I see You, God
in this morning-cerulean sky;
I feel You
in the sun illuminating
this frozen landscape.
I speak; You talk
and I hear You
in a breeze
that scatters from high limbs
tufts of snow —
little white angels fluttering and dancing
on currents.
In this season of withdrawal,
purity is born of introspection
and I taste the deepening connection in the
still
and the
quiet.
I sigh;
branches sway,
and I breathe in the fragrance of
Union
and wonder why I ever
turn away.
© 2008
A year and a half ago I transcribed here in this column a piece of news from the CNN saying that on 31 October 2004, resorting to a feudal law that was abolished in the following month, the town of Prestopans, in Scotland, granted official pardon to 81 people — and their cats — executed for practicing witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries.
According to the official spokesperson for the Barons of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun, “most of them had been condemned without any concrete evidence — based only on witnesses for the prosecution who claimed they felt the presence of evil spirits”.
The oddest thing about this news item is that the town and the 14th Baron of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun are “granting pardon” to people who were brutally executed. Here we are plump in the 21st century, and those who killed innocent people still feel they have the right to “pardon”.
To my surprise, that did not bring the matter to an end.
At least according to the highly respected Reuters news agency, there still exist witches to be pardoned by the system. In a piece of news published recently, the grand-daughter of one of them has just launched a campaign for the “posthumous redemption” of Helen Duncan, a woman accused by the English during the Second World War. Duncan’s crime was to have answered, during a séance of spiritualism, a question asked by a mother desperate to know the whereabouts of her son, a member of the crew of the ship HMS Barbham. The medium stated that the ship had just sunk and that the entire crew had died.
This was true, but the fact was being kept secret so as not to affect the morale of the soldiers. The news soon spread, and reached the government. Based on a law dating from 1735, Winston Churchill ordered her arrested until the war was over.
Helen Duncan died in 1956, without ever being pardoned. Her grand-daughter, Mary Martin (now aged 72) has already even managed to have an audience with the Minister of the Interior of the Tony Blair government, but to no avail.
As I write these lines, the Baron of Prestoungrange, the same man who succeeded in obtaining the official pardon of the town of Prestopans, is directly involved in the matter, and has even opened a site on the Internet (www.prestoungrange.org/helenduncan) to raise international support.
In the words of the Baron:
“The 300 soldiers executed for desertion during the First World War have already been pardoned. The denunciations that caused the death of a group of 20 innocent young people in Salem, Massachusetts, have already been treated with due respect. We have already apologized for trading in slaves and adopting piracy as a noble way to make the United Kingdom prosperous. What has to be done to pardon Helen Duncan?”
It is simple. In the beginning, Duncan was accused of spying. A massive investigation carried out by the government concluded that it was impossible for a woman to have access to official secrets and secret information. How, then, could she have known what had happened to the frigate HMS Barbham?
The only explanation that remains is: witchcraft. And what purpose is served by the old laws, even if they have been forgotten by a civilization that deems itself enlightened and immune to the superstitions of yore?
Their purpose is to be applied.
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On Christmas Eve, the king invited the prime minister to join him for their usual walk together. He enjoyed seeing the decorations in the streets, but since he didn’t want his subjects to spend too much money on these just to please him, the two men always disguised themselves as traders from some far distant land.
They walked through the centre of the city, admiring the lights, the Christmas trees, the candles burning on the steps of the houses, the stalls selling gifts, and the men, women and children hurrying off to celebrate a family Christmas around a table laden with food.
On the way back, they passed through a poorer area, where the atmosphere was quite different. There were no lights, no candles, no delicious smells of food about to be served. There was hardly a soul in the street, and, as he did every year, the king remarked to the prime minister that he really must pay more attention to the poor in his kingdom. The prime minister nodded, knowing that the matter would soon be forgotten again, buried beneath the day-to-day bureaucracy of budgets to be approved and discussions with foreign dignitaries.
