Fire and Brimstone

There is something quite abnormal about approaching a pool of water in the earth, and seeing that it is boiling.

In this valley of hot springs a few hours from Reykjavik is the original "Geysir," which gave its name to the geothermal phenomenon of water erupting in a huge plume from a subterranean shaft and reservoir. Geysir was famous, attaining heights of as much as 170 metres — even Napoleon came to see it — but it now erupts infrequently. Geological research indicates that Geysir has been active for more than 10,000 years; the activity of all the geysers in this region seems to vary depending on earthquake activity.

A neighboring geyser, Strokkur, first mentioned in 1789, erupts less spectacularly, but is very reliable. While we were in this valley, it erupted four times, about every ten minutes. Even more amazing than the eruption itself is the way the pool seems to "breathe" and finally gather strength, rising in a great bubble-like curve of water, and then exploding upward in a tall plume of sulfurous steam and water. (The Wikipedia link for Strokkur, above, shows a sequence of eruption photos.)

Elsa and I watch Strokkur erupt. In the photograph below, you can see how close the path (and the people) are to the geyser.

The valley also contains pools of extraordinary color, apparently from living algae and dissolved minerals, in water that is far too hot to touch, and the gravelly soil is also colored with hues of red, ochre, and yellow; on the flanks of the pools that eject streams of water there is a slippery, hard deposit of minerals. The smell is difficult. We didn't stay very long, in this valley that reminds one of Dante's vision of hell, but is actually closer to the birthing of worlds. Iceland, one of the geologically youngest places on earth, shows us something of what the earth was like in its infancy.

I found that fact both fascinating and sobering. The landscape is extraordinary, and – to me – extremely beautiful. It can be dangerous. But most of all, it moved me profoundly.

We spend so much of our life in populated places, looking at what human beings have created, and even when we manage to find some wildness, it's often in the company of others. Most of Iceland is unpopulated, or very sparsely settled. In the astounding places we visited, we were often the only people there. There are almost no warning signs — here a small sign mentioning not to touch the water, which was 80-100 degrees C — a flimsy rope, no disclaimers; you and your common sense are on their own.

Cultural differences can be huge about the assumptions surrounding perceived danger. After my friend G. read my initial account of this place, he wrote me a letter about his experience visiting geysers and hot springs in Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, under the apt subject heading: "Tiptoe to the Portals of Geothermal Hell:"

"On our road trip west, August 2010, we drove through and walked around parts of Yellowstone Park, which makes an interesting contrast with your geothermal adventures in Iceland.  It is a huge park with dense clusters of visitors in a handful of accessible places, and lots of remote but regulated wilderness that we, like most visitors, never approached. The thermal areas are just unlike anything we are used to.  Approaching a wooded area with steam rising all around might lead you to think of the first or last stages of forest fire — until the sulfur fumes hit you.  The carefully curated thermal areas around Old Faithful are polar opposite of the "visitor beware" ethos you describe in Iceland.  Boardwalks, rangers, warning signs, and wheelchair accessible ramps with numbered and annotated viewpoints give you no chance to do (or feel proud for refraining from doing) the stupid things you might otherwise be tempted to do in the vicinity of weird and smelly gurgling springs of boiling water, mud or extremophile bacterial colonies. I had thoughts, not of birthing planets, but of native Americans or early explorers coming upon such a place without the commercial buildup or grade school science projects that almost make these things trite.  The ground between these steaming springs can be a shallow and fragile layer over subterranean hot and wet: fatal attractions, with a danger obvious  to thinking folks. The bison like it here in the summer because the sulfur fumes keep the bugs away, and in the winter because the shallower snowpack gives better access to grazing.  Once in a while, one falls into a steaming pool and can't get out."

Iceland is wilderness, but not merely a national preserve or an unspoiled stretch of beach — it is wilderness that, in and of itself, is changing, mutating, moving, growing. There are old volcanoes, rifts, and relics of lava flows that happened long ago, but there is the constant possibility — probability – of new events, and the measurable drift of the tectonic plates away from each other, as the mid-Atlantic ridge rises from the sea in this northern land-that-is-still-becoming.

Who am I, I wondered, in this landscape? Not the same person, surely, as I naively was in the streets of Montreal.

