[update] this kid hates the word "Christian": my response to Rachel's rally to restore unity

[update below]

Isn't there still time to join in Rachel Held Evans's "Rally to Restore Unity—a week-long celebration of Christian unity and fundraising effort for Charity:Water?"

How do you join in when you hate the word "Christian"?  No, as a kid, I didn't say this:

As a Jew, I had been led to feel cold chills at the mention of his name. Is this strange? For a thousand years Jews have lived among people who interpreted Christ’s will to mean floggings and burnings, ‘gentleman’s agreements,’ and closed universities.... 

I think very few Gentiles realize that even the most Americanized Jew usually shudders when he sees a church, a cross, or even the name of Christ in print. It is, of course, a shudder of fear; but it gives rise to hate immediately…. I have almost never met a Jew who wasn’t anti-Christian.

No, that's something that Joy Davidman wrote in some of her letters.  But since we're being personal, let me tell you what I was made to sing as a kid, as a missionary's kid, as a Christian MK:
Our parents heard the call of God
And followed His command
To preach the Gospel true and pure
Throughout a distant land

So we too have followed
And in this place called home
We too are sharing in the task
To make Christ Jesus known

For we are MKs
We love to share it...

The one who wrote those lyrics (and got us little kid MKs singing that when I was growing up in my home called Vietnam) was one of my missionary aunts.  Like Joy Davidman (when married to Mr. Gresham), my missionary aunt was abused by her husband.  I'm only bringing that up because she had the experience also that my own mother did.  The men wore the label, "Christian."

But that's not necessarily the only reason I hate the word, Christian.  Maybe I'll have to explain all of that another time.  Today, while there's still the rally for unity going on, I'd just like to remember that Jesus was not a Christian.  When he gave that new commandment, he wasn't talking to Christians.  When he said the sign of following him was unity in love, well, that's right, he wasn't talking about getting Christians not to abuse each other or their wives or their little kids.  And he never used the word, Christian either.  He didn't even use the word in Greek that we get our English word from. 

The point I'm trying to get at is that the word Christian automatically leaves out Jews who are not Christians.  Ironically, the first Jews to whom Jesus gave his rally to unity for were not even believers in Christian doctrines.  The closest followers of Jesus were, like him, all Jews.  And all of them were doubters in the resurrection, according to the gospels of Jesus.  Oh, and those gospels?  Not written by Christians either.  So for Christians to have a unity rally, that doesn't include non-believing Jews, is something, isn't it?  Such a rally doesn't call on atheists or Muslims or Mormons or agnostics either.  Unity is for Christians only?  Well, I guess that's sort of a start.  But that's sort of the way my life started too in a Christian family.  Now what?  Well, I think about the words of jesus a lot.  And here's my little sign:

(sorry for the scowl.  it's the sun in my eyes.  or i'm thinking about the tv show survivor where the Christian guy throws his teammates under the bus because he heard some message from Jesus about love.  and why are there so many Bible reading God talking Christians on the show this season?)

[update:

It's probably helpful to know that this missionary kid who hated the word Christian is still growing up.  He's now more often able to say, "I don't love that word."  Once he was an atheist in the closet; now he's most days a theist openly.  For Mother's Day, his mother is coming over for dinner, with her husband (this mk's dad), and that man has recently been making changes.  The retired missionary has been making amends, confessing past abuses, and seeking restitution, forgiveness, restoration, fulness in relationships, and reconciliations where possible.  The relationship that the mk has with his Christian father is in repair (more that it ever was).  The family breathes easier.  The family breathes easier even though that daddy has six cancerous brain tumors, a spine tumor, and stage 4 lung cancer, "incurable and untreatable," says the MD.  The phrase Holy Spirit has taken on new meanings in this family.  What seemed like impossible rifts between people are being overcome.  There's something like the unity rally, but just not so public, going on here.  At this kid does smile often more too:

progress.  not perfection.]

How she (a biblical disaster) responds

Rachel Evans Held has a piece up today entitled,

"How (not) to respond to a natural disaster:"

which points out how John Piper and Skye Jethani respectively tell Christians the meaning of the earthquake for Christians. "One presumes to know the mind of God," she observes; "the other simply imitates the actions of Jesus." You'll find which is which and her response to both men when you read her post, which I'll link to below.

