Sounds like someone with whom to have an interesting conversation.

The BBC has a good overview of the Sikh religion, with resources, here.

To learn more about Sikhism and Sikhs in the United States, go to the Pluralism Project's website, and see the section on Sikhs here.

There were quite a few hate crimes against Sikhs immediately following 9/11 because Sikh men wear a turban and their attackers assumed they were Muslim.

Journey of Reconciliation: the first "freedom ride" - in 1947! Commemorations in Chapel Hill.

I received this letter a few days ago from the Fellowship of Reconciliation:

Did you know that the first civil rights "freedom ride" took place in 1947, fourteen years before the 1961 riders captured the nation's attention by exposing the brutality of Jim Crow in the South? The Journey of Reconciliation was organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was born at FOR, and was led by FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and George Houser.

The interracial group of nine men on the Journey of Reconciliation set out from Washington, D.C. on April 9th, 1947. They met some resistance from passengers and drivers on buses in Virginia and North Carolina. But when they attempted to sit at the front of a bus in Chapel Hill on April 12th, the driver refused, and removed some of the riders by force. They were then attacked by angry cab drivers at the Chapel Hill bus station, and arrested by local police. Their subsequent time serving on a chain gang led Rustin to write about the experience. His serialized journal led to major reforms in the North Carolina prison system.

[Note from Jane: For a much earlier post on Bayard Rustin, see here.]

There are so many fascinating parts of this story. Please read this narrative by a local historian to learn more about the context and outcome of this journey.

Next week, a state historic marker will be installed in Chapel Hill to commemorate the Journey of Reconciliation. The event will be an opportunity to remember the horrors of Jim Crow past, and to look forward at the racial justice challenges of our future. I hope you can join me at one or more of these events in Chapel Hill. If not, perhaps you can show your support by making a donation to FOR in honor of the first freedom ride . Click the titles below to learn more and RSVP for these events.

Thursday 2/26, 7 pm: Screening & discussion: "You Don't have to Ride Jim Crow." Watch the documentary and discuss Chapel Hill's civil rights history with filmmaker Robin Washington. Sponsored by FOR and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP.

Friday 2/27, time TBA: Nonviolent direct action organizing, then and now . A discussion of old tactics and new frontiers with Robin Washington. Sponsored by FOR.

Saturday 2/28, noon: Day of Commemoration and Re-dedication . Freedom Riders in Chapel Hill 1947-2009: The Struggle for Racial Justice Continues. Sponsored by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP and the Community Church, with support from the Town of Chapel Hill.

I am helping to organize these events because I believe in the power of nonviolent direct action to bring about justice. I want others to remember this powerful legacy and to be inspired about the change we can continue to make happen today. I hope you will join me in Chapel Hill.

Peace,

Ruby Sinreich

Communications Co-Director

Fellowship of Reconciliation

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Fellowship of Reconciliation • 521 N. Broadway • Nyack, New York 10960 • 845-358-4601 • http://forusa.org/

Cross-posted at Race, Justice, and Love.

Two from today's Times

Mother of Acts of Hope (age 90 - her birthday was the weekend I moved after the Great Tree Disaster) highly recommends this op-ed by Bob Herbert (photo left), "When Madmen Reign."

When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

He should have said that he, along with his irresponsible Republican colleagues and their running buddies in the corporate and financial sectors, put the entire economy in danger. John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (“this is a mental recession”) Gramm, were right there running with them.

Meanwhile, back home in France...

This fascinating report, also published in today's New York Times, speaks of Catholic schools as havens of interreligious tolerance and companionship.

In France, which has only four Muslim schools, some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking what an overburdened, secularist public sector often lacks: spirituality, an environment in which good manners count alongside mathematics, and higher academic standards.

No national statistics are kept, but Muslim and Catholic educators estimate that Muslim students now make up more than 10 percent of the two million students in Catholic schools. In ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Marseille and the industrial north, the proportion can be more than half.

The quiet migration of Muslims to private Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long France’s tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity.

Shana Tovah and Eid Mubarak

Tonight is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and of the Yomim Noraim, the Days of Awe.

Tomorrow is Eid al Fitr (also transliterated Eid ul Fitr), the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. After a month of fasting, there is a great feast.

These holy days days do not always coincide. Both traditions are on a lunar calendar, so the feasts are moveable.

