not native fruit

the treasure of montsegur by sophy burnham

I just finished reading this book, The Treasure of Montsegur: A Novel of the Cathars, by Sophy Burnham, while still engrossed in "Kingsblood Royal," but I want to write my review while it's still fresh.

I've read several books on the Cathar heretics and their supposed treasure smuggled out of Montsegur before the mass martyrdom of the Cathars, and I have to say that far and away this is the best!  Not only does Burnham capture the blended Catholic-Cathar culture of the South of France and its parage (way of life), which almost no one else really 'gets,' but her writing is beautiful, sensitive, intelligent and nuanced.

Her protagonist Jeanne of Beziers goes from noble lady (by birth, adoption and marriage) to a poor beggar suffering from severe post-traumatic stress after the siege of Montsegur and the decimation of her whole world, including the loss of all her loved ones to violence, which she witnesses.  Burnham writes very insightfully about all of this in her portrayal of 'crazy Jeanne.' 

The tale spans the gamut of lovely life among the nobility to the penury of being a poor refugee, and also paints a picture of life among the peasantry working the land and raising animals and food.  To me, this book is a minor tour-de-force, and definitely worth reading if you are interested in this period in history.

(I have this book listed under 'spiritual genealogy' because we have Huguenots in our family history, and they were another group persecuted by the mainstream church, but late enough in time to have been able to escape to the 'New World.')

hallelujah why - and 'a mutt like me'

an all-American mutt...

I just heard Barack Obama's first press conference, and I am impressed all over again with how pleased I am with my choice for president of the United States.  He is so serious, pragmatic and sober, and gets right down to business.  When he tells a joke, you know it's a joke, and he has the humor of our young people, not the humor of the old fuddy-duddies, god-bless-their-hearts.  I loved the Nancy Reagan toss-off. 

I wanted to say more about why I entitled my last post 'Hallelujah.'  It wasn't just because an African-American has been elected as president, but because we need someone of Barack Obama's caliber to lead our nation, and now he is here.  I really was beginning to believe that a sense of civic duty had disappeared from our land - apart from those who feel the call to fight the war way over there in Iraq.  I'm not sure how that war protects or benefits us, so I'm not sure quite how it relates to civic duty, but serving in the armed forces has always traditionally been seen as a civic duty, and I think in most cases it is.

Anyway, I believe that Barack Obama can revive our flagging sense of civic duty, of unity as Americans, no matter what our race or ethnicity - and especially generate an enthusiasm for civic duty among the young.  It would be so great to see a return of that Spirit, which has been missing for so long.  The fact that he is African-American is like some kind of fabulous bonus. 

People probably think I'm a white liberal who is enthused about an African-American or 'mixed-race' person as president-elect.  It isn't just that.  In fact, I'm not sure I really fit the white liberal profile.  I was brought up in an African-American neighborhood to feel that the fate of the African-American people was intimately tied up with my own.  Now, why would that be, you might ask?  Well, my father used to lovingly call me a mutt all the time.  My mother, ever trying to exclude me from the 'moor' element in our family, (even though our home was permeated by it on sub-surface levels), tried to stop him, until she realized that I interpreted the 'Heinz 57 different varieties' label as referring to mixed European heritage.  So she allowed it. 

Among our class of people, the term 'mutt' was a term of endearment.  I found it interesting to see that the white media people who ensconced themselves during the Bush era mentioned the Mutt remark immediately as a sign that Barack seemed 'punchy.'  I notice they use all sorts of pejorative words in relation to him that have never been applied to our current president who used to seem positively high on something during many of his press conferences.  He performed like one of the clowns in Philadelphia's Mummer's Parade, deflecting our attention while major floats drifted right past our eyes, landing us in this delightful crisis we are now in.  Can all the blame be placed at the current administration's door?  No, not all, but I think it's fair to say, most.  Just the cost of the Iraq war alone, and the derailment of federal aid to states and cities into 'Homeland Security' ('yeah, right') has been enough to upset the apple-cart.  They gobbled up all that nice surplus the evil Clinton administration amassed for the American people, and just went on from there.  The Pied Piper of good cheer and down-home ungrammatical humor leading us down the primrose path.

