Tales from the Shark Tank

I was walking through a parking lot in a nearby small town when a woman coming out the door of the Dollar Store met my eye, reached in her pocket, and handed me a flyer, saying “you should read this.” ‘Scuse me? You don’t know from Mother Eve – what is this thing and why are you handing it to me? When I glanced down, it was a classic, standard model Mark I tract. My spirituality isn’t likely to pull up roots at this point in my life, but I confess that I was curious. I glanced through it.

It starts with a middle aged man being loaded into an ambulance and asking for a priest. Next we see him with the classic sheet over his face, as a weeping young woman asks the priest if he managed to make his confession. The priest assures her that he confessed, was forgiven and received Last Rites, and that his soul was safely on his way to heaven. I noticed in passing that the words put into the priest’s mouth were “I forgave him” not “G-d forgave him”, but what do I know? I’m no Catholic. I’m also fairly certain that the clergyman isn’t the one personally doing the forgiving, which puts me ahead of the folks who wrote this little gem. But whatever. I forged on.

Next they show Our Hero at the proverbial Gates, with an indistinct but imposing figure pointing down. The next frame, clearly meant to be at the same time, is of the priest describing this man’s life, and assuring his flock that Our Hero was already enjoying Heaven’s Bliss, for he had been not only a been an observant Catholic, but a loyal son of Mother Church, known for charity and good works, building homes for the poor with his own funds, giving clothing to any poor child he saw, never throwing away leftovers from the restaurant he owned because “everyone knew” that if they came at the end of the day, he’d give anyone a package of leftovers sufficient for a family with no questions asked. They laid it on with a trowel; this guy was a Good Person.

“But I did everything right! Why am I condemned to the Lake of Fire?” cries Our Hero. And so he is brought for an audience with Jesus – another indistinct but imposing figure. (Why not G-d, I wondered? But again, what do I know? Not Christian in any form, much less this one, and never will be.) And in great detail, this figure tells the man that all that matters is that he never “accepted [Jesus] as his personal Lord and Savior in life, that everything he was taught by the Church was a lie, and that not only he but everyone who became Catholic because of his example would burn eternally, THE END.

I threw it away, of course, but I found myself thinking about the people who hand those things out and believe their message. How sad, to believe that your $DEITY is so cruel and petty. Good intentions count for nothing. Concern for those less fortunate counts for nothing. Charity, honorable behavior, ethics, morals, honest faith – all of those things count for nothing. The road to their divinity is a one-way street, accessible only through their particular gate-keeper. They have made G-d as finite and narrow-minded as they themselves are – making G-d in their image, rather than making themselves in G-d’s image.

I’ve seen these things before, and they’ve always left me disgusted. So did this one; no one has a right to determine the validity of another’s belief. But it left me with another response as well – pure pity. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reaction they were hoping for.

Miep Gies, the woman who found Anne Frank’s diary and saved it, has died at age 100. She was in her early thirties when the Nazis first came to Holland. Her employer, Otto Frank, had moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the increasing virulence of the Nazi regime in their native Germany. When the Nazis came to the place the Franks had hoped would be a haven, there was no way to run again. So the four of them, plus another small family and a single man – eight people in all – hid for a bit over two years, helped by Miep and her husband Jan and a few others. Even after their arrest, she risked going to the German police and trying to bribe them into letting the Franks go. Her courage was almost incomprehensible from my living room in the safety of 21st century Indiana.

I’ve been trying for the past several hours to think of something appropriate to say about her, something of what she taught simply by the way she lived her life, but there is too much there. That there is light, even in the deepest darkness. The greatness of spirit that an ordinary person is capable of, when the need arises. That heroism isn’t only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet, day in and day out actions of anyone who tries to do what is right even when it could cost them everything. She insisted that she was not a heroine, because, she said, she did not want children to think that it required someone special to do what was right. “Who is a hero?” she asked. “I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

She was indeed a housewife and secretary, and a mother. But it was in her very “ordinariness”, in being the sort of person everyone knows, that she was most extraordinary.

In what you did, in what you said, in a girl’s writings carefully preserved, in the stories you told and by the example you set, you changed the world, Miep Gies. And in so doing, you blessed us all.

Via the friend-of-a-friend sort of thing, I started reading the blog of a young woman (college age) in Norway.  She mostly blogs in English.  I’ve never asked her why, but if I didn’t know she was from Trondheim, I’d never have guessed.  Her use of English is quirky, but not so much more so than some of my other friends.

She started having some problems and talking about them, and I commented, sometimes telling her about applicable things I’d seen, sometimes asking questions that (she said) made her think rather than simply react, sometimes simply being sympathetic and telling her someone wished her well.  They’re all things I do in the way of listening, just this time it was in writing instead of in person.

Somewhere in the process, I seem to have acquired another fledgling.  She e-mails me now to talk things over that she doesn’t want to post publicly in her blog.  It seems what I have to say matters to her.  We’ve never met in person, but that doesn’t matter to her, or really much to me.  In everything but making her tea and listening in my own living room, it’s exactly like the other fledglings I’ve had.  On the one hand, it feels perfectly normal.  But when I stop to think about it, I find it utterly mind-boggling.

I just had two Purveyors of Religion (aka missionaries) appear at my door.  I was polite; I try always to be polite, even when I consider what they’re doing to be the height (shouldn’t that be depth?) of rudeness.  I told them it was a Jewish household, and when they didn’t take that hint, added one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes on religion.  That confused them, and they left.