And you'll read how helpfully agnostic Held Evans can be, how helpfully open.  She says, "We cannot know for sure why these things happen. But we can weep.... The Japanese people don't need our lectures; they need our love."  Now that's quite a response.  And some of us are weeping; I know a Japanese mother is crying here in the USA, where she studies English, although she was to board an airplane for home, where her daughter was to have wed her own bridegroom in Sendai later this month.  Sadness.  Profound sorrow.

This, then reminds of a really biblical response.

It's very similar to Rachel Held Evans's response of empathy.

It's also the Jewish, pre-Jesus response of an earthquake or of the Earth herself.

Well, hmm, only some Christians might agree it is a biblical response.  And most Jews would agree, that if biblical, it makes no mention of G-d whatsoever. And then many Christians and Jews would question whether it was really ever canonical, although entirely historical, in the first place. It's the stuff of translation and of gendered translation and such.  Pathetic really.

Without further ado, here it is (in four - or five - translations - if you'll work with me on a fifth):

25 Great sorrow came upon Israel,
.....wherever they lived.
26 Nobles and elders broke out wailing,
.....maidens and young men lost their vigor,
.....and the women's beauty was marred.
27 Every bridegroom took up the dirge
.....while his bride sitting in the bedchamber turned to mourn.
28 Indeed, the earth had quaked against its inhabitants,
.....and the entire house of Jacob was clothed in shame.
..........--Jonathan A. Goldstein, for the Anchor Bible series

 25 Israel mourned deeply in every community, 26 rulers and elders groaned, maidens and young men became faint, the beauty of women faded. 27 Every bridegroom took up the lament; she who sat in the bridal chamber was mourning. 28 Even the land shook for its inhabitants, and all the house of Jacob was clothed with shame.
..........--the Revised Standard Version translation team 

25 And there was great mourning in Israel, in
...............every place of theirs.
26 .....And rulers and elders groaned,
virgins and young men weakened,
..........and the beauty of the women was
...................deformed.
27 Every bridegroom took up lamentation;
..........she who sat in the bridal chamber was in
...................mourning.
28 And the land quaked for those dwelling in it,
..........and all the house of Iakob was clothed
...................with shame.
..........--George Themelis Zervos, of the NETS translation team

25 καὶ ἐγένετο πένθος μέγα ἐπὶ Ισραηλ
..........ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ αὐτῶν.
26 καὶ ἐστέναξαν ἄρχοντες καὶ πρεσβύτεροι,
..........παρθένοι καὶ νεανίσκοι ἠσθένησαν,
.....καὶ τὸ κάλλος τῶν γυναικῶν ἠλλοιώθη.
27 πᾶς νυμφίος ἀνέλαβεν θρῆνον,
.....καὶ καθημένη ἐν παστῷ ἐπένθει.
28 καὶ ἐσείσθη ἡ γῆ ἐπὶ τοὺς κατοικοῦντας αὐτήν,
.....καὶ πᾶς ὁ οἶκος Ιακωβ ἐνεδύσατο αἰσχύνην.
..........---some anonymous Jewish translator rendering
................some anonymous Jewish writer's Hebrew into Hellene
....................in, of all places, Alexander the Great's Alexandria, Egypt

To be sure, Goldstein and the RSV team and Zervos are only working from the Hellene, bringing the Greek language into their English.  The real struggle for them is to know how to render the preposition epi (ἐπὶ).  It might have been written, and certainly can be read, as a bookend preposition, appearing at the start of the poetic stanza of the initial verse (25) and then at some point of the ending verse (28), which concludes the sad song.

Notice in verse 25, Goldstein chooses "upon" for the English, while the RSV team and Zervos make it "in."  What's better "upon Israel" or "in Israel" or does it make a difference?   But then in verse 28, to round out the poetic stanza, Goldstein has "against."  In contrast, the RSV team and Zervos have the opposite of "against":  "for."

I think all these men translating have missed the fact that the phrase for "the earth" or "the land" is in the feminine form in Greek:  Hē Gē (ἡ γῆ).  That's not so important until you're trying to translate the feminine pronoun:  autēn αὐτήν.  She's such a troublesome little pronoun for English bible translators these days!  Should she be he or she or it?