I understand what Barack Obama means when he says 'a mutt like me.'  Like me.

H A L L E L U J A H !

more on obama

Dear Fellow Taxpayers,

Barack Obama and John McCain, compared to almost every one of us, are members of the country's elite.  The difference is, that Barack Obama knows the reality of the experience of those who live at the opposite end of the spectrum and he is less likely to just forget those people or think that, in a sense, they don't really exist or matter. 

Would I like to spend a Saturday evening with either of our commander-in-chief candidates?  Not really.  Why not?  Because I'm not really in their class, and the upper crust make me feel kinda nervous.  Well, maybe one evening with Barack and Michelle, just so I could tell my bedside attendants when I get to the nursing home.  But I don't think even one with 'McPale' and his running-mate because their humor is a little too crude for me.  I used to like that sort of thing more when I was a teenager.

This election is not about electing a black man as president or a first female VP.  It's about getting someone who has a group of people around him who are educated enough to be aware of what the problems are, and how to address them in a way that benefits as many people as possible, not just a fortunate few at the top with the expectation that they will allow some crumbs to trickle down to the rest of us.  We need an intelligent team who can handle subtleties and complexities as well as the forthright and obvious stuff.  McPale's intelligence seems to have shown itself to be superficial and opportunistic, as witness the selection of his running mate.  The various people I've seen interviewed around Obama seem very knowledgable and articulate.

My dear fellow taxpayers, we all know how onerous it is to be the main taxpaying base.  We all know how much our society has slipped since so many local revenues have been diverted to homeland security, with no apparent results.  One might say we have not had any more violent terrorist activities since 9-11.  Of course, we didn't have any before 9-11 either, with the exception of the American-created Kansas City bombing and a previous attempt on the World Trade Center, which had long been a political target.  So, since the status quo has been steady with just one or two (albeit dramatic) incidents, I don't see that the homeland security funds have yielded any appreciable results.  But that's a whole 'nother topic.

The point I want to make is: yes, there are many of us, although not most, who are making an income of over $250,000.00 per year from owning a small business, and don't want to be taxed.  But my dear, dear friends and neighbors, just consider: without income to support programs for the less fortunate and to provide public services that extend also to us, we will be living in a miserable world, surrounded by a crumbling infrastructure, masses of poverty-stricken unhappy and even more angry people, slipping standards of safety that affect all of us, and our children and grand-children will be exposed to incurable contagious diseases, pollution will begin to affect their havens such as The Hamptons, and the world will be a much less safe place even for the most privileged among us.  Some of you may think this has already happened, but trust me, this is just the beginning.  Please don't vote from your pocket-book's perspective.  Penny-pinching now will cost you Big Dollars later, and it may already be later than you think.

Just the other day, I was driving around Lake Merritt in Oakland, and was observing ordinary citizens walking around the Lake, or stopping to gaze at the twin fountains that grace each end of this man-made loch, with its ring of beautiful buildings glinting with many colors in the evening sunlight.  I couldn't help but think how fortunate we were that our ancestors designed our cities and built them to reflect their high ideals about the people of our land, and to embody their determined intentions regarding the public good.  They understood, having fled poverty and prejudice in the old country, the importance of a new society in which the distance between the high and the low was not inapproachable and no class of people are consigned to permanent penury.  The opposite were the  methods of the Old World, where tax-monies simply went into the pockets of the rich to be dispersed at their whim.  No, our New Society was to be a government By the People and For the People, Under God, and our tax dollars meant to be put toward serving the Public Good. 

The question for Nov 4th is, which kind of world do you want to live in?

joe the plumber endorses barack obama

Hi, we're Joe the Plumber, er, I mean Gary the Lumber Yard guy, and Karin the elder-worker (I've done lots of different kinds of work with elders, both as a volunteer and in paid positions).  My Dad helped to found the Seaman's Union, trying to get a decent livelihood for working class men in the misty past. He would definitely support Barack Obama, as do we. 

