Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Ymmm...PIZZA TONIGHT
In a few minutes, two of our oldest friends are coming over for homemade pizza. We're looking forward to being together; when we met, almost twenty-five years ago, we were all just starting out in our various professions and our marriages. We met professionally, actually - the person who introduced J. and me was working for the same company as B., and recommended us to do design and advertising work for him. B. and T. got married the next year, and our relationships continued thorough the births of their three children, the rise and eventual demise of that company, more professional ups and down, house renovations, illnesses and deaths of parents, surgeries, politics, lots of birthdays, tough times and high points, confidences and complaints, children's graduations...it's the sort of friendship where any one of us is willing to shed tears in front of the others, and has, and also knows that the others will rejoice with us just as readily.
We don't see each other as much as we used to, when we worked together, but the friendship means a great deal to all of us, especially so, I think, because we knew each other before any of us had any money or even a career - we were just starting out, and it was all rather raw and honest, so there's nothing to hide, and no reason to impress. We just get together, and catch up, and enjoy a meal...
One connecting point has always been pizza. B. is Italian - really Italian - and he loves Italian food, especially pizza, which J. and T. both make at home. When times have been rough for business, there's always been our joke about opening a pizza joint together. Another connection is music - B. was a drummer in a rock band, way back when, and his career has always involved music peripherally, but his soul is thoroughly that of a musician and composer, which I hope one day he'll get back to.
I guess my archetypal image of the four of us is riding down the highway, laughing and singing at the top of our lungs along with some old song from the 60s or 70s, while B. plays the drums on the steering wheel, occasionally leaning over to hit an imaginary cymbal on my head. Good times.
Friday, October 29, 2004
Duong Tuong Tran is a writer, poet and Vietnam’s most influential art critic. When meeting with writer William Zinsser and his wife in 1996, he mentioned that he had visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. and had written a poem there. The Zinssers were very moved by the poem, and it is included in William Zinsser’s new book, Writing About Your Life, published by Marlowe.
At the Vietnam Wall by Duong Tuong Tran
because I never knew you nor did you me i come
because you left behind mother, father and betrothed and i wife and children i come
because love is stronger than enmity and can bridge oceans i come
because you never return and i do i come
From the November 2 issue of The Christian Century.
This link is to an excellent article, the best and most detailed-from-the-inside I've yet read, on how the Windsor Report might be read and interpreted from a western, progressive point of view. It's from the Anglican Journal, the official newsletter of the Anglican Church in Canada. The article includes interviews with Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, who served on the Lambeth Commission as Canada's representative, and with the new Canadian primate, Andrew Hutchison. It was especially helpful to me to read Canon Barnett-Cowan's answers, since she was able to speak first-hand to the intent of the Commission on various points.
“How’s your book coming?” The question today from my father-in-law took me completely by surprise.
“Fine!” I said, gulping. “It’s going well.”
“Halfway?” he asked. I nodded. “Good for you!”
I told him I had just been there yesterday, to do another interview. He was surprised. “You’ve talked to him?” he said. “Really?” I don't know how he thought I was writing the book. I told him I had had a number of interviews and knew the bishop pretty well by now. He considered for a minute, then leaned forward, and said in a low voice, “I think I would be repulsed.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “He’s a wonderful man.” I thought about how the bishop had chattered with me in the tiny kitchen at Diocesan House yesterday, handing me a plate and a fork, sharing the sponge so we could both wipe up the salad dressing we’d spilled, how he’d insisted on carrying our empty plates back to the kitchen after lunch on our laps in his office – how humble and funny he was, how eminently likeable.
My father-in-law shook his head, but was smiling, as if he might just barely take my word for it. He wanted to know what had happened with the controversy in the Anglican Church; he thought it had all died down. We told him about the African bishops and their unlikely alliance with conservative Episcopalians, mostly from the south.
“It’s a cultural thing for me,” he explained. “There are lots of homosexuals in the Middle East,” he said, “but nobody ever talks about it. It’s just not something you discuss. And I’ve had lots of friends who were. But as priests?” Years ago, my father-in-law had staunchly defended someone in a small New England town who was known to be gay and had been persecuted and shunned; he’d been in academic situations where there were many gay teachers and students, and as far as I knew, had been very tolerant. This was something that was more about a visceral reaction to the gay person in his or her role as priest.
“How did you feel about women being ordained, back in the ‘70s?” I asked. I had to put the questions several ways before he could hear what I was saying.
“I can’t see a woman being a priest either,” he said. “And that was the final cleavage between the Anglicans and Catholics – when you began ordaining women.”
“Well, the Catholics have finally allowed girl acolytes,” I said.
“Wow!" he said, surprised. "That’s really a concession! Well - that's the first step downt he road..."
