Frye part 1

revelation |ˌrevəˈlā sh ən|
noun
1 a surprising and previously unknown fact, esp. one that is made known in a dramatic way : revelations about his personal life.
• the making known of something that was previously secret or unknown : the revelation of an alleged plot to assassinate the king.
• used to emphasize the surprising or remarkable quality of someone or something : seeing them play at international level was a revelation.
2 the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world : an attempt to reconcile Darwinian theories with biblical revelation | a divine revelation.
• ( Revelation or informal Revelations) (in full the Revelation of St. John the Divine) the last book of the New Testament, recounting a divine revelation of the future to St. John.
DERIVATIVES
revelational |- sh ənl| adjective
ORIGIN Middle English (in the theological sense): from Old French, or from late Latin revelatio(n-), from revelare ‘lay bare’ (see reveal 1 ). Sense 1 dates from the mid 19th cent.
-New Oxford American Dictionary

CREATION
"In Genesis, however, the forms of life are spoken into existence, so that while they are made or created, they are not made out of something else" (106). Again, the power of WORDS, and oral language.

Something that always has bothered me about Genesis: "We know only of a world in which every human and animal form is born from a female body; but the Bible insists, not only on the association of God with the male sex, but that at the beginning the roles of male and female were reversed in human life, the first woman having been made out of the body of the first man" (107). Aha! "God is male because that rationalizes the ethos of a patriarchal male-dominated society."

"But, because we begin and end, we insist that beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the reality of things than the universe around us suggests, and we shape our myths accordingly" (108). Even existing in this modern world, we have no actual concept of our universe. We may have the scientific facts: estimations on the age of the universe, the earth--its birth via explosion--and all sorts of physical information. But on a conceptual level, all these facts fail us. None of us is capable of fathoming any of these facts, they are too far beyond our little existence and experience. Again I wonder, how do we remove ourselves from ourselves to observe? I do not think it is possible beyond some ideal to strive toward (fantasy perhaps?).

Beginning, like waking up from sleep is a revelation in itself. I think this may be a point Frye is getting to...Therefore Genesis mimics the structure of the U-shape that is the entire Bible. Thinking of creation in this way makes sense to me if I think of my own experience. Experience itself did not begin with birth, at least it means nothing to me now as those early years are not a part of memory. Early memories are like thoughts upon first waking, until we emerge into the full experience of life.


"The world God made was so "good" that he spent his seventh day contemplating it--which means that his Creation, including man, was already objective to God, even if we assume that man acquired with his fall a new and more intense feeling of the "otherness" of both God and nature" (110).

Revolution

The contrast of light and dark is like the binary of life and not-life (after death). I think heaven, too, is a natural human creation: how can we imagine an end of our experience?


"The spoken words of Christ are recorded with great care, but his physical appearance, the fact that he was bound to resemble some people more closely than others, could never have been anything but an embarrassment" (116). Funny that today we have such a concrete image of Jesus's physical appearance.

I do not think I understand this section...

why i have not blogged recently and a hero's death

I was up until 2 last night crying. I haven't been eating well. haven't been sleeping. haven't really been writing in my journal. people tell you to call them if you need anything. they don't realize how difficult it can be to make that call.

But I managed to lift myself out of it enough to make some calls, to reach out to some people. I am trying to keep living; focusing on the baby steps. Someone told me "life is for the living". I am trying to function among the living. But i do not feel fully alive. a part of me died up there with him. He took part of me with him. When he died, my life as it was at that point died. And I was shoved suddenly into adulthood; numbly I stumble onward, trying to figure out this strange new life. I don't really know why I am in school right now. My brain is on vacation, and I keep trying to force it back to work. I guess I know education was important to my dad and my initial thought was "he would want me to continue living normally". I did not realize that living normally is impossible. I guess I feel pressure from society to dive back into life as it was. Sometimes distraction is nice, but sometimes it is impossible. And my memory is a blur; this whole part of my life is a blur as I am living it and already it blurs in memory. I am thinking I will take next semester off. I need time and space to digest all that has just happened to me. I have to learn how to live without my dad. and he's everywhere. All I have left are memories, and it's the memories that hurt so much.

