Six geese a-laying: The six days of creation described in Genesis

Sometimes a blogger posts a tidbit so precious that a fellow blogger cannot help but use it. So, with a courtesy to Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish, I would like to post the following quote from Pope John Paul II:

"The Bible itself speaks to us of the origin of the universe and its make-up, not in order to provide us with a scientific treatise, but in order to state the correct relationships of man with God and with the universe. Sacred Scripture wishes simply to declare that the world was created by God, and in order to teach this truth it expresses itself in the terms of the cosmology in use at the time of the writer."

In other words: Don’t take the biblical account of creation literally. But where should Catholics look for information about the origin of the world?

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Greetings from Jerusalem! The internet cafe next to the central bus station from which I write closes in half an hour, so indulge just one memory from this land of many memories

Thursday night I went to the Kotel, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple Compound. It is the the holiest place at which Jews can pray. Very nearby is the Al-Asqa mosque, which sits on what was the Holy of Holies in the Temple that the Romans destroyed many years ago. By custom, the Old City of Jerusalem is divided into an Arab quarter, a Jewish quarter, an Armenian quarter, and the Christian quarter, through which I walked on the way to the Kotel. I passed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, known to some Christians as the place of Jesus's burial. (Before I get many angry comments, remember the spot is disputed, as is the ownership of the church.) Next to the church is the Mosque of Omar. A religious Jew told me that Omar, an early Muslim holy man, asked to be taken to the Temple of Solomon and was taken to that Church. As this holy man visited, later Muslims built a Mosque there. I have no reason to disbelieve this story.

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Five golden rings: The first five books of the Old Testament

On today, the Feast of the Holy Family, the New York Times brings us a story straight out of Bethlehem –Connecticut, that is.

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Four calling birds: The four Evangelists--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

The four authors of the Gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are credited with writing the “Good News,” the Gospels on the birth, life and resurrection of Jesus. After each Gospel reading at mass, the priest declares the reading to be the “Gospel of the Lord,” to which the congregation replies “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” We then take our seats and prepare to get our homily on.

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Three French Hens: Faith, Hope, and Charity

When I hear the triad of words “faith, hope and charity [love]” from St. Paul’s famous passage in his letter to the Corinthians, I don’t immediately conjure up benevolent Christian images, although I perhaps should. The phrase “faith, hope and charity” is one that I long ago memorized, no doubt in order to score well on a religion test at my Catholic high school, a place where Saints names were uttered during prayer as speed talk, morning mass was a place to meet boyfriends and frenetic, uniform-clad teenagers mingled freely with Franciscan brothersclothed in heavy black robes.

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“Benazir is dead.”

I look up quietly from my Elle magazine, sitting at Zarqa’s Salon in Karachi, Pakistan, awaiting a henna temporary tattoo on my hands for my cousin’s wedding the next day. Zarqa, the parlor owner, is talking on the landline phone. My cousins and I turn to each other in alarm.

The news unraveled quickly from Zarqa. Benazir Bhutto, an ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan and candidate for election on January 8th, was shot before her killer committed suicide and killed twenty others with a bomb in Rawalpindi, a city very close to Islamabad. My cousins and I rushed home, half-pedicured and half-hennaed.

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Two turtle doves: The Old and New Testaments

A few years ago, I purchased a red-letter bible, bringing color-coded pizazz to my New American Bible This bible highlights Jesus’ words in red font so that they stand out, and so simpletons like myself can pluck Jesus’ moral one-liners from the page and apply them at whim. Catholicism’s understanding of scripture, however, is more complicated than my approach implies: The bible is interpreted contextually, yet understood as an inspired work containing divine revelation.

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The partridge in a pear tree represents Jesus.

On this, the “First Day of Christmas,” I will be enduring the treacherous, gravity-defying feat of air travel. The whole process is a one-man obstacle course with luggage.

I don’t want miss my flight, so I end up at the ticket counter three hours too early, but, predictably, fifteen minutes after the previous flight has departed. Then I hurry up and wait my turn to perform a juggling act of my shoes, license, ticket, toiletries and laptop. By the time that I’ve walked through the magical doorway [also known as a metal detector] I’ve broken out in a sweat and am desperate for the water bottle that I was just forced to throw away.