Couldn't we all just as easily note the Pathos, specifically the Penthos, of the Earthquake here?  Everybody is sad and is weeping.  Old people, young people, brides and bridegrooms.  Even the Earth is.  If great sorrow has come upon Israel (men and women), as Goldstein shows it has, then listen again to that Greek of verses 25 and 28 of I Maccabees 1:

25 And It birthed - Sadness did - a tremendous pain upon Isra-El,
..........in each of Its places - His places, Her places.

28 And She quaked - Earth did - a shaking upon those of
..........Her household,
.....And everybody of Jacob's house dressed with Her in shame.

(If that's not enough Bible for you, then go here for some real "New Testament."   And then do notice what Held Evans says that Jethani says that Jesus says -- and what he does not say, while he's weeping, while he's helping, when it all seems way too late.)


Now, if you're really ready, then please go read Rachel Held Evans's post.

Jesus and Women on Men and Women Friendship

Well, I really don't have much to say here.  You read the narratives of women and of Jesus and you get the idea that love isn't really so boxed up into neat categories that match Greek words that reinforce hierarchies.

Aristotle and Meilaender on Men and Women Friendship

Carolyn Custis James has again quoted Gilbert Meilaender at Whitby Forum.  Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed had quoted him too.  Now Michael at Kruse Kronicle is interested, and so is Linda at christian feminism.  At issue is Meilaender's question on "friendship between the sexes."

Now what I'd like to do here is to review some of how Meilaendar quotes Aristotle.

As we all know, Meilaendar quotes Aristotle an awful lot.  Interestingly enough, the ethos of Aristotle has lots of appeal, because he's written a lot to quote with such tidy conclusions.  It's not surprising that Meilaendar appeals to Aristotle as one large authority on "friendship."  (And, likewise, it's not entirely surprising that more of you have read my quotations of Aristotle "On Love" than any other posting at this blog -- except that good-contemporary research post on Aristotle's "sexism").

Meilaendar wants to emphasize that there will be "a problem for friendships between men and women, even if it may also be enriching."  The warrant for his claim?  It's this:  "Eros always threatens; for, unlike friendship [i.e., 'philia'], eros is a love that is jealous and cannot be shared."

Meilaendar's presumption is that eros, at least as Aristotle conceives of it, is or might be between males and females as some sort of equally mutual, reciprocal love (or lust).  Of course, Meilaendar does acknowledge that Aristotle is not thinking about equals:  "he has in mind, it would seem, pederastic relationships."  And yet Meilaendar wants to explore something else, somehow, with Aristotle's endorsement:  "but this does not affect his view of the relation between eros and philia" ... as if Aristotle is interested in eros between the sexes.  He is not.  Just to be clear:  Aristotle is not interested in mutual eros or philia between men and women.  For example, when Aristotle talks about eros and friendship in the same paragraph, look at where the woman belongs; here's from his Politics:

For the constitution [at Syracuse in ancient times] underwent a revolution as a result of a quarrel that arose between two young men, who belonged to the ruling class, about a love affair [eros, ἐρωτικὴν]. While one of them was abroad the other who was his comrade won over the [male] youth with whom he was in love [eros, ἐρώμενον], and the former in his anger against him retaliated by persuading his wife to come to him.

In Aristotle's example of the problem of eros, the two male comrades get in a spat, and one uses erotic love with a younger male to get the other angry or jealous.  To get back at him, the other woos his friend's female spouse (although it's not, as Aristotle writes it, explicitly the same sort of relationship as with the male youth).  The woman who's the wife in the story Aristotle tells is used, but she doesn't even get the sort of love the boy who's used does; Aristotle is not interested in naming what comes to the wife, or what might or ought to come to her, as either love [eros] or friendship [philea].

And friendship within the heterosexual marriage, Aristotle says, is by Nature aristocratic, with the man as ruler and king over his wife, his subject.  Meilaender does well to repeat this notion, if in an understated sort of way:  "Aristotle recognizes, of course, that there is a kind of friendship between husband and wife, but it is one example of what he calls friendship between unequals."  So, we do well to get the fact that, for Aristotle, a female is a mutated male, never equal and always inferior.

