Poem-Prayer Time Out Jesus

Time Out Jesus, Time Out!

I need some time out Jesus, some time out.

David knew when it was time to move the ark to the city of David,

Jerusalem,

And he did, putting in the tent he pitched for it.

Now is the time that I sit here naked like a fresh creature of the mud,

your Golem,

as I was before you finished creating me

to tell you I need time out

Like all the earth before the Lord I ought to tremble

And the heavens rejoicing the earth glad,

I am a trembler, you know it, you saw it, touched it – my body – as it quivered

my body in ecstasy (or orgasm)

your divine touch combing my soul

How though I am to fear you? Y

You are my lover, I sought you and my fears you delivered!

Lord,

How could you ever come with the sword?
Or will it just be the blazing fire from heaven

To punish those of my brethren

Who do not obey the gospel

I need Time out Jesus Time Out@!

There are sheep and there are goats

And I know you as my shepherd

You took me down to lie in pastures green (with you),

But what of those who do not profess you?

Gored

I just cannot apprehend

How you would vanquish anyone to this end!

Is hell their fate?

Time Out Jesus, Time Out!

Make me humble and give me again your peace,

Remember how one year ago,

In the night I wandered,

My faith wasting away,

Because of these thoughts – inconsistencies – they would not go away,

But you let me dance before you at Manna au large group

What a collage of movement, song and people!

In one swoop,

You took my heart

But now,

I want Time Out!

I tear before you, because you gave me so much,

And now I chose to depart from your touch.

Time Out Jesus, means Time Out!

I need to shout it out – Time Out!

No more (m)aking time with you

No Churches, youth groups only quit(e) time

Aching with no pain,

Just an emptiness and disquietude

Cause I don’t accept a lot of things,

The only pain is that I must be a man, but I don’t

I don’t say “dude”

I am not firm enough in handshake and spirit,

But this is discussion is outside my aim

I just want to say, I love you – still

You to the world meant no ill

And I do not believe anyone you will kill

Now or then,

Just that I need to some time to ponder you

Outside

(though I prefer your bedside)

I felt like sharing this poem with you readers. So I did, infact I did write it to be shared.

Peace be with you! I am praying for you my friends. Still pRAYING.

Etanga from last week

I wish that I could just chose without much thought, chose the tracks of the hours of recording of music, of hands clapping, feet pounding, stone grinding red ochre – Otjithe. Then I would move on and read my epidemiology and statistics and genetic aspects of Medical Anthropology. But it is exactly this anthropological interest that compels me to write now and break from my plan of reading that. I will read those later.

I just compiled a digital CD with a 80 minute sampling of the recordings I made during the course of six days before August 26 2008, when I left Etanga. I hear it every morning when I let the cold shower water spray onto my body and I belt out a roar as I dance – within that space – some of what I learnt there. I have been doing every since I left there.

Now I am writing about it.

Do you know how much though goes into selecting? This is what Danna Bullington, a missionary wife and a missionary in her own right, said to us all as she recalled what one of her close friends used to say whenever someone asked her whether she baked it herself “I selected it. Do you know how much thought goes into selecting?”

Baking. My dance professor Rebecca Lazier told us “I could be bake it for eight”, or did I just mishear and she meant “make it for eight.” Eight dancers, including me. But then again, she told me how technically challenging it would and in any case I was going to Africa, the place I am from, and I would my whole study that would be basis of my own senior dance thesis work. I would not need to be in her piece that was made for her professional company. I got over that, the desire to be in her piece, the fact that I did not make my own dance thesis and the consequences thereof – that I would not be a dance professional. At Etanga I met imwe at Mbunga’s shop while I showing and doing glissades to my translator Hoveka. Imwe had a swollen leg and he wanted to carry his plea for treatment back to Windhoek, because he had received no treatment so far. Then I knew something in public health had already pulled me away, piqued my interest such that I was never going to be the same again.

Last Tuesday was World Health Day. I was there at the march and at the ampitheatre where it was celebrated. I say celebrated because there was a lot of dance. Including a Herero speaking group called bullet, clad in animal skins around waist and on head, they danced with bent wobbling legs and bouncing steps while their behinds bounced and arms jiggled. It was amazing.

