Just Give Me a Moment

I know. Just yesterday I wrote of hope. I live in hope. Hope is my mojo. And very, very rarely do I give in to despair. But right now, in this moment the sadness overwhelms me. The news gets worse every day; death, violence, disease, brutal governments, torture, oppression of the weak, suppression of truth, a f**king global war against women, Buddhist monks killed as they protest for justice, murder committed in sick appeals to a loving God. If there is a god, She should just come down right now, annihilate us all and proclaim the human race a "failed experiment."

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In the past week:

 

* I have seen a story on a national news network about sexual trafficking in women’s and children’s bodies. This global “industry” is now the second largest illegal trade in the world. It used to be third.

* I read a story in the NY Times about a 13 year old Egyptian girl who died as a result of her female “circumcision.” The “clinic” where this mutilation was performed was closed down. The men in her village vowed that the practice would continue and that even though the clinic was shut down, the practice would not be. According to the article in the Times,

“For centuries Egyptian girls, usually between the ages of 7 and 13, have been taken to have the procedure done, sometimes by a doctor, sometimes by a barber or whoever else in the village would do it. As recently as 2005, a government health survey showed that 96 percent of the thousands of married, divorced or widowed women interviewed said they had undergone the procedure — a figure that astounds even many Egyptians. In the language of the survey, “The practice of female circumcision is virtually universal among women of reproductive age in Egypt…The challenge, however, rests in persuading people that their grandparents, parents and they themselves have harmed their daughters. Moreover, advocates must convince a skeptical public that men will marry a woman who has not undergone the procedure and that circumcision is not necessary to preserve family honor. It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.”

* I read a story, again in the Times, about a 16 year old young woman from Syria who was raped when she was 15. In order to protect HER honor, a beloved cousin offered to marry her. He loved her deeply. They were married. A month after their marriage, after her new husband had left the house for work, her brother went into her bedroom where she slept and brutally stabbed her five times. Her murder is traditionally considered an “honor killing.” It does not carry the charge of murder. Typically, the assailant in an honor killing is either acquitted or sentenced to a month in prison, at which point he is released to go home to family and friends who honor HIM for reconciling the family “shame.” The woman was raped by a man and then murdered by a man who presumably redeemed her; her shame and honor, determined by others than herself.

 

How much brutality have women endured throughout history in the name of “protection,” control and definition of their sexuality? It is too much to consider.

 

I can find hope only in the fact that at last there is outrage.

At last, sexual slavery and the “disappearance” of millions of women worldwide are being exposed.

At last, there is opposition to a practice that denies women sexual pleasure, autonomy and threatens their safety and their lives.

At last, there is intolerance for an absurd practice that counts a woman’s virginity as more valuable than her life.

 

The claim to moral relativity is not relevant here. A woman’s life is not negotiable. Murder cannot be defended by appealing to cultural differences or by a reluctance to make moral judgments. And know this: the feminist movement is about many things but at its core it is about liberation and ultimately, the protection of women’s lives from the men who would end them.

Dubyawood

It occurred to me today that this country has a tradition of honoring its former Presidents with Presidential libraries. Somehow though, in George Dubya Bush’s case, a library just doesn’t seem right unless the books contained within it are those most often reserved for the level of reading found in The Children’s Room. I doubt that there are enough Sendaks, Steigs, Dr. Seusses and Shel Silversteins to fill a library worthy of the status of “Presidential.” Think however, how appropriate even this might be, though first we might have to find a way to resurrect these beloved authors to write sequels to some of their most cherished stories. For example:

 

Maurice Sendak would have to write Where the Crooked Things Are. The night George wore his flight suit, and made mischief of one kind, and another, his mother called him “AWOL,” and George said, “I’ll deport you!” so he was sent to bed without reading anything. That very night, in George’s room, an oil rig grew, and grew, and grew until his ceiling hung with money and the walls became the world all around.

 

And Dr. Seuss’  Dubya Hears a Who:

 

On the fifteenth of May, in the jungle of Nool,
In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool,
He was splashing…enjoying the Texan great joys…
When Dubya the President heard a loud noise.

So Dubya stopped splashing. He looked towards the sound.
“That’s funny,” thought Dubya. “There’s no one around.”
Then he heard it again! Just a very great yelp
As if some great god were calling for help.
“I’ll help you,” said George. “But who are you? Where?”
He looked and he looked. He could see nothing there
But a small speck of dust blowing past though the air.

“I say!” murmured Dubya. “I’ve never heard tell
Of a small speck of dust that is able to yell.
So you know what I think? Why, I think that there must
Be a God on top of that small speck of dust!
The God of the Bible of very small size,
too small to be seen by a President’s eyes…

 

No, I think a Presidential Library is out of the question.

I suggest rather, a theme park, in the manner of Dollywood.

 

Dubyawood. The attractions of Dubyawood will pay tribute to the landmark moments that characterize the Bush Presidency:

 

*Pollution Park- This will represent Dubya’s progress on the issue of the environment. All the trees will be dead or cut down to the trunk. Park goers will picnic inside a specially designed dome. Inside the dome, the temperature will be regulated to reflect the effects of Global Warming. Heat indices will hover between 110 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit but all park personnel will deny what everyone else knows. Outside the dome, the picnickers will have a wonderful view of giant smokestacks, a memorial to the de-regulation of pollutant emissions. The stream that will run aside the dome will glisten with the sludge of toxic waste, oil slicks and dead fish.

 

* Liars’ Lake- Swimmers will be convinced that there is a lake there. Eye witnesses will swear up and down that there really is a lake there. Documents will be forged by engineers who will attest to actually having made the lake there. When swimmers pass through the gates there will be no lake to be seen for miles. But in order not to appear foolish, when they leave the area they too will tell others that there really is a lake there.