Meilaender wants to appeal to Aristotle's "view of the relation between eros and philia," Aristotle's seemingly objective division and separation of love into types, in order ironically somehow to get to mutuality between the sexes.  But Meilaender must look beyond the patriarchy, beyond the gynophobia, beyond the misogyny, if he's going to succeed.  Fortunately, he does briefly.  He quotes Mary Hunt, author of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (1991):

Nonetheless, it may be worth thinking briefly about what she recommends: namely, “new models of mutuality” which are most easily found among women friends. We ought not, she argues, take Aristotle's model of friendship and suppose that he simply forgot to include women when he talked and wrote of it—an omission we can then easily correct. We should not take his model and then just add women's experience “as if they should have been there in the first place” .... Thus, according to Hunt, women need not worry about classifying friendships as carefully as did Aristotle, nor need they worry about whether friends are best friends or just good friends. “Only ruling-class men whose survival is not in question have the dubious luxury of looking up and down at their friends, companions, and acquaintances.” Women, by contrast, in a society which—in Hunt's view—is oppressive, cannot concern themselves with levels of friendship. For them the simple truth is that “friends, lots of them, are necessary for . . . survival in an often unfriendly environment.”

Unfortunately, Meilaender goes on to box up "Hunt's view" and to eventually make her sound like Aristotle in very odd ways.  "Hunt is far more like Aristotle than she realizes," he says.  But we wonder if he knows what Aristotle is like.

Meilaender, with some other men he continues to quote, seems to have the "luxury of looking up and down at" various types of friendship and love.  He seems to continue find "classifying friendships as carefully as did Aristotle" important.  He seems to want to keep one thing different from and quite above the other:

[C. S.] Lewis believes that friendship and erotic love may go together, but in many respects he agrees with Harry and with Aristotle that the combination is an unstable one....  We ought not, I think, deny that friendships between men and women—friendships that are not also marked by erotic love—are possible. We ought not, that is, let a theory lead us to deny the reality we see around us, and we do sometimes see or experience such friendships. Nor need we express the view shared by Harry [Burns, the character in Nora Ephron's screenplay, "When Harry Met Sally"] and Lewis quite as crassly as did [Friedrich] Nietzsche: “Women can enter into a friendship with a man perfectly well; but in order to maintain it the aid of a little physical antipathy is perhaps required.” Nor, surely, need we hold, as my students sometimes do, that friendship between men and women is possible only if at least one of the friends is homosexual (a view that will make same-sex friendships difficult for those who are homosexual, unless, of course, their experience of eros is in no way jealous or exclusive). At the same time, however, there is no reason to deny some truth to Harry's claim, even without the additional support provided by Aristotle and Lewis, for our experience also suggests that there is something to it.

When Meilaender hints here that his experience (as "our experience"?) supports something that Aristotle says (and, therefore, that the support of Aristotle may be discarded since no longer needed), then we are not surprised.  We are not surprised when Meilaender finds himself turning again and again to Aristotle for support:

That is, to revert to the terms I drew from Aristotle, they [men and women] must find in the friend another self, another individuality, but one whose otherness is not so overwhelming as to threaten to engulf or invade their selfhood. No doubt this is not always possible, for reasons we noted earlier when considering the impact of eros on friendship.

Mainly how Meilaender quotes Aristotle is for support that love must be compartmentalized into various categories of difference.  He then can tell women and men how they must and must not love.

Aristotle on Love

Aristotle on the Golden Rule:
Eavesdropping on (Male-Logical-Ethnocentric Ethical) Love

In a post yesterday, we said far too much about us and, therefore, hardly anything about Aristotle. (We were so amused by our own categories of history and fiction, religion and secularism, politics and prayer, and law and love - that we ran out of attention to the father of our logic and how we think it must derive his ethics for us. Yes, I'm talking about how we tend to co-opt a method of knowing in order, for example, to rob Jesus of the Golden Rule as if that's our moral obligation. "But we're only being objective," we protest, "merely investigating the nature of what's really real." We hardly think about why Aristotle hated Heraclitus and why Einstein loved Heisenberg and why Toni Morrison's blind, wise woman, who is "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and . . . alone in a small house outside of town," will, without forgoing much at all, kindly point out the fact that the "systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.") So today let's get right to Aristotle on Love.