I have found this blog to be somewhat therapeutic. I figured, instead of trying to fight against where my brain is going constantly, maybe I should just throw it all out there. I do not know if people read this, but there is something healing about getting my thoughts out into the ethers. I don't feel quite so alone with them, so haunted by them. Although I am still haunted, constantly, of grotesque images from my dad's death. I dream about it. I wake up crying. I re-live it over and over again, at varying levels of intensity.

And I miss him intensely. He was my best friend, my protector, my daddy. He fixed things when they broke. He told me how to fix things if he couldn't because he was too far away. He hugged me and kissed my bruises when I fell down. He picked up the pieces when I screwed up. And he always forgave me and continued loving me just as deeply. He always told me, "Natalie, you won't understand the love a parent has for a child until you have kids of your own." I know I am lucky to have had such an awesome dad. I can't imagine having a better relationship with him. How many people can say they have no regrets, no unfinished conflicts with the dead? I am lucky enough to feel overwhelmingly that way (of course there are always small things, but I love d my dad so).

I know this event, the event of my dad's death, is one of the primary shapers of my life. I will never "recover" from this people tell me. It will change, and the pain will shift, but it will not go away. I will never stop missing him.

Death is as natural as birth, and yet why do we shy so much from it? Our culture especially, is so afraid of sadness, grief any uncomfortable feelings. But I have found that avoiding the grief does not make it go away, and it does not make me feel any better. It simply changes form and manifests itself in a different way. I feel it in my body, especially if I have not acknowledged it recently. I feel heavy; like I am living in molasses. I am exhausted, yet sleep is illusive (as it always has been for me). I find my grief comes out as anger at small things. Perhaps this will teach me empathy for the actions of people--you never know what someone is going through. Why are we, as humans, so afraid of the pain of grief? I wonder if we are afraid that the pain will kill us. It certainly feels like too much sometimes. I feel like I am about to fall over some edge, and I am so afraid of falling. But, I think, the only way to move through this and find myself again is by falling, again and again. Each time I start to slip, I fall deeper into the darkness of memory. I allow myself to miss him a little bit more. I miss him so, so terribly. His absence is like a bright light shining on my constantly. I blink against it, I try to hide from it, but it finds me where ever I turn. I cannot call him to ask him to help me with my computer. Or when my truck won't start. Or when I need money to pay the vet bills for my horse. Or to cry to him about how freaking hard living is right now. I cannot call him when I have a good day. Or when I have a bad day. I have to find new people to share my excitement and my sorrow with. As David says, "I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12.23)

Like Moses, my dad died at the top of a mountain. Well near the top, really. His death certificate says 200 feet below the summit of Long's Peak. Although we did not make the top together that day, I signed the register for both of us. And really, my dad's body did make it all the way, because they air-lifted him off in a helicopter that they landed on the summit.

Ok, I am hoping that writing this will help clear some fog so I can return to schoolwork. . .

the slave

I seem to have lost my momentum for blogging. Then again I feel a little like I've lost my momentum for life in general lately. I guess just keep getting back on the horse each time I fall off...

I loved The Slave. I thought it was tragic and real and beautiful. The end was my favorite part. I thought it really brought beauty into the tragedy. And I like that it took my viewpoint from the microcosm, the story of Jacob alone without Sarah in exile, to the macrocosm, they were together again in spirit and in a sense in physical body. Themes of fate and destiny drive the tale, and from turmoil and tragedy emerges peace. I was left with a feeling that there is more to this life than the earthly experience, and I felt comforted for Jacob that he was brought back to Sarah.

Job part 1.2

Job 1:13-19. Job loses one thing after another. This seems like a metaphor for the way suffering tends to happen in real life. They say bad things always come in threes. Usually, it seems, it is one bad thing after another for a certain period of time. And Job states that which I think is the central message of the book in 1:21 "...the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." And being the pious man modern Christians want to find in the book of Job, he "did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing" even after his wife tells him to do otherwise. Perhaps Job is in the first "stage" of grief: denial.

Interesting that Job's three friends just sit with him for a week. In some native American cultures, it is customary to go and just sit by someone who is grieving and this is thought to bring the greatest comfort. True, there is no right thing to say to someone who is grieving, but there certainly is a wrong thing to say!

Job, like a child, wishes for an easy out from his suffering. His solution: to never have been born! Who hasn't wished for a moment that we could just not deal with something? Well, by never existing in the first place, Job would not have had, nor would he have lost, and therefore he would not be suffering now. But he also would not be around to be relieved from suffering... Seems almost like a temper tantrum. I think this outburst make Job a more realistic character. If he really were the pious, uncomplaining character the traditionalists want him to be he would not be human.

