Lewis R. Scudder, Jr. writes periodic essays from his home in Apaisia Village, Cyprus. These have been collected as PDFs. Please click on the link to access the complete essay.  October
2009: Jaton Dustu!
Since September 11, 2001 something’s been
staring me in the face. I’ve finally cottoned on to it. The Turks have a
saying: ‘Jaton dushtu!’ meaning that
the token for the ‘Tünel’ -- the
underground tram connecting the end of Istanbul’s fabled Istiklâl Jaddesi with
the Galata Bridge crossing into the ancient golden city -- finally dropped. Jaton dushtu! You could then finally
move onto the station platform and board the tram. The idiomatic English
equivalent, of course, is ‘the penny’s dropped’, but I do like the Turkish
phrase and its cadence … jaton dustu. September
2009: Viva! Vida and Ida!
There are two names that will resonate with me forever. The one is Ida Sophie Scudder (1870-1960); the other is Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954) … Vida and Ida. The onomatopoetic pair were contemporaries and they both, to use the antique term of their day, remained ‘spinsters’ single-mindedly committed to their perceived vocations (for them there was simply no space for married life). That they were both born in India of missionary parents, that they were ‘driven’ personalities, that they reached the pinnacles of their demanding professions, and that they both achieved a degree of renown in the doing is also quite remarkable. Theirs — beginning at the end of the 19th century and carrying on into the mid-20th — were the days when the liberation of women in western society was gathering steam and finally broke out into the open. And these two, each in her idiosyncratic way, were spearheads. I’m quite proud to share their surname and, in Ida’s case, a direct relationship. (I’m her first cousin twice removed and had the privilege of knowing her personally.)
August
2009: Happiness Pursued
Even as we celebrate personally (and enthusiastically!), there are things that do sour. I am not a pessimist by inclination. I enjoy joy. I enjoy helping others find it. People deserve to be happy. God's message to humanity, as the Arabic term has it, is a bushrah, a celebration of good news, a joyful thing. The American Declaration of Independence proclaims that the revolution of the erstwhile British colonies back in the 18th century was dedicated to establishing the right of all individuals to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' And that's one reason why I'm a proud American. Happiness, like life and liberty, is an inalienable right...at least the pursuit thereof. July
2009: Prepositions...and the Goldmann Enigma
What a complicated business language is. There’s grammar, rhetoric, word choice and God knows what all. In an ever more verbose world, leave aside the writer’s genius creatively to invent something that truly stands out against the cacophony. But as a wannabe decent translator, I’ve often been confronted by, of all things, the often tiny preposition. In every language under heaven (or every one that I’ve encountered or heard reported about thus far) the preposition is the linchpin of meaning and sense. May/June
2009: Patience and the Courage to Change
As Christians we've come through the season of Easter and we're now well into
the Pentecost/Trinity season. In the Christian experience, radical and even cataclysmic
change came upon the world in those days, and the experience is not over...no, not
by a long shot. That’s just what the Pentecost experience is all about. Change comes...change comes...change comes. But a great many of us would like it to be genteel
and unobtrusive so that we don’t really notice it. Pentecost, however, doesn’t work
that way. It’s always had a boisterous and bullish way about it. Since then Pentecost
Christians have scattered worldwide, embracing as they did so all the momentous
changes that the scattering implied. April
2009: A Good Legacy
In February Nancy and I went on a trip to Oman with my cousin, Lois, and her husband David Dickason to help Dave research a study on Lowey’s parents, Wells and Beth Thoms who, from 1939 until 1970, served in that magnificent country on the eastern heel of the Arabian Peninsula. From the 9th century onward it has been a rather unique corner of the Muslim world and may yet raise a real beacon of hope for all the rest. In a modest way, to be sure, the Thoms legacy has contributed to the role Oman now plays in encouraging Islamic tolerance and openness to global culture. February
2009: Waiting
Having listened to Barak Obama’s Inaugural Address on January 20th and having read the text very carefully, I here present my condensation of it. I call it ‘The Condensed Obama’. Cutting and pasting as I did and inserting a few transitions as I had to, there’s been some editing and the real risk of changed meaning. But this is what I heard (or hope I heard) Obama say, and you can judge the product. January
2009: Myth … God Help Us!
