Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo Survive the Test of Fire

Some of the stories you come across in the Bible are so horrifying – and so human – that they still have a compelling immediacy. People do the most horrible things to one another, it mystifies me. This King, Nebuchadnezzar, is so incensed that his Jewish bureaucrats won’t bow down and worship his statue that he orders them cast into a furnace, which he heats seven times hotter than normal. That’s pretty angry!

Daniel 3:19-30

19 Then Nebuchadnezzar was so filled with rage against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that his face was distorted. He ordered the furnace to be heated up seven times more than was customary, 20and ordered some of the strongest guards in his army to bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and to throw them into the furnace of blazing fire. 21So the men were bound, still wearing their tunics,* their trousers,* their hats, and their other garments, and they were thrown into the furnace of blazing fire.

22Because the king’s command was urgent and the furnace was so overheated, the raging flames killed the men who lifted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. 23But the three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down, bound, into the furnace of blazing fire.

24 Then King Nebuchadnezzar was astonished and rose up quickly. He said to his counsellors, ‘Was it not three men that we threw bound into the fire?’ They answered the king, ‘True, O king.’

25He replied, ‘But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god.’* 26Nebuchadnezzar then approached the door of the furnace of blazing fire and said, ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out! Come here!’

So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire. 27And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king’s counsellors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men; the hair of their heads was not singed, their tunics* were not harmed, and not even the smell of fire came from them.

28Nebuchadnezzar said, ‘Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants who trusted in him. They disobeyed the king’s command and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God. 29Therefore I make a decree: Any people, nation, or language that utters blasphemy against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses laid in ruins; for there is no other god who is able to deliver in this way.’ 30Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the province of Babylon.

When I read this, I think of the recent legislation proposed in Kuwait against insulting God or his prophets. Let men insult. Let them build their gods, their statures, let them pursue their little gods of vanity, power and wealth. The one true God laughs. He holds all the true power. He doesn’t need our protection; he is in charge.

In Florida, some friends complain about “the law that says our kids can’t pray in school.” There is no law that says kids can’t pray in school. Kids pray in school all the time! I did, specially when I had a really hard test I hadn’t prepared adequately for What the law says is that no one can make all pray together, using the same words, as we did at one time. It’s not such a bad thing; even as Christians, we don’t all share the same beliefs. You might not want your children praying a prayer I might compose because I might have a dogmatic belief a little different from your own. Our job is to teach our children to pray; the Holy Spirit will be with them, and put the words in their hearts.

February Barnacles

I rarely miss a water aerobics class. The Y makes it easy, even if I oversleep, there is also a 0930 class, or if I’m feeling bad, there are also classes on Tuesday and Thursday. Since I’m going to have to make it up anyway, I just go. I rarely feel bad enough to stay home, and most things I can schedule for after my class.

Any kind of aerobics class is funny. I try to be friendly to everyone, because these classes can be a real pain in the patootie if there are cliques or snobs, it starts to feel like junior high all over again, and God knows, that was bad enough the first time. Life is too short.

But there is one spot I really like. I like to be in the back of the class, so I can exercise harder or differently and not confuse anyone else. I’ve been doing water aerobics for a while and sometimes while the rest of the class is doing cross-country, for example, I will do it off the floor of the pool, or do an extra kick on the jacks, things like that, so it just works better for me to be at the back of the class. I also like to be at a certain depth, not too deep and not too shallow. So . . . regrettably . . . I am one of those people who have a spot.

Sometimes if I am a little late someone else stands in “my” spot and I have to stand somewhere else. I don’t worry about it, people in these classes come and go, and I usually get to stand there. If I don’t, I am still OK.

There are two other women on the back wall with me, who are pretty much always in their same places, and we really do have a good time. I joke that we are the barnacles, stuck to the back wall. This morning, I complimented one of them on her earrings, and she said they were amethysts for February, and as it turns out, we all have birthdays within one week of one another in February – all three of us, within one week. What an amazing coincidence.

She worked us hard this morning, and it is a good thing, as I fly this afternoon for Seattle. Keep me in your prayers for safe travels, and travel mercies, please!

Music Banned in Somalia

We are in our own world these days, boxes needing unpacking, deliveries interrupting tasks, and no connection – no TV, no internet, no land line phone. We do have a cell phone, and Friday night our son called to ask us if we have heard about the weather.

Nope.

Heavy rains, strong winds, possibility of tornados. It was lively!

I hadn’t heard about Somalia, either.

This is really scary to me. This is the kind of thing I worry about in my own country – who makes the rules? Who gets to say what music I listen to, what movies I watch? Who gets to restrict my access to information?

Who gets to tell me that as a woman, I can’t have a checking account in my name? Or that I have to wear a burqa? Or that I am not allowed to wear a niqab (if that’s what I want?)

