Abe: A Channelling

( universitywaterloo )

So much is spinning inside
me, as I sit
so placid,
                knowing
that if I find happiness
in even the least happy
day,
I will be happy; in fact,
I will die happy
if I can find happiness
in even the most unhappy day.
That's why
it is wise to laugh at funerals,
much wiser than to sob,
because if you're laughing at a funeral,
you're sending that soul off
on wings of joy.

~ ~ ~

For how much longer
will we send souls off
on wings of tears,
or worse yet,
empty wings---
this is the pain produced by the terrorist.
                         The terrorist is he
who has made it his role
to act out the anger
produced by the collective pain of an abused people.

The terrorist who is murdered
is a martyr,
whether we like it or not,
because he was bold enough to act out
the agonized pain of his oppressed people.
No matter how evil his deeds,
some of his people will still applaud him
and laud him.

We can stop the cycle, and I'll tell you how --
stop oppressing Muslim people.

( universitywaterloo )

For how long has the world oppressed Muslims?
Their religion is as valid as any other; it is
the sister religion to Judaism & Christianity.

Surely,
they have killed;
they have hurt us
deeply.
But did you ever stop
to think about
how long we have abused and oppressed them, our brothers and sisters?
Though we say it rarely
our Books tell us that we
should think of our religions
as siblings, born of Abraham,
stemming from the two races
produced by he:
                the children of Isaac
                       and
               the children of Ismael.

And herein, my friends,
lies the core of the contention between
the three Abramic religions:

Who was there?  On that mountain top at the foot
of raging flames set by the father,
was it Isaac?
was it Ishmael?

Did it ever cross our minds to think
that it was both?
that they both stood there, and their weary sad father's command
was to burn them both:
that's what his Master,
the God of Abraham told him:
offer them both up to me
so I can see 
how much you love me.

?

Anyway,
so many of us are the distant offspring of
that nasty threesome:
Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar.

Some of us trace our dominant
roots to Sarah's womb,
and some
to Hagar's but
in general, we all have the same distant
paternal line:
Abe.

blogs.pitch


We're basically all
brothers and sisters,
distantly,
who fight, bitterly, because
once upon a time,
someone told the story wrong,
either purposefully or not,
and when they told it wrong,
there was only one son there.

Of course, if you're one of
Isaac's brood, you'd say
your dad was there,
thereby
pissing off your Uncle Ishmael's family
so much that they
start spreading the story that it was their father who was there.

But since no one else was there,
except Abe, Isaac, Ishmael,
a goat, and God,
well, no one could witness and amend.

So

I tell you now:  both the boys were there,
their knees trembling,
Isaac crying uncontrollably because
he was the younger,
oh such a sweet-faced boy
(he looked like his beautiful mother),
who knew that what his father was about
to do was horrible.
And his elder brother, too,
trembled but did not want to show
his little brother the fear
that gripped him.

They gripped each other,
knowing
that they both would die together in
the growing, devouring fire.
And their father, so singular
and certain.  It was his God
that commanded him.  Though
their mothers both had begged
him not to listen to that Voice.
But Abraham listened to his God,
who drove him
up that mountain.

That was how it happened, and those two boys knew
that they were dead,
hopelost,
embers.  They stared
into the fire and they knew it
was their grave, and they took
some comfort from that, that is

until their father fell
to his knees and heard
his God gain heart.
The goat bleated with the same
relief as the boys, when it
saw the burning flames --

the goat became the sacrifice, meat
for the raging God,
and the boys skipped down the moutain,
closer now than they had ever been before.

They were both saved,
by a God who loved them both,
loved them all.

Oh, Isaac surely
did some special things with his father
that Ishmael did not do;
Oh, Ishmael too
did some very special things with his father,
that Isaac did not do.

They both gave birth to nations.
It was in the writing
of the story
that the problem began.

That story held one of the earliest
blatant, premeditated
lies,
fictionalized to valorize
the teller,
and not the tale.

The tale
we've all participated in.
But the one brother,
the younger,
more frightened brother
wrote his side of
the story down first.  He
repeated it again and again
to his wide-eyed, naieve
gang of children.  Oh,
it was a great story,
and most of it was true,
except one minor detail.


