Archive - Dec 26, 2008

A big day for reading in the hottest apartment in Toronto.

After I finished Bedlam, I wandered over to my friend's bookcase to look for something to preoccupy me. It seemed I had caught a mild flu so the question of socks was out the window for today.

My friend has made the interesting decision to put all the in-house spirituality books on one shelf, the shelf directly at eye-level. Since I am at heart a browser and not a searcher, I picked a book by Karen Armstrong and took it with me back to the living room.

10 hours later, here I am book finished, sweating and a little hungry. I did actually make some noodles, and I did in the immortal words of Sheryl Crow "scrape the mold off the bread", I made regular toast though.

The book so good I ate moldy bread is called The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness. It is Armstrong's personal account of the years, the career and the transformation of faith that followed her decision to renounce her vows at the age of 24 and leave the convent she had joined when only a 17 year old in in 1962.

Of course the book is not simply about leaving her faith. It is about regaining one's sanity after nervous collapse, living with failure, finding a vocation, and ultimately discovering a transformative faith and in my opinion a renewal of the self.

It is also about developing compassion, in a major way, but I will leave that for tomorrow's post which will doubtless be huge unless I have to actually spend time with my family who would probably like to see me.

For now I will leave you with the T.S Elliot poem that served as inspiration for Armstrong's journey, and is a fitting testament to all people who wrestle with lives that seem not to be a "broad, noble flight of steps", but a "twisted spiral staircase".

I am reading the book 'Bedlam' by Greg Hollingshead this season. Christmas vacation, as far as I am concerned, is much better spent buried in a good book, then taking part in a tradition bedecked with historically satanic rituals that once upon a time scapegoated my people. (Ironically forcing the Jews to eat too much and then run great distances only to purge themselves dramatically was a saturnalia tradition. Then I guess someone invented turkey, gravy, stuffing and cheesy mashed potatoes all of which are obviously too yummy to waste on the Jews?)

The present set of saturnalia traditions we take good advantage of along with every other shopkeeper on the planet.

I am not being a bah humbug. Okay a little. I had lots of turkey last night and today I am going out to find some cheap (cheap!) something or others that I didn't think I needed but if they are marked down enough I will buy anyways.

The real purpose of this entry is to quote from this book I am reading and enjoying very much (between bouts of intense socializing and trying to remember if I brought enough clean pairs of socks).

So Bedlam is a story about one of the first documented cases of Paranoid Schizophrenia, a man named James Tilly Matthews who claimed to be the victim of a "gang" who used magnetic forces to control political outcomes in France and England during the era of both the French Revolution and England's Reformation.