I wish I could have joined in (that was condoned as other people were dancing in the ampitheatre), but for me it was a performance. And so for me it was like at the proscenium stage, I just watched and absorbed.

Now I am going to write mini biographies or nanoethnographies of people who wish to be called “the Windhoek Urban Health Champion” as part of the “1000 Cities, 1000 Lives” campaign of World Health Day. I do not know how to do ethnography, but it seems that will be fine. They want “a brief description of activities (1 page) and their results” for each public health champion nominee. In any case, it will give me a sense of what this thing called qualitative research is and whether I want to purse it further…

Saturday 10 April

So I am about to go to sleep. Let me just tell you I had a great day today as I went to national botanical garden and then to the WIKA carnival.

Earlier in the week I met a peace corps volunteer, who I mistook as one of the “born frees” I speak about in the last post. He seemed interesting, really. And he did bio.

The internet seems bizarre, so many forums, so disappointing, that someone can genuinely listen without judgment!

Goodnight

Dear Lord protect us and keep us all safe please in YOUR NAME I pray.

Amen

Excerpts of life

How do I tell you what is going on in my life in about 5 minutes?
Well there is an aim to this post and this to reflect on the driving lesson and my poor performance on it. We drive in the morning and this morning again my instructor came, pulled up infron of the small gate in his ligh blue fiat city care. We swapped places and we drove off, slowly because the street is sloped down, so the clutch and the break are both pressed down, the clutch in completely and the break only so far that I can descend safely to the place where I turn into the main road.

I only became aware of the fact that one can pull out of the clutch smothly yet quickly today. I used to pull away ever so slowly and that apparantly translated in me being "too slow for conditions", as it is known technically, according to my driving instructor. My turns were too slow as made my way around the bend within the junction of two roads to begin moving along a road that is perpedicular to the one I was in just moments before.

So this post serves as a way for me to reflect on what I need to do. When I approach the robots, what you call traffic lights in the US and elswhere, I slow down, downgrade and go to first gear to stop at the read light. Cluth and break in. However, I need to just every so slightly lift my foot from the clutch so that I "vibrate" meaning I feel the reverberations from the engine the steering wheel. Then when it is green I go into the gass and the car will move forward while I feel that reving sound and the vibrating subsides, then I can slowly pull away from the clutch. I do this, but too slowly. I am not phlegmatic, no. It is just that today I did not vibrate at the junction of Hendrik Witbooi and Moses Garoeb (look it up on Google Maps for Windhoek), while waiting or the red to turn green. As a result the car that was supposed to give me right off way just turned ahead to left and I went after him. (From his perpsective he was turning right and he was supposed to yield to all incoming traffic, and by the way, we drive on the left side of the road here, as you might have inferred).

I am learning and I have about 4 lessons left before I go to the test. That translates into about 45 minutes per lesson (although they should be an hour long, but my instructor arrives earlier than our agreed time and we drive for less than an hour. It is incumbent on me to speak with him and tell him that he should come at the agreed time. He has never cheated me though, I think I will be able take all those minutes and get an extra lesson, hopefully. I pray he feels better though, he is experiencing leg pain).

I think I can do, YES, I can get the liscence. But as my psychologist said, there are things that are important yet not urgent. My liscence is one of those. I would love to have it as soon as possible and it is certainly not going to become easier to attain it, but I realize it is not urgent. So I will take it easy. I also nearly did not spot a stop sign today! I need to drive alot more to become accustomed to it all, but my confidence should not dwindle when I make "blunders" as Dolly, my instructor says. He is a nice man. There is something I saw in his appearance, that resembled the deamounour of my grandmother, I don't remember what,b ut maybe it was just the way he was looking at road from the drivers seat when I saw him driving with another student another. This sounds weird, but I had to throw it out there.
So I will make sure that I know how to drive when I get my liscence. Driving is no trivial task and nor is safe for the driver or others around him or her. It can be safe. I hope to do it right. In Bulgarian we have a saying called" doing something like the people", napravi go kakto horata which entails doing something like good, decent people would.