Plainfield Today, a blog based in Plainfield, New Jersey, has a lovely post (with pictures) from last year on the convergence (yes, last year too) of the two holidays. Plainfield has both Jewish and Muslim residents.

The BBC has a nice primer on Islam here.

The BBC primer on Judaism is here.

Photos:

1) A round (rather than long) challah or braided loaf, a traditional bread for Rosh Hashanah. The round shape symbolizes the cycle of the year or perfection and completion. Credit here.

2) Chinese Muslims celebrate Eid ul Fitr last year in Urumqi, Northwest China. Credit here.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center sends too many e-mails, many of them marked "urgent," but that does not mean he doesn't send inspired letters. This is his greeting for the convergence of Rosh Hashanah and Eid al-Fitr.

Eid Mubarak, Shanah tovah u'm'tukah!

This year, just as the solemn fasts of Ramadan end and Islam rejoices in its renewed connection with the One, the Jewish people meets the Days of Awe and of Returning to that same One with prayers and acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.

I wish it were possible for those of both our traditions who have met during this last year - sometimes in grief, sometimes in fear and trepidation, sometimes in anger, sometimes in joy -- to walk hand in hand to a vast assemblage of both communities:

"Cousins, let us introduce you to each other!"

And then to turn together to another multitude, the Abrahamic family that follows Jesus, to wait with them for the season of Advent in which their own connection with the One swells into a birthing.

Many of us know from our small families that sometimes it is precisely our love for the same parents, the same home, the same teachers, the same children that can corrode into jealousy, anger, fear, violence.

And so it is with the Families of Abraham/ Ibrahim/ Avraham.

Sometimes in our history, we have lived together, sharing poetry, philosophy, politics. And sometimes -- now - the acts of some in both our families have embittered our relationships.

During this summer past, Phyllis and I (Rabbi Phyllis Berman, to whom I am married) - had the extraordinary opportunity to take part in two different interfaith gatherings that went beyond intellectual dialogue into deeper feeling and ensouling. Both gatherings were call together by Muslims. Muslims at amazingly different parts of the Muslim world:

One, called by the Guardian of the Two Sacred Places, Abdullah of Arabia, upholder of the Wahabi path and doctrine.

The other, called by Pir Zia Inayat Khan, leader of the Sufi Order International, the most universalist strand of the mystic Sufi orders.

The first gathering brought together many people who were for the first time meeting in such a way:

• Saudis and Pakistanis who had never met a Jew, and had no idea that there were Jews anywhere who both cared for the state of Israel and strenuously opposed its occupation of Palestinian territories;

• Jews who had never met a Wahabi Muslim and had no idea they might seek to honor Jewish thought and talk with Jewish teachers -

• Muslims who sought dialogue with all the traditions of our planet, even those like Hinduism and Shintoism that classical Islam might have dismissed as idolatry;

• Christians of Euro-America who had painfully learned to respect Judaism but had never before opened their minds and hearts to Islam;

• Christians of the Middle East who had long ago learned to live with Muslims but were still possessed by ancient anger at the Jews.

Here the remarkable heart-opening came from the joy of new discovery, the happiness of doing what everyone knew God wanted but had never seemed possible before. It was precisely our awkwardness that suddenly filled with grace.

In the other meeting - the one called by Sufis -- were people who had for years learned from each others' wisdom, across all the evanescent boundaries of official religious life. Here too there was the remarkable heart-opening, but it came from a different place: from the depth, the breadth, of sharing. It came in unexpected laughter as people wove together different symbols and texts and stories into coherent fringes of connection.

There is much we need to heal. Into our American polity, in the midst of efforts for us all to discern the best direction for our nation in the most important choosing moment we have faced in a century and more -

Into that solemn moment of rethinking, some Americans in just the past few weeks have plunged a dish of poison, a film whose title is "Obsession" and whose content breathes obsession in its every picture-frame.

It is bad enough that a film rooted in fear and hatred of Islam was distributed in millions of copies as an insert in a number of major metropolitan newspapers. Even worse, the distribution seems to have been carefully aimed at the "swing states" -- - those of uncertain outcome in the coming Presidential election. It is as if the virulent anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin had been directly injected into the election, say, of 1940. Was "President Rosenfeld" really a tool of the Jews?