Are we as educated and cool as Barack Obama?  I don't think we are, but we recognize that we need him and his style of leadership.  We don't need hot-headedness and the kind of narrowness of vision that characterizes his opponent, and has characterized the present administration.  We don't need the PAST, we need the FUTURE!

Hey, you know we have a lot of really smart, capable, skilled friends: plumbers, electricians, contractors, carpenters, teachers, nurses.  And all of us know that as good as we are at our jobs, we recognize that we need people with a different level of education to fix some of the problems that face us.  Could one of us handle being mayor of our city?  Yeah, I think so.  But running the whole country?  No, I think someone who has a whole team of skilled, enthusiastic, informed people would do a better job at that.  As good as our plumber buddy, Mark, is at redesigning and fixing up your whole house's plumbing, or redoing the plumbing at the local swimming pool (!) he wouldn't have a clue how to provide clean, safe drinking water for the entire city of Cleveland.  There's a whole other level of know-how necessary for that job.  I'm great with a needle, I knit, sew my own clothes, do embroidery, etc, but would I be able to resection your bowels in surgery?  Would you like to try me on that?  There are specific skills that are needed to do a job right.  We skilled laborers know that.  We know that we need people like Barack Obama and his team, with their level of understanding of and education in the problems of the modern world.

Hey, this is politics.  We're not looking for perfection here.  We're not looking for heaven on earth.  There's no one running for office right now with whom we're going to agree one hundred percent.  But we've got to turn the country around and get ourselves going on a new track.  We need someone who can reach out across the many dividing lines that create conflict in the modern world and draw more people in to taking an active part in the process of creating a better world for our kids and grandkids.  In the United States of America, that person is Barack Obama.

california proposition 8 ban on gay marriage

Most of the people I know who support California's Proposition 8, Ban on Gay Marriage, do so out of the conviction that the Bible condemns homosexual love, and that gay marriage somehow threatens the institution of heterosexual marriage.

I was brought up in a working class family in a very conservative environment.  In my teen years I worked at a local 'little theater' in Philadelphia, my home town, and I got to know gay people for the first time - and I thought they were all right, because after all, theater people were already...different.  Different sexual mores seemed natural to the theatrical life.  I was a teenager, what did I know?

Fast-forward to 2008.  Now I'm almost sixty, and I have to say, a life-time of observation leads me to believe that the institution of marriage - as an institution - is more threatened by divorce, which is also condemned in the Bible.  And some of my friends who support Prop 8 on the Biblical basis noted above, have indulged themselves in divorce, sometimes more than one time.  Where is the outraged condemnation of that?  Who is standing on street corners waving placards over divorce? 

As for divorce: "Whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder."  "The Lord God says, I hate divorce."

Nuff said.

Another main problem for the institution of marriage is that both parents have to work night and day just to survive and can't spend all that much time with their kids, but that's not an issue that relates to the Bible.  Right?  Well, we can discuss that another time.

The Jewish faith, out of which the Christian faith has sprung, plants marriage and the raising of children front and center to its way of life.  As do Hindus, although they, like the Catholics, offer the alternative of an institutionalized celibate lifestyle, called brahmacharya in India and monasticism in the West. In either case, it's a lifetime commitment.  Real marriage is a lifetime undertaking.  It's not a part-time deal.  'Oh, I was married to L_____ for ten years.'  No, better to say, 'I was 'together' with L____ for ten years.'  That's the truth of it.

Personally, I don't know why gay people want to get married.  Is it because they want a sentimental ceremony to celebrate their 'love?'  (BTW, we'll see how their 'love' holds up over the long haul.)  Well, they can have a ceremony without its having any legality.  Do they want legal rights?  For example, visitation at the death-bed, rights over children they are raising together, tax-breaks?  People tell me they've already got that.  Do they want the blessing of God?  They've already got that, too.  I just heard the reading in church this past Sunday that says God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust.  No one is without God's love and blessing.