There are times when you want to change something but feel so powerless. Myths especially don’t change easily least of all when they merge with other myths and set up a resonating system that yields new ones. And they’re such nimbostratus things — so up there in the air, all gray and light-occluding, so pregnant with the threat of downpour. It takes a real myth-master to deal with them. When they shake, thunder and cascade, most of us just hunker down under shelter and wait them out. January
2009: The Soil of Everyman
At Nancy’s strong urging I picked up and have just finished reading The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan. I wasn’t going to read it. Some of us who’ve circled around the Palestine-Israel black hole for decades eventually sense that we’ve gotten perilously close to the event horizon and face the prospect of being sucked down into that horrific gravity well where all reality simply comes unglued. Beyond it is insanity. From Nancy’s description and that of Chris Oldham, the friend who loaned us the book, I thought this would be just one more pulp piece in a genre that’s almost all pulp … brain-numbing useless stuff. But eventually, to keep the peace, I picked it up with a kind of sneering sense of immune superiority. After all, in my own modest and frankly largely fruitless way, I’ve got the battle scars and bruises that show I’ve fought the ideological war in the trenches. What more could I learn at this stage? January
2009: In With the New!
Barack Obama is a TCK [Third Culture Kid]. And he is the first of our kind to achieve the high office into which he is being inducted. Does that make any difference? Perhaps it does. We shall see. After all we live in a global age and the United States (the quintessential TCK nation) is a global player … the most crucial player of all, some say. If the American president possesses that global subtext in his identity, then perhaps he will act in accord with that identity. Let’s hope. For the sake of expediency, he may reject it, to be sure. He just may. Jingoism has played more subtle tricks. But he will do so only at great cost not only to his own soul, but also to his own people and to the world at large. He has become, to all intents and purposes, the center of America’s global identity and polity. And if the center won’t hold, then we’re in for trouble … deep trouble … worldwide. The American identity is highly fissionable material; it can be used to generate peaceful power, or it could be detonated into a world conflagration. December 2008: Teaching … ‘Gloria’!
It strikes me, though, that lofty declarations by so-called leaders won’t ‘shift the load’ for those, wittingly or not, already heavily burdened by prejudice. What’s needed is an agenda for teaching people things of value that yields mature perception, a hands-on process to effect a transition in attitude — not necessarily a radical break but at least an opening of long-shut windows. We don’t change our minds all that easily unless we are already of a mind to change. The Qur’ân’s thoughtful aphorism is, “God doesn’t change what’s in a people until they change what’s in themselves.” (13:11b) That is to say, teaching is important … even crucial. November 2008: Thanks for the Giving
But what is there to give thanks for? Stock markets around the world slosh around with our money and speculators mob around the market barrels as though bobbing for apples. Were it not for the great damage they do, they would be comic. We sing, “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land,” but it’s money that’s getting scattered, and parasites are the ones rewarded for raking it up and trashing it. October 2008: Hurricane Season
This year saw an exceptionally fierce season of deadly hurricanes (Gustav, Hannah and Ike) in the Caribbean and on the Gulf coast of the United States. And here's an irony: The Florida folks who forecast and monitor the Atlantic's tropical storms figure that the season should taper off on or around September 11th. And they were about right this year, weren't they? Is it a fluke? These days, when polar and glacial ice is melting like the Good Humor Man's soft ice cream in summer, and ocean currents are changing because the once-muscular polar ice no longer cools warm currents and bashes them back down to the ocean floor to run the other way, who's to say what seasonal patterns can be predicted? Precedent is no longer a guide. Septmember 2008: Poets
In his tribute to Mahmoud Darwish, Uri Avnery relates an anecdote. After Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Israel, members of the first Israeli delegation to Egypt (of which Avnery was one) wanted to know how the Egyptians had surprised them in the October war of 1973. In answer an Egyptian general replied, "Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets." And in that terse observation the general put his finger on a growing gap between East and West. August 2008: The Old Tree Still Lives
...There squats this ancient thing still very much alive just beyond our old Greek Orthodox church of St. George. You can't miss it as you drive or walk eastward out toward our neighboring village of Yerasa. And it expresses something I'm not sure there are words to express. It is a survivor and people kind of respect that, a sort of standing truth for their own endurance. It belongs to the architecture of human habitation here, a witness through the years, a very old 'word' for something that still has meaning, and people take a kind of bemused pride in the fact that they did not strike it down. July 2008: Liberty for All
Without really planning it that way, we have just watched the stunning mini-series, John Adams, and we've been reminded again what a struggle it was that birthed the United States of America onto the world stage with its pledge that 'all men are created equal' and 'endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights'. The American Revolution and the framing of the United States' Constitution was a moment not only for the infant nation but also for the world. It gave the world a champion of liberty that proclaimed all peoples had the right to be free from tyranny. It mesmerized people worldwide from 1776 through at least until the mid-1950s. And, in spite of significant internal blemishes (the genocide against Native Americans comes to mind and the whole saga of racism), that was a magnificent achievement. The world has not forgotten. May/June 2008: Swatting Beelzebub
...Lies like flies must be finite in number because there is a finite number of liars, even though that number has not yet been defined. And I do hear my son: "Swat one and three more take its place." Like flies lies have a way of cutting loose from their creators. They take on lives of their own and mysteriously multiply. The task remains: 'Swat Beelzebub!' Some who are trapped in lies may yet be liberated. Just pass around the swatters. April 2008: Spring Forward!