We train our children and our dogs that they make a mistake and they are punished. If good, they are rewarded. So why wouldn't we expect that the universe operates in the same manner? Especially if we (I'm using we here as humanity; early humanity) view ourselves as the "children" of God. It is natural to question why bad things happen; and if we view ourselves as a child or servant of a higher power, why wouldn't we search and search our memory for something that we have done wrong. Perhaps this is why there are so many freaking rules in the Bible! They were trying so hard to be good and to therefore eliminate suffering. But alas, turns out, everyone suffers anyway...

Job asks, "What is my strength, that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient?/ Is my strength the strength of stones, or is my flesh bronze?/ In truth I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me" (Job 6:11-13). Aren't these the questions that we all ask when we are going through a hard time? I have questioned my own strength with dealing with the traumatic death of my father. And at times I wonder "what is the point of being strong?" I have also wondered when my strength will break; when enough is enough--similar to Job asking "is my strength the strength of stones?" I have wondered how much I am expected to be able to handle (expected by whom? society? God? the universe? I am not sure). Job here demonstrates his anger and frustration (stage 2 of the "grief cycle").

Job ch 7.

Stage 4 depression

Job says, "so I am allotted months of emptiness and nights of misery are apportioned to me./ When I lie down I say, 'when shall I rise?'/ But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn..." he goes on to lament: "my eye will never again see good." Job is depressed.

And it is refreshing to me that he goes on to say "Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul" (Job 7.11). In our society, we praise those who suffer gallantly in silence. We applaud a good attitude, even if the person is really feeling sad, angry, depressed; we expect cheerfulness and a "good" or "positive" attitude. Was it the same during the time that the book of Job was written? Or did this behavior come from a traditionalist view of the Book of Job, ignoring the center? Finally, someone who does not try to hold in all of his emotions that arise from suffering but allows them to pass through him. Job is human. He asks God to leave him alone! ("Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?" Job 7.19). I have felt the same way, as have we all when we have suffered. We reach a point where we just want to cry out "ENOUGH!". What more do you want me to handle? (again the "you" here does not necessarily mean god; it seems like a common question people ask of life when they are suffering). And those who believe are called to question God, just as Job does.

Also, Job blames God for his suffering; it seems we as humans always need a scapegoat; again, he demonstrates anger!

Zophar's line I like "And you will have confidence, because there is hope" (Job 11.18). For those who are suffering, hope brings us through. We have to hold on to the hope that today will be better; or manageable at least. We hope for a future day, hour, moment, when we will find joy instead of sorrow. Job responds to this only as a man who is truly suffering and in a deep depression would. He complains that he is laughingstock because "those at ease have contempt for misfortune" because his friends continue to blame Job for some wrong-doing that has brought upon this suffering. Job is angry and frustrated, and he seems to have given up. Key line of Job: "I am not inferior to you" he says to his friends. I am not inferior to you because I suffer.

"See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face./ THis will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him" ( Job 13.15-16). He has nothing left to lose, so he can lose nothing by questioning God. He has no more fear of God because all he can lose is his life (and we all die anyway).

"so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep" (14.12).

"My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me" (17.1). Grief often leads us to thoughts of death, perhaps suicide. It is too much to handle, so we must search for a reason to continue living...Job doesn't seem to have one.

And yet his friends continue to insist that he has done something wrong; that he somehow deserves his suffering (again--perhaps the reason for so many RULES? Then they figured out that even the most pious, perfectly well behaved man suffers, so they wrote Job...?)

Why the number three? Three parts to the Hebrew bible--> Three friends? I guess many religions have the concept of triple deity. I wonder though where this comes from. Can anyone enlighten me?

"If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!" (23.17) The God Job knows is dark and terrifying. He is the God of suffering. Who has the power to give but also the power to take away and therefore cause suffering. Job feels lonely and alone. Even his friends do not listen or understand him or where he is coming from.

Job 25.4 "How can one born of woman be pure?" wow.

Rebellious Elihu: "I am young in years and you are aged; therefore I was timid and afraid to declare my opinion to you" (32.6) So here we discover that old age does not bring wisdom, nor are the aged always correct in their thinking or their answers. He says something interesting at the end of the chapter: "For I do not know how to flatter--or my Maker would soon put an end to me!" (32.22). What does that mean? Thou shalt not flatter one another?

