muslims forced to eat pork

The following is a story about my father, a life-long seafarer, who was already fifty-one years old when I was born.  He was a cancer survivor who’d lost the hearing in his left ear.  As a young man, he’d taught himself navigation, and rose up through the seamen’s ranks to become captain.  With English as his second language, and the condition known as ‘profoundly hard of hearing’, communication with my father was largely a non-verbal affair.  But he was nevertheless a master of communication, and despite his problems we had many long, intimate talks, with me mostly listening.  My parents friends used to say Niels could spin a yarn.

His fine blonde hair was turning gray, and thinning out on top, when I first knew him.  But he had the sea in his eyes, blue and gray by turns, according to his two chief moods, peaceful and slightly melancholic.  And sometimes the stars twinkled in those blue eyes, too.  He seemed to be nearly always good-humored, and there was some gentle knowingness in his face, which set people at ease.  I thought he was a remarkable man, and so did many others.  It was a privilege to know him, the old capt’n.

He used to point out the stars to me, from our wooden bench in the backyard, a small plot of grass behind a narrow brick house in Philadelphia.  The Seven Sisters was our favorite constellation, the Pleiades.  He explained how to use a hand-held sextant to navigate by the heavenly bodies.  He told me about the far-distant places he had seen, about South America, and the Middle East, Mauritius, and India.  I would go there with him in imagination, never dreaming that someday I’d stand in some of those same places myself.  He especially liked to talk about how varied the different cultures of the world were, and how there are many paths to the Divine, and we must treat the religions of other peoples with great, great respect. 

Even in his seventies he was still upset by an incident that occurred decades before, when he saw an instance of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ in connection with diversity of culture and religion.  His ship was sailing in the Middle East, along the coast of Yemen or Saudi Arabia, during a famine in those lands. 

People were calling out to the sailors from the beach alongside the water, to please give them whatever food they could spare.  There was the usual language problem, but somehow they deciphered what the people were asking.  My father instructed that a launch should be sent ashore with whatever hard bread, flour and dried pease could be spared.  They could take these staples home and cook them for themselves.  But some of the men, laughing among themselves, went down to the galley, and returned with a sack full of chunks of cooked meat turning rotten.  They threw the sack onto the shore.  The people were so hungry, they began to devour the meat right on the spot, while the launch returned to the ship.  Once safely aboard, and underway again, these men shouted out to the starving Muslims, that the meat they were eating was pork!  As the ship pulled away from the scene, my father watched the desperate Muslims attempt to force themselves to vomit out the forbidden meat.  The pathetic sight made a deep impression on my father. He could never forget such cruelty, perpetrated by his own people, his own sailors.  He paid off the ship as soon as he could.  He didn’t want to work with that crew of men.  He was still affected by it, decades later. 

When I heard this story as a teenager, it deeply impressed me, and moved me toward the track I'm on at present.  I didn't want to be like those sailors, ridiculing the sacred tenets of others' religion & culture.  This was definitely a flagstone on my spiritual path, and a link in my spiritual genealogy. 

Comments

[loren]

What a powerful story.

[Conrad]

So, what do you think about last comments ?
;)

[Dolores]

Jade will say they didn’t choose
;)

[Zenon]

Beautiful site!
;)

[Hiacynta]

Excellent site, added to favorites!!