Suddenly, they heard music coming from one of the poorest houses. The hut was so ramshackle and the rotten wooden timbers so full of cracks, that they were able to peer through and see what was happening inside. And what they saw was utterly absurd: an old man in a wheelchair apparently crying, a shaven-headed young woman dancing, and a young man with sad eyes shaking a tambourine and singing a folk song.
‘I’m going to find out what they’re up to,’ said the king.
He knocked. The music stopped, and the young man came to the door.
‘We are merchants in search of a place to sleep. We heard the music, saw that you were still awake, and wondered if we could spend the night here.’
‘You can find shelter in a hotel in the city. We, alas, cannot help you. Despite the music, this house is full of sadness and suffering.’
‘And may we know why?’
‘It’s all because of me.’ It was the old man in the wheelchair who spoke. ‘I’ve spent my life teaching my son calligraphy, so that he could one day get a job as a palace scribe. But the years have passed and no post has ever come up. And then, last night, I had a stupid dream: an angel appeared to me and asked me to buy a silver goblet because, the angel said, the king would be coming to visit me. He would drink from the goblet and give my son a job.
‘The angel was so persuasive that I decided to do as he said. Since we have no money, my daughter-in-law went to the market this morning to sell her hair so that we could buy that goblet over there. The two of them are doing their best to get me in the Christmas spirit by singing and dancing, but it’s no use.’
The king saw the silver goblet, asked to be given a little water to quench his thirst and, before leaving, said to the family:
‘Do you know, we were talking to the prime minister only today, and he told us that an opening for a palace scribe would be announced next week.’
The old man nodded, not really believing what he was hearing, and bade farewell to the strangers. The following morning, however, a royal proclamation was read out in all the city streets; a new scribe was needed at court. On the appointed day, the audience room at the palace was packed with people eager to compete for that much-sought-after post. The prime minister entered and asked everyone there to prepare their paper and pens:
‘Here is the subject of the composition: Why is an old man weeping, a shaven-headed woman dancing, and a sad young man singing?’
A murmur of disbelief went round the room. No one knew how to tell such a story, apart, that is, from the shabbily dressed young man sitting in one corner, who smiled broadly and began to write.
(Based on an Indian story)
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
One of Brazil’s great philosophers, Tim Maia, once said: “I decided to go on a strict diet. I cut out alcohol, all fats and sugar. In two weeks I lost 14 days”.
For 28 years I have been living with a marvelous woman who now and again loses her temper and her usual good humor because she feels that she has put on a couple of kilos. I wonder if maybe we are exaggerating a little. One thing is obesity, another is trying to stop the time and normal evolution of our organism.
The worst of it all is that at each and every moment there appears a new way to lose weight: eating calories, then not eating calories, compulsively consuming fats, then avoiding fats at any price. We step inside a pharmacy and are visually assaulted by all sorts of miraculous products that promise to do away with our desire to eat, with our fat tissue, with our belly, and so on.
We have survived all these millennia because we could eat. And nowadays this seems to have turned into a curse. Why is that? What makes us try at the age of 40 to keep the same body we had when we were young? Will it ever be at all possible to stop this dimension of time?
Of course not. And so why do we need to be slim?
We don’t. We buy books, go to the gym, devote a great deal of our concentration trying to stop time, when we ought to be celebrating the miracle of living in this world. Instead of wondering how to live better, we are obsessed with how much we weigh.
Let’s forget all that; you can read all the books you want, do all the exercise you want, suffer all the punishment you decide to inflict on yourself, and you will have only two choices — you either stop living, or else you will get fat.
It is obvious that you have to eat moderately, but above all you have to take pleasure in eating. Jesus Christ said that: “evil is not what goes into man’s mouth, but rather what comes out of it”.