Oh Lord I pray for your guidance here. Let my heart not be troubled but strengthed by faith in you, you have already overcome the world (and driving tests).
Pancho

More about Passover

I was at my first Passover seder on Monday. It was a really multitude of experiences for me. At the end of the meal, we sang songs. We were serenaded by Ari – a young man that just graduated from Grinnel college and was playing the guitar wearing a kippa made of colored aluminum of soda cans. He was singing in English and Damara-Nama along with Elsita, a young woman is at once Jewish and Latin American, having being adopted by her mother Lucy Steinitz, who invited me to her house. The dinning room where we were seated listening to this song came alive with warmth as they sang this “Passover !Tyre, Passover ! Tyre, Passover !Trye, !Trye mamma !Ta ! Ta ! Ta” The exclamations are a but a poor substitute for the clicking sounds that are made at the start of the word that we heard. This is a popular Namibian song where !Tyrae means good “We are just saying good at the start of every word,” explained Ari after he strummed his has chord having included “Passover”, “Marov (the bitter herb)” “Elijiah” and “Dayenu” in the song.

Did your Passover have any local variations based on where you live?

What I want to ask you though, is whether you have heard of adding an orange to a seder plate? I am not familiar with how the plate should be, but I was told that unlike the parsley, the egg, the bone (we had a sweet potato) , the orange is a strange addition. Apparently, the orange represents the lesbians and gay men within the Jewish community who are “marginalized” according to the letter that was read at the table, a letter from a woman Rabbi of the Hillel movement written sometime at the end of the 1970s. The organe is peculiar yet it is not chamitz so it can still be added to the plate, I think the reasoning goes. I felt a mixture of discomfort and humor when Dianne, an expat American, was reading the letter, especially when she mentioned that the orange is peeled, shared, eaten and the seeds are spat out so as to reject prejudice and homophobia within the Jewish community. It was funny because it reminded me of the talk about homosexuality at the CJL two years ago, the one Isaiah derided jokingly saying “there is no-one there that will say anything from the Orthodox perspective” when I asked him whether he would go to the talk. It was uncomfortable because in Namibia homosexuality is a taboo and though I wanted to come out to everyone in the subsequent discussion, I knew I could not because I knew some of the guests very well and they knew my family, to whom I was not out to.

Holy Thursday and the Passover

Tonight is the night of the last supper. In all my years a Catholic, I have never had the opportunity to have my experience of this evening be informed by my experience of the Passover, till this year. Tonight, I went to the mass and I ate the “body of Christ”. I know that St Paul wrote the “But food does not bring us nearer to God; we are not worse if we do not eat it and no better if we do.” If I cannot come nearer to God by the eating of the unleavened bread – the body of Christ today or the matzah of the Passover, it can led me remember God.

Passing the matzah around the table, in pieces for each one to take, I partook in the Passover of the Jews. Though some of the guest in attendance at Lucy’s house told me “We are those other Jews” when I questioned whether my non-kosher Bulgarian stuffed cabbage leaves would be suitable, I found out that order of the meal – the seder – is ancient regardless of contemporary comprises and accommodations in other aspects of the Passover. We took the irregular shaped pieces of the thin crusty bread and added the bitter herb to remind us of the bitter times the slaves endured. There was also haroset , the mortar used for the bricks, as a reminder of the life draining labor that was enforced upon the Jews. I wish I could write “the labor that we endured”, but I was just an invited outsider. On the other hand, my Christian and Jewish brother in heaven – St Paul – wrote that we are “all grafted to one tree” through Jesus Christ destroying the “middle wall of separation” between Jew and Gentile. Nonetheless, I am unable to self identify with being enslaved in Egypt. My mind is instead wandering back forth from the image of a slave working under the whip and the flagellation of the Jew called “Jeshua”, apparently the name of Jesus in Hebrew (cf "Passion of the Christ").

