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3:12 a.m. - 2003-08-31 My youngest son and I carried out a "new moon" ritual tonight. Our garden was the venue. The "tools" of the ceremony were some eggs I bought a while ago that had gone bad. The shells make great fertilizer for the soil here, which is rather acidic. I rarely participate in any type of ritualistic activity, so it was quite a departure from the norm. However my inner voice kept urging me to go through the motions and to include my son. He just thought it was great fun to have permission to smash eggs all over the yard. The last time I recall doing anything resembling a ritual was about a dozen years ago. My intent then was to secure psychological release from the bondage I felt my ex held me in. I don't know what this one was for, but the feeling was a lot more positive. Like creating the space for a completely new cycle or sowing seeds. Maybe most people wouldn't notice it, but I feel that a lot of potential energy that has been tied up somehow, has just been released. For the past few years I've felt like I've been swimming upstream against a very strong current. Even just being at rest would be an improvement. We'll see. Now I've had a fascination with myths and legends from all cultures and faiths since I could first read. Certain of my family attribute this to nosiness - whatever. By the time I had devoured every book I could find on those "children's" tales in my school and public libraries, I was old enough to understand that those archetypal stories were the companions of the faith systems held by the people who used the myths to explain or elaborate on the core values of their faith - parables of a sort. Understanding that, I read every holy book from every faith system to which I could gain access. The last time I worked with the Koran was about a decade ago when I was helping a survivor of torture from the Middle East. I gave my copy to her because she seemed to draw tremendous comfort just from holding it. To me it was simply of intellectual interest. Each faith system has it's own unique form of expression and it's own internal ordering of it's language of the sacred. I received a very disturbing "joke" in my e-mail today. It was presented as a prophecy from the Q'uran(Koran - the holy book of Muslims). It was worded to imply that there was a long standing promise that the Muslim world would be "cleansed" at the hands of the "eagles". It was cited as being from book 9 verse (surah)11. The "joke" was written in a style that wouldn't be amiss in the book of Jeremiah, Isaiah or in Psalms or Proverbs especially. It doesn't have any of the conventional syntax or imagery of the Quran. I went to a credible website that is part of the University of Virginia's on-line text library, Koran, just to ensure my memory wasn't playing tricks on me. It isn't. Guess I can't cite Alzheimer's as an excuse for my behaviour yet. There is enough misunderstanding and confusion between our different cultures/faiths now. I find it disturbing that someone would go out of their way to create such a perception in order to escalate the expectation that violence is the only possible option because even "Allah wills it". I am well aware that there are some of the Muslim culture who have frequently descended to that level, but it doesn't justify sinking to the lowest common denominator in response. If we do we are no different from the terrorists, who say they are Muslim but who continually violate the commandments in the Q'uran. You see the Q'uran acknowledges that Musa (Moses) and Isa (Jesus) were messengers sent directly from God too.
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