Somalia Radicals Declare Music ‘Un-Islamic,’ and Radio Goes Tuneless
POSTED: 04/25/10

If, as my colleague Sarah Wildman reports, the Francophonic world is intent on curbing expressions of fundamentalist Islam belief, then the radical Muslim world is taking no prisoners with the West, either. Last week, the Somalian fundamentalist Islamic group Hizbul Islam announced that music of any kind is “un-Islamic,” warning of “serious consequences” for those who dare to violate their decree. In response, radio stations all over the country, including those run by the moderate Muslim transitional government, cut all music from their broadcasts. Even intro music for news reports was scrapped. In its place? “We are using sounds such as gunfire, the noise of vehicles and the sound of birds to link up our programmes and news,” said one Somalian head of radio programming.

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Somalia has been wracked with inter-tribal violence for nearly two decades. In the last few years, increasingly radical Muslim militants, including the dominant Shabab group, have taken over large parts of the country and become closely affiliated with al-Qaeda. A moderate Muslim transitional government, helmed by a former teacher named Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, controls a small part of the country. His government is largely propped up by African Union peacekeepers, with United Nations’ and U.S. support.

In the meantime, Islamic radicals like Shabab have gone on a campaign the New York Times described as “a quest to turn Somalia into a seventh century style Islamic state.”

The music decree follows a string of fundamentalist decrees, including prohibitions on wearing bras (also “un-Islamic”), the banning of modern movies and news channels, including the BBC and Voice of America.

As evidence of a power struggle between the moderate Muslim government and the hard-line radicals who control many parts of the country, Sheik Ahmed’s government responded last Sunday by saying any radio stations that stopped playing music would face closure. In the government’s eyes, those radio stations that complied with the ban were colluding with the radicals.

In the meantime, the radio stations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. “The order and counter-order are very destructive,” radio director Abukar Hassan Kadaf said in the Times article. “Each group are issuing orders against us and we are the victims.”

In the escalating tug-of-war between Western and Islamic powers over freedom of expression, what remains to be seen is how much of a causal relationship exists between the two. Is a proposed burqa ban in Quebec a result of the shuttering of a radio station in Somalia? Does a call for prohibition of headscarves in Paris force a bra-burning in Mogadishu?

If Islamic decrees do, in fact, fuel the fire for legal actions in the West (and vice versa), then continued and increased prohibition seems inevitable. But if radical Islam and a skeptical West are destined to one-up each other in a battle of bans, the powers that be might remember the men and women caught in the crossfire. That is, the women in the West who wear niqabs by choice, or the men and women in Somalia who just want to listen to music. What is perhaps most strikingly absent in all the brouhaha surrounding sharia vs. Western law are the voices of the moderate Muslims themselves. In the end, perhaps the gulf between the two sides will prove too great to be bridged, but for the immediate future, we would do well to remember the ground we share in common. Before there’s nothing left to ban.

Heavenly Sunset

This sunset sort of made me think about the heavens opening and the hand of God coming out – yep, sunsets in the Pacific Northwest are like that.

Donna Leon: Suffer the Little Children

After reading Zanzibar Chest I decided it was time to give myself a break, and I allowed myself another Donna Leon book, this one Suffer the Little Children. I am currently reading another detective series, recommended by my sister, set in China. What they all seem to have in common is a very tired, sad, jaded view of corruption in society, and particularly among the poorly paid police. Sigh.

In this book, a Doctor and his wife are invaded in the middle of the night by the carabinieri, a kind of police in Venice. I am not sure how the two agencies differ, maybe it is like the difference between state police and local police in the US, but when the paper was faxed over coordinating with Brunetti’s office, it got lost somewhere, and the action was never coordinated, and Brunetti gets a call in the middle of the night.

The doctor and his wife have adopted a child illegally. They bought an unwanted child from an Albanian woman, paid for her pregnancy expenses, paid a huge fee to her, and then had the child taken from them. Here is the saddest part of the story – the child’s mother doesn’t want the child, the illegally adopting parents want him back desperately, but the child is sent to a state orphanage, because of the illegal adoption.

It is a very sad book.

Here is why I read Donna Leon – some of her paragraphs are just brilliant. Memorable. Unforgettable.

“Brunetti’s profession had made him a master of pauses: he could distinguish them in the way a concert-master could distinguish the tones of the various strings. There was the absolute, almost belligerent pause, after which nothing would come unless in response to questions or threats. There was the attentive pause, after which the speaker measured the effect on the listener of what had just been said. And there was the exhausted pause, after which the speaker needed to be left undistrubed until emotional control returned.