When Jesus ate the Passover as described in the Gospel of the New Testament, how did he and his disciples eat it? I wonder whether that sacred passing of the bitter herb, haroset and matzah was observed. Sounds plausible. They probably had all been numerous seders in their lives and they probably ate according to the order that had now existed for probably over seven centuries, assuming Moses left roughly Egypt seven hundred and fifty years before that Passover meal, the so called “last supper”. And the Gospel speaks of the disciples and Jesus “reclining at table eating” (Mark 14:17), which is what happens at a seder, “you are supposed to actually lean on pillows” Lucy said explaining to those of us invited who are not Jewish and not familiar with this ritual. I can only imagine what Jesus though of during the dinner. The connection between himself, slavery in Egypt and the writings of Isaiah was perhaps on his mind. He knew that the servent of the Lord who Isaiah speaks about was ostracized and subjected to pain, like the Israelites in Egypt: “³He was despised by and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.” Isaiah 53:3. Amidst the chatter at the table, much akin to the Passover I attended, speaking to Ari to my left and Elsita to my right, was Jesus withdrawn and solemn as he mediated on the writings of Isaiah: “Surely he took up our iniquities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53: 4-6. Indeed, this man was convinced he was the Messiah and his mission of bearing all of humanity’s iniquity – and all the wounds he would have afflicted on him. This drove him to pray at Mount of Olives where he was in such state of fear of his imminent death that he sweated blood and perhaps hallucinated seeing an Angel later the same evening. Even during the dinner, I would wager, fear may have welled up inside him and mingled with love for his disciples, which maybe led him to exclaim: “ Take it, this is my body!” (Mark 14:4) after he gave the thanks to God and broke it. Was this like when Lucy broke the Matzah and distributed it to all of us? Where did Jesus add his own wish for him to be eaten yet not cannibalized? It seems this happened during the heart of the meal, while I was adding the raddish and wasabi peas and haroset (one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi one -the thicker one) to my plate because the Gospel says “While they were eating, Jesus broke the bread and said… (Mark 14:22). But he could have done it at a later time, during the main meal, when we were gulping down the vegetarian lasagna made with matzah meal, ratatouille and my Bulgarian surmi. There were times when I was talking with either Matilde, a sprightly Colombian woman in front of me in Spanish, or chatting to Ari who graduated last year like myself or Louis, a young mid career international American about his work with special Olympics in Namibia or for Care International in Gaza as the only Jew to ever work for them, and imagine if during one of these moments, Lucy just interjected and broke the bread telling all of us to do something that had never been done before during a seder , but was nonetheless imbued with intent, not a mere game or the offering of an exotic dish. In the Gospel of Luke it says that Jesus told the disciples that “my body is given for you,” once again associating himself with the servant described by the prophet Isaiah. But he went a step further, instructing them to “do this in remembrance” of him and thereby adding something to the Passover. Adding extras to the Passover, like the conspicuous orange on our seder plate in solidarity for the Lesbian and gay men in the Jewish community as per the initiative of some Jewish feminists from the Hillel Organisation in the late 1970s, can be controversial and not everyone does it. In another vein, the remembrance of Holocaust victims at various places during the seder such as during the part about questions from the smart kid, the rude kid and the simple kid, where a child from the Holocaust asks a question to which there is only silence, are accepted universally. I wonder what Jesus was thinking when he said “do this in remembrance of me”. Instinctively, I believe he wanted to be remembered as a person who saw himself as the Lord’s servant and who did not want to die, whether or not he was a blasphemous phony messiah or the Christ for those who keep him in recollection.

Seeing Namibia throug the eyes of a Born free

They walk in the streets. I saw them in my own neighborhood. Sauntering on the sidewalks, three boys who had their arms slung around each others shoulders. Friends. This may seem trite to you, but one of them was white and the other two were black. What were they thinking? Did not the mother of the white one never tell him that he cannot just stroll around with those things – those kafirs ? Do the black boys not fear of being questioned by stern faced white men about what they are doing in a white neighborhood? I gather that these blithe youngsters are completely ignorant of what it was to be Namibian before 1990, when the color of your skin and the texture of your hair predicated what you could and could not do. They do not believe in the lie of apartheid, the lie of people that should be set apart. They are born free.

With the dissolution of apartheid laws in 1990, Namibia adopted a policy of national reconciliation that in a nutshell acknowledges we are all humans under the sun. Young people born within these two decades of Namibia’s existence were born free of institutionalized discrimination and inferiority complexes that were imposed on the older generations. These so called “born frees” are indeed the incarnation of our young republic. I took to the streets to speak with some of these young men and women about what they see in Namibia.

