Danusha Goska offers a book that sparkles with wit, charm, and - most importantly in this epistolary form, unbridled honesty.
To say too much would be to rob you of the pleasure - the addictive pleasure - of allowing yourself to slip into the world in which Mira resides; one of determination, of curiosity, of hurt, of triumph ... all of the things human beings have in common, but are sometimes difficult to reckon with, including not only the wonder of love, but the pursuit of its meaning. Whether or not I agreed with all of Mira's conclusions, I was mesmerized by Goska's mastery of the English language and her breadth of knowledge.
Save Send Delete does not patronize or proselytize. It requests, perhaps even demands at times, that the reader consider his or her own pleasures, pains, and prejudices in matters of faith. For that reason and for many more, I have no reservations about saying I believe it deserves to be placed in the canon of great literature comprising the very best of contemporary theological introspection and thought. If the course of time determines otherwise, it has ignored a great contribution.
God Bless You, Danusha Goska. I felt a kinship with Mira. I was moved deeply. Every laugh and every tear afforded me the opportunity to visit myself at my best and at my worst. Thank you. *** I am very, very grateful to Amazon reviewer J. Edward Troupe for his review, above. You can see it on Amazon here.
On July 10,
2013, Pope Francis issued his "Message of Pope Francis to Muslims Throughout
the World for the End of Ramadan."
One excerpt from
that message made international news. Pope Francis wrote, "We are called
to respect the religion of the other, its teachings, its symbols, its values."
Pope Francis' letter is approximately seven hundred words
long. The only portion of it most people will see is the sixteen-word excerpt
that caused so much controversy.
Several of my Facebook
friends insisted that Pope Francis is wrong. NO! They emphatically stated. We
as Christians, we as Pagans, we as Jews, we as feminists, we as gay people, we
as counter-jihadis, we as victims who remember 9-11, we do NOT respect Islam!
My
friends are wrong.
We must respect Islam and Muslims if we
are to have any positive impact on our world.
We must start
from respect. Respect Muslims' god-fearing. Respect their desire to do the
right thing. Respect their spiritual lives.
My friends
answer back: Do you respect jihad? War on unbelievers? Clitoredectomy? Child
marriage?
This is what I respect: I respect that human
beings JUST LIKE ME want to do what they think God wants them to do JUST LIKE
ME and they are operating with the best information they have JUST LIKE ME and
if I want to stop jihad – which I do – if I want to stop child marriage – which
I do – if I want to stop clitoredectomy – which I do – my best bet is to
approach those with whom I disagree with respect for their best intentions.
No
politically correct speech. No obfuscation. No weasel words. I am not afraid of
saying that I think jihad is wrong.
I can say, "What
you believe is wrong" and still respect the person to whom I am speaking.
Those
of you who reject Pope Francis' words. Do you really think addressing people in
a disrespectful way will get you anywhere? Will rescue one little girl from child
marriage? Will talk the next Tamerlan Tsarnaev out of jihad? If you have any
success by treating people with a lack of respect, please let me know. Really,
I mean it.
Please read Pope Francis' entire Ramadan
greeting here.
Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren and Lily Taylor as a Woman Covered by a White Sheet in "The Conjuring."
Catholics are
frequently accused of idolatry. We worship beads, statues, and stained glass,
we are told by those who don't like us or our church.
I
said in my review of the new James Wan movie "The Conjuring", here,
that the film gets Catholicism wrong. Ed and Lorraine Warren were a real couple
who self-identified as Catholic. In the film, Ed and Lorraine attribute great
power to things – to crosses, holy water, and rosaries. You can see in the still
above that Vera Farmiga, as Lorraine Warren, is wearing a rosary around her
wrist.
This movie version of Catholicism troubles me. There
is evil in the world, we humans do have to fight it, and we need the best
weapon we can get – faith in Jesus Christ. Physical objects like rosary beads
won't save us.
A couple of friends disagreed with me. One is
a Jehovah's Witness and she insisted that Catholics worship images. Another is
Polish and she talked about Polish peasants and their attachment to pagan
practices.
I was never taught, not in church, not in
Catholic school, and not at home, to worship images or things. Rather, it was
taken for granted that the images and things were aids to focus and
concentration on God.
I just about never leave the house
without a rosary in my pocket. I usually lose rosaries before they break, but
if my rosary broke, I would throw it away. It's not sacred. It's not powerful.
I
like what St Jerome said about relics, "We do not worship the relics of
the martyrs, but honor them in our worship of Him whose martyrs they are. We
honor the servants in order that the respect paid to them may be reflected back
to the Lord."