The other day I was in a Lebanese restaurant with an Irish friend, and we were talking about salads. With all due respect to vegetarians and the fundamentalists of food, for me, salad is just something to decorate a dish. We cannot live without it, but on the other hand we cannot consider it as the center of our gastronomic attention. Every day the newspapers publish stories of young people looking for fame on the catwalk who end up dying because of this obsession with weight.
Remember that for thousands of years we fought to avoid being hungry. Who invented this story that we have to spend our whole life being slim?
Let me give you the answer: the vampires of the soul, who think that it is possible to stop the wheel of time. It is not possible. Use the energy and the effort of a diet to feed yourself with the bread of the spirit, and go on enjoying (moderately, let me repeat) the pleasures of good eating. Last year I wrote a series of columns on the capital sins, and greed was one of them. But what exactly is greed? An obsession.
The same goes for diets. And this is where the two extremes meet and become harmful to our health. While millions of people the world over are hungry, we see people provoking this other obsession because at some moment or other somebody decides that being slim is the only option for regaining youth and beauty.
Instead of artificially burning those calories, we should try to turn them into the energy we need to fight for our dreams; no-one has ever stayed slim for long just by following a diet.
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According to the dictionary: from the Latin cor: heart; firmness of spirit, energy before danger; intrepidness; cheerfulness; bravery; perseverance.
For Jesus Christ: You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its savor, what shall it be salted with? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown away and trodden under the foot of men. You are the light of the world; a city that is et on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light to all that are in the house. (Matthew 5:13-15)
In the heat of the fight: Yesterday I had the courage to fight. Today I shall have the courage to win. (Bernadette Devlin, Catholic political activist in Northern Ireland)
Among the priests in the desert: a group of monks from the monastery of Sceta — among them the great Abbot Nicerius — were walking in the Egyptian desert when a lion appeared before them. Terrified, they all began to run.
Years later, when Nicerius was on his death bed, one of the monks remarked:
“Abbot, do you remember the day we met the lion? That was the only time I saw you afraid.”
“But I was not afraid of the lion.”
“Then why did you run like all the rest of us?”
“I thought it better to run away from a lion one afternoon than to spend the rest of my life running away from vanity.”
In a speech: These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other. Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance. Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person’s human rights should be violated. (Nelson Mandela, who for 28 years was a prisoner of conscience, on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, 10/12/1993)
In the face of absolute evil: Two rabbis are trying by every possible means to bring spiritual comfort to Jews in Nazi Germany. For a whole year, though scared to death, they deceive the Gestapo (the secret police) and perform religious ceremonies in various communities.
They are finally arrested. One of them, terrified at what could happen from then on, does not stop praying. The other spends the whole day sleeping.
“Why do you sleep?” asks the fearful rabbi. “Aren’t you afraid? Don’t you realize what can happen to us?”
“I was afraid up to the moment we were arrested. Now that I’m imprisoned, what good does it do to be afraid? The time for fear is over; now it’s time for courage to face our fate.”
On a beach: What’s all around you? There’s no happiness, no courage, just terror on this beautiful sunset. The terror of being alone, the terror of the dark that fills the imagination with demons, the terror of doing something that isn’t in the handbook of good behavior, the terror of God’s judgment, the terror of men’s comments, the terror of risking and losing, the terror of winning and having to live with envy, the terror of loving and being rejected, the terror of asking for a raise, accepting an invitation, going to unknown places, not managing to speak a foreign language, not being able to impress others, growing old, dying, being noticed on account of your defects, not being noticed for your qualities, not being noticed either for your defects or qualities. (The Devil and Miss Prym, 1998)
According to a wise man: Courage is shown in acts, not in words; it is not bluffing, arrogance, or madness. A courageous man is the one who dares to do what he finds is right, and bears the consequences of his acts — whether they are political, social or individual.
A man can obey others for two reasons: for fear of being punished, or for love. Obedience that comes from love of others is a thousand times stronger than fear of punishment. (Mahatma Ghandi, 1869–1948)
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