The Shalom Center is in the midst of a careful examination of "Obsession," and we will have a full report soon. But now we will set aside the next few days for our own prayerful and contemplative searching into the Days of Awe and Reconciliation.

With blessings of shalom, salaam, peace -

Arthur

Mahmoud Darwish, R.I.P

A humane and heartstrong poet has died, of consequences of heart surgery. His physical heart had been ill for some years. Mahmoud Darwish was the leading Palestinian poet.

The BCC story is here from the Agence France-Presse (AFP). One learns more about Darwish there.

I'll try to find a poem later and post it.

Photo: AFP, 2005.

Later:

"I Come From There and Remember"

*****by Mahmoud Darwish

I am from There:
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts
in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home

(Translated by Tania Nasir for publication in Marwan’s 1998 exhibit catalogue: “An Die Kinder Palästinas”, published in Berlin by the Goethe Institut.) H/T: Annie's Letters

A video of a song by Marcel Khalife, "Ummi" ("My Mother" in Arabic) whose words are a poem by Darwish. H/T: Annie's Letters

Here's the info about a book of selected poems by Darwish published by the University of California Press, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.

And here is a review of a Hebrew edition of a book of poems (Mural in English) by Darwish in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The review is titled "Palestine as Poetry." Its author is Sami Shalom Chetrit, who teaches literature and politics in the film department at Sapir College in the Negev (Israel) and at UCLA.

Science-and-religion resources (and foodie postscript)

No, this is not about creationism or intelligent design or science in the public schools. That's a whole other set of resources, websites, and organizations.

This is about the conversation between science and religion, which is alive and well. It's not my field, but I know a few things about it and have had colleagues and teachers who specialized in this area. It's fascinating and important.

I had dinner last night with the Adorable Godson, who as you may or may not recall is a budding astrophysicist. He has a bachelor's in computer science already and is getting a second bachelor's in physics so that he can go on to graduate school in this field, which he has decided is his vocation. We caught up on the summer and various matters not for blog consumption, he told me about his summer internship and taught me all sorts of interesting things about light and telescopes and and stars and galaxies, and we had a brief conversation on science and religion. I promised I'd follow up with some resources, and having just written him a letter that took over an hour to compose because of all the hyperlinks, I thought I'd post it here (with the personal bits taken out) as a resource for blog visitors.

There were two questions that led to this letter. One was whether there were physicist-priests out there. (The answer is yes.) Another was a more general one about science and religion. The Adorable Godson has been reading a book on this topic by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

It's really fun having a godson and having him be local. I have two goddaughters who are the same age (all of them are in the 22-23 year old range) but they are not in town --one lives in Europe-- and neither is an Episcopalian. I love them all dearly, so this isn't an issue of favorites. I'm just tickled to have one of them be local and involved in the same congregation as I. As you may recall, he's a recently baptized member. Also, he can explain computers and stars. And he and Her Grace, the fabulous Maya Pavlova, are fond of each other. What's not to love?

Okay, here is the slightly edited letter. Enjoy the resources.


The best known priest-physicist is John Polkinghorne, who was the recipient of the Templeton Prize half a dozen years ago. A short bio is here. There is a website about him with all kinds of links here. You can find the text of an interview of him (from sometime in the last decade, I think, maybe late 90s) with a bibliography at the end.

Maybe an even better place to start: A lovely intro to Polkinghorne and issues he addresses is the episode of the excellent, excellent radio show Speaking of Faith called "Quarks and Creation." There is an interview of Polkinghorne there. The show has podcasts, too :-) but its website is also worth exploring at length.

There are three U.S. centers for science-religion dialogue. They always host a reception together at the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the professional society whose meeting I attend every November.

One of them, CTNS, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, is part of the GTU where I did my Ph.D. studies. Poke around their website (I made a hyperlink, as you see) - it has great stuff on it.

The other two centers are the Zygon Center for Religion and Science in Chicago and IRAS, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. They co-publish the journal Zygon.

CTNS has gotten a ton of grants from the Templeton Foundation and they had a project (one among many, you can see on their site all the books their affiliated scholars have produced re: religion and science) called "Science and the Spiritual Quest." That is also the title of the book I mentioned to you; I have the book in my office. All the essays in it are by leading scientists who have varied religious affiliations and backgrounds.