“I see beautiful people full of life,” says Janine, a sixteen year old who I met at the Post Street Mall one afternoon. That was her first reply, but as we eased into the interview she dared to expand on her earlier answer, much to my delight: “Ok I see Namibia as a country where we live free – independence, there are no like in other countries – wars and stuff – in this country we are actually safe here...I feel safe here.” There was nothing rehearsed in what she said, she meant all of it. I also queried whether Janine celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Namibian independence by attending the concerts and lectures leading up to March 21^st – our independence day:

“I did not celebrate on that day, but that day I went to church, its like the people were praying and they were happy, not really celebrating, but people were thanking God for one more year of freedom in our country” I find it paradoxical that she claimed to have not celebrated though her Church community clearly acknowledged independence. On that Sunday morning, March 21^st, I was at Independence stadium where masses of people assembled to preside at the official (government sponsored) festivities. At the stadium we all prayed and listened to a Bible reading. Church and independence were one that day.

Unlike Janine, nineteen year old Christiano opted to go to the stadium that Sunday morning. Or did he? His father is part of the Namibia Defense Force that parades – Soviet style marching – every year at the stadium. Naturally, Christiano went, “sat down and listened to speeches”, just as he told me. However, when I asked him for his take on the speeches, I became aware of just how subjective listening is: “I don’t remember anything of what the president said, I went to the back of the tent and we started talking about cars, football.” Boys will be boys. I gathered that what the head of state said was drowned out by the chatter of his friends: “Those people keep on distracting you.” Christiano, though, concurs with Janine by saying “I see a beautiful country” when describing Namibia.

The Namibia of the born frees is beautiful and bright. But it would be inaccurate to portray it as just sunny, because it also has a night side. Christiano has experienced this darker side and related it to me: “There is no racism except at a local golf course[1]. Most of the…golfers are black. When you are there on the golf course, they act like they have never seen you before. It is like a totally different world there.” That peculiar feeling of not belonging is still experienced by some people at some places. If only we could be as color blind as the children I saw walking that day. The street they were on was the same one where I met Christiano and his friend, twenty year old Dee-Dee. We sat down at an outside table by the local petrol station and talked. Dee-Dee added to the talk on racism by saying: “I have never experienced racism anywhere. I have never been to a golf course,” just before she checks a message on her cellphone. Tech savvy and probably ever in touch with her friends, she experiences Namibia very differently from they way her parents did at her age. I came away with the impression that the racism they spoke of was not the evil apartheid of our collective memory, but a mere remnant of that sense of skin color we tried to efface.

I spoke to three young people. They all considered themselves to be born frees. Dee had no doubt that she was one, neither did Christiano or Janine. “Off course,” “yeah” and “yes” were the answers I got to “Are you a born free?” They understood what I spoke of immediately. Now I am left to wonder how they see themselves in relation to those who marched along the former Kaiser Willem Strasse twenty years ago and thereby baptized this central street of Windhoek as “Independence” Avenue. There is a mural of this in our parliament building. People from all walks of life, traditional and urban, black and white, young and old, fill the avenue to the brim. That was then. Now the born free are constructing their identity against these first steps taken by their forefathers and foremothers in streets of Namibia. They, of course, have a choice of destiny, because they are born free.

Epilogue:

I am standing on the side of independence avenue. It is the day after I turned in my article on the born frees, but it is the day of the Wika Carnival! Busloads of people have already passed waving at us from buses with no roofs. Others walk beside them, teenage girls in white and red shortsleved and short skirt outfits. Waving about their batons they march along with the masses of multicolored polyglots ( many of who speak German, English, and Afrikaans at least). The WIKA is a feast that Germans have done since many moons ago, before independence. Now I ponder if I can partake in the marching, because right now I am just a black person waving from the sidelines. Before I finish my thought, a curly green haired young man pulls me into the fray with his arm around my shoulder. Two other youths join us and we shout as we stride along with the parade. Underneath their green clown wigs, there are youths from our German yet Namibian community. I am now walking with them, irrespective of my reservations. These guys see me as a friend, since I met them during a clown training workshop for healing through humor at local high school. Of course, they are born free and they welcome to their world with glee!

