IXQ Danny Boy Interrogate My Love As Long As I Can

REMEMBER I HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH SOME MANIFESTATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love or even approve)! [Spring '67/Nurit/Katamon/Mitspeh Ramon/Eilat/Be'er Sheva/Jeanny/Shula] Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on tv the hymn 'In The Garden' moved me to tears when I was a child! For an oddly gendered teenager, St. Francis, the Sissy, proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man. Later on it was f.i. medieval Christian art & architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the spirituality of Meister Eckhart & Jakob Böhme. Still later, & most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting for me (DB) into a world so close to that of my own beloved Rabbis of late antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise relationships between the posited persons of a complete godhead, a world, as well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and enthuastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I find this world endlessly moving & alluring, even when at its most bizarre to me. For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time & spirit to learning the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives. Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, or personal history to be drawn to Christianity: this book (Border Lines) won't let me be done with it, or so it seems, until I come clean & confess that I am one of those Jews. I (DB) cannot, of course, deny the problematic aspects of that desire; desire is frequently unruly & problematic. Christians, of course, have been bloody rotten to Jews through much of our histories, and Jews, when occasionally given the chance, have taken their turn at being rotten to Christians. This desire seems sometimes to be not entirely unlike the "love" that binds an abusive couple to each other? Nevertheless, it is there! The question is, then, what creative use can be made of problematic desire ~ not only what pleasures can it engender but also what utile can it be in the world? Some Jews who are so absorbed by Christianity have been induced by that affection to convert & become Christians. I have not, held back by an even more powerful libidinal commitment to the religion, the memories, the thick history, the literature & liturgy of diasporic rabbinic Judaism as practiced for nearly the last two millennia. In earlier work, I have attempted to express & make some sense of that greater love. Mòr pauses ......

17 dec 2014 - bewerkt op 18 dec 2014 - meld ongepast verhaal
Weet je zeker dat je dit verhaal wilt rapporteren? Ja | Nee
Profielfoto van Asih
Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
Log in om een reactie te plaatsen.   vorige volgende