Sunday, March 30th was Cyprus's moment to 'Spring Forward' into daylight savings time. Personally, I think this daylight savings business is an invention of the devil. I've never understood what is meant by 'spring forward' and 'fall back'. I always seem to get them back-to-front and on occasion my temporal dyslexia has embarrassed. Apart from Nancy, who has all this well in hand, I now have a whole bevy of friends who call me up on the Saturday evening before the change to remind me how to 'spring' or 'fall'. Is this all a paradigm for how we manage our world? March 2008: Peace Now!
We are in a new day and, God willing, a hopeful one. Muslim and Christian voices calling for a new and more open dialogue are beginning to make themselves heard in spite of the main-line western media's virtual blackout. I think the first sign of hope is that people are no longer sucked in by those who intone, 'Peace, peace!' when there is no peace. So-called 'Peace Processes' that are sponsored by those who finance and promote violence (yes, among others, I mean the United States) have long been dead in the water precisely because they provide none of the elements that make for peace. As Martin Luther King observed years ago, 'Peace is not the absence of violence; it is the presence of justice.' And that is the burden of the voices (especially Muslim voices) that are now being heard. November 2007: Getting Culture Right
Getting our cultural identity and context right is no easy task. It is a task that must be undertaken from generation to generation not least of all because culture is such a plastic and malleable thing. But each culture carries with it certain 'root stock' that changes very little and very slowly. We carry with us a lot of baggage that we don't even know we have. Most of the time we do not even feel its drag. The mountain of valises and suitcases and plastic bags full of cultural junk is just there, one piece piled up on top of another on our mental pallets, from the time we were barely able to understand words ... much less manipulate thoughts. And those pieces of baggage are difficult to sort out far less jettison, not least of all because we often don't even know they're there. And a good many of the archetypal ideas in the loads we drag along with us engender in us knee-jerk prejudices and preconceptions with regard to those who are different. September/October 2007: Celebrating Mortal Flesh
Listening to the news of our fragile world of late, though, I know that my [medical] condition is downright paltry. I didn’t have my skull crushed by a steel-shod rifle butt as a Burmese Buddhist monk did in Rangoon the other day; nor did I die as a child in an aerial bombardment on a village in Afghanistan, my limbs scattered about higgledy-piggledy. I don’t live in Iraq or in Gaza or in the West Bank where sudden death is a daily and an utterly banal occurrence. We, Nancy and I, live in a comfortable and safe hacienda in Cyprus with all the mod-cons we could possibly want and more, and our financial future is relatively secure. But I am, none-the-less, suddenly very aware of my mortality. August 2007: Profoundly...Trivial
Every year we come to these days ... the 'dog days of August'. Unless you live in the southern hemisphere (in which case, I presume, they are the 'witching days of winter'), August can be 'the pits'. But our resident and very fecund female cat, MOE ('Mother Of Everyone'... né 'Miss One Eye'), has managed to bring to us in these days yet another lovely but very wild and skittish gray kitten that we really thought she had lost. She herself is perhaps the ugliest cat on this island -- one eyed, one-toothed and scrawny beyond description -- but also perhaps the most long-lived. She is a survivor par excellence. And now we're working on trying to seduce her latest offspring to join our little covey of cats. No dogs! Dogs, love them though I may, are just too dependent. Betrayal of my childhood though it might be, but give me a semi-wild cat any day. They are self-administering. I'm thinking of naming our new addition Haggai (provided he signs on the dotted line) because that's what I call him whenever I see him: 'Hey guy!' Unless, of course, 'he' turns out to be a 'she', in which case she might gain the sobriquet of 'Charlotte' after her great-grandfather, Charlie. July 2007: God Mend Thine Every Flaw
That day, the 4th of July, has come and gone but I began this writing before. We had three British guests and did a cookout -- a dip in the pool, burgers on the grill, potato salad and a monster watermelon for desert. We hung out our Wal-Mart-bought American flag that we do once a year. We did the whole nine yards bar the fireworks (this is brushfire season in Cyprus). How patriotic can you get? And Nancy and I also did some serious soul searching. June 2007: In Saecula Saeculorum
The old Latin liturgical phrase 'in saecula saeculorum' means, loosely interpreted, something like 'the world and a whole lot more of the same!' In English it is tersely expressed by the colorless phrase, 'world without end'. Where it actually comes from I've not the foggiest idea. It's certainly not biblical. But there it is, firmly imbedded in the Church's liturgy from a very, very long time ago, and when we sing the Doxology we belt it out with great gusto just before the double 'Amen'. June 2007: The Rainbow Covenant
I write on the 40th anniversary of the first day (June 5th) of the Six-Day War of 1967. It was Nancy's and my baptism of fire into the real world of the Middle East. Twenty-six year-olds though we were, I was a political innocent. I saw the Arab world through the rose-tinted glasses of my childhood. I reveled in the taste of good food and sweet tea sucked out of a saucer. I loved Persian bread fresh-snatched from the ceiling of a dome oven by a guy with no hair left on his right arm. I knew gluttony as I attacked with my right hand the pungent spiced mutton on top of a pile of garnished rice. I rejoiced in the 'taste' of Arabic on the tongue, the blaze of a desert summer and the smiles of Arab friends who loved what I loved. But in early 1967 I had no politics at all. Lord! How typical was I of our 'Apathetic Generation' of American youth! June 2007: Only Let There Be...