Protestants get this wrong. They get it
very wrong.
I am dyslexic. This curse has been a blessing to
me as a teacher. I know that there is not one avenue to learning, to memory, or
to the heart. I teach my students using every avenue I can: their ears, their
eyes, their entire bodies. My students must DO as well as LISTEN.
Sola
scriptura, churches bare of images, services in which the body does not move,
the nostrils do not smell, are themselves weirdly idolatrous. They place power
in austerity, in rigidity, rather than in God and God's relationship to us,
God's children, in all our physicality.
I love the Catholic
church's insistence on our bodies.
I dip my fingertips in
holy water. I walk through alternating streaks of colored light. I kneel,
stand, sit, stand, kneel. I shake hands with the person next to me. Outside of
church, other than Sunday, I finger the beads in my pocket. My Hispanic
neighbors cross themselves when our bus passes a Catholic church. I know not
just because my eyes decoded letters on a page. I know because my entire body
knows: the scent of frankincense, the physical workout of mass, my lips on my
beads after I am done praying.
Too many Protestants have
cut off all these avenues of access to God with their fetishistic insistence on
sola scriptura.
"The
Conjuring" did scare me, but twenty minutes after I left the theater, I'd
momentarily forgotten that I'd just seen it. While I was watching it I got a
little bored and some scenes tempted me to laugh. If you've seen 1963's
"The Haunting," 1973's "The Exorcist" and 1944's "The
Uninvited" you've seen three much better films from which "The
Conjuring" gets its bag of tricks.
Probably any clever
film student could make something like this movie. We all know the basic
ingredients: a large, old house in an isolated setting. The house should be
attractive but something about it makes it ugly. It's in New England. It's
autumn: cold winds blow skittering dead leaves. An innocent family moves into the
house. The family is generic, without too many details; they are All-American
and the audience can identify with them. They do normal things like go to the
beach and watch "The Brady Bunch."
Their new home
contains many dark and dusty nooks and crannies. There are antique curios that
look a bit menacing.
Suddenly, during a quiet night, a
strange noise is heard. For some reason, no one in this family ever switches on
normal lighting. Rather, they use weak flashlights or match flames.
An
innocent child arises from bed in a long white nightgown. She moves slowly,
slowly, slowly, down a dark hall to investigate the noise. The scene is very
quiet, very long, and very repetitive. You know that eventually the innocent
child is going to come across something unusual: a vision of a hanged person,
the reflection of a ghost in a mirror, or something truly terrifying, an IRS
man there to conduct an audit.
You know that at the same
moment that the defenseless family member sees the unusual thing, the
previously silent scene will burst with sudden, loud, and oppressive noise. The
sudden vision and noise will startle you, and you will be scared. What you paid
the ticket price for. Oh, and the family dog dies, birds act weird, and mom is
bruising easily.
At first, of course, everyone in the house
writes off these events as mere chance. Everyone is rational and is not tempted
to believe in the supernatural. Eventually someone in the family levitates or clocks
stop or people feel cold or something. Just like in "The Haunting,"
there are loud banging noises. Just as in "The Uninvited," a family
member is possessed by the dark energies of the house, and there is the ghost
of a bad mother and a not-so-bad mother. Just as in "The Exorcist,"
there will be an exorcism.
So the team of experts is
brought in. They speak some ancient language like Latin and possess arcane
knowledge. I won't tell you any more because that would reveal the end of the
movie to you, but I bet you can guess.
I'll just say that
at one point, the satanic shenanigans in the house reach fever pitch. Satan is
beating the stuffing out of these poor fools. Any sane person would immediately
evacuate. At that point a paranormal investigator, Lorraine Warren (Vera
Farmiga) says, "Leaving the house won't help because the dark spirits have
attached themselves to you." OH COME ON. Vera Farmiga may as well have
said, "You can't leave now because there's still forty-five minutes to go
in the movie."
Vera Farmiga is a scintillating actress.
She electrifies every scene she is in. Patrick Wilson is perfect as her
husband; they have great chemistry. The movie wastes them, though. The
filmmakers don't seem to realize that Farmiga's human depth and complexity are
the best thing the movie has going for it, and utilizing that human power would
have made their film a classic, rather than just another "Boo!"
movie.
"The Excorsist," "The Haunting"
and "The Uninvited" are all scary but they are also deep. They
present big themes. "The Conjuring" avoids big themes. One character
tries to kill another, and it's the kind of killing that makes your skin crawl.
The movie makes no attempt to plumb these murky waters.