Who was there.


Of course, if you and your brother or sister shared
the most horrifying and life confirming experience
of your lives together,
and your sibling told it and failed
to mention you were there, too,

wouldn't you be mad? 
Deeply hurt you'd be,
in the depths of your soul, because
you loved him so; so much
you loved him, you even
offered to die
if your father would only
let him live.

But it never came to that because
God is merciful and saved you both.

But he turned on you,
and told a lie,
and told it so well,
they believed him; I mean he was,
after all, the legitimate son,
and you were just the bastard.

But you were both there; I tell it right
right now.
Both of the "I"s spawned
by ol' Abe.

And you've been fighting ever since,
and it's time to stop,  because you,
the heirs of Isaac
have been tormenting the heirs of Ishmael
for too long.
This is why
we suffer terror.  His family is finally
striking back violently,
after centuries of being called
the evil, the profane,
the wrong, the insane,
the heirs of Ishmael
finally had enough.

It happens at every level of society:
in the family home,
in the clannish group,
in the extended clan,
in the racial nation,
in the human race:

we all mimic the rivalry of kin, both
witihin our ranks,
and between each other;
we all bear
and will continue to bear
the sins of our fathers
until
we can honestly acknowledge them
and forgive.


Forgive all.  Kill
no more; never
send another soul weeping to the heavens again.
From now on
only send every human souls with joy, the greatest
joy we can muster at the death of one
who shares with us the same
living, loving heritage
of humanity.

( dl.ket.org )

It is Written, by Mostafa Heravi

short film "It Is Written" by Mostafa Heravi 2006 from Mostafa heravi on Vimeo.

Blood Red Pants

(from Google search page, thanks.)

*

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

My summer with family in the States.

Only a week previous,

We had celebrated my youngest brother’s wedding

In New York City.

With our new-found family members
(my sister-in-law’s Greek family,

The kind generous people

Who welcomed me so warmly

This past summer)

We had taken the Circle Line Cruise

And enjoyed the Manhattan skyline,

Complete with

Twin Towers.

( photo by Makropoulos )

What a happy day that had been for me,

To be with my whole family,

In New York City,

One of my favorite cities

In the world.

I had lived three and a half very happy years

In that city

While I completed coursework

For my Ph.D., and

I had my own relationship with the

World Trade Center:

One summer I had done temp work in one of the Towers,

For a month or so

On around the 64^th floor,

In a bustling stock trading office.

I don’t remember the name of the place.

But I remember the people,

All frenetic, some struggling

To find a human moment

In the bustle of the day.

I remember being amused

By the high-stakes game they were playing,

But only really wanting to watch.

I knew that if I tried to participate,

I’d probably destroy something,

Like somebody’s

Fragile fortune.

I remember my lunch breaks, too,

Sitting out in the heat,

Under the creaking,

Looming

Monoliths,

Eating my simple sandwich

Every now and then wishing

One of the besuited men

Would take a shine to me

And invite me to lunch.

(But I was newly married then, so I played it safe,

wearing non-descript cotton

dresses

and hose.

In the heat,

That’s right.

I wore hose.)

My other memory of the Towers

Was a daily one:

I would step out of my

East 9^th Street apartment building

And head West

To my classes.

Crossing 1^st Avenue, I could look down

And see them in the distance.

They became my beacon,

My guide,

My reminder that I was headed

In the right direction.

It was very hard to live in New York City

And not have a relationship

With the

Twin Towers.

( guardianchronicle )

* *

( alibaba)

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

Shopping

In the streets of Ankara.

I loved the new red pants

I had bought

That hugged me

Like hose.

But as pants,

They were far more sexy

Than hose.

Blood red pants.

I still have them.

I came into my apartment,

Turned on my TV,

Always set

On CNN,

And

Without looking,

Went to the bedroom

And put on my

Blood red pants.

(photo by Makropoulos)

They were very sweet,

Indeed,

And made me smitten

With my own ass.

Returning to the other room,

I saw it:

My lovely city

New York

An aerial view

An airplane flying

Low

And colliding

With a Tower.

Like so many others,

I thought it was a hoax at first,

But then,

I saw the next plane.

