My wife has the strange idea that you can make money by writing. Here are two anecdotes she just submitted to two of Reader's Digest's humor columns.
Tales from school
By Marie Taylor; 2006 October 13
My daughters name is Silvie and occasionally people wonder how it is spelled. At the beginning of a school year her new teacher asked: Are you "Sylvie" with a y? To which she answered: No, I am Silvie with an i. On hearing this when she got home from school, my husband quipped: You should have told him, you are Silvie with two eyes!
As kids see it
By Marie Taylor; 2006 October 13
"My husband eats homemade gazpacho (a blendered mix of raw veggies) every day and adds a variety of strong spices for flavor. Both, appearance and smell of this food is utterly disgusting to our two children. Recently we went on a short trip to the
My thanks to the readers who submitted their best wishes for my fiftieth birthday last Tuesday. Silvie made up a very original and unusual birthday card using humor based upon the fact that I am a vegetarian (she is too), which I will try to remember to include with this mailout. I came across on some small town newspaper's website the following article about a one man show by a fellow who discovered the Baha'i Faith. If any of my readers can give some more background on this, please share it with us all.
Theater: Jesus walks ... and you, too, can live in his basement!
by Pete Freedman
Jesus in
Thursday, Oct. 19, through Saturday, Oct. 21,
Tickets: $15, all ages; call 685-4729. http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2006-10-12/theater.html
As a confused twenty-something, when Barry Smith had nowhere else to turn, he, like many before him, turned to Jesus.
In fact, Smith will tell you he "found" Jesus. But there's just one small difference between Smith and the thousands of
Smith had learned that the second coming of the messiah was in, of all places,
Fast-forward 10 years or so. Smith's hindsight is 20/20. He says he's not crazy, and believes he never was. But he feels his story is worth sharing if not for his own sake, then for the amusement of others.
His one-man show, Jesus in
This weekend, though, Smith could face his toughest crowd yet. He'll be performing a three-day run of Jesus in Manitou. And, he admits, the more he learns about the conservative religious nature of the greater Springs region, the more pause he has about performing here.
He hopes, however, that people "get" where he's coming from with his story.
"It's an explanation of my rationalization," says Smith, a spoken word poet and humor columnist for the Aspen Times. "My show is not anti-religion. But it's also not pro-religion. A sense of humor is a must, despite your religious beliefs.
"It's really not worth picketing."
The show, Smith says, is just an attempt at rationalizing why a small sub-sect of the eastern religion Baha'i, comprising of no more than about 150 people, is so convinced that it has found Jesus. And it's an attempt for him to explain his own belief.
"I was just curious," he says. "I've always been willing to follow my intuition, no matter how weird a place it would lead me."
It's easy to understand Smith's naivety. He grew up in a religious home in
It all seemed normal enough enlightening, in fact. So when his instructor, on the last day of class, dropped one last bombshell, he listened with excited ears: Oh, by the way, that Jesus we've been talking about? He's back, and in
"This is potentially apocalyptic," Smith recalls thinking at the time.
When the end never came, Smith concluded that the man he once felt sure was Jesus, probably isn't.
No hard feelings, though. Smith's done OK for himself. And oddly enough, he's pretty sure this path has led him to his higher calling: humorous-self-deprecating-one-man-PowerPoint-slideshow performances.
"People will ask, "Wow, you actually want people to know that about you?'" he says. "Apparently, I'm marching to the beat of a different drummer. It just seemed like the next obvious step."
Friday Essay on the Days of the Badi' Week
By
"Each day He is upon some task." (Qu'ran 55:29)
Today is Friday the 13th, an unlucky day according to old superstitions. This day motorcycle clubs, in their contrarian, outlaw spirit, have taken for their own. They regularly congregate at this time at Port Dover, several dozen clicks down the road from Dunnville. In summer months whenever a Friday falls on the thirteenth of the month, the roaring of motorcycles travelling in packs towards Port Dover is heard all day long. So Friday the 13th is the day of periodic roaring around here.