– This post is my submission to the anniversary edition of the Language/Place blog carnival, hosted this month by Dorothee Lang, on the theme of "Streets, Signs, Directions." I'll post the link as soon as it become active.

FIFA by the fan

I'm not a big soccer fan but have gotten caught up, at least a little, in the fervor surrounding the World Cup. Today was so incredibly hot here that I was glad for an excuse to sit still on the studio couch, watching the match between Spain and Germany, and sketching while the fan kept me sort of comfortable and the tense match and drawing kept my mind off the sweat rolling down my body.

Now, though, I have to get up and go home, which will at least be on my bike – its own wind machine.

For more drawings, see also my Photostream on Flickr.

Tongues of Flame

Pentecost, a Christian feast commemorating the birth of the church and
the descent of the Holy Spirit, as well as the gift of glossalia, or
speaking in tongues, occurs 50 days after Easter. I like the little orange flames sitting over the heads of the apostles in this painting by Duccio!

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one
accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of
a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were
sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire,
and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy
Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them
utterance. (Acts 2:1-4)

The symbolic point of this "babble" was not chaos, but that even though everyone was suddenly speaking in a language incomprehensible to themselves, they could "hear" what was being said and understand it. In my former church, this used to be dramatized by having the gospel for the day (below) read aloud all at once by different people in many languages, which went on for several minutes, and then at the end the English version emerged out of the babble of incomprehensible words.

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation
under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in
bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.
Utterly amazed, they asked: "Are not all these men who are speaking
Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native
language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia,
Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and
the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and
converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs-we hear them declaring the
wonders of God in our own tongues!" Amazed and perplexed, they asked
one another, "What does this mean?"

Theologically, I think Pentecost is supposed to be a time of marveling at the greatest gift that Love (what I'd prefer to call the Holy Spirit) can offer: the coming-together of all the human tribes into mutual understanding and common awe, but I've never heard that expressed in a sermon.

—

When I was young, the
prayer book didn't call it Pentecost, but Whitsunday (Whitsuntide)
which is the British name for the pagan midsummer feast the Christian
festival merged with.

In somer at Whitsuntide,
Whan knightes most on horsebacke ride,
A cours let they make on a daye,
Steedes and palfrays for to assaye,
Whiche horse that best may ren.(Chambers)

Pentecost always had a resonance for me, because I was
such a nut on Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I liked the
word itself, and the fact that Pentecost was Arthur's favorite
festival, when he held a jousting tournament and big feast, and expected all his knights to gather around the round Table to tell stories, and some great marvel usually occurred. I think it was on Pentecost when the knights, in a communal fervor,
departed on the quest for the Holy Grail. Their vow tore at Arthur's heart because he foresaw that they would scatter and die, following out their own interpretations of what the Quest meant and blinded by their own lusts and desires. He knew it would lead to the downfall of everything he had tried to accomplish in his Kingdom.

"So King Arthur had ever a custome, that at the high feast of
Pentecost especially, afore al other high feasts in the yeare, he
would not goe that day to meat until he had heard or seene some
great adventure or mervaile. And for that custom all manner of
strange adventures came before King Arthur at that feast afore all
other feasts." (Malory, Morte d'Arthur)

I was probably one of a minuscule handful of people in the blogosphere actually observing Pentecost yesterday, and wondering what it might mean in a modern context. We sang a big mass for choir and organ by the French composer Louis Vierne, and at the offertory one of the Sunday School teachers swept down the center aisle with a basket full of construction paper "flames" made by the kids, on which were pasted little plastic butterflies (one hopes they had fire-resistant wings.)

In the afternoon we went to a modern joust: a soccer match between the local Montreal team and Fiorentina. The Italian community turned out in large numbers; Montreal fans cheered lustily for both sides; we got a little sunburned but it was a lot of fun – our first live, upper-level soccer match, which ended in a 1-1 tie.

Sitting in the shade during the half, I especially liked this grandfather, explaining the fine points of the game to his grandson.

Like the city itself, the game and the presence of an A-level team brought out soccer fans from every country; languages were flying all around us as I stood on the upper level of the stadium, watching the crowds leave and the Olympic Stadium in the background.