P.S. THis post has been submitted for publication in a travel magazine, let's pray it is taken

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[1] The place he mentioned was Windhoek Country Club, but I have chosen not to mention this name. Do you agree?

Reflections on Jesus (Warning very RADICAL)

First entry

I cannot sleep. I wish I could but I have to write. Ce que j’ai lu est très bouleversant pour me taire. What I read is far to revolutionary for me to keep tacit. Sin continues in the Christian life – is that not what we know – in spite of our walk with Christ.

But then in First John Chapter three it says :

“ Everyone who has this hope in Christ Keeps himself pure as Christ is pure.” Alright, so whoever hopes that when “Christ appears we shall see him in him as he really is (1 John 3: 2)” does not fall into lust (the antithesis of pure). But we do, I do, at least all the time. It goes one to say “ Whoever sins is guilty of breaking Gods Law, because sin is breaking of the law.” That’s obvious but what disturbs is what he mentions three times in 1 John 3:5-9 “ So everyone who lives in union with Chrsit does not continue to sin; but whoever continues to sin has seen him or known him. Let no one deceive you my children! Whoever does what is right is righteous, just as Christ is righteous. Whoever continues to sin belongs to the Devil, because the Devil has sinner from the very beginning. The Son of God appeared for this very reason, to destroy what the Devil has done. Whoever is a child of God does not continue to Sin, for God’s very is in him, and because God is his Father, he cannot continue to sin. This the clear difference between God’s Children and the Devil’s Children. (6-9)”

Let us suppose we are Bible Literalists and we interpret the Bible literally here. What a tormented existence it must then be for us, continuing to sin and undermining our belief that we are children of God and in union of Christ! Instead, we are spawn of the Devil, how vile! Ceasing to sin is then the trait of the true Christian while those who continue to sin are surely not part of His Body, but are those who defile their own Body. Christ’s body, it implies here, was kept free from sinful acts. What did he do with his body that we fail to do? How did he make use of his members (all of them) in a way that pleased the Lord? Did he never orgasm and if he did, how did he ‘do it’ in a way that is good?

Perhaps I am not interpreting this passage correctly and I need someone of you to give me a nuanced approach that accounts for unintentional, yet repeated sin, in the life of a Christian. I am at a loss for words here, so I will no longer comment on this passage.

Ironically, the version of the Bible I read this is called “The Good News New Testament and Psalms” that is dated to 1986 – the name is “Obed Ngh Stefanus Omushesha, Ongwediva” The name Ongwediva – place of the leopard – is the in local of my father’s birthplace and I have this Bible via him, in fact I am Christian, Roman Catholic, because of him. However, I fail to the glad tidings in what I have just described in First James.

I know I continue to sin. Like yesterday, I went on to a porn site after about three to fourth months of not doing so. And I left site feeling empty. You might think that I got off and then realized how void it all was. But no, I could not even get myself going here! There was arousal, yes, as I watched two kissing, touching, caressing, but there was noting to keep me going. At this point you may think I am probably desensitized and I probably needed a higher dose of erotica, like a drug addict, but as they did much more than kissing and caressing, the more I was repulsed.

Indeed, I think sin is my desperate act of filling in the void. I want to be loved, so I look for it on the net, only to find that there is no love there. In addition, my regard of pornography as a comodification of the body and part and parcel of the exploitation of human beings, whether or not they concede to it, may have played a part in numbing my response to it. But I believe there is more to that. I have contemplated hooking up with people, but when I carry my thoughts to completion I find emptiness. Perhaps I am able to always correctly calculate the pleasure and pain summation that apparently an agent does before embarking on an action. According to one of Plato’s early dialogues(Protagoras), the incorrect calculation just before doing a bad thing is what leads people to do bad things. It’s that we think that its right, permissible, pleasurable, when in fact our position to make the right calculation is compromised by the allure of the “instant pleasure” we would get from the action. Perhaps.