As annoying as his attitudes were, I was enjoying his honesty – we hadn’t talked about this before, certainly not so bluntly. That’s happening more and more these days; the guard is down.
“You see, where I am from, the priests are from the top intellectual segment of society. They are thinkers. The minister in our church was a member of the Arab Literary Academy! Intellectuals! And I just couldn’t see a woman being in that company.”
Ah, closer and closer to the truth. I felt J. tense up. He was taking pictures of his father while we talked; probably being behind the camera kept him from exploding.
"Really?" I pressed. "None of them?"
"Of course, there were a few. My own mother attended the first Arab Women's Conference! It was a big thing! And she read. But - she was a housewife." I felt a wave of sympathy for those women, and did a quick mental comparison of the lives of his mother and my grandmother, or even great-grandmother, who had been college educated and determined feminists even before that was a common word.
“How do you feel about women being ministers now?” (My father-in-law was a minister himself.)
“I don’t like it!” he said, laughing. “I just can’t see them in that…role.”
“Do you think they do a good job?”
“Not particularly!”
OK, I thought, at least we’ve laid that out on the table.
“Can you imagine a woman pope?” he said, and we both laughed.
“I can’t imagine a woman wanting to be pope!” I said.
“Certainly not like the current one!” he said. “Awful!”
Somewhere along the line, I’ve learned that these sweeping statements about women don’t necessarily include me, or his own daughter, although to some extent we’re all tarred with the same brush. My father-in-law only waxes poetic when talking about women as mothers: he has a Madonna complex, I think, and always says the same thing: “She looked so beautiful with her children! So lovely! So fulfilled!”
Sometimes I’ve bristled, or been wounded. But today I was just interested, because these attitudes are a window for me into a world we don’t see clearly at all from the West. His ideas were formed early in the last century, just when westerners began to be a presence in his homeland, today's Syria. Despite its origins next door, in Palestine, Christianity was seen as the religion of the West. Arabs who wanted to “move up” tried to emulate western ways, to give their children a western education, to learn English and French – and many of them became Christian, influenced by those first westerners who stayed in the Middle East to set up schools and hospitals. In Damascus, these were Presbyterian missionaries. Christianity was 600 years older than Islam, but in many ways it was overlaid on a predominantly Islamic society when the missionaries came and made converts. My mother-in-law, an emancipated, educated, self-made woman from the earliest country to establish the Orthodox church, Armenia, wanted her own career and independence. She had fought all her life against the traditional roles, and even though my father-in-law had defended her right to an education, equal treatment and good pay, the roles of men and women, both inside and outside the house, had been a constant bone of contention between them, as had his dismissive opinion about women's intellectual gifts.
All this made me think today of the situation in Africa, and how starkly different the expression of a religion can be, depending on its cultural context. The BBC reported the bluntest statement from the African bishops I’ve yet read, from the current meeting of 300 African primates in Nigeria: “Anglican leaders in Africa said if they condoned homosexuality - which is criminalised in the majority of African countries - then Africans would leave the Church or turn to Islam.” (italics mine)
The Nigerian president, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, who is a born-again Christian, “told the bishops he had followed ‘with keen interest your principled stand against the totally unacceptable tendency towards same-sex marriages and homosexual practice. Such a tendency is clearly un-Biblical, unnatural and definitely un-African,’ he said.”
Many of us in the west may find such opinions retrograde, but it’s so naïve – and unfortunately so typical of us - to think we can simply overlay our culture, and whatever historical processes it has gone through so far (whether toward "democracy" or modern attitudes about women or homosexuals) on someone else’s, or begin a dialogue only from where we are. Some of my father-in-law’s attitudes, formed nearly a century ago, clearly never caught up with those of his adopted culture. While I may deplore that, the best I can do may be to exemplify something else.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
No, friends, I have not dropped off the face of the earth - just been busy with traveling and work (and distracted two evenings in a row by our Icelandic neighbors, for whom the sun never sets and a 10:00 pm party is just the beginning!) There is something enchanting about explaining baseball to people who are totally baffled by not only the game but its mythical qualities (which, as Icelanders, they are quick to pick up on); and we've been talking about different cultures' children's stories; and then when that conversation wanes, there is always politics...or another bottle of wine.
We drove back down here on Monday evening, through the darkness of the forested mountains, where nary a light from a dwelling can be seen for miles at times. I was knitting, in the silver light of the nearly-full moon which led us over the frosty high pass and down into the village-dotted valleys. We had brought vegetables, bread, cheese, and we carried our packages and clothes and computers into the house just before the phone rang with a dinner invitation from next-door. The next morning I got up early and drove to Concord for my meeting with the bishop, who was in fine spirits and who I'll write about soon....
