alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. glory to thee, o god.

Would you
Could you
True my wheel?

srsly. CLICKITY.
frustrating.

like the rest of my life.

Dear coworkers,
Please stop being backbiting bitches.
❤ dana.

Dear dana,
Please heed your own advice to fellow workers.
❤ dana.

hypocrite.

In other news, I've mentioned my love for the Orthodox, yeah? Well, I can't quite put my finger on why I love them, but I do. However, I feel really out of place when talking to people converting (oh, how I hate that term) and they are joining because they believe the Orthodox have the Truth. I've never really gotten along with Truth.

I was talking to the priest at the local church and he was asking me about why I liked it there, and I said something about liking the liturgy. Maybe because it's old. In retrospect, that's not it at all. I love it because it's BEAUTIFUL. And maybe part of the reason I think it is BEAUTIFUL is because it is ancient, but it's more than the antiquity of it.

I don't know what to think about capital T- Truth, but Beauty. I know that when I see it. And I really feel that in Beauty there must be some Truth.

There are a couple of other things I'd like to talk about when it comes to Beauty, but I'm tired. And I doubt this makes any sense. So we'll save the nonsense talk for later.

why is everybody always chasing we?

Dear Matisyahu,
I love you. I’m sorry I listened to those naysayers commenting on “Youth” It’s fantastic.
❤ dana.

Jerusalem, if I forget you, let my right hand forget what it’s supposed to do.

So, on a completely different note: I started this book by Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy and it has me thinking about my own religious literacy. I have a good general knowledge of world religions, and I remember stuff from when I was a kid about Bible stories. But some people, man! They really know their Bible! I have a good overview of it, but I can’t quote anything at length. (I can make up faux psalms though).

Anyway, I know when Isaac said he read most of the Bible, I think he finished it up with “and I’ll never do that again” but, I think once again, I am resolved to read … some more of it. at least. We’ll see.

shabbat.

So, I went to Temple today. Or Friday night, which might be today. Whatever. It was different. And yet, at the same time very familiar.

Reading psalms. Words that are very familiar to me, putting them in a new light. An alter. Carrying the Torah around the room. People kissing it, or touching their seder to it and kissing that. Kissing things, it’s becoming familiar.

Chanting. At times very bad Hebrew chanting. Bad chanting is something I’m familiar with, and in certain ways truly love, along with its sister, bad singing. But there were parts where the congregation was more familiar and raised its voice together. Very lovely.

I think I’m going to add it to my list of places I go regularly, as my work schedule allows. I wonder what this makes me.

nativity of st. john the baptist.

Last semester, towards the end of the semester, one of my psychology classmates and I were talking before class. He asked me, “From all your travels, what truth have you learned?” And I was floored. I don’t think of what truth I have learned. I think about those trips in finding, learning and experiencing beauty, not truth. And definitely not Truth, as I understood he meant it.

I’m not sure if that’s just the way my mind/body/soul work or what, but the thought of “Truth” in my travels never ever occured to me.

So, I was dumfounded last Wednesday, as I sat in church for the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and saw, once again, how amazingly beautiful our church is and my thoughts were on Truth. Yes, our church is beautiful, but what truth is there in here? What truth is there in our liturgy? What truth is there in our tradition? What truth is there in our Bible?

I just don’t know.

I am very frustrated, with a lot of things. Don’t get me wrong, I still intend to continue worshipping in my church. I think there is great truth there, along with its great beauty. It’s just that I can’t see it right now.

ponderings

how is it possible to be uplifted and disheartened  simultaneously? or at least swung back and forth between the two in just the one day?

a general why

I have been considering covering my hair for quite a while, maybe even pre Yemen, though back then my ‘considering’ was a general wondering and not an actual desire. In Yemen, I hated hijab (as my friend Isaac reminded me yesterday.) But, I think that was because I was wearing hijab/abaya because I got way too much attention without it. I only wore it out of societal pressure. Sometime after I returned from Yemen, I would look at hijab and other traditional Christian and Jewish head covers online and think to myself “I really want to try that. Now is not the right time, though. Maybe when I go away to nursing school and am in a bigger city, I will.”

At the same time, I read about why modern women cover. I was very disappointed to find  that everyone I ran across online, especially in the beginning, were ’sola scriptura’ people, who solely based their reasonings behind covering on Paul and 1 Corinthians 11. I am not a fan of this passage because I believe it is demeaning to women. To make matters worse, I ran across these crazy IFB (Independent Fundamentalist Baptist) forums (or maybe it was just that one) that supported women’s head covering. The women on this forum encourage the ideas that a woman’s place is in the home, quiet and subservient to their husbands. This is not something I want to support!

Which leads me to a difficult place because I want to cover, but not for these reasons. I want to cover because, as I understand, it wasn’t until recently that Christian women didn’t cover. The act of covering full time may have faded earlier, but covering in church remained standard until very recently.  Head covering has been a part of the church’s tradition from the very beginning, as Paul demonstrates. It has continued throughout time, and in many eastern churches, it is still practiced. I loved that many of the Southeastern Asian Catholics covered during Mass and prayer time with the nuns in Yemen. The Ethiopian Orthodox women covered in Ethiopia. And while these examples maybe cultural, it is, at least in my mind, a nearly universal practice throughout church history.

This might not be the best reasoning ever, but it is mine. I hope that as I practice covering and practice explaining why I cover to others, my logic will become more solid and my understanding of why women in general and myself in specific cover will become deeper than my current, rather random and fluffy, desire to put something on my head and be associated with this one aspect of Christian tradition.