Judging that he was listening to the third, Brunetti remained silent, certain that she would eventually continue. A sound came down the corridor: a moan or the cry of a sleeping person. When it stoped, the silence seemed to expand to fill the place.”

When you read Donna Leon, you forget you live anywhere else. For one brief moment, you become Venetian, you live in Guido Brunetti’s shoes. The speak the Venetian dialect, you think like a Venetian. What an escape!

The paperback edition will be out in April for $7.99 at Amazon.com for $7.99 plus shipping.

Leon: Friends in High Places

After reading two stinkers, I needed a read I could rely on for a good fix. I needed escape, mixed with good food, good clothes and some social awareness. I needed Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon’s Venetian detective, and his smart, savvy wife Paula, and his family meals of pasta with soft shell crabs and risi e bisi, his children, his disgust for the politics that impinge on his doing his job.

If you think Kuwait has “wasta” (doing business by connections, influence, calling in favors), you aint’ seen nuthin’ till you’ve seen how Byzantine Venetians operate.

Friends in High Places opens with Commissario Brunetti lying on his couch re-reading Anabasis when he receives a visit from a building inspector, who determines that the apartment he owns, on the very top of a building in Venice, was probably built illegally – there are no plans or restoration approvals on file at the bureaucracy regulating residential buildings in Venice – and may have to be torn down.

Wouldn’t that be a shock? It’s a shock to Brunetti and to his family, just as it would be to us. We learn all the ins and outs of housing codes, the impact of becoming part of the EEC, and how the clever Venetians devise ways around the codes, all while Brunetti is investigating one murder – and then three other murders.

It is a VERY satisfying book. I will share with you a lengthy quote from Friends in High Places as Guido and Paola discuss how to deal with the problem:

At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered, Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in it’s employ, prone to the abuses resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy.

I am sorry to tell you that the only copy of this I could find on Amazon.com cost $99.98. I must have bought this one in England, where, I promise you, it was the normal cost of a paperback book.

I will warn you in addition, I was looking forward to reading a second Leon novel, Quietly in their Sleep, only to discover when I started that I had already read it, as The Death of Faith. The books published by Leon in England are often retitled for the American market. Leon fans, beware!

Donna Leon: Wilful Behavior

You think Donna Leon is writing about one thing, and then you discover it is about something else entirely. It seems to happen often in that line of work – you see the same thing on Law and Order, and Cold Case, and The Wire – what initially seems like a straightforward crime had depths and switch-backs unfathomable from the initial crime scene.

In Wilful Behavior, Paula, Brunetti’s wife, has just about had it with her university level students. They have no yearning for knowledge and insight, they are rife with materialism, she is feeling burned out and cynical. One student, who bucks the trend, comes to talk with her, and then Brunetti about the possibility of a post-mortem clearing of a person’s name, but she won’t give the name of the person or the crime that person committed. Before Commissario Brunetti has begun to plumb these depths – the student is murdered.

It’s always depressing when a young person dies. You can’t help but think of how treasured they were, how full of potential, and all that is gone now, wasted. A light in the world has gone out, and you grieve for how brightly that light might have shown. Brunetti and his wife only knew the murdered girl briefly, but her murder strikes them deeply.

Here is an excerpt from Brunetti’s discussion with the student before she was killed:

“I didn’t know young people even knew who Il Duce was.” Brunetti said, exaggerating, but not by much, and mindful of the almost total amnesia he had discovered in the minds of anyone, of whatever age, with whom he had attempted to discuss the war or its causes. Or worse, the sort of cock-eyed, retouched history that protrayed the friendly, generously disposed Italians led astray by their wicked Teutonic neighbors to the north.

The girl’s voice drew him back from these reflections. “Most of them don’t. This is old people I’m talking about. You’d think they’d know or remember what things were like then, what he was like.” She shook her head in another sign of exasperation. “But no, all I hear is that nonsense about the trains being on time and no trouble from the Mafia and how happy the Ethiopians were to see our brave soldiers.” She paused as if assessing just how far to go with this conservatively dressed man with the kind eyes; whatever she saw seemed to reassure her, for she continued. “Our brave soldiers come with their poison gas and machine guns to show them the wonders of Fascism.”

So young and yet so cynical, he thought, and how tired she must be already of having people point this out to her. “I’m surprised you aren’t enrolled in the history faculty,” he said.

“Oh, I was, for a year. But I couldn’t stand it, all the lies and dishonest books and the refusal to take a stand about anything that’s happened in the last hundred years.”

“And so?”

“I changed to English Literature. The worst they can do is make us listen to all their idiotic theories about the meaning of literature or whether the text exists or not.” Hearing her, Brunetti had the strange sensation of listening to Paula in one of her wilder moments. “But they can’t change the texts themselves. It’s not like what the people in power do when they remove embarassing documents from the State Archives. They can’t do that to Dante or Manzoni, can they?” she asked speculatively, a question that really asked for an answer.