 

*The Spinning Wheel- You will only be allowed to play this game if you are a friend of Dubya’s. The player will step up to the wheel and have a chance to win 1) a juicy government contract 2) a Cabinet post 3) an ambassadorship in a sweet place 4) a Supreme Court appointment 5) a week in Kennebunkport, ME 6) a week in Crawford, Texas 7) a trip on an aircraft carrier 8) a suspended sentence for a conviction of a crime

 

* The Wheel of Fortune- Contestants will solve puzzles comprised of the many “Bushisms” that he has spoken over the past seven years such as:

 

“I can only speak to myself.”

“I’m the decider.”

“Jobs will begat houses.”

“Those who enter the country illegally violate the law.”

“Wow! Brazil is big!”

"Nucular war." "Nucular weapons." "Nucular threat." Nucular family." (Any phrase really, that refers to NUCLEAR anything).

“I’ve got eck-a-lec-tic (reading material).”

“I’m a commander guy.”

“You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

“Who could have possibly envisioned an erection, uh…an election in Iraq at this point in history?”

 

OK. Enough. Needless to say, Pat Sajak will not be wanting for material.

 

* Dunk the Clowns: This fairway game will place mannequins of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Condi Rice and Ashcroft in the “dunk the clown” seat. Anyone who dunks one of the clowns will win a talking Dubya doll who will repeat one of the Bushisms mentioned above when the string on his back is pulled.

 

So, that’s my suggestion. Dubyawood.

I’m open to other ideas for rides, attractions, concession stands and fairway games. 

After all, we have a little bit of time before ground breaking needs to begin.

But not much.

 

 

Dark Night of the Soul?

Last night, I finally read Time magazine’s recent cover story on Mother Teresa.

The principle subject of the piece is not Teresa’s canonization, life story, nor even her great work among the poor but rather, her doubt. Papers and letters recently made public, paint a portrait of a woman of faith who had none; a woman the world thought close to God whose God was abysmally and chronically absent. Teresa’s torment is evident in her writings and one is struck by the stunning irony of it all. She was the saint without faith.

 

One has to question the motivation (not to mention the morality) of the Church and of trusted advisors who against her expressed wish to destroy the papers upon her death have instead chosen to publish them. The papers are startling in their revelatory descriptions of the state of Mother Teresa’s interior castles; bereft, hollow and tortuously empty:

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?

In the Time article the previous passage is followed by a notation, which reads “addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated.” It seems less a prayer than a desperate experiment suggested by an advisor; that if she pretended God was there, He might actually appear.

In almost all of the world’s religions there is the acknowledgement of a phenomenon which affirms that emptiness and darkness may serve as vehicles to spiritual fulfillment. This phenomenon has many names in the many traditions; kenosis, sunyata, the Via Negativa. Simone Weil, the 20th century Christian mystic maintained that through affliction, the experience of abandonment by God may indeed work towards bringing God more sharply into focus; may in fact result in the experience of divine intimacy. Like the beloved who is on vacation and whose qualities become more vivid and more endearing in the memory of the lover, the memory of an absent God induces greater longing and invokes a more intimate divine presence. But ultimately, even for Weil, the beloved does return. For Saint John of the Cross who first used the phrase “dark night of the soul,” the “night” is a phase of spiritual growth, a phase that is marked by suffering, but a phase that passes. The experience of the absence of God in Teresa’s life spanned a period of almost 50 years and seems not to have changed even before death. Her Beloved never returned.

When does one concede that almost 50 years of spiritual desert, absence of faith, doubt in the existence of God, and the presence of Christ signify no longer a “dark night” but rather a perpetual condition of the soul? Night passes. Dawn comes. A fifty year night is hardly a night at all. It is an existential nightmare, particularly for one whose appearance in the world is in direct contradiction to her internal reality; the nightmare, which in Teresa’s own words was marked by the terrible realization of her own deceptive persona:

 

"The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'" Time magazine

I am not without sympathy for Teresa’s spiritual torture. That she obviously suffered arouses pity and compassion. I am however, not sympathetic to, nor am I convinced by those who would nonetheless interpret Teresa’s spiritual emptiness as a further indication of her “holiness,” and “sanctity.” I am not convinced by those who would insist that the absence of God in her life is ironic evidence of the presence of God in her life. I am instead reminded of the post-Holocaust theologian who argued that God’s “hiddenness” at Auschwitz was proof of God’s existence. And of Karl Rahner’s famous (or infamous) “anonymous Christian,” the title given to his claim that everyone is a Christian, they just don’t know it yet. I am very much aware of the presence of paradox in the field of religion, but in order for a paradox to be accepted it must somehow have the capacity to clear the hurdle of absurdity. It must somehow fill in the space where the contradiction might be held in believable tension, if not suspension.

 

Neither would I deny that the continuation of her work in the midst of such spiritual destitution was heroic in its persistence and determination. But if one would argue that the absence of God, while yet ministering to the poor are indications of holiness and saintliness, then how different is she from the thousands of others who commit their lives to a cause, who sacrifice body and “soul” in the service of others and who do so in living conditions from which most of us would flee? How different is she from those who also do so without the presence of faith and the experience of God (and yet, who do not claim God as their inspiration)? If a life of service in the absence of faith is grounds for beatification and canonization, then the litany of saints must surely be increased a hundred-fold.

And if, in the final stages of canonization the  requisite miracles needed forsainthood indeed be confirmed, upon whose faith did the miraculous events depend? Upon Teresa’s? Or upon those who had faith in Teresa?

 

I have never known of a saint whose principle spiritual characteristic was lack of faith. Perhaps it is time for one. Such a canonization might just crack the door open for the rest of us.