When the first Tower

Crumbled,

I too

Crumbled

To the ground,

Sobbing,

And suddenly

Very alone, and very frightened.

I could see very clearly

How the massive

American Ship of State

Now had a gaping hole

Torn right into its water line,

And all I could think was:

Now all the passengers,

Those US Citizens,

 on board that massive

Ship of State that they thought

Was the Love Boat

Have a clear view of the rest of the world.

What will they see?

They could, if they dared, see very clearly

The position America had come to assume

In the rest of the world.

They could, indeed, if they dared, look closely

At the now imperiled vessel

In which they had blissfully

Floated for nearly a century

And recognize

That it was not the Love Boat after all,

But rather,

A Battleship.

And they could apologize and get on with mending their wounds,

Everyone’s wounds.

Or

They could get really pissed

And fight back

And keep pretending they are on the

Love Boat

When in fact the more they fought

(the more they fight)

The more the rest of the world

Would see their concealed weapons

More clearly,

And watch how frantic they would all become

As the still damaged

Ship-Of-The-American-State

Began (and begins) to slowly sink

Into

The Sea of History.

Seriously,

That’s what I thought.

Sometimes my brain

Waxes quite poetically.

If you haven't noticed by now.

* * *

On 9/11/2001,

I was living in Turkey.

I had just returned from

The U.S.A.

I had brought some gifts

For my building’s

Kapacı,
(door man, building manager, maintenance man)

A lovely always-smiling man

Named

Salaam.

Which, by the way,

Means “peace”

If you didn’t know that.

It’s often part of a greeting.

I had bought with me a bag full of gifts

For his children,

And he had been so shocked

When I handed them to him.

(In my then very modest Turkish,

I had asked him,

before I left,

how many children he had,

or I thought I asked him that.

After a confused expression, he answered
“altı” – six

So I had brought back a bag full of

Six little stuffed animals.

I later learned he had two

Children,

And the oldest was

Six, and the question I had posed

Was actually

“How old is your child?”)

Salaam was always smiling at the door of the building,

Or working in the grounds, making them a fabulous garden.

His beautiful wife

Aylın

Would bring me homemade food
when she had extra.

After the events of 9/11/2001,

Salaam brought me flowers,

And wished me and my country
a quick healing.

People in my building who I did not know

Stopped me in the elevator and on the stairs,

And said they were deeply sorry

For the attack on the

Twin Towers.

That was not, they said,

The true Islam.

Within the year that followed,

When my apartment was broken into

Salaam took personal responsibility for it,

And did all he could to make the building secure.

My neighbors paid to have my door fixed;

They gave me money and food until

I could stabilize myself.

In my independent American Way,

I was embarrassed
and told them
they didn't have to do that.

But a neighbor explained to me

That the moment I moved into their building,

I became a member of their family,

Their community,

And they felt it was their duty

To help and protect me.

It was, this woman said,

The Turkish way,

The True Islamic way,

Not like what happened in New York

On 9/11/2001.

( brewed coffee )

It is 9/11/2010,

And I live in America.

And somewhere

In Florida,

A preacher,

A religious man

A man whose job it is to train his people

Ethically

About the true nature of God,

And the Peaceful,

Forgiving,

Self-Effacing

Teachings of Jesus Christ

Has threatened to  burn

The Koran –

And I say to you

That man is Not a True Christian.

He should go move

Into a working class apartment complex

In a Muslim country

And see

What a true Christian 
Is supposed to act like.
 

Jesus and Representations

1.

I really love the idea

of Jesus.

(from spiritlessons )

If you do a Google search on "pictures of Jesus" it's amazing how many results you can get.  All for a guy who lived during a time when they didn't have cameras. 

This picture was in my grandmother's house, during the 1960s;

it's so soothing and passionate.  

One of the reasons I love the idea of Jesus.

2.

We don't have pictures of Jesus, but we have accounts of how he acted.  We have stories.

Stories give us the pictures

the remembrances

of events where we forgot our camera.

Kind of like the Book of Genesis:

and other Creation Stories -

they're attempts to capture 

the impressions of a really important event

when God forgot his camera.

Stories are really important,

because

each little word

is like a snapshot

of a gesture,

and expression,

an act.

3.

The word - Jesus - is a representation.