“No,” Brunetti agreed. “But is suspect that’s only because there are standard editions of the basic texts. Otherwise, I’m sure they’d try, if they thought they could get away with it.” He saw that he had her interest, so he added, “I’ve always been afraid of people in possession of what they believe is the truth. They’ll do anything to see that the facts are changed and whipped into shape to agree with it.”

And, as it turns out, in the persistent corruption of Venetian bureaucracy, that is exactly what this murder is all about – the theft and possession of art during WWII, and how the ramifications are still trickling down today. How people are willing to kill to keep the past safely in the past, and to hang on to their treasured and priceless possessions.

Donna Leon continues to be one of my favorites because she is never formulaic – she has ISSUES, and she uses her Brunetti novels to educate her readers. As we become educated, we continue to experience Venice through all the senses, the smell of the veal cooking for dinner, the taste of the tiny espressos in the corner cafe meeting places, the gruesome murder sites, the sound of the waves in the canals, whipped up by the prevailing winds . . .you read Donna Leon, you become Venetian.

Donna Leon Crossing Cultures

I’m in the middle of a Donna Leon read-fest. When I wrote the reviews the last time, I saw three books by her I had never seen – and I comb the aisles of Barnes and Noble when I am in the US, and Half Price Books, looking for titles by her. I am guessing some of her books haven’t been printed in the US, but I was able to find them from the UK Amazon.com.

The two latest books I have read by Donna Leon are timely. The first, Fatal Remedies, starts out being about Commissario Guido Brunetti’s wife, Paola’s crusade against the sex tours to undeveloped countries, her outrage against trips that allow grown men to exploit the poverty and need that the poorest of families will sell their own daughters and even young children to satisfy these men’s uncontrolled lusts. Her outrage leads her to a jail cell in her own husband’s precinct.

But just when you think you know where this story is going, it turns, as many of Leon’s books do, and tackles another subject, one very much in the eye of the news – falsified medications. There is a huge profit to be made, and huge wrongdoings in the medical supplies field, as expired medications are shipped to the most needy countries, and prescription and over-the-counter medications contain ingredients that are at best, harmless, and at worst – poisonous!

Guido Brunetti follows the money, and exposes the cheats.

In the second book, The Death of Faith, the issue – corruption in the church – comes close to home, as Brunetti’s daughter gets a low grade from her religious education instructor for asking questions, logical questions, about the dogma of the Catholic faith. Leon also tackles the issue of the order of Opus Dei, the same mysterious order featured in The DaVinci Code, an order that does exist, but about which solid knowledge is murky. What is known is that the order, in jihadist fashion, seeks to establish the Catholic church as the supreme guide to behavior on earth, it’s own version of sharia law to be the ruling principle in every country.

This is an anethema to Commissario Brunetti, and to all thinking Italians who savor the separation of church and state. He asks the eternal question – who decides? Who decides what behavior is acceptable, what questions are allowable? Religious belief, or the lack of it, is so very personal – this is a very timely issue that all nations are struggling with. Religious rule? Secular rule?

Underlying all the Donna Leon books is the sweetness of daily life with Brunetti’s family, his beautiful and principled wife, his teenaged children, the food they eat, the family discussions they have, the flowers he brings home and the strength of the connection they have with one another. The Venetian setting weaves its own magical thread through every novel, as we ride with Brunetti in the vaporetto on the canals, as we sit with him in a local bar for a quick coffee – or something stronger – and as he walks the streets from home to office, or to talk with a witness.

And last, but not least, the utter corruption in the Venetian system reminds us that veniality is not restricted to the United States, or to Kuwait, or to Nigeria, or Italy, or to any one country, but wherever man seeks to impose order, the chaos of corruption must be slowly and surely overcome by the building of an honest bureaucracy, people like you and me, serving in seemingly hopeless situations, but doing our best, day by day, like Guido Brunetti, to build a better world for our children.

Strolling Through Villagio

As I sat in the Kuwait airport, waiting, waiting, waiting . . . .I ran into a friend also heading to Doha, and we spent some time together. For one thing, she told me about Villagio, which didn’t exist when I lived in Doha.

If I lived in Doha, this is where I would spend my summer, walking along the avenues and gondola filled lagoons of Villagio. After a good stroll, I could sit down at one of the many restaurants and cafes and wipe out all the good work I had done strolling!

How cool is this?

The lagoon winds through the Mall, and you can take a boat ride when you are tired of shopping:

I love all the attention to detail, especially the streetlights, which are lit day and night, and provide a delightful romantic atmosphere:

The perfect place for a stroll – or a 10K hike!