I've just translated an essay written by an acquaintance of mine, Ridwân as-Sayyid. A senior Arab thinker, Ridwân has seen it all. He has 'won his spurs'. I respect him because he speaks with candor and doesn't whine or whinge. And that's refreshing. He is a realist. The portrait he paints is unapologetic. For all the agony of getting his meaning right as a translator, I quite admire him for hitting the nail on the head time and time again. (I've bruised my thumb too many times to use that analogy lightly.) May 2007: The Citizen's Day...Dawning?
I've been working on a set of translations. That's not unusual. I've done a lot of that over the past forty years. By and large it's great fun, and it's challenging. The focal issue of the essays I'm working on now is 'citizenship'. And I've learned how very new an issue 'citizenship' really is, both in western culture and in the Muslim milieu. April 2007: Back to Horse Sense...God Willing!
To the readers of these meditations I must apologize. Some who know Nancy's and my e-mail address (scudder@spidernet.com.cy) have written to ask whether they've missed something. They haven't. For the last few months I have been deliberately 'taking a break' if for no other reason than to reassess what these meditations are all about. November/December 2006: The Violence-Faith Disconnect
Nancy and I have been having a special experience, and it is now drawing to an end. Far from where the sun rises, we came into the lands of the evening in mid-September, into mid-America's heartland of the Reformed faith -- Holland, Michigan. The task before us has been to interpret Islam and the Middle East in an environment that has been so drenched in propaganda that truth, indeed, is a whole lot stranger than fiction. Don't think this hasn't been a challenge! And among the questions we've had to field with a depressing degree of regularity is, "Is Islam a religion that teaches violence?" October 2006: Movers and Shakers
Who is it that moves and shakes our world these days? Personally I have a whole list of saints and I don't know whom I should list first. September 2006: What's the 'Emperor' Wearing?
Our friend, Ann Staal, the Reformed Church in America's anchorperson for 'Middle East Peace-Makers', has taken the bit between her teeth and pressed us on our use language and its consequences. Serendipitously perhaps, she also called to my mind the old fable related by Hans Christian Anderson about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. (We could only wish that it were more fabulous than real.) August 2006: Those Who Try
After a while you become aware that, your whole life long, you've been surrounded by people who ... well ... people who've given their best for you. If Providence has been generous, you've grown up in a loving family in which parents and siblings have extended themselves and at least tried to make the breaks break your way, and kept you in their embrace when they haven't broken your way. July 2006: Patriotism and Piety...and Morality
I started writing this 'meditation' on the eve of July 4th. Quite unabashedly, I am an American patriot. Furthermore I am a Christian with universalist predilections, a passionate ecumenist, and in that context, a world citizen. What I was taught and what I still believe is that patriotism, spirituality and morality have to coincide. June 2006: Accounts Outstanding
Globalization, once touted as the panacea for the world's ills, has a nasty side. It seems to have become the ideal breeding ground for war and terrorism. It also plays the old ditty: 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' The pressure's on all the time, and those in a position to relieve it just don't seem to give a rip. The Internet, the grand highway for information and communication, has turned into the perfect medium for chaos and the venue for crud and crudity. The world's so-called 'great religions' are in massive disarray, their leaders, like Sergeant Schultz of the old TV series, Hogan's Heroes, shake their massive jowls, each proclaiming, 'I know nothing! ... nothing!' Political leadership the world over has become a mockery, and the proliferation of NGOs for every cause under heaven only adds to the cacophony. May 2006: Language Again...the Confusion of Tongues
The Qur'ân speaks about 'religion' in the singular. That is one reason why, the word, dîn, commonly translated from Arabic into English as 'religion', poses such a phenomenal problem for any competent translator. April 2006: Dubai Ports World
The British-based shipping company, P&O, for years has been managing seaports around the world including several major ones in the United States. An Arab corporation, Dubai Ports World, gained ownership, and all hell broke loose. Quite suddenly and, initially, much to the world's amusement, US congressmen went into Keystone Cops gyrations claiming this change in ownership would open a gateway for terrorism and undermine the nation's security.
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