Faiths, Daggers, and Thorns

Last night Martha started her second job at our south Broadway Burger King to bring in some extra money -- we haven't gone on a summer vacation out-of-state in the last few years and we'd like to remedy that before our kids get too much older and we have a few small but niggling debts to take care of. I picked up the kids at my in-laws' house where they'd been since they were picked up from school after I got off work and we headed home to catch up on their Reading At Home, have a dinner of homemade bacon cheeseburgers with potato rounds and apple juice, and watch the season finale of Once Upon A Time. Sarah and Jeffrey have been hooked on the show with us since the beginning of season three in Neverland while Martha and I started watching this show of fairy tale characters transposed and adapted to our world (the "Land Without Magic") about mid-first season and caught up quickly.

So a hack author who'd had every work of his so far rejected became THE Author for the -- from our perspective -- fairy tale world and the power got to his head (essentially whatever he'd write would happen, and he no longer simply recorded what happened) enough so that once he had a chance he worked with the fairy tale villains he did so by changing the world so THEY would have the happy endings, not the typical heroes. If you haven't watched this yet and plan to, I don't want to spoil it for you. Martha got home to watch the episode herself as the kids and I were on the last twenty minutes of this two-part episode, and she was willing to behead anyone who told her how it turned out! That, and I SO wish I'd snapped a photo of Jeffrey half-bounding off his seat as the show ended with the name ... wait, that would give it away too. (No, Martha really wasn't that bad about it, but it's hard to not get worked up on favorite shows. Me especially, for there were years I didn't have a TV.)

Two of the books I've read over the last few days, one of which I finished yesterday, read to me almost like the first two books of a trilogy of modern -- I'll say at least in my lifetime, being born in 1971 -- Islam. Yesterday while I had some down time at work I finished Yaroslav Trofimov's The Siege of Mecca (ISBN 9780739493496) this Middle Eastern journalist at the Wall Street Journal gives account of an event the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is loathe to let get out. In late 1979 another group heralding the coming of the Mahdi (the Islamic Messiah) seized the city which non-Muslims aren't allowed to enter and the country's leadership and military force, with surreptitious help from France and the United States, were able to take back control physically but in the hearts of minds of their people by becoming more fundamentalist, more Muslim, and anti-Western. Consider this book's subtitle, "The Forgotten Uprising In Islam's Holiest Shrine and The Birth of Al Qaeda",

and we're living in the world this event started maybe even more than Yalta or 9/11. (That was the World War II conference between the Allies discussing Europe's postwar reorganization ... I remember a line from Herman Wouk's The Winds of War: "If you would see the results of Yalta, look around you.") The second book of this unofficial trilogy which I finished this weekend was So Long a Letter (ISBN 9780435905552) by Mariama Bâ, a woman from Senegal whose husband ... what I'm reading is unclear whether Mariama herself or her main character/narrator in the book Ramatoulaye was abandoned, or rather she felt abandoned, by her husband who took a second wife (Islam allows you to do this scripturally, but it's open to interpretation by country) and she goes into this long confessional letter on how she's doing her best as a schoolteacher and raising many children but feels the practice itself, that any man can take multiple wives -- up to four, provided he's able to provide for them all equally -- is demeaning to women and keeps them from wanting to rise in their societies.

Ok, that's probably more of a sociology lecture than I intended today, but at least they're books that provide for ME some impressive insights into a world that often gets obscured by the fundamentalists on our modern news carriers who try to convince us that every Muslim is Al Qaeda material ... well, that's about the same as convincing people that every Christian is Westboro Baptist material. We need to be more concerned about whether we're living as God made us to be, whether we're visiting the fatherless and the widows in their affliction and keeping ourselves unspotted from the world (I'm paraphrasing James 1:27 on "pure religion") than we are about proving "hey, this is how basic and simple we can make ourselves" -- OURSELVES, neither our personal faiths nor our religious ideologies. Perhaps I and we are not desert nomad who can change the way you think and feel (paraphrasing the subtitle to Thomas Cahill's The Gifts of the Jews, whom Muslims and Christians owe a significant debt to) but we can give you reason -- indeed, we ask you -- to think.

Welcome to our world, David