Let's let Aristotle speak for himself, shall we? Translator Harris Rackham does. (But aren't we amused that Jeffrey M. Perl and his friends suggest that Aristotle and his translators need anything more than logic? Perl and his pals recognize nuance, complexity, and un-forgone mid-wifery properties: "It takes a rhetorician more ingenious than Aristotle to refigure 'a lover of war' as an isolated pawn — though, as Harris Rackham demonstrates, a translator can devise a sort of logic: 'For one by nature unsocial is also a "lover of war" . . . inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts.'" Yes, I know, I'm suggesting we're not so much going to listen to Aristotle's original authorial intent as much as we are going to listen with our own. And yet Krista Ratcliffe suggested this long ago: our recovering Rhetorical Listening from its banishment by Aristotle so as to authorize eavesdroppers). When Aristotle says one thing, Rackham gets it as that very same (dynamically equivalent) thing (and the Greek reader, especially the one of racial and sexual and academic privilege should not make an error). When the author writes, the invisible translator renders precisely. First a glossary, then Aristotle:

φιλίας [philías] = "friendship"
φιλήσεις [philēsis] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "friendship"
ἀντιφίλησις [anti-phílēsis] = "reciprocal affection"

φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = "friend"
φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = (person) "loved"

φιλεῖται [phileĩtai] = (to be) "loved"
φιλητοῖς [philētoĩs] = "loveable"
φιλοῦσιν [philoũsin] = (to) "love"
φιλοῦσι [philoũsi] = (to) "form attachments"

ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to) "enjoy"
ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to be) "fond of"
ἀγαπᾷ [agapã] = (to) "care for"

ἐρωτικοὶ [érōtikoì] = "to fall in love"
ἐρωτικῆς [érōtikēs] = "love"

ἀλλήλους ... καθ’ αὑτοὺς
[allēlous ... kath' aűtoùs]
= "each other in themselves"

Now listen:

Now these qualities differ in kind; hence the affection [φιλήσεις] or friendship [φιλίαι] they occasion may differ in kind also. There are accordingly three kinds of friendship [φιλίας], corresponding in number to the three lovable [φιλητοῖς] qualities; since a reciprocal affection [ἀντιφίλησις], known to either party, can be based on each of the three, and when men love each other [φιλοῦντες ἀλλήλους], they wish each other well in respect of the quality which is the ground of their friendship [φιλοῦσιν]. So that there is a different species of will-wishing in each case.

Thus friends whose affection [φιλοῦντες] is based on utility do not love each other in themselves [ἀλλήλους οὐ καθ’ αὑτοὺς φιλοῦσιν], but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other [ἀλλήλων].

And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy [ἀγαπῶσι] the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us.

Hence in a friendship [φιλοῦντες] based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved [φιλούμενός], but as useful or agreeable. And therefore these friendships [φιλίαι] are based on an accident, since the friend [φιλούμενος] is not loved [φιλεῖται] for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be.

There's more in the Nichomachean Ethics:

And the tastes of youth change quickly. Also the young are prone to fall in love [ἐρωτικοὶ], as love [ἐρωτικῆς] is chiefly guided by emotion, and grounded on pleasure; hence they form attachments [φιλοῦσι] quickly and give them up quickly, often changing before the day is out.

The young do desire to pass their time in their friend's [φιλίαν] company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship [φιλίαν]. The perfect form of friendship [φιλία] is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends [φίλοις] wish each alike the other's good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends [φίλοι] for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship [φιλία] of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.—

And there's the distinctive distinguishing of love based on science - far separate from that of the poets and pseudo scientists like Heraclitus and Heisenburg - who know nothing of logic or objectivity:

Some try to find a more profound and scientific explanation of the nature of affection. Euripides writes that ‘Earth yearneth for the rain’ when dried up, ‘And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.’ Heracleitus says, ‘Opposition unites,’ and ‘The fairest harmony springs from difference,’ and ‘'Tis strife that makes the world go on.’ Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that ‘Like seeks after like.’