CTNS has had several joint projects with the Vatican Observatory, which is not just at the Vatican but in Arizona. The main researcher there, a very sweet guy, is a Jesuit priest and physicist named Bill Stoeger. You'll like his bio -- I think some of the work he's done is in areas of physics in which you are interested.

CTNS's founding director is a physicist (Ph.D. in physics) who is also an ordained United Church of Christ (U.C.C.) minister. His name is Robert John (Bob) Russell and he was my friend Kirk's dissertation chair.

Kirk Wegter-McNelly is my classmate and he specializes in the dialogue between physics and religion. He was a physics major as an undergraduate and wrote his dissertation in theology on quantum nonlocality and the Christian theology of creation. Click on his publications and you will see he is the author of a forthcoming encyclopedia article on physics and religion! Kirk just got a humongous research grant for a wild project with Raymond Chiao at UC-Merced.)

A former professor at the GTU who was also part of CTNS is now teaching at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church (know as "General"). His name is Mark Richardson. (That link will also show you the Metanexus Institute.) Very nice guy.

They are all nice guys. Yes, this is a male-dominated field. There are a few women in the science and religion biz and at one point they founded their own support and research group. The main person I know from that group is Lisa Stenmark, whose major work has been in high-tech-related science as I recall and who teaches in the area of Magic, Science, and Religion according to the San Jose State website. (The other major person I knew in that group was Lou Ann Trost, whose doctorate is in theology, and I see that she's now teaching with Lisa in CA.) I see that Zygon, the center in Chicago, has just appointed a woman as its new director. This is a big deal and a first. Her name is Gayle Woloschak and she is an Orthodox Christian. She's a molecular biologist and medical school professor.

The issue of course is not just having women in the field but including in the field feminist, womanist, and other theoretical or theological approaches. Here's a very short essay or piece of essay on this. Also a short essay , "An Ecology of Knowledge," by Lisa Stenmark. (A lot of the issues raised are epistemological as well as ethical.)

Oh, and CTNS also has a new project called STARS. Check out the research topic and the theme! Lots of physics there.

For one of the basic books on the whole religion and science dialogue, go to the works of Ian Barbour and see his short When Science Meets Religion. But he has, as you will see by the bio, written a lot of books. And yes, he is a physicist. Here's another bio of him.

I'd be very interested to hear more about the book by the Dalai Lama. Eric and Don's course [These are my colleagues -- Eric Mortensen in religious studies, my department, an expert in Buddhism, shamanism and folklore et al., and Donald Smith in physics; they team teach a course on science and religion; I'd love to take it!] probably has perspectives from Asian and other religious perspectives that the folks above have not explored in depth, if at all. So of course, a look at their syllabus would be really important. The science-and-religion field is vast. It is also serious and scholarly and a lot of people don't realize this -- which is why it's great that Krista Tippett has done shows like the one with Polkinghorne. Another thing that helped spread the wealth, so to speak, was a curriculum contest (I have friends who applied for grants via this competition back in the day) and program on teaching religion and science. CTNS called it the Science and Religion Course Program.

That should get you started ;-) .

* * * * *
P.S. JohnieB, Pablito, TCR, and others will want to know what we had for dinner.

I cooked, if you can call such a simple meal cooking. Four courses:

1. Crenshaw melon.

2. Salad of mixed greens with heirloom tomato slices, avocado slices, red bell pepper strips, and cold salmon (not much, left over from my dinner of the night before -- cooked en papillote with absolutely nothing, just the fresh fish, and yes, it was the ecologically okay kind, wild caught from Alaska, thank you to my local supermarket, big ol' corporate Harris Teeter), dressed with extra virgin olive oil and freshly ground French sea salt.

3. Whole wheat fusilli with pesto. (Pine nuts are too pricey and hard to digest, though classic pesto calls for them; I was out of walnuts; and the only nuts I had in the house --I keep nuts in the freezer so they won't go stale or rancid-- were cashews, so I experimented. Besides the cashews, the classic ingredients: olive oil, garlic, fresh basil, grated parmesan.)

4. Small amount of Julie's Organic Mocha Java ice cream with blueberries on top. (Originally it was going to be just the ice cream; but the Adorable Godson caught sight of the blueberries in the fridge and said, "Mmmm, blueberries.")