People who knock on my door trying to bring me the One True Faith(tm) have always bothered me.  What, all others are counterfeit, like the Canterville Ghost? (If you haven’t read the short story, do so.  It’s fabulous.)  It’s the implicit arrogance of it that I find most disturbing.  I mean really.  To claim that they have the One True Way – and not just “Christianity” but their particular sect and flavor of Christianity requires that they claim that they, and only they, know the mind of the $DEITY.  I’ve always thought the whole point of any deity was to be beyond human, and beyond our comprehension.  We’re mortal, limited in our perceptions and ability to conceptualize; the Creator of the Universe(s) by definition is not.  So how can they, or anyone, say that not only are there a finite number of ways to approach that Infinite, there is only one, and they alone know it?

What unmitigated gall, and they themselves don’t perceive it.  And they think they’re doing me a favor?

It was above 50^o F. today, so I took advantage of the relative warmth and sunshine to take a walk. I hoped it would improve the mood, and indeed it did.

But I was not walking quickly, and noticed details I don’t always perceive. A small marsh-willow (non-weeping) had a nest in the fork where three tiny branches met. It was a neat, perfectly woven cup, perhaps two and a half inches in diameter, and I found myself wondering how small a bird must be to occupy such a nest along with her hatchlings. It’s untenanted now, of course, but so well built and anchored that all the winds and storms this winter has presented so far have neither torn nor dislodged it.

A few feet further on I found a young locust. It too had a nest, though not as whole as the first. What intrigued me was that the second nest was braced by a small branch and a thorn long enough that had it not been sharp, it would have qualified as a twig in its own right. The tree itself was part of the bird’s defense, in a way more direct than the usual cloaking leaves. When I was a little girl, I read about thorns being used as pins, but I couldn’t imagine how that worked. The only thorns I’d ever seen were rose or berry thorns, and while those certainly could tear unwary arms, they were too short to fasten anything. But locust thorns make sense. They’re incredibly sharp, easily thin enough to pass through hand-woven fabric, and longer than my quilting pins. Looking at them, I thought that if one drilled a small hole in the flared end that attaches it to the tree, it could serve as quite a serviceable needle as well. I think I’d be more surprised to learn they hadn’t been used so than that they had.

Around the corner, there was an oak in my landlady’s yard. It would have been easy to take the brown bits at the tips of the twigs for a few last leaves the wind had left behind, had they not taken wing in a fluttering whirl. It may be winter, but the tree is still good camouflage for the small brown chirpy birds that brave the cold and snow and wind. Instead of hiding in the leaves, they look very like brown leaves themselves.

And home again, to my boychick on the computer. “Mom, look at this!” It was a picture of a large tornado he’d found on Wikipedia. The things I found outside were smaller and less dramatic. They’ve been there all along. I just wasn’t looking.

It’s Erev Rosh Hashonah.  This is the season when Jews are obligated to examine their behavior and their relationships to both their fellow human beings and to the Divine.  Among other things, we look for ways to accomplish tikun olam, the healing of the world that we are commanded to undertake.  We are, indeed, “our brother’s keepers”.

I already had that sort of self-examination in mind when I started reading my usual list of blogs this afternoon.  In them, I found discussions of a thing that evidently happened last Friday.  Someone sprayed a chemical irritant into the room being used to care for the youngest congregants in a house of worship.  A number people were treated for chemical irritation to skin, eyes and throats; some of the children needed oxygen because they’d gotten a lung full of the stuff and were so small that it sent them into shock.  Several mothers and children were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment.  Thankfully, no one was so seriously hurt they had to stay, but the congregants were badly frightened, and with good cause.

It clearly fits any reasonable definition of an act of terror.  It is pure luck that no permanent physical harm was done.  It was totally reprehensible.  Nothing exucses a random attack on a house of worship.  Nothing excuses an attack on innocents, and no victims are more innocent than babies.  But this didn’t happen in Pakistan or Iraq.  It happened at a mosque in Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of United States.

Now, I have heard how “they” all hate “us”, where “they” are Muslims.  I have heard that it is “they” who perpetrate the violence.  I have had friends hurt in cross-border raids in Israel.  But my own observation is that fanatics of any and every stripe perpetrate violence, that it accomplishes nothing save to breed fear and vengeance and further violence, and that when “they” are babies and their mothers, nothing can justify it.  I don’t care who is doing what to whom in Afghanistan, or Kurdistan, or Iran or Iraq.  Babies in child care to allow their mothers to worship in peace here, in this country that is supposed to carry the banner for religious freedom – especially here – should be safe.

I’ve studied religiously-prompted violence, both in the course of learning my own religious history and in college.  It leaves marks not only on those present, but marks on cultures that can last for generations or even millenia.  We still celebrate the failure of a plan for destruction that occurred 2600 years ago.  (Purim, which has been summarized as “they tried to kill us, it failed, let’s eat.)  Kristalnacht did not only mark Jewish culture and memory; it has marked German culture.  This isn’t on anything close to the same scale.  It isn’t institutionalized, is not government sponsored or sanctioned.  But it’s still an act of hate, carried out against those who could not possibly have done harm.  It’s still an act of terrorism, the sort of thing we see reported as occurring in places like Islamabad or Belgrade.

Not here.  Not in America.  We’re better than that.  Except it did, and we’re not.  I am ashamed for my country, for a government that has intentionally fed people’s fear and xenophobia so that someone thought it made sense to attack children.  And I’m thinking that what we need now is to learn to think of those little ones not as “their children”, somehow distinct from “our children” – but of all of them as everyone’s children.