Games, music: these are the common languages we recognize today. Few people would identify the communal lifting of hearts, and sense of lack of separation, at a rock concert or football game as the "Holy Spirit;" that's a term now reserved for the ecstasy of pentecostal (yes) religion and used almost with embarrassment by more reserved Christians, but it describes a phenomenon that's fundamental to human social behavior and for which, I think, we hunger.

The profound disconnect between the rich myths and literature from all cultures, and our contemporary sense of alienation, despair, anxiety, and atomization — which we could call "lack of meaning" –  makes me very sad. These stories that form the basis of myth and scripture have developed over the millenia in order to help us see and interpret our own historical patterns, the failings of flawed kings and the gifts of true leaders, as well as our personal longings, fears, hopes, and wonder. Without them, each individual, like Arthur's knights going off in a hundred individual directions, is forced to begin again and again to try to piece together meaning from the babble of a chaotic contemporary world, or seek communal or private highs from experiences that largely exist now without their historical psychological, emotional, and spiritual context because the traditional repositories of wisdom — whether they're religious institutions, classical literary educations, or even art forms — have become inaccessible, discredited, or impoverished by the inability of teachers to interpret them for a modern technological age. Meanwhile, fundamentalisms — and governments based on them — clash in conflicts of ever-more-epic proportion. All one can hope is that new forms and new stories are arising that will eventually become a counter to the despair and destructiveness so prevalent in our modern world, rather than mere opiates proffered by the media and continually washed into our subconscious minds.

Wrapping It Up – Film Festival Awards

Typical Montreal behavior: reading while waiting in line for the movies.

The winners have been announced for the 2008 Montreal World Film Festival, and to our surprise they corresponded closely with our own choices.

Best Film went to Okuribito, "Departures," the Japanese film about the cellist who becomes an undertaker. After seeing 20 movies, including nearly all of the competition entrants, I still felt that this was the best – the most creative and unusual, with the most to say.

The People’s Choice, not surprisingly, went to Ce qu’il faut pour vivre, the Quebec film about the Inuit man with TB.

Best Short Film was an animation by a young Canadian director/animator called "The Necktie;" it had taken him five years to make and was absolutely remarkable.

Best actress was Barbara Sukowa in The Invention of Curry Sausage; best actor went to Eri Canete for The Voyage of Teo, about a young boy who becomes separated from his father after the two try to cross the US/Mexican border. This was also a very good film; I’m sure it will be distributed in the U.S.

Varg, "Wolf," about the Samii reindeer herders, won an ecumenical prize and was named by the jury for best artistic contribution.

Best Screenplay went to Bienvenido Farewell-Gutmann, which we saw over the past weekend. J. remarked afterwards that it had felt like a movie made out of a play, and that’s true. It was a very good screenplay though, a Spanish psychological drama about the machinations of three people vying for the job vacated when the boss of a pharmaceutical company dies.

We also saw three other films that are worth looking for in your area over the next year: Lluvia, "Rain," a drama/love story set in Buenos Aires; Todos Estamos Invitados, "Who’s Next,"  a tense drama about terrorism in the Basque region; and "All Inclusive", an excellent Chilean/Mexican film about a dysfunctional family on vacation at a Mexican all-inclusive resort, with the problems of each family  member playing out under the gathering clouds of an approaching hurricane. This one wasn’t in the competition, but J. said if it had been, it would have been his top pick. We both put the Inuit film in second place, and rated "the Invention of Curry Sausage" third because of Barbara Sukowa’s performance, or perhaps tied with "The Voyage of Teo."

The intrepid duo, reflected in a window while on line for the final film of the festival.

I’ve never seen so many films in such a short time, and it was great! I’m not sure if we’re experiencing relief or withdrawal at the moment, but I know I’m already looking forward to next year.

The Road to Baleya

Yesterday’s documentary, The Road to Baleya, was about four Canadian musicians who went to Mali to meet, record and collaborate with Malian musicians. The project, organized by musician Lewis Melville, was very low-key. Melville’s brother is an aide worker living in Bamako, the capital of Mali. The city is a locus for young people looking for economic opportunity that is lacking in their native villages, and although the entire country is poor, Bamako is its center for education and culture. The Canadians visited the city’s music school, where they were warmly welcomed, and for which they had brought some donated instruments. Melville’s personal focus was to set up a basic recording studio in his brother’s home, where local musicians who didn’t have the money to record in Malian studios could come and record their music; word of his project spread quickly and there was a steady stream of Malian musicians who came to play, sing, record, and jam with the Canadians.