He says, "Surely God is great, and we do not know him;" (36.26). God is like the weather--powerful and impossible to understand. Yet there is a reason behind the storm, Elihu says. "Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice and he rumbling that comes from his mouth" (37.2). God is the weather, he is there to explain this dark and terrifying world of nature that makes men (humanity) feel so small and vulnerable. I would feel better too thinking I was not alone in this vast world, but someone was watching out for me. "God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend" (37.5) Agnosticism I think, should be at the base of all religions, for one principle of religion is faith, and is not the act of having faith a bit agnostic in itself?

Then God answers Job, much like I remember my parents answering me sometimes: "because I'm the Father, that's why...!"

God's answer to Job returns us again to the topic of knowledge. Job proclaims knowledge that he does not have and God is angry. God knows all, and because he is mortal, Job cannot and does not. Knowledge is power and control.

Questioning why we suffer is like questioning the ways of the world: why does a horse have a mane and leap; a majestic creature. Why did God create things the way they are. It is questioning why things happen in the wild the way that they do (most of God's answer deals with imagery of wild animals and nature). I looked up Behemoth: a creature found in the book of Job; perhaps the largest most powerful animal ever to exist (wikipedia). (I guess I don't know if this was talked about in class; I missed the last day of Job discussion). I was a little disappointed to reach the end of Job and find him so humbled. I liked how he spoke his mind and wailed out his anguish. And yet he seems to have found peace with the way things are and that I think is a gift. He has reached the last stage of grief: acceptance.

Job pt. 1.1

I did not mean to publish the last Job post yet. oops. I think the whole book of Job is a metaphor for this little nugget at the center of the human condition and experience. As my dad would have said: "sometimes you win some, sometimes you lose some." Meaning that we all have good days and bad days. We will all know happiness and joy, and we will all suffer. We will all know sickness and we will all know health. Life is a binary. You cannot have joy without suffering; it matters not whether you are a sinner or the utmost pious person. You will suffer. When you are suffering though, you search for justification or meaning. You think, why me? So I think it would be natural for a more primitive to question the motive of some sort of deity. As humans, we think too much, so we must question and agonize over our suffering. We run away from our negative emotions, we stuff them down, we try anything to avoid acceptance. Yet acceptance is what we ultimately move to, and only by moving straight through the heart of the grief we try so hard to avoid can we move beyond it. I think about animals and sometimes I think they are lucky. They grieve for one another. But they don't have the ability to think about avoiding their grief; so they simply grief and move through it and accept it.

Back to Job:I think Job is a metaphor for the person we all want to be when we are suffering. I don't want to be polite or cheerful or patient. I want to know what is happening to me, why is this happening? Anger arises and you want someone or something to blame (like a little kid, I want to throw a temper tantrum and somehow think this fit will make things go back to normal). I do not want to be resilient or pleasant. I think Job is very realistic because he is true to his actual feelings.

Ok this is difficult for me. I am reading about Jacob watching over sarah's corpse. And images of my Dad's corpse are crowding my head. I was afraid of his body. I was afraid to touch his corpse on the mountain because I was afraid to feel it's lifelessness. I do not understand how Jacob can sit alone in a room with Sarah's body for days and not be afraid of it. At the same time, I don't understand how I could be so afraid of my dad's body. I guess it has a lot to do with how traumatic and sudden his death was. One moment, it was a normal day and we were out in the mountains again. The next moment, I was alone, and he was reduced to "the body". Am I afraid of death? I do not feel afraid of death. I think being so close to it has made me realize how natural death is. Every single one of us will die. It is only a matter of time. So what then am I afraid of when I think of seeing my dad's corpse on the mountain? I think I was and am afraid of the sudden life-altering change that I was experiencing. A part of myself is still grasping for explanation of what happened to him, and to me up there. I asked my boyfriend, who lost his father to cancer years ago, if it ever feels real. He said that it doesn't, but that you learn to somehow accept this new and bizarre life.

