In joyful hope

Everyone in my Catholic circle has been talking about the changes to the missal. Most focus on the congregation's response, "and with your spirit," rather than "and also with you."I thought that was a somewhat unnecessary change but since I study the bible in the original languages, I am all for better translations, and somehow "and with your spirit" didn't rankle me very much.


After Mass yesterday, I thought quite a bit about the changes and how flustered and uneasy people seemed in the pews. I think one of the reasons we often have a translation different from the literal meaning of the text is because our own language does not fully capture the beauty or the unspoken meaning that underlies a prayer. Translating a language that no one actually speaks any more is a difficult task, and to render it with the same poetry and feeling as its original language is even more difficult. 


One of my favorite parts of Advent mass was the part right after the recitation of the Our Father. At Boston College, where I was an undergraduate, the priest encouraged all of us to think about the words he said after our prayer, and to perhaps pray them ourselves during the season of Advent: 


"Deliver us Lord from every evil, 
and grant us peace in our day. 
In your mercy, keep us free from all anxiety 
as we wait in joyful hope 
for the coming of our savior, Jesus Christ." 


With the new Roman missal, the priest now says, 


"Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, 
graciously grant peace in our days,

that, by the help of your mercy,
we may be always free from sin
and safe from all distress,
as we await the blessed hope
and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ"


It's almost the same, but not quite. For some reason, the new translation just does not have the same beauty to it. Blessed hope does not have the same ring to it as joyful hope, and 'safe from all distress' is not the same as "keep us from all anxiety."


But alas. The change has been made. I think, however, that I will always say the old prayer when I pray the Our Father on my own. 


In joyful hope. 

A Wendell Berry poem, written to his granddaughters who visited the holocaust museum on the day of Yitzhak Rabin's burial:

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

 

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

 

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

 

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

 

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

 

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light.  It will be

 

the light of those who have suffered
for peace.  It will be
your light.

 

The music is still playing

I am sitting on the Amtrak train, heading back to Yale after a wonderful weekend with my aunt’s family. As I entered the near full compartment, I noticed two seats empty, right in front of two women who were chattering away. I took my seat in front of them, settling down for what I hoped to be a productive two-hour train ride.

No such luck. The two women are yakking away, complaining away to glory about their rotten husbands, the husbands’ ungrateful siblings, and the awful mother-in-laws, and their own wayward children who would not have turned out that way had it not been for the rotten husband, ungrateful aunts and uncles, and awful in-laws. After about four minutes, I had it up to my ears (haha, no pun intended) and so I plugged in my earphones.

I found myself thinking about what they were saying. How much of our unhappiness and sorrow come from simply letting ourselves be dissatisfied, irked, irritable? If something makes you so unhappy, say it, and say it early. Don’t let the resentment build up, don’t let the irritations simmer below the surface. Don’t let the grief take over you because at some point, the fury and the sorrows boil over. And until that happens, they eat away at you.

It seems like these women have been unhappy for decades. And yet, they were kids once, young women with hopes and dreams of exciting futures. What happened to the dreams? When did the music stop?

I have spent the last year and a half wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder. A fire, two bomb explosions, and car stoning on the way to school. Some days I don’t want to get out of bed, I don’t want to see anyone. It took me a long time to ask for help and to say that something was gravely wrong. The sorrow and fear were eating away at my core.  It becomes so much a part of you that sometimes you forget what you were like without it. I suspect these two women sitting behind me are like that.

Something gets me out of bed everyday anyway: the knowledge that today is going to be better. Being fearful, plagued by memories of terrible incidents is not something I want for myself. I want more. I want dreams, love, joy. And I hope the women on this train with me want that too. The music is playing more softly now, but it hasn’t stopped. 

The Sabbath in Tel Ashkelon

Shabbat on an archaeological dig is wonderful. I love the break from the frenzied activity of the week, the rest from the toil.