In Bamako, the group met an accomplished, locally known kora player, Mansa Sissoko, who had been born into a family of griots in the faraway village of Baleya. Sissoko hadn’t been back since he was a little boy; his father died when he was little and his mother, also now deceased, left the village shortly after that. After getting to know the Canadians and talking about the origins of his music, Sissoko invited them to accompany him to Baleya to "see the roots of his music", and so they all went back to the village in a small bus they hired – a long and difficult journey. For the second leg of it, they took on a translator and two armed security guards in case of trouble.

The scenes in the village were step back into an earlier Africa. The visitors were met by all the villagers: the  hunters dancing in a line with rifles that they kept firing, women and children clapping, and a singer who sang formal, ritual songs welcoming and praising the kora player who had come back to re-establish his ties to the village, and whose father and grandfather were still revered there. Many of the villagers wore traditional dress, some carried pet monkeys, and the children ran in packs, first shy and then enthusiastic. The village food came from hunting the depleted wildlife of the region, and very basic hillside agriculture carried out mostly by the women using primitive tools. Homes were a cluster of round thatched huts; there a mosque that functioned as a gathering place; and a rudimentary school, for which the Canadians brought eagerly-accepted books.

But music was sung or played constantly. The poverty was extreme, but the people seemed happy and they were also eloquent. The young kora player was in tears, so moved was he by the welcome and the villagers’ memories of his family. The musicians stayed up late every night playing music with the dancing villagers; during the extreme heat of the midday they rested under mosquito nets. The kora player seemed changed by the journey and expressed his desire to help the village as much as he could, as well as to become a griot "in his own way" and "for the people," saying he couldn’t be a griot exactly the way his father and mother had. His humility was sincere, and particularly poignant in the face of his obvious talent and skill.

A side story was that of a 16-yr-old drummer who played a small drum held under one arm that he hit with a curved mallet as well as his hands. Obviously bursting with talent, and with a face filled with his brilliant smile, he also went on the trip; the kora player knew him well. He was suffering from malaria, though none of them knew it at the time, and a month or two later tragically died after consulting a local healer.

"Road to Baleya" was made on a low budget and wasn’t a polished, high-tech documentary, but it was a big window into the roots of Malian music for me,  and a part of Africa I had never seen on film before. I also appreciated the generosity of the Canadian musicians and the universality of musical communication, transcending a very large cultural gap. It was one of the most uplifting films we’ve seen this week, and I wish the audience for it had been larger. The movie is being shown occasionally on "Bravo!", and perhaps will be released on DVD.

Ce qu’il faut pour vivre

During one of my first visits to Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital, I saw a government van unloading in the parking lot. Getting out of the van were several Inuit women, looking around themselves with dazed and worried eyes, and I immediately wondered if they had been sent to southern Quebec for medical treatment, and now found themselves in an utterly alien world.

"Ce qu’il faut pour vivre," ("Necessities of Life"), a new film by Quebec director Benoit Pilon, tells the story of Tivii, an Inuit hunter who contracts tuberculosis and is sent to a Quebec sanitorium in 1952. The movie had its international premiere here on Monday night, with the director and cast present; in fact we arrived and walked into Place des Arts just behind them, without knowing exactly who was who – everything is pretty low-key here in Montreal! And it wasn’t until today that I realized the star of the movie, Natar Ungalaaq, is the same man who stunned many of us with his performance in the "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner" a few years ago.

It’s a simple story, really — you can probably imagine its trajectory yourself — but the film is beautifully directed, strong, and compelling, anchored by the convincing performances of Ungalaaq, who loses his will to live when he cannot communicate with the French doctors, nuns, and fellow patients who surround him, and Evelyne Gelinas as the nurse who takes this unusual patient on as her personal responsibility. Like its title, the movie asks the viewers what would be necessary for us to live, and that is the question I still find myself musing two days later. But in addition to the more obvious cultural and personal challenges depicted in the film, I found it fascinating to simply see this careful portrayal of the Catholic Quebec of the 1950s, because that too has changed so utterly — perhaps even more than lives of the Inuit themselves.