The whole description of Jacob leaving Sarah's body is vivid and realistic. And true. I remember thinking about exactly the same things when I had to leave my dad's body on the mountain. I remember not wanting to touch him, because he had moments before been a man and I did not want to feel him as a cold, hard corpse. And at the same time, I wanted to hug him and to throw myself over his body and weep. And I wanted to kiss his lips or his cheek and say good-bye. But I, like Jacob, did not know how. "He wanted to say goodbye but he didn't know how" (248). I also remember thinking, like Jacob, that it was just a body now, an empty shell. So what did it matter? Likewise, Jacob wonders "...what difference did it make whether the corpse was eaten by mice or worms?" (249).

As I started down the mountain, I saw a raven flying low and near me--almost alongside me as I descended . And I wondered about my dad's soul, just as Jacob wonders: "Does she know what's happening to me...Or is her soul so distant that it is no longer connected with this world?" (249). I felt pulled from my dad's corpse in much the same way Jacob was, although I wasn't arrested. But I did have to go through all the logistics at the bottom of the mountain, and so I can somewhat relate to how Jacob must have felt with those men. I would have wanted to yell from the core of my being "Can't you people just leave me alone for a minute so I can digest what just happened to me? My whole world just caved in!" (note to self, try harder to eliminate 'just' from my vocab. very is another good one to nix...).

Well. I had to stop reading for today. Too much. Also kind of killed my mental state for doing any homework...

quote and frustration

"Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.

The religions of humanity should be a unifying force, for all the great religions reveal a basic unity in ethics. Whether it be Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism or Confucianism, all grow out of a sense of the sacredness of human life. This moral sensitivity to the sacredness of human personality -- the Commandments not to kill, not to hurt, not to put a stumbling block in the path of the blind, not to neglect the widow or the fatherless, not to exploit the servant or the worker -- all this can be found in the Bibles of humanity, in all the sacred books. All teach in substance: "Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you." There is, then, a basic unity among the great religions in the matter of ethics. True, there are religious philosophies which turn people away from the world, from the here and now, concentrating life-purposes on salvation for one's self or a mystic union with some supernatural reality. But most of the great religions agree on mercy, justice, love -- here on earth. And they agree that the great task is to move people from apathy, from an acceptance of the evils in life, to face the possibilities of the world, to make life sweet for one another instead of bitter. This is the unifying ethical task of all the religions -- yes, of all the philosophies of humankind. There is no need to force our own theological points of view upon one another or to insist that the moral life grows out of final, absolute authority."

-Algernon Black

My Aunt sent me the top part of this quote today in my e-mail and it fit. I have been so frustrated with people trying to control or convert one another...ugh. This frustration has come to the front with the reading of The Slave. I do not understand where humanity got this big idea that it is better to call another man a villain because he does not hold the same beliefs as you do. At the same time, exclusiveness makes sense in an evolutionary/animalistic view. Our guest speaker said that one of the greatest priorities for a people was preservation of the tribe (with pure bloodlines). It makes sense to me that it would be a natural tendency to try to preserve your own and drive out the competition-- more resources for me. We are, I think, inherently selfish by nature. And in the animal kingdom, males battle over their females all the time--preservation of your own. And yet, as thinking and creative creatures, why can't we get around this idea of exclusiveness? On a large scale, exclusiveness in religion causes violence, hate crimes, the very worst side of humanity. And it is everywhere on a small scale too--just step back into a middle school cafeteria at lunch time.

But it frustrates me. Why can't we just all get along? Why is it so difficult to communicate about our differences and find some common ground? We know we are capable of it--at least from time to time. Cannot we learn from our past as human race and all of the suffering that has unnecessarily occurred because we cannot reconcile our different interpretations of scripture? or God.

In The Slave, I have been frustrated with the Jewish people's habit of picking and choosing. I suppose that is what Singer is trying to illustrate to his readers. I am nearing the end of the book, and I will write more about it when i am actually finished. But one of the smaller parts in particular stands out to me. The way the women in Pilitz gossip and redicule Sarah. It has always seemed so controversial to me to watch supposedly "religious" people gossip and be so mean to one another. I have suffered in silence listening to gossip by many religious people I know. And I cannot believe how mean they can be to one another. I never understood it then, as a small person. Especially, I think, because my parents raised me without the influence of religion, watching this behavior tainted my ideas about what religion can offer a person. I do not think religion is the key to becoming a good person. I think we all know how to be good to one another; but why is treating each other well so difficult? that is what I would like to know. Religion left out of the question, why can't we just be nice to each other? Find love and compassion instead of anger, judgement, jealousy...