Dismissing then these scientific speculations as not germane to our present enquiry, let us investigate the human aspect of the matter, and examine the questions that relate to man's character and emotions: for instance, whether all men are capable of friendship [φιλία], or bad men cannot be friends [φίλους]; and whether there is only one sort of friendship [ἓν εἶδος τῆς φιλίας] or several [πλείω]. Those who hold that all friendship [...] is of the same kind [οἰόμενοι] because friendship [...] admits of degree, are relying on an insufficient proof, for things of different kinds also can differ [τὰ ἕτερα] in degree. But this has been discussed before.

Perhaps the answer to these questions will appear if we ascertain what sort of things arouse liking or love. It seems that not everything is loved [οὐ πᾶν φιλεῖσθαι], but only what is lovable [τὸ φιλητόν], and that this is either what is good, or pleasant, or useful. But useful may be taken to mean productive of some good or of pleasure, so that the class of things lovable [ὥστε φιλητὰ] as ends is reduced to the good and the pleasant.

But before we leave there's that hint at a Corinthian love, that Christian one, of that man named Paul, who begins to stretch in an other way Aristotle's more objective "agape" love (before he tells the women to be silent in the church and to ask their husbands at home). Says Aristotle, in his Ethics, logically avoiding hyperbole and other extremes:

The man who exceeds these limits cares [ἀγαπᾷ] more for such pleasures than they are worth. Not so the temperate man; he only cares for them as right principle enjoins. . . . Men who have inherited a fortune are reputed to be more liberal than those who have made one, since they have never known what it is to want; moreover everybody is specially fond of [ἀγαπῶσι] a thing that is his own creation: parents and poets show this. But it is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is not good either at getting money or at keeping it, while he is profuse in spending it and values wealth not for its own sake but as a means of giving.

That brings us back to Jesus, to the Golden Rule, to the various translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John of the conversations and questions. They are not so logical, so predictable, so categorical. They listen, with their own intent, as they listen to Moses, and to God. Have we answered all of our questions about Love, and the Law? Do we know its shape definitively (as if Greek male elite ethically)?

Would we recognize that "The love of God and for God resides in a gap"? Why are we listening to silenced women, like Julia Kristeva with her Tales of Love and their erotic, apagetic, philetic ambiguities? Like Jane's attention to ... Maggi Dawn and Jeanette Winterson and Simone preaching ... Bits and pieces, fragments, gaps, inbetween.

Who is my "neighbor"? and what must that mean?, asks Suzanne.

If we keep up this nonsense, we'll never listen to Aristotle only and only to his original designs on the Golden Rule.

Obama on Prayer

Barack Hussein Obama was "overheard" praying a prayer: a written one, in his hand writing in Jerusalem. It goes, ostensibly, like this (as we lurk and eavesdrop on a conversation between a human being and his Creator):

"Lord, protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

Old news, but it casts a shadow perhaps on the latest public attention to his behavior and words on praying. On this Official United States of America Day of Prayer, the now-President Obama issues, and signs by his hand, this statement:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-National-Day-of-Prayer/

". . . As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth. . . . I call upon Americans to pray in thanksgiving for our freedoms and blessings and to ask for God's continued guidance, grace, and protection for this land that we love."

These words remind me of some of my favorite passages in one of the President's favorite books. Blogworthy passages (after time for reflection, and prayer).

The Churches of Lesbos

Dear theist (especially Christian theist),
I grew up in Việt Nam singing from Thánh Ca in church. When my Texan parents took my siblings and me "home" to America for visits, we'd sing from the Baptist Hymnal. Did we know anything of Sappho, of her influence on us?

Dear feminist,
I am still fascinated by adult human conversion. The most profound changes have come for me, and for our fathers, when we and they have deeply listened to the other openly with audacious hope. Have the newer hymns of the Church of Agia Paraskevi been forgotten?

So, my friends, can we hear stories, our stories of transformation?
What about hymns and Sappho?

Let's listen: Over Sappho, over Lesbos Greece, over the Christian Church, there's been a clash. It's a loveless gong and a clanging cymbal sounded above the songs directed to the sky. It's a burning and a burying. A silencing of histories and of identities, of persons, like you and me. Shall we remember and respect?