The melon, tomato, pepper, basil, and blueberries were from the farmers' market.

Oh, and to drink, iced peppermint tea; it was a no-wine evening.

The Adorable Godson says he's cooking next time.

Yes, there are cherries here

I posted the photo of the cherries below partly because it was pretty and seasonal and partly because life has not been a bowl of cherries these days given a number of converging pressures. But I am happy to report that there are fresh cherries at my Undisclosed Location (which is urban but has good produce) and that I have eaten a quantity of them, and also strawberries, to round off my birth-month.

I have been working very hard, but things are now easing off. I am well and in addition to having some good breaks from midweek on, I have been enjoying some Sabbath time this weekend, both figuratively and literally, since I accompanied a Jewish friend and her family to synagogue last night. On one of the stained glass windows (this is a historic synagogue and quite old by U.S. standards) is the saying "Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless." Yup, straight out of Isaiah. Jesus didn't get this from nowhere, he got it from his own folk.

Bumper sticker of the week: "GOT HOPE?" Black and white, plain lettering, brought to you by the Obama campaign.

Regular blogging will resume after the weekend, when I am back in the fair state of North Carolina.

Meanwhile, send prayers to my friend Jim who is co-chair of the Democratic Party Rules Committee! (No, my trip had nothing to do with the Democratic Party and I haven't seen Jim and his family in months.) He is a person of deep integrity, I can tell you that. I think the article gives a sense of this.

Many thanks to friends from OCICBW for the prayers during a very stressful time, and special thanks to MadPriest for taking the initiative to put up the request. Now send some prayers his way. He has a little stress of his own. Let us know what we can do besides pray, brother.

P.S. Prayers and good thoughts are also welcome for my friend Ken (see comments) who just lost his job. Or to put it more exactly, whose corporate employer took his job (and the jobs of a bunch of other people) away from him.

Interfaith peace delegation to Iran - and a woman rabbi speaks in Tehran

My friend Ethan Vesely-Flad, who works for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and with whom I helped start the East Bay chapter of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship some years ago when we were both living in the San Francisco Bay Area (East Bay means Berkeley, Oakland, and environs), is in Iran with an interfaith peace delegation.

You read that right, Iran. One of the members of the delegation is Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and she recently stood before an Orthodox Jewish congregation in Tehran, a historical first.

Ethan, who edits FOR's magazine, Fellowship, is reporting on the trip. You can read about it on the FOR blog here.

Make sure you click the "read more" words so you can read the full stories. The home page of the blog just shows the first paragraph of each blog entry. Read the one about Lynn under "Climbing mountains, making history." (Direct link to the story here.)

Blogging will be scarce in this space for a few days again while I take some more writing time to work on a Big Theological Tome (and also on the required year-end reports - more of the romantic life of academe), but Ethan's writing is much more worthy of your attention right now than my writing, so enjoy and ponder.

It's worth exploring the whole FOR homepage and links too. Scroll all the way down on that page, there is a wealth of information.

A few prayers for the interfaith delegation wouldn't hurt, either.

Speaking of elephants...

I promised you some visuals to keep the blog lively. This is the Indian/Hindu god Ganesh. People invoke him for sustained intellectual effort, among many other things...


Posted May 7 with a May 5 signature.

Chag Sameach Pesach: More from Velveteen Rabbi

For your Passover or post-Passover meditation, whether or not you are immersed in Yiddishkeit. Come on in and visit. The wonderful Velveteen Rabbi offers several reflections at her place, including:

This week's portion: leaving Mitzrayim
Calendar Christians: The "Torah portion" is the liturgical and spiritual equivalent of our weekly Gospel passage in the lectionary. "Leaving Mitzrayim," as you saw in the previous post, means "leaving Egypt" (as in the Exodus) but also "leaving the narrow place."

Make sure you read the comments there and at the other posts, too.

Birth
A reflection on Pesach as a festival of new creation. Remember many Jewish festivals are both agricultural and historical, so the life of the land and the history of the people are both present.


A tale of two seders
Foodies: there is a recipe for Persian haroset in here. Liturgical types: there are blessings and prayers and reflections on the wording and the texts. Everyone: we all enjoy tales of festive gatherings.