"The
Conjuring" misrepresents evil and Catholicism. When the Warrens arrive at
the haunted house, Lorraine has a rosary strung from her wrist. Ed Warren
places little wooden crucifixes around the house. In the exorcism scene, Latin
is spoken. This isn't true spirituality; it's fetishism – the belief that
objects and rituals possess supernatural power. They do not. Only God has
power. I am a Catholic, I pray the rosary, and I believe in Satan. The force
that defies Satan is not an object, a rosary, it is rather faith in God. *** Owners of the home now are harassed by film fans see article here. *** A youtube video of the Warrens at work below:
"Save
Send Delete," so far, has received over-the-top reviews on Amazon
and Goodreads.
I've been really blessed by these good reviews.
Well, my
bubble has burst. "Save Send Delete" has received its first bad
review. "Joe," a Goodreads reviewer, called "Save Send Delete"
"Nauseating and boring."
Sigh.
To
be honest – I'm surprised other reviewers haven't called "Save Send Delete"
"boring." It's not exactly an action-packed thriller. It's just two
people talking. I myself don't really get why it works so well for so many
readers.
Anyway, that whole male action v. female
contemplation literary dichotomy reminded me of one of my favorite internet
jokes, which I've cut and pasted below:
***
Tandem
Writing Assignment
Today we will experiment with a new form
called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with
the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write
the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph
and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a
third paragraph, and so on back and forth.
Rebecca starts:
At
first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile,
which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too
much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she
felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was
suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up
again. So chamomile was out of the question.
Gary:
Meanwhile,
Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over
Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an
air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night
over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic
communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far...".
But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and
blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent
him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
Rebecca:
He
bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang
of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings
for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the
peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing
War and Space Travel." Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news
simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming
of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no
newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent
wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's
innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
Gary:
Little
did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles
above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium
fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral
Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left earth a defenseless
target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human
race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships
were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire
planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan.
The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in
his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast
of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85
million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference
table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em
out of the sky!"
Rebecca:
This is
absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is
a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.
Gary:
Yeah?
Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the
literary equivalent of Valium.
Blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to six hundred lashes and seven years in prison for blogging about Islam in a critical way. Please visit the website of Amnesty International here and Human Rights Watch here to protest this monstrous decision. To the Saudis, I say, the winter is yours. The spring is ours.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere where
the days and nights are of unequal length and vary throughout the year, the
year is divided in half by the equinoxes – March 20 and September 22 – when
days and nights are of equal length. Then the year is divided into quarters by
the solstices – June 21 and December 21, with, respectively, the longest day
and shortest night, and the shortest day and longest night of the year.
The
year is divided into eighths by the halfway points between solstices and
equinoxes: February Second, Candlemas or Groundhog Day, May first or May Day, August
first, Lammas or Loaf Mass, and Halloween or All Saints' Day.
In the vocabulary of
Arnold van Gennep's "Rites
of Passage," these days are liminal times. Liminal comes from the
Latin "limin" or threshold.
In a rite of passage –
for example a Bar Mitzvah – a person goes from being one thing – a child say –
to being a man.
Van Gennep pointed out that that in between
time, between leaving childhood and assuming adulthood, is a dangerous time,
because one identity has been cast off, and another has not yet been completely
assumed. This is the limin, the in-between time, no longer one thing, not yet
another. It is for this reason that traditional people assess liminal times as
magic times.
Pagans will perform ceremonies today on Lammas.
Catholics used to celebrate Lammas, too. They called it
Loaf Mass.
From Catholic Culture:
"…this
day was offered as thanksgiving for the wheat harvest, used for the bread that
becomes the Eucharist…As the hot, dry corn weather of July settles down on our
countryside, there is a stop in our feasting. These are the days when dawn is
not too early to get out a-berrying, and moonlight is not too late to tie
tomatoes. Even the birds do most of their talking in the dew of the morning or
the cool of the night. And in between the rickety-rackety tractor snorts on the
hills and whinnies on the down grade, each one of the family is preoccupied
with the plans of the day and more than occupied with the raw material of our
life. I think the Church as well as tradition herself knew we were all busy in
July. The Church lets us all be Marthas for the month, to work like the bees in
the hive gathering food for our families. Tradition lets us all be Jacks for
the month, to be as dull as dross while we fill the barns."
My Catholic
church no longer celebrates Loaf Mass.
But I am glad it is
Lammas.