Friday, the thirteenth or otherwise, we are told will someday be the day of rest for Baha'is, as it already is for Muslims. In preparation for that, I have taken on the project on Fridays (Fridays when I remember and have leisure to do so) of discussing the Badi' calendar virtues assigned to each of the days of the week.
The first question that springs to mind is, why is Friday our day of rest? Most often the explanation is that given in Genesis, where God created the world in six days and took a break on the seventh. Less often do we hear this explication, given in Exodus:
"And the glory of the LORD abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud." (Ex 24:16)
Thus the first day of our Badi' week is just that, Baha, Glory, which like a cloud covers over the mount where the Law of God, the Ten Commandments, are about to to be revealed. Clouds behave strangely over mountains, forming wierd and beautiful plumes that have been photographed by cloud fanciers clubs. Their shots of these unusual formations have been given broad media attention lately. Thus veiled by mist on the mountain top, Moses waits six days until before on the seventh day the cloud of Glory passes and the revelation of the Law, the meeting with Yahweh unveiled, takes place -- from this brief meeting with the unveiled Godhead, Moses seated, Yahweh walking away, we get the expression "God Passes By."
Parallels and allusions to this primal revelatory event are common in the Writings of Baha'u'llah. For example the Tablet "Tajalliyat," translated "Effulgences," uses a root, Tajalli, which means "self-disclosure," or "God's unveiling Himself to His creatures." The allusion seems to be to the traditional Jewish marriage ceremony, where the bride after the ancient ceremony used to hand over her veil (in the Muslim version she is completely veiled beforehand, even to the husband-to-be), symbolizing their entry into a new household.
The revelation of the law of God, then, is no ordinary lifting of the fog, it is a marriage ceremony entailing a complete change of lifestyle for the creature, who must show eternal love, a lifelong commitment extending through this life and all the worlds of God. This may be why in the fourth and last Tajalli, about "Divinity, Godhead and the like," Baha'u'llah promises that turning to the Lote tree there would so enrich the "man of insight" as to make him "independent of aught else and to acknowledge his belief in that which the Speaker on Sinai hath uttered from the throne of Revelation." Hence the last day's virtue, Istiqlal,
This outlines some of the meaning of the first and last days of the Badi week, but what about the days in between? How do their virtues fit in between Glory and
This combination of the Seven Valleys with the image of Moses veiled in clouds awaiting a revelation of the Law on Mount Sinai above can fit with each day and its virtue. Each day is a descent into the valley of conscious life, rounded by sleep in the unknowable mists above. Here is how such a virtue week would look, combined with its corresponding valley:
1. Jalal - Glory (Saturday); search
2. Jamal - Beauty (Sunday); love
3. Kamal - Perfection (Monday); knowledge
4. Fidal - Grace (Tuesday); unity
5. 'Idal - Justice (Wednesday); contentment
6. Istijlal - Majesty (Thursday); wonderment
7. Istiqlal -
As the Qu'ran notes at the beginning, God reveals something new each day, and each week. A week is seven days of new revelation, sitting in a valley looking up to see what the Law reveals from its mystic cloud. Each day is a virtue, and each virtue has an opposite, a vice to avoid. Consider the seven virtues and seven deadly sins, as laid out by Cameron:
"Man can acquire the `seven virtues' of faith, hope, charity, justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance or he can fall into the grip of the "seven deadly" or "capital sins" of pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, avarice and sloth." (Cameron - Disconnected Letters of the Qur'an, p. 40)
Accordingly, with minor changes in order could you chart these virtues and vices together, and juxtapose them with the days of the week and the seven valleys mentioned above? Here is the best I can do with that idea. Let me know if it makes any sense.
1. Glory (Saturday); valley of search, faith vs. pride
2. Jamal - Beauty (Sunday); valley of love, charity vs. wrath
3. Kamal - Perfection (Monday); valley of knowledge, prudence vs. lust
4. Fidal - Grace (Tuesday); valley of unity, fortitude vs. sloth
5. 'Idal - Justice (Wednesday); valley of contentment, justice vs. avarice
6. Istijlal - Majesty (Thursday); valley of wonderment, hope vs. envy
7. Istiqlal -
No comments:
Post a Comment