The audience, which packed Theatre Maisonneuve on Monday night, gave the film, director, and cast a standing ovation. The film will certainly be a strong contender (and local favorite) for the competition prize here at the festival.

Lying for Love

"The Invention of Curry Sausage" is set in Germany during the last days of Hitler’s life; the heroine, Lena, is the second person in charge of a dining hall that serves SS officers but she despises the government. her husband, a charming "scoundrel", according to her, has been gone, at the front, for five years without a word. During an air-raid, she meets a young sailor, young enough to be her son, who’s onshore for a few days before returning to his warship. They end up back in her apartment, where she makes him a home-cooked dinner, gives him some precious pear brandy made by a friend, and, well, one thing leads to another. After a torrid night, Lena, an optimist who believes in living for each day, suggests that he could simply stay there, in hiding — and he does. As the days go on, the neighbors become suspicious, but Lena keeps returning, like sunlight, to the locked apartment with food purloined from the dining hall. But the radio is broken, and Lena insists there are no newspapers, even after Hitler’s death and Germany’s surrender, so desperate is she to prolong the affair.

"If you were on a desert island and running out of food," she asks her friend, the chef, "would you blow it all on one big party, or stretch the food without telling the others?"  He looks at her closely and answers, "I’d stretch the soup until all I had was a pot of hot water." She tries, but of course the war does end, and things change.

The actress who played Lena was present last night, and before the film she said she saw the movie as a celebration of life; I think she was right. But it was also about the lies people tell each other, even out of love.

–

As in many contemporary Iranian and Chinese films, the scope of the second movie we saw yesterday was small and not much seems to happen. "Nima’s Women" is set in inner Mongolia, and focuses on the lives of an elderly mother and her younger daughter, who live in a yurt and herd sheep in a barren landscape beyond a large modern wind-farm where the bus from the city stops and turns around. An older daughter comes on the bus from the city to celebrate the mother’s birthday. The mother’s sadness is that, because of death and divorce, there were no men in the family at her last big birthday, twelve years earlier. The daughters are determined to change that this time, but they can’t do so without weaving an intricate web of lies.

I love the gem-like movies of this genre, set in real places with real people as actors. J. was sleepy last night and less enthused; he has a hard time with Kurostami’s films, for example, while I really like them. The life lived by Nima’s Women must be pretty much like the film, and conveying its pace, as well as an evocative sense of place, was part of the filmmaker’s intent. Each day is the same, there is little to look at, nowhere to go; what color there is is provided by the floral fabrics of quilts and headscarves; every task requires hard work, and happiness is playing with a pet lamb, having a drink of alcohol in the evening, or looking forward to a rare celebration. Human relationships, though, are just as complex on the steppes of Mongolia as in a top-floor wartime walk-up in Europe — as the movie makes clear.

–

I should also note that we saw a memorable animated short film too. Called the "Bamiyan", it tells the story of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang‘s journey in AD 630 to see the giant Buddha statues of Afghanistan. The animation was done  by painting on the back of glass or plexiglass, with actual materials such as grass and clay sometimes added, or water dripped and splashed onto the paint. I’ve always been fascinated by animated drawings and paintings, but this was completely different and new to me, and the effect was simply amazing, as well as beautiful.

Departures (Okuribito)

Okuribito (Departures), directed by Yojiro Takita, follows an out-of-work Japanese cellist who leaves Tokyo, goes back to his hometown, and
becomes a undertaker. The term means something rather different than it does in the west: in Japan, the specialty our cellist learns is "en-coffinment" – the
preparation of the body of the deceased and placement into the coffin
prior to cremation. This is performed in an elaborate, slow ritual in front of the family, and
involves washing the body (while concealing any nudity from the family), dressing it, and making the deceased as
beautiful and natural as possible — with utmost respect, and
affection. People who have never witnessed the ritual seem to think of it, and the profession, as macabre, even creepy, but if the film is accurate, when performed by an artist, it is moving, beautiful and cathartic, helping to release both the spirit of the deceased, and the spirits of those left behind.

