It's a Complicated Business

I just read “Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran”, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.  

He puts across wisdom and makes it uniquely personal.  Schmitt slowly pulled me in and I felt I was standing beside the characters as they were hit by universal emotions; despair, anger, fear, intimacy, love and death.

Schmitt’s character, Monsieur Ibrahim, tells a young boy about love,

“It doesn’t matter,” Monsieur Ibrahim said.  “Your love for her belongs to you.  It’s yours.  Even if she refuses it, she cannot change it.  She isn’t benefiting from it, that’s all.  What you give, Momo, is yours forever.  What you keep is lost for all time!” 

Ibrahim tells the young man, Momo, a dozen or more times, that his book, the Koran, tells him what he needs to know in order to live.   Surprisingly, he clarifies his faith later, when he says to Momo, 

“When you want to learn something, you don’t take a book. You talk to someone.  I don’t believe in books.” 

Morality is taught in every faith.  

Sometimes it can feel like a hammer hanging over a person’s head, waiting for a screw-up to bring the hammer down,  “I told you how to live, you didn’t listen, you are a bad person, now you will pay.”  Other times it’s in the form of proverbs or stories to impart morals.  

My past experience with faith was driven by fear.  I don’t remember learning Catechism to think.  At the Catholic school I was taught to recite morality word by word and obey.  I still am taken aback when someone can say a prayer from their heart and not from a memorized chant.  I think, “Where did they learn how to do that?”   

I don’t believe morality is found in a book, either.  So, I’m not sure why I find the written word so powerful.  When I’m able to relate to the justice of right and wrong in words, it stirs up something in me.  It reaffirms what I believe or sometimes makes me question what I believe.  

The questioning has become more important to me.  I want to admit I’m part of this human race.  I want to be an integral part of the whole.  I want to look at myself rather than at others for shortcomings.

When I read I know it’s affective when it allows me to step out of my world into someone else’s.  The real drive home is when it allows me to step back into my world.  The world I’ve repressed or denied.   

I understand faith to be hinged on believing there is a god/gods out there listening.  I also think faith relies on the belief there is another sort of life after we die. 

Every time I lose someone to death, whether it be a close loved one or further removed, I can’t help but fear my own inevitable expiration date.  Even when someone is ill or getting up in the years, the fear slides through the cracks of my denial.

My sister, Kathy, recently found out she has cancer.  Cancer is not a death sentence, by any means.  But is does get the old, fear-grief-despair volcano of feelings, bubbling over the edge.  She's a lovely person and I wish I could take this burden away from her.  

I don’t believe it’s about how much we fight death that keeps us healthy.  It’s about our fight to live.  Very different intentions.  Different mind-sets.  When I watched my sister with her granddaughters I saw the fight in her.  She has a confidence about her that comes across as warm and assured.

Near the end of the second story, in Schmitt’s book, a young boy is writing God because an older nurse tells him to talk to God,  She assures him God will help him. 

Oscar, writes to God,

“…I tried to explain to my parents that life is quite a gift.  

At first you overestimate it, this gift;  you think you’ve received eternal life.  

Then you underestimate it, you think it stinks, it’s too short, you’re almost ready to throw it away.  

Finally, you realize that it wasn’t a gift at all, just a loan.  

Then you try to deserve it…the more you age, the more you have to prove you know how to savor life and appreciate it.  you have to become refined, artistic.  

Any moron can enjoy life at the age of ten or twenty, but at a hundred when you can’t move anymore, you should use your intelligence.

I don’t know if I really convinced them all that well…”    Oscar 

So is it focus?  Is it about not forgetting the big picture?  Or is it slowing down and taking the deep breath we need to acknowledge what is important to us.  I don’t know about you, but I’m searching.  I’m not afraid to think in new ways.  I am afraid to run out of questions.  I’m like Oscar.  I think it’s a complicated business.