Sex is then a void. I guess, it seems so empty for me. But I don’t want it to be that way! Here I want to speak about the Lord as the Lover I have, not as a brother, since that is one way I heard our relationship with God described, at a youth group I was (run by American Baptist Missionaries) this Friday, but as a Lover. I want to speak about it, but I but I do not know how to. All I can say is that there have been ecstatic moments in the past, where I believe the Spirit was moving in me, but they have not been such moments in a while. I hope the Lord visits me again in this way, after Lent, after the breaking of my fast. Mt fast of abstinence that has shown me the abyss where easy, quick, fast, sexual satisfaction is supposed to be.

Second Entry.

Reading the Bible does bring me to question my assumptions and ideas about Jesus. He is a handsome man with long brown hair, blue or brown eyes. Es muy guapo tiene el pelo largo y un poco rizado. A de mas tiene barba y los ojos marones, verdes o azules. Es muy muy guapo el Jesús de la imagen de mis pensamientos. The prophet Isaiah wrote about the Lord’s servant, the one whose suffering was because of our sins and here he describes the servant differently to what I assumed :

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Isaiah 53:2

What does he mean by “desire him” is it much like a man of my kind desires another?

In the Bulgarian version of the Bible it says “He had not image of the Lord or attractiveness so that we look at him or beauty that we desire him.” Isaiah 53:2

The author moves from majesty or divine beauty, a quality that inspires awe and then to desire for Jesus as a man. I venture to say this desire encompasses sexual desire for Jesus as a man, after all the book “Song of Songs” is full of desire between man and woman and is apparently a metaphor for the relationship between God and his people.

So if Jesus is the servant spoken of by Isaiah, as he is thought of being in Christian teaching, then we must efface the image a handsome Jesus from our minds. However, why would we follow someone that is so ugly! Isaiah writes about a lack of attractiveness that the servant had, which runs counter to the charismatic Jesus that convinced his disciples to follow him in perhaps just one glance followed by ‘come follow me!’.

However, the Isaiah prophecy is not one to one with the Jesus of the Gospel. Isaiah implies that the servant will have offspring saying “ Yes it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his a guilt offering, he will see his offspring prolong his days and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” Who are those “offspring” of the servant? Are they flesh and blood children or is this a metaphor for the followers of Christ who in a sense his children, by virtue of the fact that Jesus the one he calls Father are one. I doubt this a prophecy that confirms the veracity of the “Da Vinci Code” unless Isaiah had a stake in the success of that book…hahaha.

In spite of the description of Jesus as ugly, there is nothing more that I desire than to be with Him. As in be in His arms and look at His hand gently resting on my knee as I sit in between his two legs. His brown hair and facial hair – beard connected to moustache – all of it is there. I imagine it. Lying with Jesus. But then again, “thou shall not lie with another man for this is a abomination and God hates this”…Leviticus 18:22 (22:18?). When I am with Him can He really give me all of that? Can He be with me – in union with me? Will he have His flesh body and will I have mine, in other words, will I be cast out in the outer darkness where there will gnashing of teeth? I want his flesh in mine. I desire it so. It is has been in me several times already, I have taken the body of Christ into my mouth and oh if I were take him in then in heaven, would it be as I have imagined?

Passing the Matzah around the table

Tonight is the night of the last supper. In all my years a Catholic, I have never had the opportunity to have my experience of this evening be informed by my experience of the Passover, till this year. Tonight, I went to the mass and I ate the “body of Christ”. I know that St Paul wrote the “But food does not bring us nearer to God; we are not worse if we do not eat it and no better if we do.” If I cannot come nearer to God by the eating of the unleavened bread – the body of Christ today or the matzah of the Passover, it can led me remember God.