I don't own a car, and I walk everywhere, I live
without air conditioning, and my ancestors evolved in cold, dark Northern
Europe. My sister, who has sent her DNA off to be analyzed, reports that we are
related to Vikings and Sami. You don't get much farther north than that.
Summer
to me means walking uphill to work and watching my sweat drop on the path in
front of me. It means stripping down to nothing and sleeping downstairs on the
floor next to a fan and gulping midnight air that's ninety degrees and feels
solid. It means counting the days.
Since I walk everywhere,
the seasons penetrate me.
Aha. I am walking across a mall
parking lot and I hear a killdeer. Killdeer are shorebirds that sometimes nest
on gravel rooftops. Winter must be breaking up and soon it will be spring.
Aha.
There, on the path, is Saint John's wort. It must be summer solstice. St.
John's wort flowers on this day.
My shadow is short; it's
summer. My shadow is long; it's winter.
Lammas, August
first, is the time we begin to notice that the days are not quite so long as
they had been for a while, starting June 21, the summer solstice. I noticed
when I got up this morning at five that the sky was still dark. For a while
there it was feeling like no matter how early I got up, I couldn't beat the
sun. The change in the length of the day speeds up as we move toward the
Equinox.
You start hearing more crickets – gryllus pennsylvanicus
– at this time. You start seeing some red undertones in the leaves of burning
bush.
But, really, for me, the big sign of Lammas is the
light. The retreating light, its retreat getting faster as we slide down the
sine wave.
***
Since Catholics have
surrendered Loaf Mass, Pagans have picked up the slack and claimed Lammas as
their own.
I'd love to see more Christians allow nature into
their spiritual lives. We shouldn't leave it to the Pagans.
Lindow Man, possible victim of human sacrifice. Source: Wikipedia
I'm
not a Pagan and I'm not attracted to it. I find human sacrifice to be about as
repugnant as any idea humanity has ever come up with. The Pagan god demands
that humans die for him. Jesus died for us.
The Romans
outlawed Celtic human sacrifice. It's a pretty sad thing when a people as
reprobate as the Romans have to tell you that what you are doing is wrong. Lindow Man was a possible Celtic
human sacrifice. He was found in a remote bog, strangled, struck on the head, and
with his throat cut. The three-fold death may have been part of a ritual.
I'm
also troubled by Pagans' willingness to lie. Neo-Pagans claim that they are
practicing a religion that is thousands of years old. That's just not true.
Today's Paganism is a make-it-up-as-you-go phenomenon. Pagans claim that their
religion descends from a worldwide, woman-loving, goddess-worshipping religion.
That's not true, either. (See, for example, here.)
Also, Neo-Pagans tell some real whoppers about the religion they pit themselves
against, Christianity. As a woman, I am deeply troubled by their invented
history of the Witch Burnings. Just one example: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre
English's "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers,"
a book that is full of lies – and yet still embraced by many Neo-Pagans.
Finally,
it's impossible not to notice how many Neo-Pagans are obese. What's up with
that?
You can find Pagans talking about their obesity crisis
here,
here,
and here.
Oh and here.
And here.
Of course there are fat Christians, too, disclaimer
disclaimer etc etc. But I do notice it. The Pagan / obesity connection. It's
certainly worth thinking about. The many, many, many websites I found talking
about this show that that's true.
I wish my fellow
Christians would join with me in interweaving the natural world into our
worship. We Christians rightly fear the evil excesses of Pagans in relation to
nature. What evil excesses you ask? Well, ancient Pagans actually did worship animals.
What that meant. In Ancient Egypt, you needed to be mummified to enjoy your
afterlife. Egyptians mummified millions of ibises – sacred birds. Millions.
Millions!
The slaves who built the pyramids? Not mummified.
But
that wasn't just Paganism in the ancient world. The Nazis revived Paganism.
Nazis insisted that worms – yes – worms – be handled in lab experiments so that
they would not feel pain.
And we all know how much horrific
suffering Nazis inflicted on human beings.
That, in a
nutshell, to me, encapsulates the evil excesses of the Pagan overvaluation of
nature. Ibises: heaven. Human beings: slave labor followed by death and
extinction.
The Judeo-Christian tradition values human
beings more highly than animals. But there is great love for the natural world
expressed in the Bible. The Book of Job expresses as much love of the natural
world as anything I've ever read, including Thoreau or Aldo Leopold or John
Muir. Here is just one excerpt:
But now ask the beasts, and
let them teach you; And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell
you. “Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you; And let
the fish of the sea declare to you. “Who among all these does not know That
the hand of the Lord has done this, In whose hand is the life of every
living thing, And the breath of all mankind?