The film is also extremely funny at times, in fact its balance between humor and wrenching emotion was absolutely sure-footed. I felt that rare sense of bonding within the audience itself: we laughed together, but also cried: when was the
last time you heard audible sobs from a dark movie theater? Considering what
J. and I have been through recently, it was emotional for me too: I think some of the catharsis portrayed in the film was transmitted to the audience. It was astonishing for me to discover that Japanese culture includes this elaborate ritual — not always done well, however — for the preparation of the body of the dead, formerly done by the family but now entrusted to a profession, that goes beyond religion into the culture itself, and ultimately beyond culture to touch our most basic, universal issues as social beings painfully aware of our mortality and the finiteness of human relationships.

I haven’t written yet about the death of my father-in-law and what happened afterwards, but I probably will eventually. It was oddly comforting to witness a fully-developed ritual that affirmed the same instincts I’ve felt, and acted upon to the best of my ability, when caring for the bodies of loved ones immediately following their deaths. Islam and Judaism contain specific instructions for the treatment of the dead, but in western Christianity, with our great discomfort with death and, especially with corpses, we have nearly forgotten the tender responsibility once carried by family members, and as a result we’ve relinquished a big part of what these immediate hours have to teach us. Trying to reclaim that myself, and confronting and overcoming my own fears and discomfort, has been a profound inner journey in my own life.

This was a  remarkable film on so many levels: about relationships, culture, life and death, and especially, perhaps, about what art is at its core. Only one sequence in the middle of the film– al fresco cello playing and wild goose flight, with a snow-capped mountain background — felt over-long, and ill-advised. "Okuribito" ranks as one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and also did what movies do best, opening a world of specific human experience and emotion that flows between the characters and the audience, enlarging life itself.

—

Yesterday we also saw a good documentary, "Tracing Aleida," about a young Mexican woman’s search for her brother; the family was separated after the parents were "disappeared," and an absolutely dismal high-budget Egyptian film, "Baby Doll Night;" I can’t imagine how or why it was accepted into the contest here unless the sponsorship of the Egyptian government (the ambassador to Canada was in attendance last night) somehow influenced the choice. Billed as a film "about the dream of peace between all people," the film actually insulted every group it touched: Americans, Israelis, Jews and Arabs themselves, who were often presented as embarrassing caricatures. But it was also simply a terrible piece of movie-making that dragged on, lurching from one situation to another, for nearly three hours. It was the exact opposite of the Japanese film in being totally inept at balancing humor and suffering. We should have walked out – and that’s the assessment of someone who generally likes Middle Eastern movies.

Next: love stories and strong women — in Germany, and Mongolia

A Young Rwandan in Canada

Eugène Kwibuka is a 22-year-old journalism student from Butare, Rwanda, who stayed in Montréal for six weeks covering the war crimes trial of Désiré Munyaneza. He’s been chronicling his experiences in a blog.

He says he loves the idea of Canada’s changing seasons and finds the country beautiful, and he’s amazed by being able to drink tap water, use wireless internet, ride on excellent roads, and have electricity that works all the time. But he notes that people aren’t necessarily happy, even though they have big houses and lots of possessions: the stress and loneliness in western society were immediately apparent to him. He’s surprised that even well-off people don’t have live-in maids – something that’s common and affordable in Rwanda – and that parents have to worry about babysitters for their children.

Can you imagine a person living alone in a huge house in which you find more than two television sets, more than two cars, more than two sitting rooms, and many other things?

And I was interested that he picked up on some colloquial expressions in English that say quite a lot about our society:

Sayings like "there is no free lunch in North America" and "feed the goat" show how capitalist a society is. The first means that people here work hard to eat and buy things…

By the term "feed the goat," I learned that people here work for big companies that keep demanding big work and they are considered as goats to be fed anytime…I always wonder what would happen if companies stop employing people who are living in a house they haven’t paid for yet? Doesn’t it stop them from paying the mortgage? Would they be sent from the house?

Holy Innocents

The year departs in a winding sheet of snow.

Tomorrow: a Feast Day.
The blue lips
of Herod’s Holy Innocents
beg more of us than memory; more than a facile exchange of swords
for napalm, poison gas, cluster bombs.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but still we seek symbolic deaths, atonement — and all the while the Child remains hidden: beyond armies, and beyond us too.

When the wise men
had departed, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and
said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and
remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the
child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his
mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death
of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through
the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."

When Herod
saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he
sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two
years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the
wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet
Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

(Matthew 2:13-18)