I love the idea of Jesus for what he represents: 

peaceful solutions

compassion

forgiveness

a rejection of the 

Old Testament philosophy of 

an eye for an eye:

turning the other cheek.

*

When 9/11 happened, I was in

Ankara, Turkey,

and as I watched the towers tumble,

I thought:

this is the equivalent

of the hole that was blasted

into the side of the 

U.S.S.Cole -

How would my nation

respond to this

provocation?

I was afraid.

*

In March of 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq,

I was in Ankara, Turkey.

On the night of the invasion,

I was sitting in a bar with a couple Turkish friends,

and I was in total despair.

This was the answer I feared the United States would give.

My friends and I were talking about

America;

we were talking about the 

Christian world and the Muslim world.

I said to my friend Onur:

what do you think would have been the best way for America to respond to the attack of 2001?

And he said:

Enact, purely, the teachings of Jesus.

Turn the other cheek.

No self-respecting Muslim could attack

a nation that opted to practice

an act of pure love.

Furthermore,

the radical Islamic sects

would not have the sympathy and/or support

of the Islamic world if they continued to attack after we simply

turned the other cheek.

*

Of course, that's not what we did.

And any arguments about the voracity of my friend's claim

would be purely academic.

*

At the time, 

I agreed with Onur;

today,

I still agree

with what Onur 

proposed.

This is not to say we would have avoided war;

(we were already in a war,

it's just that, 

on 9/11

Americans was made aware of the fact

that we were

at war)

we just would have avoided the kind of war

that we've been having.

4.

A stumbling point

between the world of Islam

and the world of Christianity

is, of course,

Jesus.

We both share him, by the way.

Jesus

is in the Koran,

and Mary his Mother 

is the only woman who is named

in the Koran,

for the very simple reason that

men in the Koran are identified by their father's name --

Ishmael and Iaac, sons of Abraham, for instance --

but Jesus has no father,

so he's identified by

his mother's name.

Which leads us to the rather troubling question

of who his father is.

Christianity teaches

Jesus is the son of God, 

and somehow that blurs into him being

God.

Islam says there's no way

he could be God;

God is God,

and Jesus

was a great prophet.

I've also read and heard the argument

from Muslims that, if God is everything,

why would he want or need a son?

Well, hey, if God is everything,

why the heck

would he have wanted to create

us?

He created us

and everything we occupy

in his own likeness,

and then, well,

we kind of made a mistake.

It's been our job ever since, to correct that mistake.
I tend to believe that
every now and then
some human takes form
who has a really big clue
about how to correct that mistake.

(Please see my earlier contemplations on the creation & the fall; and the second coming)

One thing that is remarkable

about reading the Koran

is that it actually presupposes that its readers

have also read the Old and New Testament.

It talks about the Creation,

and some major figures in the Old and New Testaments

as if the reader already knows about them,

therefore leading one to believe that

the best way to read the Koran

and the Bible

is together.

One of the great sins of each

of the Abrahamic religions

is that we don't read

each others books:

Muslims generally don't read the Bible,

and Jews and Christians

rarely read the Koran.

However, put those books together

and there's a very interesting story that emerges,

and its central idea is this:

Jesus belongs to all of us.

5.

Christ is the population of the world,

and every object as well.  There is no room

for hypocrisy.  Why use bitter soup for healing

when sweet water is everywhere?

(Jelaluddin Rumi)

5.

Late at night, when I've been writing on this blog,

I start looking at other people's blogs.

If I simply move through

blogger, I find

that my neighboring blogs

are often

lovely family blogs

with really lovely pictures

of lovely families,

or 

Christian blogs,

with really lovely pictures

of Christian families,

and I really like seeing them.

Occasionally, though,

I find a nut case like me.

I know that most people

in the United States

would say my ideas about Jesus

are blasphemous,

but they're not,

just like

my ideas about the United States

are not blasphemous:

I deeply love

what both the U.S.A. and Jesus

represent,

and I mourn

what the two, combined,

have become.

. . T.e.x.t.u.r.e...&...T.e.x.t. . .