------

Sappho's poem is generally titled the "Hymn to Aphrodite," although it is occasionally listed in some texts as "Ode to Aphrodite." The hymn is a genre that expresses religious emotion and is most often designed to be sung. Sappho's poem almost certainly was performed in this manner. Later hymns, for example those created during the Middle Ages when the creation of hymns became an important expression of religious fervor, were the sole genre of Christian religious expression. In Sappho's time, the hymn was no less fervent. Greeks believed in their gods as fervently as do Christians, who believe in their god and church as an absolute power. Sappho's hymn is analogous to a prayer. She pleads with her goddess, Aphrodite, to intercede on her behalf. She opens the poem with a request for help, moves quickly into recalling past instances when the goddess has helped her, and concludes with an acknowledgement that she and her goddess are united as allies. A careful study of Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite" acknowledges its place as a forefather to the later hymns of the Christian church.

http://www.answers.com/topic/hymn-to-aphrodite-poem-3

------

Sappho was a Greek poetess and teacher at a girls school on the Island of Lesbos during the 6th century B.C. The exact dates of her birth and death are unknown. Her lyric poetry was so exquisite that Plato called her the “tenth muse.” Much of her poetry was about both the ecstasy and pain of love, which was virtually unknown in poetry until that time. She also wrote hymns of praise to the Greek Goddesses, particularly Aphrodite.

Not much is known about Sappho’s life, and only a few of her works remain.

Early translators, disturbed that many of her passionate love poems were addressed to adolescent girls, simply changed their gender in translation to fit their world view.

Sappho’s books were burned by Christians in 380 A.D. at the insistance of Pope Gregory Nazianzen. The rest of her works may have been destroyed in 1073 A.D. when Pope Gregory VII ordered another book burning.

A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women. . . . One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.

http://rashmanly.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/island-home-of-sappho-full-of-lesbians/

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A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity/deities, a prominent figure or an epic tale. The word hymn derives from Greek ὕμνος hymnos "a song of praise". . .

Christian Hymnody. Originally modeled on the Psalms and other poetic passages (commonly referred to as "canticles") in the Scriptures, it is generally directed as praise and worship to God. Many refer to Jesus Christ either directly or indirectly.

Since the earliest times, Christianity has sung, "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," both in private devotions and in corporate worship (Matthew 26:30; 1 Cor 14:26; Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16; James 5:13; cf. Revelation 5:8-10; Revelation 14:1-5).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymn

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love: ἀγάπη

Today seems good enough for thoughts on love. We’re reading someone else’s Greek mail (from Saul/Paul, dual citizen of Rome and of the Jewish community of remote Tarsus; to a Jewish-Greek assembly called up in Corinth; around 54 CE). We’re reading someone else’s translation into English (from Suzanne McCarthy, who shares with us on one of her blogs her desire “to integrate some of the ideas found in Alter's translation of the Pentateuch, as well as Anne Carson's translations of Sappho”; and she acknowledges “significant input” from “the Good News Bible, the CEV, the TNIV and the Rotherham Bible; 2007 CE).