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Sitting on the roof of the farmhouse where my father grew up, about four hours outside of the hustle and bustle of Karachi, we stared at the moon and the starry sky. Eating sugar cane stalks with our teeth so that we greatly resembled a herd of panda bears that had discovered piles of bamboo, I celebrated Eid-al-Adha among scores of family members, some of whom I had not seen since I was fourteen years old.

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The next movie on my Netflix queue is “White Christmas,” which I have seen at least twenty or thirty times since I was a toddler. My mom and I went in together on “The Christmas Album” a couple of years ago, and so it is perfectly routine for my iPod to go from an Israeli hip hop song to “Silver Bells” to Coldplay to another Israeli song.

My relationship with Christmas is awkward. Christmas used to be a scary time of year for Jews, where we were persecuted and accused of killing Jesus. But now, integrated as we are into American culture, it is an equally pleasant time of year for us as it is for our Christian neighbors. The struggles of intermarried couples to try to directly combine Christmas and Hanukkah have been well documented, but I think that for all Jewish Americans there are tensions.

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Goodbye dirty streets, fresh strawberry juice, and home-delivered McDonald's. No more 5 a.m. muzzeins, television programs I can’t understand and hijab. I’m supposed to be back among my co-Westerners here in Belgium. (And my “co-religionists,” so to speak.) But boy do I feel out of place.

Driving around on the streets of the capitol of the European Union, I took note of all of Mitt Romney’s empty churches standing where the mosques used to be. Little fruit stands and ahwas (sheesha stops) morphed into cozy bars and patisseries. I’ve gone from being able to talk to just about everybody to being able to get along with about half the population. And there’s this question, occurring to me on three separate occasions: What’s up with all the white people?

Day 1 back in the occident passed without a hitch. I sat in my family abode watching ESPN Sportscenter, something I hadn’t experienced since I left the U.S. on June 17. After three runs of it, I flipped over to “Deal or No Deal,” a brutal game show experience I had never previously experienced and hope to never again. I felt like I bit into a candy bar I enjoyed as a kid and, my stomach turning over a little bit, wanted to chuck the rest.

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Christians have a special sympathy for unmarried pregnant teenagers, especially during Advent. Jesus Christ was born to one. Our particular religious history is one reason why the news that Britney Spears’ 16 year-old sister Jamie Lynn is three months pregnant is an important cultural moment.

Jamie Lynn is a star in her own right, the lead character in the Nickelodeon TV show Zoey 101. After her pregnancy became public, Viacom issued a vague statement about their respect for Jamie’s “decision to take responsibility” for her pregnancy.

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You’ll forgive my recent absence. We’re in exam week and everything is due. Tomorrow’s economics exam is worth 100% of my grade, or feels like it. You who have taken exams know this phenomenon, of course. Professors on the street have started remarking that these are the days they are so glad they are done with school. Thanks, Professor. That’s helpful in these days.

Sometimes these are the days when everything comes into focus. The whole semester arrayed in front of you and you see them as coherent wholes, even interacting with one another, not discrete lectures and problem sets. Suddenly taking four religion classes in a semester pays off and you understand what it all means.

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Latke making. Check. Dreidel spinning. Check. Standing next to a nine foot menorah in the middle of campus (I am in the white scarf with my rabbi and family). Check.

Yes, it has been a good Chanukah indeed.

I loved Chanukah when I was little for the obvious reason: yummy food and presents. Sure the story of Judah and the Maccabees defending Jews from Hellenization by force was cool, but mostly I just wanted another jelly donut please. As I got older, I started to become a bit disillusioned. My family stopped doing hard core gift-giving and I started to realize that the holiday is mostly popular because it happens to coincide with Christmas and it has gotten caught up in multiculturalism of the past few decades.

Without Christmas propping up Chanukah, it just would’ve been a minor celebration forgotten by most Jews, and completely unknown to non-Jews.

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I am so over Ordinary Time. Now on to the exciting stuff. . .

December 2 was the first Sunday in Advent, the liturgical season during which Christians wait in hope for Christmas Day: the ancient celebration of getting lots of presents.

In anticipation of this holy occasion, we stockpile things –all sorts of sparkly, fantastical things –for the day that is coming. And truly, nothing says “Thank you Jesus Christ for being born into the world to show us The Way and to die for our sins” quite like that inflatable family of penguins on the front lawn.