As one relatively new to blogging, I was thinking about my last entry, where it's true, I talk about the Bible and the book of Genesis the same way I might talk about Shakespeare, or Capek's The Makropulos Case.  Like literature, like fiction.  To talk about a sacred text that way may be troubling and even offensive to some people.  And yet it is so fundamental to Makropoulos, who is a textual being, a woman who unfurls herself in words.   So don't believe for a minute that I think that there is no such thing as a sacred text.  For me, these very words are sacred, because they are all I have. 

Some texts are far more sacred than others, and the Bible is one of those texts.  In some texts, you can feel and hear the breath of God, who almost begs to be known in the words and images He chooses.

Indeed, I would say that life itself is a text, and its texture is loaded with imagery.  The challenge to all of us is to recognize the signs that direct us on a safe way through our life, and to our most desired end.

In Islam, people believe in fate; the text of anyone's life is written on her/his forehead.  And the names of God are written in our hands.  With that belief, bodies are already preinscribed, and we slip them on at birth and perform a text already written through our lives.  The test of a good human being then becomes a matter of how well one accepts fate, and lives life.

A decade ago, I was living in a country that was predominantly Muslim.  I was living in Turkey.  Now, I've had some experience with Turks in the past; I was born in Thessoloniki, and during my childhood, it was under Ottoman rule.  When I was a child, the hatred and fear of the Turks was great, and sometimes they took full advantage of that.  But I was young; I don't remember so much.  My mind was occupied with love and music, and I left Thessoloniki with a man - my first lover.  I mention him in an earlier blog.  My personal memory of the Turks was vague, but it included my father's hatred of them, and a dark looming presence that seemed to linger over the mukhtarlik - the home of the neighborhood watchman, which was at the end of my street.

When I found myself among Turks again, I was frightened at first.  But I went largely because it would put me so close to Greece again, and I missed my homeland so very much.

Again, it may appear I go off course, but not really.  They say age brings wisdom, and that is oh, so true.  My fear of the Turks was quickly replaced by fascination and recognition; I swear I met more than a few people who were like me - people who had been alive for centuries and who were weary of life, yet loving every day.  In Constantinople, some would look at me with a glimmer of recognition, and I felt like I knew them too.  Old souls.

I came to start to see the deep texture of my life while I was living in Turkey.  For the past couple hundred years or so, I've known that life goes in cycles, and that we venture out in our youth, visit new places, try new things, and then ultimately begin a return.  On the return, we begin to see the patterns.  That's part of the texture of life.  It's as if humankind is living on a huge loom, and we are the bearers of each glimmering thread, weaving back and forth, encountering others, creating a pattern.  Creating new patterns.

Time and technology has allowed those patterns to extend further and further around the planet; sometimes I imagine that to be spirit would grant one the ability to hover over the earth and see the traces (like the Australian aboriginal idea of dreamlines) left by each individual as they have travelled their life's paths.  And the overall impression would be something, I think, like an elaborate oriental carpet. Some individuals who never leave their hometowns or homelands leave tightly inscribed, ornate patterns, while others, like me, are the ones who create wide arching, barely visible curves that cover nearly the entire canvas, intersecting with the smaller patterns, pulling them together, and making them part of the whole. 

It's hard for me to not notice that what I just described is something like a grid.

Within our own little lives and patterns, we often cannot see the larger picture, and so things appear so random.  I felt that way too for a long time; but today I don't feel that way at all.  Too many signs are telling me that the pattern of my life and the pattern of human life is intersecting in a very important and fundamental way right now.  Is it my fate that I am here right at this moment, telling you this?  Or was I supposed to be here, writing this?

I like to believe that, despite the fact that some foolish man's blundering mistake put me on this human ferris wheel for longer than I was intended to be here, I do have some power over who I am at any given time, and what I do as a result of that.  Indeed, I tend to believe in a limited form of fate -- we each encounter choices as we travel throughout our lives.  Like intersections.  We can choose one way, and encounter the karma that is associated with that path, or we can choose the other.  The outcome of either is our individual fate, but it is also closely related to the fate of the human race.  In that sense, we have the power over the text of our lives, as well as the text of humanity.

Sacred texts -- books -- end up being like scripts, giving us advise on the choices to take to restore humanity to the unity we all strive for.  And this is why I think it's interesting and important to spend time reading them, very carefully.