The first day of the Omer

Yes, there is a link explaining what "counting the Omer" means. And there are links to music. Hear chants both haunting and lively.




This week's portion: Gevurah (Kedoshim)

With a poem, which you can read and also listen to via an audio link. I think the Velveteen Rabbi wrote it and that it is her voice we hear.




Release

Some thoughts, and prayers, on yoga, on life with G*d "who releases the bound."





Kol b'seder ("everything's okay") in the J-blogosphere
Lots of music here! Enjoy. Go find the link to Roman --yes, Roman Jewish-- songs! Jewish liturgical tradition, especially at Passover, is sober and serious, but also joyous and playful.


Now be nice and stop stereotyping Pharisees. Rabbinic Judaism in all its richness descends directly from them.

Episcopal Cafe tribute to Krister Stendahl by D. Good and J. Redmont

The Episcopal Cafe has published a tribute to Krister Stendahl by Deirdre Good and yours truly.

You can read it here.

By happy coincidence, the beautiful Nativity on this week's Daily Episcopalian at the Episcopal Cafe is by our friend Luiz Coelho, Brazilian artist and seminarian. We are honored to be in the company of his work.

Memorial service for Krister Stendahl (1921-2008) and some obituaries and tributes -- and recent words by Bishop Stendahl

A celebration of Krister Stendahl's life and legacy will take place Friday, May 16, 3:00 p.m. (note time change from original listing) in Memorial Church, Harvard Yard.

David Hartman writes, toward the end of his tribute (link below): We live now in a profound void. My prayer is that Krister's memory and life's work should serve as an inspiration for new Krister Stendahls to emerge in the modern world.

The New York Times obituary (4/16/08) is here.

A tribute from the Shalom Hartman Institute, written by Alan Abbey with a moving tribute by Institute co-director David Hartman, is here.

The fine, detailed obituary from Harvard Divinity School (HDS) is here. A short message from the current HDS dean William Graham is here.

Short 2007 interview with KS on the topic of leadership. Read it if you are interested in any of the following: church, power, Jesus, lgbt issues, humility, discernment, pastoring, priesthood, intellectual life, accountability.

Krister Stendahl's delicious 2007 essay "Why I Love the Bible."

Nice obit with many quotes from colleagues in the 4/17/08 Boston Globe.

Video: Krister Stendahl and Tikva Frymer-Kensky at the National Catholic speaking on Jewish-Christian relations, 2002. (Thanks to Deirdre Good for the referral to the link.)

Short tribute by a blogging member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons).

World Council of Churches obituary and tribute.

From the Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries.

I will keep updating with links to obituaries and tributes in this space.


Memorial gifts:

Bishop Stendahl's family and church have suggested that those who wish to make a memorial gift do so to one of the following two organizations:

The Harvard Square Homeless Shelter

The International Rescue Committee

Grief

Krister is still alive -- I got a note from one of his children this morning -- but near death still, in that in-between passage, and I am grieving mightily. I cried on my walk in the woods yesterday, I cried today in church, I cried at the coffee hour (and left in a hurry), I cried in the car, I cried on the phone when I called my best friend from divinity school to tell her the news and ask her prayers. It's a good thing I wasn't doing much more than being a chalice bearer today. The readings were perfectly timed, too: shepherding, breaking bread and praying in community, the Twenty-Third Psalm. Everything reminded me of what a holy and pastoral person Krister Stendahl has been for so many of us, and how much his work has built up the Body of Christ and so many of us individually, in our various ministries. May Godde have mercy on us who will survive him, and help us do for others a fraction of what he has done for us and for the kin-dom.

Oremus: Krister Stendahl is dying

As I was posting the icon of the Mother of God below, I received word that my beloved mentor, Krister Stendahl, is near death.

Just a year ago (a year ago tomorrow, to be exact) I posted about him following an excellent post by Deirdre Good.

I have been grieving him for several weeks already, sensing that I would not see him alive again. This is a death I have been dreading for years. Bishop Stendahl is dying in the fullness of years, but this is someone who has been a true spiritual father to me and there will never be anyone like him again.

I pray for him, ask for your prayers for him, for his wife and partner Brita, and for their children and family.

I can't find a photo of him on the web, except for a not very good one. The link to a photo on the link above is broken (the link to my post does work fine, though) and all the photos seem to have disappeared.

