With only 4 days left until my prospectus and my speech for the Dempster Banquet at AAR are due, I am all over web surfing.
Josh and I have not yet been able to eat these carrots that came as part of our last CSA share for the year.Halloween used to be a harmless day when kids would go out dressed as pirates, princesses and superheroes to collect candy from friends and neighbors. Sadly, many American children no longer get to participate in this lighthearted holiday. Their conscientious parents stand as examples of the truth a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Their parents have been told that the dark and evil religion of the ancient Celts threatens to corrupt their children’s souls. Rather than a quaint folkway that has outlived its historical roots, it is a sinister scheme devised by the devil in order to seduce children into the dark web of the occult and the demonic. You can almost hear Satan’s laughter at the brilliance of his diabolical plan --a diabolical plan that has all the subtlety of a conspiracy of Skeletor or Cobra Commander.
According to this plan, there are Druids or Wiccans about just waiting to seduce your child into a world of Celtic chants and an appreciation of nature. Druids, far from being extinct or having their religion transformed into the stuff of banal, New Age self-help books, have in secret been executing their dark master’s plan to seduce the youth of
Christianity’s complete and utter defeat of paganism throughout
Apparently the joy and happiness I felt as child, costumed and sugared-up, and that I have witnessed in others was completely naïve. It was a superficial deception in a demonic gambit for my soul. Even though it felt good, made me happy and holds a warm place in my memory I was deceived. These feelings should have been tempered by obscure biblical commands condemning witchcraft, although I hesitate to speculate whether my Bunny Rabbit or Batman costume was more demonic.
I do not believe this. The perversion of Halloween is not by dark spiritual forces, but by fundamentalist fear mongers obsessed with their own puritanical consciences to the point of demonizing a harmless cultural anachronism. But they are partially right; there is a witchcraft to Halloween. The day has a power to weave spells of laughter in the faces of children and joy in their hearts, but I guess unfettered joy is too frightening for some people. - posted by jga
An industrialized culture whose members must show up for their shift or incur the wrath of "The Man" has no time, no space to spend a few days reflecting on deceased love ones or the continuity of memory with the past. Memory preserves the dead from oblivion, enlarges the community and the world that we move through, connecting us to people and spaces beyond ourselves.
The celebration of memory is the admission of mortality. Taking time to remember what has passed confronts us with the threat of our own passing. In our culture, Christianity is often applied as an anaesthetic to this fact. Death is made illusory by the promise of paradise, or even worse, life is. Memory holds life and death in tension. A culture of memory sustains the living with the promise that death will not cause them to lose their place in the community.
This trait is uniquely isolated from much of the rest of the Christian ethos in the Eucharist. Jesus remains continually embodied and relatable in the quotidian human need to eat. As much as his followers may cast their cares at his feet, Jesus remains human: He weeps. He gets angry. He gets tired. He loves. He eats. He dies.
Dia de los Muertos also preserves the humanity of those who have died. Favorite candies are laid out for the dead or pillows for spirits that have traveled far. A spiritual world no longer touched by human concerns is nihilistic, an escapist fantasy. Subjected to a pristine heaven the Saints join the pantheon as demigods in God’s feudal service while the more mundane among us disappear into the celestial ether.
Celebration of the Day of the Dead is neither morbid nor gloomy. It is in fact a celebration of life, an affirmation of this life. The best thing is to be remembered within the context of a community by those who loved you not to deny death by acquiescing to a wish for a painless immortality. The “bliss” of a world beyond this one has no meaning except to express a this-worldly desire for a cessation of struggle and suffering or for a perfect, unchanging happiness.
The problem is that a posthumous return to
Conversely, the denial of death’s reality is also the denial of this life’s richness. It is a discontented hope that longs for a cup where no bitter is intermingled with the sweet. It fails to understand that the sweet contains within itself its own bitterness. A celebration of memory such as the Day of the Dead wholistically encompasses this dynamic. Remembering ancestors in this way recognizes the cycle of life and death. It honors the embedded-ness of human concerns and celebrates a community whose past stretches into the depths of time and forward to an unknown horizon. --jga
Last year I discovered the joy of knitting and have once again, as the weather has grown colder, re-discovered the nirvana of knitting.
I really do need to work on plating my dishes. I watch Hell's Kitchen and the Iron Chef and still my plates look less than appetizing!!!
The photo does not look as appetizing as the smells were last night.
'The message for American women and little girls in the 1950s, maybe women everywhere, and maybe all women now,' said Lord, 'is that you are supposed to look like a hooker but be so wholesome.'"
I always knew something was wrong about Barbie!!! Now it makes perfect sense!
PS The title to this post comes from an old SNL skit with "Velvet Jones" played by Eddie Murphy. A classic and one of my favorites!!!