Wendell Berry, one of my favorite poets, wrote a series of poems called A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, and it's become my shabbat ritual to read a few of these every week. Here is one I read this morning:

"Who makes a clearing makes a work of art,
The true world's Sabbath trees in festival
Around it. And the stepping stream, a part
Of Sabbath also, flows past, by its fall
Made musical, making the hillslope by
It's fall, and still at rest in falling, song
Rising. The field is made by hand and eye,
By daily work, by hope outreaching wrong,
And yet the Sabbath, parted, still must stay
In the dark mazings of the soil no hand
May light, the great Life, broken, make its way
Along the stemmy footholds of the ant.
    Bewildered in our timely dwelling place,
    Where we arrive by work, we stay by grace." (1983. IV.)

Shabbat shalom.

computerless in Jerusalem!

After four years of trusted service, my faithful little MacBook seems to have given up the ghost! I didn't realize quite how dependent I was on it until yesterday. I didn't bring too many textbooks or hard copies of articles with me to Israel, preferring instead to have everything on my computer. I also have a great bible program on it that lets me tailor my own reading schedule and a calendar that reminds me about important events, due dates, and birthdays. And of course, I spent many a happy hour watching old episodes of the West Wing! I am holding out hope that it is fixable.... I have quite a while to go before i am back in the USA and so here's to my little mac, and here is to hoping that the good souls at the Jerusalem tech center are able to fix it!

Writing the colors of your life

I've always marveled at my friend Meg and my mother for their ability to write the most wonderful blog posts. They write about things you and I might take for granted or that we might not even notice. They also write rather frequently. This year, in a effort to be more like them. I promised myself that I would write more often. It is something I love to do, and I frequently think about, but I never actually sit down to do it, thinking to myself, "well if I have the time to write, perhaps I should use it to study that Akkadian vocabulary, review some Ugaritic grammar, at the very least organize my notes for tomorrow's classes." I failed rather miserably at being like Meg and my mother. By the time I finish organizing and color-coding my flashcards, I don't have any time left. I wondered where they found both the time and the inspiration.

The more I read their posts, the more I see their love for the process of writing, the very act of noticing something they can write about. Their inspiration is in the world around them, the people they meet, the work they do, the books they read, the prayers they pray. The pictures they paint with their words come from the colors around them, the colors that they take the time to notice. Writing doesn't seem to be something they schedule carefully into an already packed day of work. They just love to write. Somehow, they take the joy that infuses everything they do, and they put it into words.

I don't know if I can be quite like them, but it is something I do aspire to. For someone who thrives on rules, order, and planners, it's a little daunting to sit down and write without a carefully thought out plan, a nicely planned thesis. But I am learning. By little and by little.




You can read Meg's blog at http://felicemifa.wordpress.com/ and my mother's at http://jochopra.blogspot.com/

He returned to say thank you.

When I was growing up, one of my favorite stories from the bible was Luke 17:11-19. In the story, Jesus is traveling between Galilee and Samaria. A group of ten lepers sees him, and they cry out to him, asking to be healed. Jesus instructs them to show themselves to the priests, and as they went, they were healed. The story could have ended there, but it doesn't. Luke tells us that suddenly, one of the men turns and runs back to Jesus to thank him. Jesus wonders aloud that none of the others returned, and blesses the man, telling him that his faith made him well. All ten men were healed of course, but my guess is that this healing meant even more to the man who returned to say thank you.

Yesterday, my mother wrote an essay about a little girl she knows (you can find the essay here). This little girl has a skin condition called vitiligo that leaves white patches all over her body. It's not dangerous or contagious, it just makes her look a little different from the other kids around her. But it is the death knell in traditional societies. Skin diseases in India, as in many places, render a person impure: socially; ritually; religiously. This little girl has been completely ostracized by her classmates and neighbors, and her friends no longer play with her for fear of catching it.

A couple of chapters later in Luke, Jesus is approaching the city of Jericho, when he is stopped by a blind man, who asks for mercy. Jesus stops and asks him, "what can I do for you?" "I want to see," said the man simply.  Jesus responds, "Receive your sight, your faith has healed you."

All that this little girl wants is to have her friends back, and to be welcomed as a part of regular society. Perhaps we should take a lesson from Jesus, and say "it doesn't matter if you have a skin condition. I'll stick by you, you can count on me." She has the faith. We ought to be the answer.