As for myself, I've been married to the same man for thirty-five years, and we didn't have a sentimental celebration of our love.  We married each other on a Quaker certificate, which means we didn't need a minister, in a 'ceremony' that lasted less than five minutes, with our parents and a couple of friends in attendance in my parents' living room.  We were a bit leery of 'being in love' but we had a good feeling about each other, were attracted to each other, enjoyed talking and had some of the same aims in life, and as it has turned out, a lot of the same values. We believed in 'love' more than in 'falling in love' if you catch my drift. We loved each other. Our basic premise for our marriage was that we would 'share life together' and that meant 'whatever comes.'  Very open-ended and yet totally committed.  We chose the Quaker certificate because we felt that we were marrying each other with God as the Third Partner, so to speak, and so we didn't need a minister for that.

Some people say we were lucky, and we do believe that 'God has brought us together' (so divorce would be out of the question) and perhaps God's 'blessing' can also be described as 'luck'  - in the Chinese sense - after all.  But we also worked hard and learned the meaning of the word 'sacrifice.' A very important word in the lexicon of marriage.  'Compromise' is another one.

But I think, my own story and various preachments on marriage aside, that I finally do understand why gay people want to get married. 

Let me back up a little.  Mainstream Protestantism and even modern-day Catholicism teach that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  They both believe that human beings must bring their intellect to bear on interpreting this Word of God.  Protestants trust the prayerful, self-reflective individual's conscience, and Catholicism calls on the community, as especially represented in the synod (?) of bishops and the deliberations of church councils and of highly-educated theologians, etc, to make an intelligent interpretation of the Word of God.   That means you have to be able to justify your interpretation of the Bible in terms that other people can relate to.  It isn't enough to say, 'the Bible told me so.'  That is an approach that leads nowhere.  And if you insist on taking that tack, then there can't be any divorce, y'all.  And you better set to making those sacrifices of sheep and goats, and report any white spots that show up on your skin, eat no shellfish - forget the jumbo prawns, the surf and turf platter - etc, etc, etc.

Now, some people are so unfortunate, ill-educated, or unsupported in life that the Bible is a kind of lifeline for them. I know these people from the days when I was doing Christian pastoral ministry for the church.  They read in the Bible that God cares about them, even more than He cares about the lilies of the field, and if this sustains them and helps them not to drink, commit suicide, beat their children, give up, give in, etc, well, in that case, I support the use of the principle, 'The Bible tells me so.'  Because that is using the Bible as a source of spiritual strength and faith in one's personal relationship with God. This is not about running the country, for which this approach is totally inadequate.

But back to the public sphere.  Many of the people I know who support California's Proposition 8, Ban on Gay Marriage, do so out of the conviction that the Bible condemns the gay and lesbian lifestyle.  Not so.  The Bible condemns a profligate lifestyle. Yet people who support Gay and Lesbian marriage do not engage in a profligate lifestyle.  They want to raise children - and ARE raising children in loving, supportive families.

Gay and Lesbian couples face the dilemna that as long as they are not married in the eyes of society, they are 'living in sin' (to use the old-fashioned expression I was brought up with).  So that clumps them with the 'profligate' sinners so distasteful to the ancient Jews, for whom family was the most sacred thing on earth.  If they do marry and raise their children in stable families, they will be able to stand with those who stand against profligacy. 

They are in the same position that many of our ancestors were in, in this country in earlier times.  If you weren't both white - let's say one was white, the other Indian, or one was white, the other 'mulatto' - in many states you couldn't get a marriage license.  Then, if you lived together, raising your children - even if you lived together for fifty years and had a love worthy of the greatest poet - and even if you raised your great-grandchildren - you were 'living in sin.' That's it, end of story.  You were below the notice of 'decent people'  (aka hard-hearted people, who needed the Lord to remove the stones from their chests and give them hearts of flesh.)  Of course, you were also pushed into abject poverty and then blamed for your human failings in trying to deal with such a difficult lot in life, by the holier-than-thou.  I'm sure many of you remember the relatives and neighbors who had to deal with this.

(For a more innocent example, see the film 'Sweet Land' about a European couple who had to deal with the same kind of rejection.)

People, be careful here.  Don't make the Bible into a graven idol.  Don't force people to wear the mantle of 'sin' when they could be raising with love children who need them.  Open up your hearts, and let your love-light shine.