Passing the matzah around the table, in pieces for each one to take, I partook in the Passover of the Jews. Though some of the guest in attendance at Lucy’s house told me “We are those other Jews” when I questioned whether my non-kosher Bulgarian stuffed cabbage leaves would be suitable, I found out that order of the meal – the seder – is ancient regardless of contemporary comprises and accommodations in other aspects of the Passover. We took the irregular shaped pieces of the thin crusty bread and added the bitter herb to remind us of the bitter times the slaves endured. There was also haroset , the mortar used for the bricks, as a reminder of the life draining labor that was enforced upon the Jews. I wish I could write “the labor that we endured”, but I was just an invited outsider. On the other hand, my Christian and Jewish brother in heaven – St Paul – wrote that we are “all grafted to one tree” through Jesus Christ destroying the “middle wall of separation” between Jew and Gentile. Nonetheless, I am unable to self identify with being enslaved in Egypt. My mind is instead wandering back forth from the image of a slave working under the whip and the flagellation of the Jew called “Jeshua”, apparently the name of Jesus in Hebrew (cf "Passion of the Christ").

When Jesus ate the Passover as described in the Gospel of the New Testament, how did he and his disciples eat it? I wonder whether that sacred passing of the bitter herb, haroset and matzah was observed. Sounds plausible. They probably had all been numerous seders in their lives and they probably ate according to the order that had now existed for probably over seven centuries, assuming Moses left roughly Egypt seven hundred and fifty years before that Passover meal, the so called “last supper”. And the Gospel speaks of the disciples and Jesus “reclining at table eating” (Mark 14:17), which is what happens at a seder, “you are supposed to actually lean on pillows” Lucy said explaining to those of us invited who are not Jewish and not familiar with this ritual. I can only imagine what Jesus though of during the dinner. The connection between himself, slavery in Egypt and the writings of Isaiah was perhaps on his mind. He knew that the servent of the Lord who Isaiah speaks about was ostracized and subjected to pain, like the Israelites in Egypt: “³He was despised by and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.” Isaiah 53:3. Amidst the chatter at the table, much akin to the Passover I attended, speaking to Ari to my left and Elsita to my right, was Jesus withdrawn and solemn as he mediated on the writings of Isaiah: “Surely he took up our iniquities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53: 4-6. Indeed, this man was convinced he was the Messiah and his mission of bearing all of humanity’s iniquity – and all the wounds he would have afflicted on him. This drove him to pray at Mount of Olives where he was in such state of fear of his imminent death that he sweated blood and perhaps hallucinated seeing an Angel later the same evening. Even during the dinner, I would wager, fear may have welled up inside him and mingled with love for his disciples, which maybe led him to exclaim: “ Take it, this is my body!” (Mark 14:4) after he gave the thanks to God and broke it. Was this like when Lucy broke the Matzah and distributed it to all of us? Where did Jesus add his own wish for him to be eaten yet not cannibalized? It seems this happened during the heart of the meal, while I was adding the raddish and wasabi peas and haroset (one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi one -the thicker one) to my plate because the Gospel says “While they were eating, Jesus broke the bread and said… (Mark 14:22). But he could have done it at a later time, during the main meal, when we were gulping down the vegetarian lasagna made with matzah meal, ratatouille and my Bulgarian surmi. There were times when I was talking with either Matilde, a sprightly Colombian woman in front of me in Spanish, or chatting to Ari who graduated last year like myself or Louis, a young mid career international American about his work with special Olympics in Namibia or for Care International in Gaza as the only Jew to ever work for them, and imagine if during one of these moments, Lucy just interjected and broke the bread telling all of us to do something that had never been done before during a seder , but was nonetheless imbued with intent, not a mere game or the offering of an exotic dish. In the Gospel of Luke it says that Jesus told the disciples that “my body is given for you,” once again associating himself with the servant described by the prophet Isaiah. But he went a step further, instructing them to “do this in remembrance” of him and thereby adding something to the Passover. Adding extras to the Passover, like the conspicuous orange on our seder plate in solidarity for the Lesbian and gay men in the Jewish community as per the initiative of some Jewish feminists from the Hillel Organisation in the late 1970s, can be controversial and not everyone does it. In another vein, the remembrance of Holocaust victims at various places during the seder such as during the part about questions from the smart kid, the rude kid and the simple kid, where a child from the Holocaust asks a question to which there is only silence, are accepted universally. I wonder what Jesus was thinking when he said “do this in remembrance of me”. Instinctively, I believe he wanted to be remembered as a person who saw himself as the Lord’s servant and who did not want to die, whether or not he was a blasphemous phony messiah or the Christ for those who keep him in recollection.