If with the tongues of humans, I talk, and even of angels - but love, I have not, I am become a timbring gong or a tinkling cymbal. And if I have prophesy and fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith to remove mountains But do not have love I am nothing. And if I give away all my belongings And surrender my body to suffering for the sake of self glory But do not have love I gain nothing. Love is generosity of spirit Love is acts of kindness. Kindness in deed is love.	ἐὰν ταῖς γλώσσαις τῶν ἀνθρώπων λαλῶ καὶ τῶν ἀγγέλων ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω γέγονα χαλκὸς ἠχῶν ἢ κύμβαλον ἀλαλάζον καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω προφητείαν καὶ εἰδῶ τὰ μυστήρια πάντα καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν γνῶσιν καὶ ἐὰν ἔχω πᾶσαν τὴν πίστιν ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάναι ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω οὐθέν εἰμι κἂν ψωμίσω πάντα τὰ ὑπάρχοντά μου καὶ ἐὰν παραδῶ τὸ σῶμά μου ἵνα καυχήσωμαι ἀγάπην δὲ μὴ ἔχω οὐδὲν ὠφελοῦμαι ἡ ἀγάπη μακροθυμεῖ χρηστεύεται ἡ ἀγάπη
It does not envy love does not brag does not puff up does not act shamefully does not seek self does not get irritated does not find fault does not delight at injustice but rejoices along with truth always sustains always trusts always hopes always supports love never fails.	οὐ ζηλοῖ ἡ ἀγάπη οὐ περπερεύεται οὐ φυσιοῦται οὐκ ἀσχημονεῖ οὐ ζητεῖ τὰ ἑαυτῆς οὐ παροξύνεται οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν οὐ χαίρει ἐπὶ τῇ ἀδικίᾳ συγχαίρει δὲ τῇ ἀληθείᾳ πάντα στέγει πάντα πιστεύει πάντα ἐλπίζει πάντα ὑπομένει ἡ ἀγάπη οὐδέποτε πίπτει
Whether prophesies, they will be left aside or tongues they will end or knowledge it will be left aside. For in part we know and in part we prophesy but when that which is complete comes the end comes that which is in part will be left aside. When I was a child I talked like a child I thought like a child I argued like a child But when I became an adult The things of a child I left aside. Now we see through the looking glass in riddles but then face to face. Now we know in part But then we will know Even as we are known. As so remain faith, hope and love, these three things but the greatest of these is love.	εἴτε δὲ προφητεῖαι καταργηθήσονται εἴτε γλῶσσαι παύσονται εἴτε γνῶσις καταργηθήσεται ἐκ μέρους γὰρ γινώσκομεν καὶ ἐκ μέρους προφητεύομεν ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ τὸ τέλειον τὸ ἐκ μέρους καταργηθήσεται ὅτε ἤμην νήπιος ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι' ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις ἐλπίς ἀγάπη τὰ τρία ταῦτα μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη

Martin Luther King, Jr. is no Aristotle

Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary,

the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon?

and are not his sisters here with us?

This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is no Aristotle. Sure, in America where we once forgot we’d fought long and hard to free ourselves from the tyrannies of slavery, he gets his day.

But King is way too subjective, too unoriginal, too fragile, too emotional, too rhetorical, too ambiguous, too dependent on the actions of his followers, too dreamy, too loving, too much willing to distract us with his too-often abused and his too-often imprisoned and his also-murdered body.

Listen to him if you dare.

Read him if you will.

Remember him if you can.

He’s one of Phillip Yancey’s unlikely teachers (with a dozen others).

He’s one of Robert E. Quinn’s extraordinary masters (with Jesus and Gandhi).

He’s Keith D. Miller’s voice of deliverance (with others whose mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers were enslaved). Listen.

Listen also because he’s Theodore Pappas’s plagiarist who’s literally no “Martin Luther” but is rather America’s progaganda minister in the culture wars.

When I first read Pappas a decade ago (before I’d read Yancey or Quinn or Miller), I decided I’d hear out King on his own terms. So I read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and found it to be very much like the gospels of Jesus Christ. Here’s the way they’re alike: they allude to and quote and paraphrase the ideas of others (kind of like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friends like Frederick Douglas do with the revolutionary declarative egalitarian theological ideas of Thomas Jefferson). There are variant texts out there. I found at least three strains of the "Letter" in publication, two different versions published by King himself (one in the Atlantic Monthly of August 1963 now excerpted here on the Atlantic's web site and another revised by him and his editors for a book in which he compiles some of his writings and speech transcripts). And there are textual mistakes in the variants, both little things like misspellings and big ones in which different words and paragraphs are changed so that the texts in certain ways could well be of interest to lovers of the Q theory and fans of the lost gospels of “Jesus” and paid subscribers to J.D.E.P. except that M.L.K. Jr. won’t as quickly give them tenure or technorati ratings. And there are different versions of how the “original” letter was written down and eventually copied for publication. This should excite historians of text. But the thrilling thing is that Pappas hadn’t uncovered any of this “evidence” for his more willing, more explicit, more damning, more arrogant, more Aristotelian part in the culture wars. And I’ve sat on it silently for years now, waiting for much time to pass, telling only a few friends who understand Aristotle. We are trying to understand (with Yancey and Quinn and Miller) Jesus. And King. But we keep finding that Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. understand us better than we’re understanding them. My humble advice after all these years is this: listen. (Listen even if it sounds like great demands on you: “change your minds” and “believe” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”)