Friday 27 December 2013

L'hiver chrétien : Le Devoir / MARIO ROY La Presse

Publié le 27 décembre 2013 à 05h00 | Mis à jour à 05h00

L'hiver chrétien

MARIO ROY
La Presse
Le jour même de Noël, quatre explosions ont secoué un quartier chrétien de Bagdad pendant et immédiatement après une messe célébrée à l'église catholique chaldéenne Saint-Jean. La plus violente a tué des hommes, femmes et enfants qui sortaient du lieu de culte ainsi que des policiers chargés de les protéger. Au total, au moins 40 personnes sont mortes et une soixantaine ont été blessées.








Bien sûr, les tueries de masse sont devenues presque banales en Irak, qui aura connu en 2013 les pires violences depuis 2008.
Au cours des 12 derniers mois, au moins 6700 personnes ont été tuées, en effet. Ce sont dans la plupart des cas des victimes du conflit entre chiites et sunnites auquel participent les groupes extrémistes liés à Al-Qaïda.
Cependant, les chrétiens aussi sont touchés. Rappelons le carnage à la Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Sacré-Coeur de Bagdad, en 2010, qui avait coûté la vie à une cinquantaine de fidèles. Depuis ce temps en particulier, les chrétiens désertent l'Irak. Ils ne seraient plus qu'environ 300 000 aujourd'hui, quatre ou cinq fois moins que sous Saddam Hussein - et il est difficile de prétendre que ceux qui fuient souffrent d'islamophobie.
Mais où se réfugier?
Le territoire irakien est presque entièrement cerné par l'Iran, la Syrie et l'Arabie saoudite, qui comptent parmi les plus dangereusement hostiles à la chrétienté. Et des douze contrées où la foi chrétienne est la plus persécutée, onze sont officiellement musulmanes ou assaillies par l'islamisme radical (l'exception étant la Corée du Nord), selon l'ONG Portes ouvertes.
L'organisme craint qu'au Printemps arabe, ait succédé un «hiver chrétien».
***
Face à cela, il ne se trouve à peu près personne en Occident pour dénoncer la christianophobie. De sorte que celle-ci opprime et tue dans un silence d'autant plus assourdissant que «les chrétiens ne font pas partie d'un clan pouvant les défendre et ne sont pas susceptibles de réagir violemment», constate encore Portes ouvertes en donnant l'Irak en exemple.
De fait, ce silence prévaut même dans le cas des pires exactions.
Sait-on suffisamment que 75% des persécutions religieuses dans le monde sont dirigées contre des chrétiens? A-t-on beaucoup déploré le massacre de 1000 villageois chrétiens survenu il y a à peine quelques jours en Centrafrique? Ou, deux mois plus tôt, l'attentat commis par deux kamikazes aux portes d'une église pakistanaise et qui a fait 80 morts? Ou le tri entre musulmans et non-musulmans destinés à mourir lors de l'attentat sur un site gazier algérien, ou les dizaines de coptes tués en Égypte, ou le meurtre à la machette de 500 chrétiens nigérians, ou...
Dans un monde idéal, aucun dieu n'aurait le moindre pouvoir terrestre permettant qu'on tue en son nom. Mais nous ne vivons pas dans un monde idéal. Et les dieux les plus vengeurs semblent avoir encore l'éternité devant eux.

Sunday 1 December 2013

Journey of Faith By Tad Szulc ( NG- dec- 2001)

Re-post from National Geographic- dec-2001

Journey of Faith

By Tad Szulc

In the Old City of Jerusalem—flash point for an ancient religious and political conflict—medics evacuate a Palestinian man who was wounded in a recent clash with Israeli police. "Religious extremism has deepened the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but basically it is a struggle over land and national identity," says Philip Wilcox, the former U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem and the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Was there ever, thousands of years ago, a personage named Abraham whom more than three billion people—more than half of humanity—venerate as the father, patriarch, and spiritual ancestor of their faiths? Two billion of them are Christians, 1.2 billion are Muslims, and close to 15 million are Jews. And had Abraham verily spoken with God and celebrated with him covenants that became the foundations of these religions?

The outlines of Abraham's life appear first and most fully in Genesis, the first book of the holy scriptures of Judaism and the Christian Bible's Old Testament. Abraham also makes frequent appearances in other Jewish and Christian writings, including the Talmud and the New Testament, and he is mentioned time and again in the Koran, the holy book of Islam.

Christianity accepted Abraham as its patriarch almost at its own birth. Paul the Apostle wrote in the New Testament's Epistle to the Romans of that faith of our father Abraham.

And in the Magnificat in Luke, the Virgin Mary says the Lord helped his servant Israel in remembrance of mercy; as he spake to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for ever. The Prophet Muhammad, who taught the principles of Islam in the seventh century, similarly honored Abraham, whom the Koran recognizes as one of Islam's prophets: We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob. The Koran elevates Abraham's story to religious practice. Muslims are commanded to prefer the religion of Abraham the Hanif (monotheist), and the Koran says God took Abraham as Khalil, his "friend."

Yet when I asked scholars the question, "Was there ever a man called Abraham?" as often as not they were respectful (we can't disprove it) but convinced of the futility of trying to find a flesh-and-blood individual. "Abraham is beyond recovery," said Israel Finkelstein, a biblical archaeologist at Tel Aviv University. Without any proof of the patriarch's existence, the search for a historical Abraham is even more difficult than the search for a historical Jesus.

The important thing, we are told, is to assess the meaning and legacy of the ideas Abraham came to embody. He is most famously thought of as the founder of monotheism, although Genesis never credits him with this. The stories do, however, describe his hospitality and peaceableness and, most important, his faith and obedience to God.

Whatever scholars may say about the history of Abraham, Genesis provides an irresistible narrative. So I set out during the year 2000, following him through Genesis, keeping other scriptural writings and modern scholarship within reach. As Genesis tells it, Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees, journeyed to Haran, thence to Canaan and west to Egypt. He returned to Canaan, to Hebron, where he died and was buried in a cave next to his wife Sarah.

When might these wanderings have taken place? Islamic scholarship does not delve into Abraham's origins, and in the other two religions there is no firm consensus. Working with the lineages recorded in the Bible, some scholars place Abraham around 2100 b.c. A number of historians who have married biblical history with archaeology converge on the period from 2000 to 1500 b.c.; others argue that the most you can say is that an Abraham figure could have preceded the Israelite monarchy, which began about 1000 b.c.

For all his mystery, Abraham remains intensely alive today. In fact, we may even be witnessing a renaissance of his memory. Pope John Paul II—Abraham's ardent champion—earnestly hoped to make a pilgrimage early in the millennial year in honor of the patriarch, because Jews, Christians, and Muslims all regard themselves as Abraham's spiritual offspring. In 1994 the pope told me that going to Ur was his dream. "No visit to the lands of the Bible is possible without a start in Ur, where it all began," he said. But at the last moment, in late 1999, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, canceled the invitation.

The pontiff announced that instead he would hold in the Vatican "a spiritual commemoration of some of the key events of Abraham's experience." On February 23, 2000, Rome witnessed a huge Vatican auditorium being turned over to Abraham. When the pope lit branches on an altar recalling the site of Abraham's impending sacrifice of his son, smoke and incense filled the auditorium. For a moment 6,000 of us relived the story.

Why is Abraham so vividly alive today? Faith—Judaic, Christian, and Islamic—and his majestic yet elusive presence provide one answer. But the most eloquent explanation I've heard originated with Rabbi Menahem Froman, who lives near Hebron. He said, "For me Abraham is philosophy, Abraham is culture. Abraham may or may not be historical. Abraham is a message of loving kindness. Abraham is an idea. Abraham is everything. I don't need flesh and blood."

And Terah took Abram his son and Lot son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law . . . and he set out with them from Ur of the Chaldees toward the land of Canaan. (Genesis 11:31)

My pursuit of Abraham began with a 500-mile (805 kilometers) taxi ride from Amman, the capital of Jordan, to Baghdad, in Iraq. This was followed by a 200-mile (322 kilometers) dash southeast through a wasteland of sand and scrub grass. Crossing the Euphrates River, I passed through a half dozen military checkpoints, arriving at last in Ur, widely believed to be Abraham's birthplace. My first impression was one of utter disappointment: Ur was dusty and forlorn, with no discernible pulse. The only visual point of reference was the pyramid-like brick tower, or ziggurat, built in tribute to Sin, the moon god, around 2100 b.c.

A sharp east wind arose as Dheif Mushin guided me around the site of the ancient city, which covered about 120 acres (49 hectares). Founded sometime in the fifth millennium b.c., Ur was unearthed during the 1920s and '30s by an expedition under the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley. Along with the ziggurat the team found royal tombs and the remains of houses on city streets, which Woolley gave such incongruous names as Church Lane and Paternoster Row. The tombs held scores of stunning objects in gold, silver, and precious stones, confirming that Ur was at the heart of a rich and powerful civilization.

"This is the house," declared Mushin, a slim, blue-eyed man of 41. We had come to the corner of Church Lane and Broad Street and were staring into a shallow pit near the remains of the palace of Ur's glorious third dynasty, which lasted from 2100 to 2000 b.c. In the pit were a square stone floor and partly restored walls—the ruins of one of the largest houses Woolley excavated in Ur—dating from between 2000 and 1595 b.c. Woolley made much of his "discovery" of Abraham's birthplace, for which he was knighted. Although the possibility that Abraham had actually lived in this house was remote, I couldn't help but be excited by the thought.

"You must imagine Ur as it was," Piotr Michalowski, an authority on ancient Mesopotamia at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told me before I left for Iraq. "In the third millennium Ur was the metropolis of Mesopotamia—a port on the Euphrates very close to the Persian Gulf." The river brought rich alluvium down to Ur, creating a floodplain that gave generous sustenance to a population of perhaps 12,000 at the city's peak around 2100 b.c. Since then, said Michalowski, the coastline retreated a hundred miles (161 kilometers), leaving Ur behind—to the sands.

We owe our knowledge of the region to the Mesopotamians, who invented cuneiform writing around 3200 b.c. They produced hundreds of thousands of clay tablets and cylinders chronicling life; Ur alone has yielded thousands of texts just from the third dynasty.

"We have many archives from about the 19th century b.c. dealing with seagoing enterprises," said Michalowski, who is editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. "I see a thriving urban center, with bustling, narrow streets full of shops, where craftsmen were making everything from leather goods to precious ornaments. Ur was a major commercial center—one might think of Venice in later days." Traffic in river vessels and cattle carts and donkey caravans linked Ur and Mesopotamia with present-day Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan, as well as with Syria, Israel, and Egypt. Date palms grew in the countryside, and irrigation canals from the Euphrates and the Tigris, which then flowed closer to the city, made farming possible: barley, lentils, onions, garlic. Sheep and goats supplied ghee and wool.

It was beguiling to think of an Abraham growing up in Ur—I imagine a thin teenager of middle height, dressed in comfortable leather and wool, going to school, playing with his brothers, Nahor and Haran, and their friends. "Only a very small proportion of the population could read and write," said Michalowski. "If Abraham was literate, that would mean he had taken schooling at the house of a priest or bureaucrat who would have taught him a broad range of skills. He would have studied languages, arithmetic, and accounting, but above all else he would have been immersed in Sumerian literature. This would be the intellectual milieu he grew up in."

I see Abraham developing into a tough, compact young man with evident leadership skills. He may have worshiped Sin, the god of the moon and Ur's chief deity. "Mesopotamians worshiped a pantheon of deities, including major ones like Sin," said Michalowski, "but each person also had an additional, personal god." I wondered if, somehow, Abraham's reflections on the moon god had led him to the idea that the world is governed by one God.

In my quest for Abraham, divine inspiration would have helped. It was frustrating to find myself continuously suspended between different sets of legends—like virtual realities—with no facts to direct my investigation.

For the scriptural recorders the concept of time was so elastic that Abraham's family history strains credulity. In Genesis the entire story of Abraham's lineage is told in breathless, compressed language, starting with Noah and the flood, then proceeding with Noah's son Shem and Shem's brothers and their progeny. If this genealogy is taken literally, it would have covered centuries—ten generations from Noah to Abraham.

Given the vacuum of evidence, it is understandable that historians and archaeologists are locked in debate about the patriarch's existence and time of birth. Abraham Malamat, a spry septuagenarian who is emeritus professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, believes Abraham may have lived sometime between 2000 and 1800 b.c. "The Bible and the entire body of ancient Israelite history make this the most plausible time frame for Abraham," Malamat told me one snowy evening in his Jerusalem apartment. "We are possibly the closest people on the subject. A historian is closer than an archaeologist."

Israel Finkelstein, who is chairman of the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University, argues that written documents are not the only source for reconstructing history. "In the past 20 years archaeology has become the main tool for studying the earliest phases of ancient Israel. Archaeology is sometimes the only tool." There is no archaeological evidence, Finkelstein says, that camels—which are often described in Genesis as beasts of burden—were widely used for carrying goods until after 1000 b.c. He sees this as but one clue that the way of life reflected in the stories about Abraham is that of a much later time than the period of 2100 b.c., which some scholars arrived at by studying lineages in the Bible. "Whether there was a historical Abraham or not, I cannot say. But much of the reality behind Abraham in Genesis should probably be dated to the seventh century b.c."

Ur is another case in point. The writers of Genesis refer to it as Ur of the Chaldees, but scholars agree that the scriptures are confusing, because the Chaldees did not appear in Mesopotamia until early in the first millennium b.c. Finkelstein suggests this is further confirmation that the Genesis stories emerged at that time, as the people of Judah sought to build a national identity in a hostile world.

I asked Abraham Malamat about these confusions. "There are anachronisms like the camels—you might have a few anachronisms—but this doesn't destroy the overall picture." Rather, he says, these inconsistencies should be seen as later additions by biblical writers and therefore as hardly relevant for dating purposes.

Amid all the uncertainties, one thing seemed clear as I climbed the famous ziggurat in Ur with Dheif Mushin: To the ancients the three-tiered tower must have been a mighty symbol of the solidity of traditional beliefs. The great monument brought me closer to understanding the magnitude of Abraham's break from those beliefs. We can never know, but perhaps his early experiences in Ur prepared him for the spark of inspiration that carried him—and humanity—on a great journey.

In ancient Mesopotamia as in the Middle East today, armed conflict was frequent. Cuneiform texts record an attack by Elamite armies from present-day Iran around 2000 b.c., and a disruption of this kind may have contributed to Abraham's leaving Ur. Whatever the reason, Genesis tells us that he left toward the land of Canaan with Terah, Sarah, and his nephew, Lot, and they came to Haran and settled there.

"Settling and starting off again, waging war and making peace, fighting battles and concluding treaties"—this was to be the basic rhythm of Abraham's life, writes Karl-Josef Kuschel, a theology professor at Germany's University of Täbingen. The 600-mile (966 kilometers) journey from Ur must have taken the family and their caravan of donkeys several months as they progressed northward up the Euphrates Valley to Haran. The city lay on the banks of the Balikh River at the crossroads of important trade routes in the Fertile Crescent. Like Ur, it was a major center of worship of the moon god, Sin.

In Haran, Abraham would have found himself in the midst of a clamorous community of Amorites, Hurrians, and other ethnic groups. Haran today is a dusty Turkish village of around 500 people living in beehive-shaped clay houses, joined by arches to increase the shade and air circulation. Numerous archaeological excavations show that builders in ancient times also sought, by using thick walls and wide-open yards, to moderate the effects of temperatures that can exceed 120°F.

With Aydin Kudu, a young guide from Istanbul, I visited the remains of a house on a small hill in the center of Haran, where, according to local legend, Abraham lived. Judging from its configuration, this spacious construction had belonged to a large and prosperous family. Sitting on a low wall, Aydin and I speculated that Abraham's family must have been quite affluent during the years they lived in Haran. After Terah, his father, died, Abraham, as paterfamilias, would have supervised the family's flocks, traded wool for wheat with farmers, and recruited local people for his growing clan. Seeing the multitude of sheep around Haran, it struck me that the scene today was probably not very different from that in Abraham's time.

Later, I tried to extract at least one new Abrahamic legend out of Suleyman Sanäar, a village elder. Sanäar, a dignified 63-year-old Muslim with an impressive white beard, had invited me to his house for ceremonial tea and pita bread with a few friends. But all I got was the suggestion that a king of the region early in the second millennium b.c. was Abraham's uncle. Such stories exist to please visitors, small groups of whom—mainly Christians—come by bus every week to search for Abraham's heritage.

If archaeology denies us any direct evidence of Abraham, Terah's name appears tantalizingly in cuneiform tablets. Ömer Faruk Harman of Marmara University in Istanbul cautions that "Terah" almost certainly is not a personal name. It is probably a clan name or the name of a town in extreme northern Syria or, more likely, southeastern Turkey, not far from Haran. Still, Abraham was a son of Terah, which may establish the connection between Abraham and Haran.

While in Haran I made a side trip to a place that claims its own intimate connection with the patriarch. Şanliurfa (known as Urfa until World War I) is a pleasant, relaxed city of nearly half a million an hour's drive away. Some scholars believe that because Şanliurfa is so much closer to Haran than Ur, it is the more logical candidate for Abraham's birthplace. Either way, paternity of Abraham is a boon to tourism, and the city has instituted annual Abraham festivals that swell city coffers.

Not surprisingly, Şanliurfa is rife with legends about Abraham. One says he was born in a cave at the foot of a rock outcrop in the southern part of the city. According to this tale Abraham aged a month on the first day after his birth and turned 12 on his first birthday. His faith in a single God led him to smash figures of deities and idols. Furious, King Nimrod ordered Abraham burned, but a huge pool of water materialized, dousing the fire, and flaming logs turned into fierce fish that saved Abraham. A few steps from the cave two large pools—Halil üÖr Rahman and Aynzeliha—symbolize the miracle. They are stocked with a plethora of fat carp that are believed to be sacred: He who eats Abraham's carp will be struck blind.

Many of Şanliurfa's pilgrims come from Iran, and buses arrive a few times a week with Muslim worshipers, chiefly women, their heads covered with scarves. Worshipers enter the cave through a small mosque with a minaret, spend a few minutes inside praying, then leave. Some pray outside at the low stone wall around the mosque, bowing over it or prostrating themselves on the ground. The afternoon of my visit, a lone elderly woman in a black head scarf was praying at the wall as lightning flashed overhead.

Wherever Abraham was born—Şanliurfa or Ur or somewhere else—it was in Haran, Genesis says, that he received the words that established his obedient relationship with God. Once again, he would have to leave his home. And the Lord said to Abram, "Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father's house to the land I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing."

As Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, writes, "Abram, a mere figure in a notation of genealogy and migration... becomes an individual character...when he is here addressed by God."

The only time I came close to glimpsing the patriarch as an individual was in Jerusalem, when Abraham Malamat showed me a book containing reproductions of a fresco painted in an ancient palace in Mari, Syria, about 200 miles (322 kilometers) southeast of Haran. Dating from the early second millennium b.c., which Malamat believes is the right period for Abraham, the palace—along with tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets—was excavated by a French expedition starting in 1933.

What I saw was a rather unheroic-looking man with brownish skin and a small black beard. He is wearing a black cap with a white headband, and the two-horned head of a sacrificial bull reposes by his lap. "His face is characteristic of the western Semitic type," Malamat said. "So are the cap and the bull. I think it most likely that Abraham descended from western Semitic nomadic tribes, probably from Syria or southern Mesopotamia.

"This picture in my opinion comes close to Abraham," Malamat continued. "Maybe he's a concept, but his figure makes sense. There are pictures on the Mari walls, figures that may be close to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

It was the old conundrum: Without clear proof, the only thing you can ever say about Abraham is: "In my opinion."

Abram being seventy-five years old when he left Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew and all the goods they had gotten . . . and they set out on the way to the land of Canaan, and they came to the land of Canaan.

As best as can be reconstructed from imprecise maps of the ancient Fertile Crescent, Abraham traveled southwest from Haran across Syria, past Damascus. A large body of retainers would have accompanied him. Abraham's crossing into Canaan gave me the sensation that I was emerging from a fog and beginning to see the historical landscape. Not only is Genesis a more detailed road map from this point on—it names Canaan and specific locations there—but history itself is reasonably explicit about the region and the people Abraham would have encountered in the Promised Land.

Flowing with milk and honey, as the Bible describes it, Canaan stretched roughly from Syria in the north to Egypt in the south. Canaanites produced an unusual purple dye made from shellfish, so much so that the region came to be called "the land of purple." They were active traders—one meaning of "Canaanite" was "merchant"—and as such were subject to the influences of their flanking civilizations, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Around the time Abraham may have arrived, Mesopotamia was an especially important source of goods, people, and ideas.

And Abram crossed through the land to the site of Shechem, to the Terebinth of the Oracle, proclaims Genesis. Shechem is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, dating from the beginning of the second millennium b.c. Situated west of the Jordan River, it is today's Nablus, a bustling city of 130,000 under the control of the Palestinian Authority. In Shechem, God appeared to Abraham, saying, "To your seed I will give this land." Genesis gives no response from Abraham but notes that he built an altar to the Lord.

As to Canaanite religion, Abraham would have encountered a fertility-centered religion with seasonal festivals and animal sacrifices. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Bible portrays the Canaanites as idol worshipers who held human sacrifices and engaged in deviant sex, practices seen as a threat to an emerging monotheism, but neither archaeology nor Canaanite texts support this description of the Canaanites.

In Nablus I met up with Avner Goren, an archaeologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of biblical history. We went looking for evidence of Abraham's Shechem but found nothing that could be tied to the patriarch. Everything seemed harmonious while we were there, but before long lethal battles would erupt between Palestinians and Israelis. Automatic arms' fire would fill the air around the tomb thought to be that of the Prophet Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson. Canaan is still a battlefield, as it has been on and off for thousands of years.

Genesis says nothing about how long Abraham remained in Shechem. All we learn is that from there he pulled up his stakes. . .for the high country east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east, and he built there an altar to the Lord, and he invoked the name of the Lord. Some scholars believe that since Bethel was a Canaanite cultic site, the Bible, by directly connecting Abraham to it, provided a way for the Hebrews to claim it as their own.

From Bethel, the modern Arab town of Baytin, Abraham journeyed south to the Negev desert. It was mainly downhill traveling, over brushland and into the barrens. Irrigation makes the Negev bloom today, but in Abraham's time a dry, rocky expanse filled the landscape between Beersheba and the Gulf of Aqaba. To make matters worse, an especially severe drought struck the Negev soon after his arrival, forcing him to move again. Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was grave in the land. The attraction of Egypt was the Nile and its extravagantly fertile delta.

At this point Abraham must have been questioning God's promises that he would give him a child and a homeland. He was still childless, and after reaching Canaan, he had been uprooted yet again.

One spring morning I drove from Cairo to Avaris, an archaeological site at Tell el Daba, where Abraham may have established himself. The area produces rice, corn, cotton, and, during the spring months, wheat. I was cordially received by Manfred Bietak, chairman of the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Vienna, who is leading the excavation of the site.

"Absolutely blank," was his immediate reply when I asked what the Egyptian historical sources say about Abraham. "As far as the Egyptians are concerned," he said, "it's as if Abraham never set foot in the delta."

The timing of Abraham's arrival in the delta is as indeterminate as where he settled. Some scholars believe that an Abraham figure could have come to Egypt at the time of the Hyksos (an Egyptian word meaning "foreign rulers") in the first half of the second millennium b.c., but most argue he would have been there much earlier.

Whoever the pharaoh was during Abraham's stay in Egypt, he was implicated in Abraham's life in the most intimate way. As Abraham approached the Egyptian border, he said to Sarai his wife, "Look, I know you are a beautiful woman, and so when the Egyptians see you and say, 'She's his wife,' they will kill me while you they will let live. Say, please, that you are my sister, so that it will go well with me on your count and I shall stay alive because of you."

Genesis continues, and Pharaoh's courtiers saw her and praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. That Sarah was no longer a young woman did not seem to have discouraged the pharaoh.

Genesis offers no moral judgments on this peculiar turn of events, nor does it go into any other aspect of Abraham's life when Sarah was presumably in the pharaoh's harem. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, a compilation of largely Roman Catholic biblical studies, suggests that Abraham's deception calls into question his faith that God would protect him and fulfill the promise that, To your seed I will give this land. The JPS Torah Commentary, a Jewish analysis, makes the point that Abraham would have erred if he had expected God to work a miracle to get him out of this fix. As it turned out, God did intervene. And the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his household with terrible plagues because of Sarai the wife of Abram.

The lack of detail about Abraham's behavior is a frustrating example of the gaps spawned by the transformation of oral traditions into the written stories of Genesis. If Abraham's deception is open to interpretation, the pharaoh's reaction was abundantly clear. And Pharaoh summoned Abram and said, "What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, 'She's my sister,' so that I took her to me as wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out!"

Abraham was a rich man when he left Egypt—heavily laden with cattle, with silver and gold. By now I see him, consciously or not, beginning to lay the foundation for the establishment of monotheistic religion. To understand Abraham's connection with monotheism, says James Kugel of Harvard University, you have to look beyond Genesis itself, which says nothing directly about it. "Centuries and centuries after Abraham might have lived, there were interpreters who read his story in Genesis. These interpreters lived from around the third century b.c. on. When they got to chapter 12, they said, 'Oh, why does God start speaking to Abraham and promise him all these wonderful things, like making him a great nation?' Eventually they went to the Book of Joshua, where it says that Abraham's family all worshiped other gods." Kugel says the interpreters concluded that Abraham was the only one who didn't worship these other gods.

In numerous later works—including the Book of Jubilees (found with the Dead Sea Scrolls), the New Testament, early Christian writings, and the Koran—Abraham is presented as a model of faith and pure monotheism. The idea caught on and became fixed.

After returning to Canaan, Abraham settled a land dispute between his herdsmen and those of his nephew, Lot, who had left Egypt with him. He did this not by fighting but by letting the younger man decide. Lot picked the verdant valley of the Jordan River down to the southernmost shore of the Dead Sea, where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah stood. Abraham—known ever more as a peacemaker—was content to remain among the mountains and deserts of the Promised Land, making his temporary home under terebinth trees in Mamre.

By now God had appeared to Abraham, reconfirming his gift of the Promised Land. "Raise your eyes and look out from the place where you are to the north and the south and the east and the west, for all the land you see, to you I will give it and to your seed forever. . . . Rise, walk about the land through its length and its breadth, for to you I will give it."

In the ancient Middle East, walking around a property was a ritual for taking final possession of a piece of land. Genesis makes no mention that Abraham fulfilled God's order to walk about the land. But the Genesis Apocryphon, an interpretive text found in the 1940s among the Dead Sea Scrolls, fills in this blank, describing at length a journey Abraham made around the Promised Land.

To show his gratitude to God, Abraham built an altar in Hebron, which lies in a hollow in the mountains of Judah some 15 miles (24 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem. Although Israel largely withdrew its military forces from the overwhelmingly Arab city in January 1997 as part of the peace process with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government kept control of a strip including a small Jewish neighborhood along al Shuhada Street in the center of the old town. Some 450 Jews live on al Shuhada Street (with 210,000 Arabs around them), which was closed to Arab traffic and guarded at either end by Israeli soldiers. I found it eerie driving along the silent, empty street, with the storefronts shuttered.

In Hebron, Abraham suddenly found himself an active military commander. An emissary brought him word that Lot had been captured in Sodom by four warmongering kings. Genesis, which at times is very precise, recounts that Abraham marshaled 318 of his retainers and struck the enemy at night, chasing them north past Damascus in Syria and freeing Lot.

Returning in triumph, Abraham reached Salem—the town that most likely became Jerusalem, sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It may have been there that he had a "conversation" with God in which he expressed his doubts about the divine promises. As Robert Alter of UC Berkeley points out, "This first speech to God reveals a hitherto unglimpsed human dimension of Abram." God's promise of a very great reward prompted Abraham to complain about what he thought had been the Lord's failure to fulfill earlier pledges. He said, "O my Master, Lord, what can You give me when I am going to my end childless. . . . to me you have given no seed."

God replied, "Look up to the heavens and count the stars. . . . So shall be your seed."

On that day, Genesis says, God made a covenant with Abraham: "To your seed I have given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates."

From Salem, Abraham went to Mamre and Hebron, where he now spent most of his time. I visualize him as a grand old man, sitting under a tree, dispensing wisdom, overseeing the family finances, and, of course, talking with God.

At this point Genesis records an event that would profoundly influence the course of world history. In the ancient Middle East wives who could not bear children encouraged their husbands to procreate with slaves or concubines. Thus Sarah, who was barren, convinced Abraham to have a child with Hagar, an Egyptian slave who had probably stayed with them since the clan's expulsion by the pharaoh.

The birth of Ishmael, Abraham's first son, foreshadowed the emergence in Arabia in the seventh century a.d. of a new religion—Islam—under the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad. The Koran calls Abraham's first son an apostle (and) a prophet ... He was most acceptable in the sight of his Lord. Ishmael's pedigree lent legitimacy to the new faith, but the Koran never mentions Hagar's name.

Abraham first, then Ishmael, are the perfect models of piety for Muslims. Abraham's name appears in 25 of the 114 chapters of the Koran, and to this day Ibrahim and Ismail are common first names among Muslims. "The Koran explains that all true revelations come from God," says John Voll, professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. "It is the record of the divine revelation, which is shared by all the scriptures."

There is no doubt that Muhammad and his inner circle of disciples believed in Abraham as the founder of their faith. The Koran orders Muslims to follow the religion of Abraham. Abraham was not a Jew nor yet a Christian; but he was true in Faith, . . . and he joined not gods with God.

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570. There he was surrounded by Jewish and Christian communities—although Muslims do not believe that these faiths influenced the revelation of Islam. In 622 Muhammad moved to Medina, where his following quickly grew. He was recognized as the last in a series of prophets, including Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, all of whom appear, redefined, in the Holy Book of Islam.

The Koran reports that Abraham and Isma'il raised the foundations of the House. The "house" is the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's holiest shrine. One of the four corners of this small rectangular structure is a sacred black stone that is a remnant of the original building. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, when Muslims from all over the world circle the Kaaba, reinforces the central role of Abraham and Ishmael in the Islamic faith.

The Koran does not give particulars about the birth of Ishmael, but Genesis goes into great detail. It reports that after Hagar became pregnant, Sarah resented her. She complained to Abraham that when the Egyptian "saw she had conceived, I became slight in her eyes," and she went on harassing the girl. Abraham replied meekly, "Look, your slavegirl is in your hands. Do to her whatever you think right."

Consequently Hagar fled from Sarah into the desert wilderness. Sarah's motivations are blurred, but what intrigues Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is that she acted independently of Abraham when circumstances required. As the rabbi put it, Sarah and Abraham were as much partners as a married couple, and "she would allow Hagar to be an instrument of procreation but would not allow her the honor and privilege of being Abraham's beloved wife-companion." By law, Steinsaltz said, "women were quite independent. They had the right to own property, and they had standing. Sarah had a say, in one way or another." I asked him if this makes Sarah the first great feminist. "Yes," the rabbi shot back.

God, for his part, took another view of the situation. An angel intercepted Hagar when, apparently heading home to Egypt, pregnant, she stopped at a spring near Kadesh in the Negev. Hagar told the messenger she was fleeing from Sarah, but the angel ordered her to "return to your mistress and suffer harassment at her hand." As a consolation the angel said to Hagar, "Look, you have conceived and will bear a son and you will call his name Ishmael for the Lord has heeded your suffering." Hagar obeyed. Ishmael (whose name in Hebrew means "God has heard") was born. Abraham was said to be 86 at the time.

Thirteen years after Ishmael's birth the 99-year-old Abraham was summoned by God, who made explicit his choice of Abraham as the father to a multitude of nations. To symbolize the significance of this new, exalted status, God changed his name from Abram to Abraham. God also changed the name of his wife, Sarai, to Sarah. Then God announced that "I will also give you from her a son," and upon hearing this, Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed, saying to himself, "To a hundred-year-old will a child be born, will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?"

In their next meeting, God appeared to Abraham when he was sitting outside his tent. Looking up, Abraham saw three travelers among the trees. In a customary display of hospitality to strangers, he fetched water to wash their feet and treated the visitors to curds and milk and a calf he had cooked. Waiting on them as they ate (the scene depicted in Rembrandt's famous etching "Abraham Entertaining the Angels," owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), he heard God repeat the promise that Sarah would have a son. Sarah, who had been listening from inside the tent, laughed inwardly, expressing her doubts. "After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?...Shall I really give birth, old as I am?"

After playing host at Mamre, Abraham moved from Hebron back to Beersheba. Within a year his son Isaac ("he who laughs" in Hebrew) was born. Abraham circumcised him on the eighth day, in keeping with God's order that every male be circumcised.

Genesis then speaks of a second expulsion of Hagar. Sarah demanded this after observing the much older Ishmael playing and laughing with Isaac; she wanted to assure Isaac's inheritance, even though he was not the firstborn. Now God took Sarah's side, ordering Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. He told him that "through Isaac shall your seed be acclaimed. But the slavegirl's son, too, I will make a nation, for he is your seed."

Hagar and her son were banished to the desert, but they were not alone. God provided for them, giving them a well of water when Hagar had lost all hope. Ishmael, Genesis says, grew up and dwelled in the wilderness, and he became a seasoned bowman. The Bible reveals little else except that his mother procured him an Egyptian wife and he helped bury his father. This is the last mention of Hagar. Muslim tradition holds that mother and son stayed together in Mecca, and they are said to be buried in a common grave—Hijr Ismail—next to the Kaaba.

Accompanied by Avner Goren, I followed Abraham to Beersheba. When we stopped at one Bedouin settlement, children rushed forward to beg: for water, not money. Abraham, too, needed water, and he dug a well in Beersheba, hoping to live in peace with the local inhabitants. He also planted a tamarisk tree, a symbol of plenty, invoking the name of the Lord, everlasting God. At this stage I envision Abraham as a full-time proselytizer and one-God activist.

The day of our visit to Beersheba was unusually raw; the Negev had just had more than half a foot of snow—one of the heaviest snowfalls in 50 years—and the whitened palm trees looked festive and beautiful. Beersheba was the patriarch's home for a number of years. A well said to be the one dug by Abraham still exists in the center of town, just off busy Hebron Road. (But it no longer provides water.)

Recognizing the city's spiritual importance, in 1979 Anwar Sadat, then president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, came to Beersheba to begin peace negotiations between their two nations. But as Goren and I stood in the snow at Abraham's well, three Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter-bombers roared overhead. The message was plain: The Middle East is still far from real peace. Achieving it, repairing Abraham's fractured spiritual legacy, will demand an extreme act of faith from Palestinians and Israelis, whose common heritage is now a matter of scientific proof. A recent study of the DNA of male Jews and Middle Eastern Arabs—among them Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese—shows that they share a common set of ancestors.

The ultimate test of Abraham's faith in the only God appears to have arisen in Beersheba, when God ordered Abraham to take Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains.

When Abraham and Isaac reached their destination—which Jewish and Christian tradition holds to have been the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site today of the Dome of the Rock shrine—the patriarch erected an altar. He bound Isaac and placed him on a pile of wood on the altar. But when Abraham raised the cleaver to kill his son, God's messenger called out from the heavens, "Do not reach out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God." A ram, caught by its horns in a nearby thicket, was presented as a burnt offering instead of Isaac.

In the Koran, God similarly tests Abraham's faith by ordering the sacrifice of his son, but the son and the place are not named. In sura, or chapter, 37:102, 112 Abraham said, "O my son! I see in vision that I offer thee in sacrifice." When Abraham shows his willingness to comply with God, he is promised another son, Isaac. And We gave him the good news of Isaac—a prophet,—one of the Righteous. Most Muslims therefore believe that Ishmael was the one to be sacrificed and that this test occurred in or near Mecca.

In Genesis, Abraham returned to Beersheba. Sarah died in Qiryat Arba, near Hebron, at the age of 127. Abraham buried her in the Cave of Machpelah, in a tomb he bought for 400 silver shekels. He then dispatched a servant to the city of Nahor in northern Mesopotamia, near Haran, to find a wife for Isaac. Rebekah was the chosen woman. Back in Hebron again, Abraham had to be the busiest old man in all of Canaan. He found himself a new wife—a woman named Keturah, who gave him six children.

Abraham died at the ripe old age of 175. Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the Machpelah cave next to Sarah.

In a sense Abraham never died. On the highest religious level Abraham and his monotheism was a model for Jesus and his early Christian disciples and, much later, Muhammad and his Muslim followers. Today he still stands out as a unique spiritual figure, transcending the frontiers of great religions. However questionable the accuracy of the scriptures, however thin the archaeological and historical evidence, Jews, Christians, and Muslims still revere him as the patriarch.

One of the most touching expressions of devotion to Abraham I encountered on my travels was a short poem, "Hymn to the Blessing of Abraham," given to me at Istanbul Technical University. It was written by a Muslim, Cengizhan Mutlu, and tells of King Nimrod, who plotted to kill Abraham for his monotheism. My Turkish guide, Aydin Kudu, provided an impromptu translation.

Idol made of pure gold

Gives no hope, no food.

Nimrod doesn't comprehend this.

Wood burns (for the stake),

Smoke reaches the sky,

Ibrahim is thrown into the fire.

He feels no pain, he doesn't groan.

He says, "My God will save me."

Two angels had said it rightly.

Embers turn into ashes,

Sparkles turn into roses.

"My God will save me." In these five simple words is the essence of Abraham and his astonishing endeavors. They spell out his fundamental belief that there is one God. That belief changed the world forever.

Monday 16 September 2013

O Saint François, stigmatisé de l’Alverne : JEAN PAUL II

O Saint François, stigmatisé de l’Alverne,
Le monde a la nostalgie de toi
Comme icône de Jésus Crucifié.
Il a besoin de ton coeur ouvert
vers Dieu et vers l’homme,
de tes pieds nus et blessés,
de tes mains transpercées et implorantes.
Il a la nostalgie de ta voix si faible,
Mais forte de la puissance de l’Évangile.
Aide, François, les hommes d’aujourd’hui
a reconnaître le mal du péché
et à en rechercher la purification dans la pénitence.
Aide-les à se libérer des ces mêmes structures de péché,
Qui oppriment la société contemporaine.
Ravive dans la conscience de ceux qui gouvernent
L’urgence de la paix entre les nations et parmi les peuples.
Infuse chez les jeunes ta fraîcheur de vie,
Capable de s’opposer aux tentations
des multiples cultures de mort.
Aux offensés par tout type de méchanceté,
communique, François, ta joie de savoir pardonner.
À tous les crucifiés de la souffrance,
De la faim et de la guerre rouvre les portes de l’espérance.
Amen.
(JEAN PAUL II, Sanctuaire de l’Alverne 17 septembre 1993).

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Diasporas: Mapping migration

Nov 17th 2011, 14:54 by The Economist online

Where are the world's biggest Chinese and Indian immigrant communities?

MORE Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent. Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia. But today their size (if migrants were a nation, they would be the world's fifth-largest) and the ease of staying in touch with those at home are making them matter much more. No other social networks offer the same global reach—and shrewd firms are taking notice. Our map highlights the world's top 20 destinations for Chinese and Indian migrants.


The joy of walking : A path through time immemorial


http://www.economist.com/node/21541720

A trip along the Dales Way shows how Britain balances walkers’ rights with property rights
Dec 17th 2011 | ILKLEY |From the print edition


PACKHORSES first crossed the Old Bridge in Ilkley in 1675, probably bringing wool to market from the sheep farms that still dot the Yorkshire Dales. The modern traveller will approach the bridge across the river Wharfe with a different purpose. A sign at its foot heralds the start of the Dales Way, a 76-mile (122-kilometre) trek through some of the prettiest parts of England.

The intrepid hiker who makes the full trip will walk on every kind of surface: main roads, narrow rocky paths that are slippery when wet (as this correspondent can painfully attest), alleys overgrown with weeds, and fields where mud has merged with sheep and cow dung to form a brown ooze the colour of oxtail soup. He will pass through tiny villages with quintessential Yorkshire names like Hubberholme and Yockenthwaite and cross (via an overhead walkway) the six lanes of the M6 motorway that threads from Birmingham to Carlisle. And he will observe the English at play in all kinds of weather—teenage boys enjoying a refreshing swim, trout fishermen standing thigh-high in the current, elderly couples accompanied by their dogs and even one man taking his falcon for a walk.

The joys of walking have long inspired poets and writers. Some have spoken of the sense of freedom that comes from leaving the city behind; the delicious choices offered by forked paths that lead through deep woods or over hilltops. In the “Song of the Open Road”, Walt Whitman wrote:


Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.



Walking seems to set the mind free for contemplation. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” The Welsh writer Lloyd Jones, who was inspired to produce his first novel by a 1,000-mile trek round his homeland, said that “The moving landscape provides an absorbing diversion which frees the mind and gives us a fresh viewpoint, and we're most at ease with the world when we walk because everything is happening at a manageable pace.”

Some politicians like the ability to ponder the great issues of state as they plod. William Gladstone, a Victorian prime minister and moralist, was an enthusiastic daily walker, opening a route up Mount Snowdon at the age of 83. While mired in the euro zone's financial woes this year, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, chose to spend her summer holiday walking in the south Tyrol (although the trip didn't inspire any immediate solutions to the problem).


In Europe, now that national borders have withered away, the open road is longer. Paths criss-cross the continent from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. Lis Nielsen of the European Ramblers' Association recounts how she met a young Slovenian while walking in her native Denmark. He had grown up in a village marked by a sign for the E6 hiking trail that runs from Finland to the Aegean. He dreamed of following the route to Denmark and saved up all his annual holiday entitlement so he could do so.

America has a huge number of hiking routes, nearly all on public land. The Appalachian Trail, which follows the eponymous mountains from Georgia to Maine, is almost 2,200 miles long (some hikers claim that there is little to see but trees). Yosemite national park in California includes over 800 miles of trails.

Some 56m Americans went hiking in 2010, according to a survey by the Outdoor Industry Foundation. The number of people who went backpacking overnight rose by 18% between 2006 and 2010. It is a cheap activity, well-suited to an era of economic malaise. A survey of hikers in America's Washington state found that, on average, they each spent just $409 a year on their hobby.

Broadly speaking, the countries that offer the most liberal rights to walkers are those with the most free space. In Norway and Sweden, where the national character is steeped in stoicism and fresh air, there is a general assumption in favour of access. But the pattern does not always hold. In the thinly populated American West, hikers sometimes find it necessary to cross private land in order to link between national and state parks. They can do so only if landowners are friendly: the idea of a “right to roam”—enacted in Britain in 2000—would strike most Americans as very strange.

Recreational walking is by far the most popular leisure activity in Britain: 16% of Britons do it each week, according to the government, compared with 11% who go to the gym. Perhaps this derives from the old connection between rural pursuits and breeding: Victorian businessmen who made good hastened to buy a country estate. Perhaps the claustrophobia caused by living in the most densely populated large country in Europe drives Britons to seek out open spaces at the weekends. Or perhaps it is down to the British love of dogs, who trot behind many an occasional walker.

But while Britons have itchy feet, they are also very attached to the notion that their homes are their castles. So there is a struggle—albeit a generally well-mannered one—between walkers' rights and property rights.

Walking since time immemorial

The 4,000 or so people who annually complete the Dales Way are tackling just one of the 720 long-distance trails that traverse the British Isles. The longest, the South West Coast path, is 630 miles long, taking in the coast of Devon and Cornwall; it is also one of the easiest to navigate as long as travellers follow a simple rule (start in Minehead and keep the sea on your right). New long-distance paths are added every year, largely by linking existing paths together; there were just 150 national trails back in 1980. The total British network covers close to 150,000 miles; a lot for a small group of islands.

These treks are part of a grand British tradition; the right to walk over private land. This right is not unlimited. The route has to have been established by custom. Some of the paths were built by the Romans; others date back to “time immemorial”, a date established by legal convention to be the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189-1199).

Paths were originally designed for practical, rather than leisure, use. In Scotland broad paths were built after the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th century, as a way of allowing English soldiers to move quickly round the rugged landscape. Medieval peasants needed to cross feudal estates to get to market. Some paths disappeared when common land was enclosed in the 18th century but walkers fought back: in 1826, the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths was formed with the aim of taking a local landowner to court.

A legal principle dubbed “once a highway, always a highway” means that a right of way, once established, is hard to abolish. That is why English hikers can find themselves wandering through a cornfield, or facing the suspicious gaze of a sheep; activities that in America might attract the attention of an angry landowner with a shotgun. The Dales Way takes the hiker past the kitchen windows of several farms and down private driveways; on this correspondent's trek, an enterprising schoolboy had set up a stall, complete with honesty box, to sell drinks to parched walkers.

A rough code binds both parties. Landowners are not supposed to block footpaths, or leave hikers at the mercy of an angry bull; walkers are supposed to shut gates, leave no litter and keep their dogs under control. The designated highway authority (usually the local council) is responsible for maintaining the route and, as a result, owns the physical ground of the path, “to the depth of two spades” according to legal custom.

These hiking rights were established through classic English compromise. In 1932, 400-500 ramblers walked across a stretch of grouse moor in Derbyshire in the face of robust opposition. Gamekeepers sought to repel the invasion, lest the hikers scare away the birds that their employers sought to shoot. Some of the trespassers were sent to jail. In those days, hiking was a cheap way for factory workers to escape from their satanic mills at weekends, so the pastime was imbued with proletarian virtue. Ministers in the post-war Labour government of 1945-51 held an annual ramble in the Pennines. That government duly passed the National Parks and Access to Countryside Act, enacting walkers' rights and creating much-loved parks in, for instance, the Lake District and Snowdonia. Another Labour government passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000 that gave walkers Nordic-style rights to roam across open land like moors and mountains.
Hiking was a cheap way for factory hands to escape from satanic mills at weekends

Such acts have a difficult balance to strike. Even those who guard the right to roam most jealously would object if passers-by wandered through their back gardens. Some celebrities, such as Madonna, have argued that walkers represent a threat to their personal security and demanded restrictions on access rights. One landowner, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, blocked a path through his land with barbed wire and even a padlocked gate. The Ramblers' Association took him to court and won.

But such cases are rare. The most alarming hazard this correspondent came across was a sign implying the presence of a bull in the next field; fortunately, it turned out to be a pictorial, rather than actual, deterrent.

To the annoyance of landowners, ramblers tend to resist permanent alterations to ancient paths, even when a diversion would make the walk no less pleasant; but landowners are often able to get courts to agree to temporary diversions past their land (as the model Claudia Schiffer did when she married in the Suffolk village of Shimpling in 2002). The Ramblers' Association, which fights doggedly for walkers' rights, says it is notified of such diversions, the vast majority of which are unopposed, 70-80 times a week.

In America, the hiker's biggest problem is generally isolation. It can be a week between towns on the Appalachian Trail, so travellers need a week's worth of food as well as extra water. On long stretches of the trail, the accommodation is a wooden hut with one side exposed to the elements.

The British hiker, by contrast, is rarely far from a bed-and-breakfast where sweaty clothes can be shed, showers taken, and a full English breakfast provided, complete with such nutritionally dubious items as fatty bacon and fried bread. At the communal dining table, doughty old women rub shoulders with rugby-playing students. While the landlady slaves away in the kitchen, the landlord may well give the guests the benefits of his views on the finer points of politics and economics. But even if his company is uncongenial, the boarding house will soon be left far behind. On the Dales Way, only the sheep can hear you scream.

From the print edition: Christmas Specials

http://www.economist.com/node/21541720/print

Tuesday 13 August 2013

The Paradox of Pope Francis | Hans Kung: National Catholic Reporter

The Paradox of Pope Francis | Hans Kung: National Catholic Reporter



By Hans Kung | May 21, 2013 | National Catholic Reporter


Who could have imagined what has happened in the last weeks?

When I decided, months ago, to resign all of my official duties on the occasion of my 85th birthday, I assumed I would never see fulfilled my dream that -- after all the setbacks following the Second Vatican Council -- the Catholic church would once again experience the kind of rejuvenation that it did under Pope John XXIII.

Then my theological companion over so many decades, Joseph Ratzinger -- both of us are now 85 -- suddenly announced his resignation from the papal office effective at the end of February. And on March 19, St. Joseph’s feast day and my birthday, a new pope with the surprising and programmatic name Francis assumed this office.

Has Jorge Mario Bergoglio considered why no pope has dared to choose the name of Francis until now? At any rate, the Argentine was aware that with the name of Francis he was connecting himself with Francis of Assisi, the world-famous 13th-century downshifter who had been the fun-loving, worldly son of a rich textile merchant in Assisi, until at the age of 24, he gave up his family, wealth and career, even giving his splendid clothes back to his father.

It is astonishing how, from the first minute of his election, Pope Francis chose a new style: unlike his predecessor, no miter with gold and jewels, no ermine-trimmed cape, no made-to-measure red shoes and headwear, no magnificent throne.

Astonishing, too, that the new pope deliberately abstains from solemn gestures and high-flown rhetoric and speaks in the language of the people.

And finally it is astonishing how the new pope emphasizes his humanity: He asked for the prayers of the people before he gave them his blessing; settled his own hotel bill like anybody else; showed his friendliness to the cardinals in the coach, in their shared residence, at the official goodbye; washed the feet of young prisoners, including those of a young Muslim woman. A pope who demonstrates that he is a man with his feet on the ground.

All this would have pleased Francis of Assisi and is the opposite of what Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) represented in his time. In 1209, Francis and 11 “lesser brothers” (fratres minores or friars minor) traveled to Rome to lay before Innocent their short rule, consisting entirely of quotations from the Bible, and to ask for papal approval for their way of life, living in poverty and preaching as lay preachers “according to the form of the Holy Gospel.”

Innocent III, the duke of Segni, who was only 37 when he was elected pope, was a born ruler; he was a theologian educated in Paris, a shrewd lawyer, a clever speaker, a capable administrator and a sophisticated diplomat. No pope before or after him had ever had as much power as he had. Innocent completed the revolution from above initiated by Gregory VII in the 11th century (“the Gregorian Reform”). Instead of the title of “Successor of St. Peter,” Innocent preferred the title of “Vicar of Christ,” as used by every bishop or priest until the 12th century. Unlike in the first millennium and never acknowledged in the apostolic churches of the East, the pope since then has acted as the absolute ruler, lawgiver and judge of Christianity -- until today.

The triumphal pontificate of Innocent proved itself to be not only the high point but also the turning point. Already in his time, there were signs of decay that, up until in our own time, have remained features of the Roman Curia system: nepotism, favoritism, acquisitiveness, corruption and dubious financial dealings. Already in the 1170s and 1180s, however, powerful nonconformist penitent and mendicant orders (Cathars, Waldensians) were developing. But popes and bishops acted against these dangerous currents by banning lay preaching, condemning “heretics” by the Inquisition, and even carrying out the Albigensian Crusade.

Yet it was Innocent himself who tried to integrate into the church evangelical-apostolic mendicant orders, even during all the eradication policies against obstinate “heretics” like the Cathars. Even Innocent knew that an urgent reform of the church was needed, and it was for this reform that he called the glorious Fourth Lateran Council. And so, after long admonition, he gave Francis of Assisi permission to preach. Concerning the ideal of absolute poverty as required by the Franciscan rule, the pope would first seek to know the will of God in prayer. On the basis of a dream in which a small, insignificant member of an order saved the papal Basilica of St. John Lateran from collapsing -- so it was told -- the pope finally allowed the Rule of Francis of Assisi. He let this be known in the Consistory of Cardinals but never had it committed to paper.

A different path

In fact, Francis of Assisi represented the alternative to the Roman system. What would have happened if Innocent and his like had taken the Gospel seriously? Even if they had understood it spiritually rather than literally, his evangelical demands meant and still mean an immense challenge to the centralized, legalized, politicized and clericalized system of power that had taken over the cause of Christ in Rome since the 11th century.

Innocent III was probably the only pope who, because of his unusual characteristics, could have directed the church along a completely different path, and this would have saved the papacies of the 14th and 15th centuries schism and exile, and the church in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation. Obviously, this would already have meant a paradigm shift for the Catholic church in the 13th century, a shift that instead of splitting the church would have renewed it, and at the same time reconciled the churches of East and West.

Thus, the early Christian basic concerns of Francis of Assisi remain even today questions for the Catholic church and now for a pope who, indicating his intentions, has called himself Francis. It is above all about the three basic concerns of the Franciscan ideal that have to be taken seriously today: It is about poverty, humility and simplicity. This probably explains why no previous pope has dared to take the name of Francis: The expectations seem to be too high.

That begs a second question: What does it mean for a pope today if he bravely takes the name of Francis? Of course the character of Francis of Assisi must not be idealized; he could be one-sided, eccentric, and he had his weaknesses, too. He is not the absolute standard. But his early Christian concerns must be taken seriously even if they need not be literally implemented but rather translated into modern times by pope and church.
Poverty: The church in the spirit of Innocent III meant a church of wealth, pomp and circumstance, acquisitiveness and financial scandal. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis means a church of transparent financial policies and modest frugality. A church that concerns itself above all with the poor, the weak and the marginalized. A church that does not pile up wealth and capital but instead actively fights poverty and offers its staff exemplary conditions of employment.
Humility: The church in the spirit of Innocent means a church of power and domination, bureaucracy and discrimination, repression and Inquisition. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis means a church of humanity, dialogue, brotherhood and sisterhood, hospitality for nonconformists; it means the unpretentious service of its leaders and social solidarity, a community that does not exclude new religious forces and ideas from the church but rather allows them to flourish.
Simplicity: The church in the spirit of Innocent means a church of dogmatic immovability, moralistic censure and legal hedging, a church of canon law regulating everything, a church of all-knowing scholastics and of fear. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis of Assisi means a church of good news and of joy, a theology based purely on the Gospel, a church that listens to people instead of indoctrinating from above, a church that does not only teach but one that constantly learns.
So, in the light of the concerns and approaches of Francis of Assisi, basic options and policies can be formulated today for a Catholic church whose façade still glitters on great Roman occasions but whose inner structure is rotten and fragile in the daily life of parishes in many lands, which is why many people have left it in spirit and often in fact.

While no reasonable person will expect that one man can effect all reforms overnight, a paradigm shift would be possible in five years: This was shown by the Lorraine Pope Leo IX (1049-54) who prepared Gregory VII’s reforms, and in the 20th century by the Italian John XXIII (1958-63) who called the Second Vatican Council. But, today above all, the direction should be made clear again: not a restoration to pre-council times as there was under the Polish and German popes, but instead considered, planned and well-communicated steps to reform along the lines of the Second Vatican Council.

A third question presents itself today as much as then: Will a reform of the church not meet with serious opposition? Doubtless, he will thus awaken powerful opposition, above all in the powerhouse of the Roman Curia, opposition that is difficult to withstand. Those in power in the Vatican are not likely to abandon the power that has been accumulated since the Middle Ages.

Curial pressures

Francis of Assisi also had to experience the force of such curial pressures. He who wanted to free himself of everything by living in poverty clung more and more closely to “Holy Mother Church.” Not in confrontation with the hierarchy but rather in obedience to pope and Curia, he wanted to live in imitation of Jesus: in a life of poverty, in lay preaching. He and his followers even had themselves tonsured in order to enter the clerical state. In fact, this made preaching easier but on the other it encouraged the clericalization of the young community, which included more and more priests. So it is not surprising that the Franciscan community became increasingly integrated into the Roman system. Francis’ last years were overshadowed by the tensions between the original ideals of Jesus’ followers and the adaptation of his community to the existing type of monastic life.

To do Francis justice: On Oct. 3, 1226, aged only 44, he died as poor as he had lived. Just 10 years previously, one year after the Fourth Lateran Council, Innocent III died unexpectedly at the age of 56. On July 16, 1216, his body was found in the Cathedral of Perugia: This pope who had known how to increase the power, property and wealth of the Holy See like no other before him was found deserted by all, naked, robbed by his own servants. A trumpet call signaling the transition from papal world domination to papal powerlessness: At the beginning of the 13th century there is Innocent III reigning in glory; at the end of the century, there is the megalomaniac Boniface VIII (1294-1303) arrested by the French; and then the 70-year exile in Avignon, France, and the Western schism with two and, finally, three popes.

Barely two decades after Francis’ death, the Roman church seemed to almost completely domesticate the rapidly spreading Franciscan movement in Italy so that it quickly became a normal order at the service of papal politics, and even became a tool of the Inquisition. If it was possible for the Roman system to finally domesticate Francis of Assisi and his followers, then obviously it cannot be excluded that a Pope Francis could also be trapped in the Roman system that he is supposed to be reforming. Pope Francis: a paradox? Is it possible that a pope and a Francis, obviously opposites, can ever be reconciled? Only by an evangelically minded, reforming pope.

To conclude, a fourth question: What is to be done if our expectations of reform are quashed from above? In any case, the time is past when pope and bishops could reckon with the obedience of the faithful. The 11th-century Gregorian Reform also introduced a certain mysticism of obedience: Obeying God means obeying the church and that means obeying the pope. Since that time, it has been drummed into Catholics that the obedience of all Christians to the pope is a cardinal virtue; commanding and enforcing obedience -- by whatever means -- has become the Roman style. But the medieval equation, “Obedience to God equals obedience to the church equals obedience to the pope,” patently contradicts the word of the apostle before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem: “Man must obey God rather than other men.”

We should then in no way fall into resignation; instead, faced with a lack of impulse toward reform from the top down, from the hierarchy, we must take the offensive, pushing for reform from the bottom up. If Pope Francis tackles reforms, he will find he has the wide approval of people far beyond the Catholic church. However, if he just lets things continue as they are, without clearing the logjam of reforms as now in the case of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, then the call of “Time for outrage! Indignez-vous!” will ring out more and more in the Catholic church, provoking reforms from the bottom up that will be implemented without the approval of the hierarchy and frequently even in spite of the hierarchy’s attempts at circumvention. In the worst case -- as I already wrote before this papal election -- the Catholic church will experience a new ice age instead of a spring and run the risk of dwindling into a barely relevant large sect.

[Theologian Fr. Hans Küng writes from Tübingen, Germany.]

Marco d'Aviano , father of cappuccino

Today is the liturgical feast of Blessed Marco d'Aviano, a catholic capuchin monk from Italie,
also known as the father of cappuccino.

This statue is in the Fő street made by Győrfi Sándor.


I just gather the following links to give you a bird's eye view on his life: 

Marco d'Aviano (1631-1699) was a Capuchin friar. Born Carlo Domenico Cristofori in Aviano, Republic of Venice. Deeply inspired by his encounter with the Capuchins, he felt that God was calling him to enter the order. In 1648, he entered the novitiate of the Capuchins. A year later, he professed his vows and was given the name "Friar Mark of Aviano". Marco d'Aviano's life changed unexpectedly on 1676 when he gave his blessing to a nun who had been bedridden for some 13 years. Upon receiving Friar Mark's blessing, she was healed.


From 1680 until his death, Marco d'Aviano assisted Leopold I, offering him spiritual guidance and advice for every sort of problem: political, economic, military and religious. Marco d'Aviano was also appointed by Pope Innocent XI as Apostolic Nuncio and Papal Legate. An impassioned preacher, Marco d'Aviano played an important role in maintaining unity among the 'Holy League' armies of Austria, Poland, Venice, and the Papal States under the leadership of the Polish king Jan III Sobieski. In the decisive Battle of Vienna (1683), the 'Holy League' armies succeeded in repulsing the invading Ottoman Turks.



..........................

Marco d'Aviano and the cappuccino ( from BBC) 

Marco d'Aviano, a wandering preacher for the Capuchin monastic order, is credited with rallying Catholics and Protestants on the eve of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which was crucial to halting the advance of Turkish soldiers into Europe. 

 He is also remembered by some as the man who, by legend, inspired the fashionable cappuccino coffee now drunk by millions across the globe.  
Coffee was once seen by the Vatican as an "infidel" drink

 The monk, who was born in the city of his name in northern Italy in 1631, was sent by the pope of the day to unite Christians in the face of a huge Ottoman army. 

 Legend has it that, following the victory, the Viennese reportedly found sacks of coffee abandoned by the enemy and, finding it too strong for their taste, diluted it with cream and honey. 

 The drink being of a brown colour like that of the Capuchins' robes, the Viennese named it cappuccino in honour of Marco D'Aviano's order.


..............................................

Marco d'Aviano and his beatification 

Sunday, 27 April, 2003 :
Pope beatifies 'father of cappuccino'

The Pope plans to make his next beatification in Spain


Pope John Paul II has formally placed a monk who inspired European resistance to Muslim invaders in the 17th Century and five other historic Italian religious figures on the path to sainthood. 

 Their beatification at a ceremony in St Peter's Square marks the final step before actual canonisation through the Roman Catholic Church.

Marco d'Aviano, a wandering preacher for the Capuchin monastic order, is credited with rallying Catholics and Protestants on the eve of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, which was crucial to halting the advance of Turkish soldiers into Europe. 

 He is also remembered by some as the man who, by legend, inspired the fashionable cappuccino coffee now drunk by millions across the globe.  

 The monk, who was born in the city of his name in northern Italy in 1631, was sent by the pope of the day to unite Christians in the face of a huge Ottoman army. 

 Legend has it that, following the victory, the Viennese reportedly found sacks of coffee abandoned by the enemy and, finding it too strong for their taste, diluted it with cream and honey. 

 The drink being of a brown colour like that of the Capuchins' robes, the Viennese named it cappuccino in honour of Marco D'Aviano's order. 

 During Sunday's two-hour ceremony, the ailing 82-year-old pontiff remained in a special chair which allows him to sit, not stand, at the altar while celebrating Mass. 

 The five figures commemorated along with Marco D'Aviano are the latest in a line of 1,310 people this Pope has beatified - a number greater than all those beatified by his predecessors over the past four centuries. 

 Giacomo Alberione (1884-1971) was an Italian priest and best-selling author who believed in preaching via modern technology and founded the Society of St Paul to this end. 

 The other four figures are all nuns who founded religious orders in the 19th Century.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2979993.stm
....................................

a little history of cappuccino: 

Cappuccino is an Italian coffee-based drink prepared with espresso, hot milk, and milk foam. But do you know where the drink - and the word - comes from? And would you believe this hot new beverage sweeping the nation is actually a hundred years old?

 Cappuccino takes its name from the order of Franciscan Minor friars, named "cappuccini" from their hooded frock ("cappuccio" means hood in Italian).

The drink has always been known by this Italian name. The Espresso coffee machine used to make cappuccino was invented in Italy, with the first patent being filed by Luigi Bezzera in 1901.

The beverage was used in Italy by the early 1900s, and grew in popularity as the large espresso machines in cafés and restaurants were improved during and after World War Two. By the 1950s, the Italian cappuccino had found its form.

Typically regarded as myth, some believe that a 17th century Capuchin monk, Marco d'Aviano, invented Cappuccino after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, and that it was named after him. No one knows if this is true or not.

Cappuccino was a taste largely confined to Europe, Australia, South Africa, South America and the more cosmopolitan regions of North America, until the mid-1990s when cappuccino was made much more widely available to North Americans, as upscale coffee bars sprang up.

In Italy, cappuccino is generally consumed early in the day as part of the breakfast, with a croissant, better known to Italians as cornetto, or a pastry. Generally, Italians do not drink cappuccino with meals other than breakfast. That's obviously not the case in most other countries.
http://www.laperfetto.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,print,0&cntnt01articleid=1&cntnt01showtemplate=false&cntnt01returnid=16
....................................................

And...a youtube video tooo....

Cappuccino, the story, the coffee and you (Film 3 of 3) by DouweEgbertsCoffee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf3UIjhTszw






Sunday 26 May 2013

Give us this day, Lord, our daily miracle : Paulo Coelho

Today , I read the new Paulo Coelho book : Manuscript Found in Accra.
I will keeep this book very next to Khalil Gibran's 'The prohet' in my bookshelf.
This is a book that has to be read and re-read.
This is a book gracefully spilled with biblical images and expressions.
trying to read it from cover to cover may be a less satisfying endavoure.
Go slow!

Here is a citation from the book:

....................


Give us this day, Lord, our daily miracle.
Just as there are many paths to the top of a mountain, so there are many paths to achieving our goal. Help us to recognize the only one that is worth following: the one on which Love is to be found.

Help us to awaken the Love sleeping within us before we awaken Love in other people. Only then will we be able to attract affection, enthusiasm, and respect.

Help us to distinguish battles that are ours, battles into which we are propelled against our will, and battles that we cannot avoid because Fate has placed them in our path.

 (miracles) transform the wheat into bread through work, the grape into wine through patience, and death into life through the resurrection of dreams.

Therefore, Lord, give us this day our daily miracle.

Sunday 17 March 2013

Le silence de la place Saint-Pierre : Christian Rioux



Le devoir-  (A3) , vendredi, 15 mars 2013

15 mars 2013 | Christian Rioux | Éthique et religion
Le silence de la place Saint-Pierre
Christian Rioux 


Nous étions quelques centaines de mil­liers sous la bruine à attendre que le pape daigne se montrer à la loggia des bénédictions. Nous étions tous là à surveil­ler le moindre petit signe de vie, à guetter une ombre à la fenêtre. Lorsque le nouveau pape s'est avancé, cela ressemblait encore à un film. Le délire de la foule semblait irréel. Mais c'est lorsque ce jésuite venu d'Argentine, dont le nom ne disait strictement rien à personne — «Bergoglio! Chi è questo Bergoglio ?» —, a de­mandé à la foule d'observer une minute de si­lence que la tension fut à son comble.

Un vrai silence de mort ! Imaginez une vérita­ble marée humaine qui, du parvis de la basi­lique au castel San Angelo 700 mètres plus loin sur les bords du Tibre, s'interrompt tout à coup, ne dit plus un mot, ne fait plus un geste et s'arrête presque de respirer. En plein délire médiatique universel, la cacophonie du monde avait soudain suspendu son vol.

C'est là que je me suis dit que cette drôle d'Église venait de nous jouer un sacré bon tour. Bref, qu'elle savait encore y faire, la sacripante. J'imaginais Benoît XVI souriant dans sa barbe devant son téléviseur à Castel Gandolfo, à 30 ki­lomètres de là. N'est-ce pas lui qui n'avait cessé de souligner tout au long de son pontificat l'im­portance du silence dans un monde qui bruit de mille agitations ? N'est-ce pas lui qui évoquait ce «parloir de l'âme» qu'est le silence et qui avait encouragé les jeunes réunis dans la cathédrale de Sulmona, en Italie, à «écouter Dieu dans le si­lence extérieur et surtout intérieur» ? En 2012, il avait même poussé la provocation jusqu'à faire du «silence» le thème central de la Journée mondiale des communications sociales. Vous avez bien lu : le silence comme thème d'une journée de la communication !

On dit souvent que le temps de l'Eglise n'est pas le temps des médias. Nous en aurons eu une nouvelle preuve éclatante. Tout au long de cet étonnant conclave, l'Église aura dupé tous les médias du début à la fin. A moins que nous ne nous soyons dupés nous-mêmes. On attendait un jeune manager capable de réformer la Çurie, on supputait les chances d'un prince de l'Eglise à poigne capable de reprendre les choses en mains, un maître de la communication sachant twitter. Voilà qu'apparaît un pape François presque aussi âgé que Benoît XVI lors de son élection, un amoureux des pauvres que per­sonne n'attendait, et qui nous impose comme première tâche urgente et essentielle de nous taire pendant au moins une minute. Chut!!!


C'est que, pendant que tous les «vatica- nistes » multipliaient les prévisions et conjectu­raient à hue et à dia, les cardinaux poursui­vaient, eux, leur petit bonhomme de chemin. L'ancien spécialiste du Monde, Henri Tincq, écrivait mercredi sur State.fr que tout se passait «comme si les cardinaux avaient voulu reprendre le fil du conclave de 2005 quand l'élu d'au­jourd'hui avait été, bien malgré lui, le challenger de Joseph Ratzinger». Huit ans plus tard, les car­dinaux ont repris leur travail où ils l'avaient laissé et élu celui qui talonnait Benoît XVI.

Pour l'imaginer, peut-être aurait-il fallu ou­blier un peu les palpitantes luttes de fractions et les sombres complots du Vatican. Peut-être au­rait-il fallu cesser de lire les médias américains qui, au Vatican comme ailleurs, ne jurent que par des réformes administratives et le déficit zéro. Peut-être aurait-il fallu ne pas prêter l'oreille à tous ceux qui s'imaginent que la mo­dernité s'écrit en 140 caractères sur Twitter et surtout pas en latin. Peut-être aurait-il fallu nous contenter de lire — oui lire ! — les délibérations du dernier synode des évêques. La dernière fois qu'ils s'étaient vus, les évêques avaient en effet débattu de la «nouvelle évangélisation». Or, sur quel continent cette « nouvelle évangélisation » est-elle la plus urgente et en même temps la plus menacée sinon en Amérique latine, où les sectes protestantes grugent lentement le capital de l'Église avant de venir la concurrencer en Afrique et en Asie ? En Occident, et peut-être en­core plus au Québec, nous n'avions d'yeux que pour la morale sexuelle de l'Église, un sujet certes important, mais qui finit par devenir obsessif et qui est surtout secondaire dans l'en­semble de ce qui se brasse au Vatican.
Cette semaine, le père LeFloc'h, un Breton de Nantes croisé devant la place Saint-Pierre, me disait que, «dans nos petites chapelles d'Occi­dent», nous n'arrivions pas à voir que, loin d'être ce «cadavre encore grouillant» que l'on a déjà décrit au Québec, l'Eglise était en pleine explosion dans le monde.

L'appel à la justice sociale du cardinal So- dano dans son homélie d'ouverture du conclave aura donc été entendu. Mais, qu'on se le dise, ce pape ne sera pas à la mode. Il est d'ailleurs venu le dire chez nous en 2008: «Si moderne veut dire imiter le monde, l'Église ne le sera pas. L'Église doit être moderne dans ses moyens de transmettre la Bonne Nouvelle [...]. Mais si elle veut être progressiste en captant les idéologies, alors elle risque de devenir une ONG vide et adolescente. »

Et si la modernité résidait dans le silence plus que dans la cacophonie ? Sacré François !