When the obits are out (they will be everywhere, he is world famous) there will be photographs, I am sure. Meanwhile we wait and pray and give thanks

P.S. I found one of the photos I was looking for. This one is of Brita and Krister Stendahl in the audience at a lecture at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). Both are in their eighties.


(To Brita and Krister's left --to their right in the photo-- is noted scholar of religion and ecology Mary Evelyn Tucker. To her left is HDS professor Kimberly Patton, my Guilford colleague Eric Mortensen's mentor and friend. In the row above them you can see emeritus professor Gordon Kaufman and next to him, Mary Evelyn Tucker's husband John Grim, also a noted scholar of religion and ecology.)

Friday cat blogging and Haghia Sophia

So, I walked into Haghia Sophia (an earlier post tells me it was on December 13) and there, in the penumbra, was a cat. Right there in the church-turned-mosque-turned-museum, HUGE (the building, not the cat), dark and cavernous and ill-lit in the entrance, then glorious with its high, high vaults and windows and walls of marble and Byzantine icons and Arabic inscriptions. The two cat photos are lousy, but just so you know there really is at least one cat in Haghia Sophia, here they are.

Below them, though, are photos of some of the other sights. Mostly I didn't take pictures. I figured there were better photographs in books and online, and for the most part the things I wanted to photograph were too high or too far away or not really accessible or too large for the lens I had. Also, I spent the first hour or so looking up with my mouth hanging open because the place was so amazing, so I doubt I'd have been capable of taking photos. My second hour there, or some part of a second hour, I recovered a bit and took these few pictures. Some are, as you will see below, photos of photos.

There is scaffolding in Haghia Sophia. There is almost always scaffolding there. It's an old building and an architectural miracle, so something always needs repair or threatens to collapse unless it's held up by something.




By clicking the links above, you will see photos that give you a little sense of the vast space. With my camera, I only took close-ups. Haghia Sophia is even bigger than you can imagine. The Byzantines never built anything close to that size again.

I've already posted a photo of the tile below, but I want you to get a sense of sequence in which I saw and photographed.



Many kinds of marble were shipped here to make the walls. (Remember, this is back in the 6th century, so we're not talking freight trains.) This was just one among many of the marble slabs, though one of the most beautiful.


I went upstairs after this. To get to the second floor, you walk up a corridor that winds around and still has what looks like the original pavement and walls.


I kept imagining, both on the bottom floor and as I walked up this corridor, what liturgy must have been like here. The robes, the incense, the processions.

All men, of course.

The Empress and her ladies sat upstairs, in a special gallery with a balcony.

I imagined what it might have been like to walk to the upper floor in this very corridor, on these very stones.

That's not a dead end. The corridor turns left when you get to that wall in front of you.


In one of the upper galeries was a photo exhibit. This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. The upper walls of Haghia Sophia have magnificent mosaics (icons made of mosaic really), but you can't see them up close. With the help of some sort of fabulous photographic technology and maybe some scaffolding, a photographer whose name I don't have handy made this set of pictures of the mosaics. The curators then put them up in light glass or plexiglas frames so that they would have the real thing just behind them and you could thus get the best possible perspective on the mosaics. So I took photos of the photos.

This here is the Theotokos with Emperor John II Comnenus and Empress Irene, his wife. (There was more than one royal Irene in Byzantium. This is not Irene the Icon Queen --not her real title-- who lived many centuries before.) The mosaic dates from the early 12th century.

Then we've got someone who looks like John the Baptizer, but I must check. Sorry for the flash, but it was dark dark dark in there.


And here again is Herself.


After the fall of Byzantium in 1453, Haghia Sofia became a mosque, so it has minarets, and this is a view of one of them from the outside yard.


An ablution fountain, which I have mentioned before, is outdoors. It is not used since this place is now a museum, but it was for the use of the worshippers at the mosque, and there are many like it, though much less ornate, around town in other mosque courtyards.





And then there was a not too happy looking cat in a corner, outside either Haghia Sophia or the Blue Mosque. It looks cold to me. It was a grey rainy day. The cat inside Haghia Sophia was happier, sheltered under the great vaults and clearly at home in the building. I don't know what this business is in Orham Pamuk's memoir about packs of dogs roaming around Istanbul. I saw cats, cats, and more cats.