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“There is something poetic about being in transit.” A friend said that to me once. If that is true, I have been poetic all my life.

Today, I leave my American home for my other home, Pakistan, a country that we have been following for weeks now on our news stations. A country that has headlines like this, or this, and this.

I am more prepared than ever. I have filled my suitcases with Advil and Tylenol, hoping that pills and shots will prevent me from contracting diseases Americans haven’t heard about since the 1850’s. While I'm gone I will not even take a sip of unboiled water.

I am prepared to live for the next three weeks the way I live here, constantly justifying my other half.

I am prepared to be in transit, on two Turkish Airlines flights, for the next 24 hours. Don’t worry; I have a lot of books.

I have always had a thing for the dorky types: undiscovered hunks hiding beneath glasses and philosophy texts. I felt like a secret investigator, constantly on the lookout for a guy with an opinion on the nature of reality –and great facial structure. So when I found him one night, a copy of Marcus Aurelius in his pocket and a smirk on his charming face, I was instantly smitten.

Three years have passed and as it turns, he is The One. I knew I wanted to marry someone tall, dark and handsome, but as fate shall have it, I get to add another adjective to that list: He is tall, dark, handsome and Catholic.

Like many matriarchs throughout the ages, both of my grandmothers prayed for me to meet a nice Catholic young man. I considered it a kind gesture, but thought that restricting myself to dating Catholic guys might be pushing my romantic luck. In an attempt to increase the odds, I chose to attend a Jesuit university, which is close enough to Catholic. (Just kidding, St. Ignatius!) Then, of course, I met a guy who went to another school.

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Happy Chanukah!

And much thanks to MIT's Jewish fraternity, AEPi, for letting me light the menorah they made out of Natural Light beer cans! Very innovative, boys.

I will always be ready to stick up for Sean Taylor. When he was in trouble for waving a gun at some folks and then got his SUV riddled with bullets, well, sometimes old habits die hard. When he spit in an opponent's face, well, the guy's a competitor with a mean streak.

I did and will do this defending because Sean Taylor was a Washington Redskin. He was by far my favorite Redskin, showing up on every video game football fantasy team I ever drafted, prowling the defensive backfield, lurking for an opportunity to spear my roommate’s receivers if they got a little too brave running routes over the middle.

One time, one of The U’s nastiest delivered a blow so heavy it hurt me. After a flick of the right control stick laid a digital wide receiver low courtesy of the Hurricane force of number 21’s equally ferocious Xbox iteration, I jumped out of my chair with a triumphant whoop so fast I drilled my head on my lofted bed.

I thought I owned Sean Taylor. But nobody owned Sean Taylor. Sean Taylor owned you.

Until now, when pointless, stupid violence got the best of a monster of a man. I’ve been trying to write something about Taylor since I first heard he was shot and figured, off hand, that there was no way Taylor could die. Critical condition is awful but not insurmountable. Maybe he’d miss the season. But there was no way he could just go.

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A few weeks ago I went to Montreal, where I met up with a friend of mine who grew up in a very religious family, although she herself is modern Orthodox. She was telling me that she recently went on a shidduch date.

A shidduch date is set up by a Jewish matchmaker with the aim of marriage; this kind of dating is not done casually, but is serious business. The guy came in to see my friend from another city, and had been set up with her a year and a half after she initially saw the matchmaker because it was the first man of comparable religiosity that she found for my friend.

The date didn’t go well, but I still can’t help thinking that maybe there is something to this old school style of up front and pragmatic dating.

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Amazing that I’ve survived three months here in Cairo without stumbling into a protest. But I was engulfed in one today just a block from my apartment where a group of employees from the Real Estate Tax Office (the very name should strike fear into the hearts of limited government conservatives) were protesting the fact that their wages were lower than the Finance Ministry and that they wanted to be included under the Finance umbrella for payment purposes. (This group has done this before.)

Favorite sign slogan: My salary = one shoe.

As more and more protesters showed up the chanting got louder, the more home-painted signs sprouted from the group and the more black-clad riot police showed up on the scene. I had walked past the enormous riot trucks parked just around the bend from the gargantuan U.S. embassy here many times and always wondered why they were around, packed to the gills with Egyptians wiling the hours away with tea or cards.

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