[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Thing
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 08:47:07 -0500
Beautiful post, David ... I'm keeping this one.
Julie Krueger
occasionally wowed.
On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:00 AM, David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> What's to be learned from understanding that the root of the word "heretic"
> is the Greek for being able to choose? Nothing more than a reminder that my
> friend Pamela Webb, though a conforming member of a congregation was, from
> Sunday to Friday a kind of heretic, someone who made choices not only for
> herself but even for those who didn't know that her choices were good for
> them.
>
> At death's door, she had the rabbi round. She was a skeptical and thus
> sound member of that congregation of thinkers, Havurah Shalom. She designed
> for them a beautiful place of worship from or out of a rat-infested old
> warehouse. And so the grateful rabbi blew the shofar for Rosh Hashonah, a
> new year in which she would barely set foot--tekiah, shevarim-teruah,
> tekiah--as she lay like one who is already dead. I'm told it stirred her,
> caused her to smile.
>
> An ending is not of course even the beginning of a poem, which is what now,
> in addition to myself,
> I am trying to compose.
>
> I'll try a different tack, examining the idea of heresy. You won't have
> met these, my doubts. They came to the funeral under duress. You, being a
> philosopher, of course are familiar with them generally, as a kind of thing,
> but yours are probably all grown up. Mine are silly, but still surprisingly
> powerful, like my daughter was as a toddler, sometimes known only by a tug
> on the hem of my jacket, but occasionally becoming Queen of the Universe, in
> a mood to have some planets moved.
>
> This doubt is a trivial one. I'm wondering whether I am really the right
> person to own and wear a Resistol self-conforming hat. I bought it at a
> sale in the Masonic Temple of Salt Lake City. It's a beautiful hat; there's
> no doubt about that. I quip that the issue is my self, what you
> philosophers might dub the essence of me, for like many other selves I
> believe it resists all conforming.
>
> But actually that's not it at all. I just can't see how to wear the hat.
> This is a plain fact, a tangle with the orthodoxy of dress. Of convention.
> I'm sure Pam could have helped, deciding in an instant, "It's sooo
> beautiful," or dismissing the purchase with a laugh.
>
> Finally, it is her heretic's laugh that will most be missed.
> That is that and this is this.
> Tekiah gedolah.
>
> http://www.biblicalgallery.com/images_templ/combination.au
>
>
> David Ritchie,
> Portland, Oregon
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
> digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
>
Other related posts:
