(no subject)
Jun. 25th, 2014 01:22 pmWhen I finally got home from Minneapolis this weekend, the first text message I received was from my brother: Mom got touched by naked Jesus.
...so while I was gone my whole family went to see The Mysteries and apparently super enjoyed it! I am very glad they liked the show. That said, I am OK with not having been present when Mom got touched by naked Jesus.
It did however remind me that I never talked about Children of the Alley, a loan from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aberration that I coincidentally ended up reading at about the same time I went to go see The Mysteries. Apparently it was just a very Biblical week for me that week -- Children of the Alley is a novel-length Biblical allegory by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, which begins when a wrathful paterfamilias kicks his son Adham out of his house.
Adham goes on to produce not!Cain and not!Abel, who subsequently go on to produce an entire community's worth of descendents; the next few sections focus on not!Moses, not!Jesus, not!Mohammed, and finally the last guy who is not particularly analogous to anyone except SCIENCE. I have to say, as a Jew, it made for a pretty fascinating reading experience -- like, I was on pretty solid ground with where the story was going for Adam and Eve etc., happily following along with Moses, little bit less confident in my grasp of the analogies when we got to Jesus, and then almost TOTALLY UNSPOILED when we got to Mohammed. (And completely unspoiled for Mr. Science, but nobody is spoiled for Mr. Science.)
Given that the book has been banned in multiple countries, it was actually a much less cynical analogy than I expected. Taken as a literary character, I find it hard to forgive Angry Paterfamilias God for his silence and neglect, but Mahfouz, as author, can, I think, and does. It's not at all my relationship with religion, but -- as with The Mysteries -- it's fascinating to read someone else's.
(I have one religious-allegorical complaint -- and it's not really my job to complain about this, seeing as how I am so very not Christian -- but ... conflating Mary Magdalene and Judas into one character? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. Doesn't having the Mary Magdalene figure betray Jesus kind of ... defeat the whole purpose of Mary Magdalene ...?)
...so while I was gone my whole family went to see The Mysteries and apparently super enjoyed it! I am very glad they liked the show. That said, I am OK with not having been present when Mom got touched by naked Jesus.
It did however remind me that I never talked about Children of the Alley, a loan from
aberration that I coincidentally ended up reading at about the same time I went to go see The Mysteries. Apparently it was just a very Biblical week for me that week -- Children of the Alley is a novel-length Biblical allegory by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, which begins when a wrathful paterfamilias kicks his son Adham out of his house.Adham goes on to produce not!Cain and not!Abel, who subsequently go on to produce an entire community's worth of descendents; the next few sections focus on not!Moses, not!Jesus, not!Mohammed, and finally the last guy who is not particularly analogous to anyone except SCIENCE. I have to say, as a Jew, it made for a pretty fascinating reading experience -- like, I was on pretty solid ground with where the story was going for Adam and Eve etc., happily following along with Moses, little bit less confident in my grasp of the analogies when we got to Jesus, and then almost TOTALLY UNSPOILED when we got to Mohammed. (And completely unspoiled for Mr. Science, but nobody is spoiled for Mr. Science.)
Given that the book has been banned in multiple countries, it was actually a much less cynical analogy than I expected. Taken as a literary character, I find it hard to forgive Angry Paterfamilias God for his silence and neglect, but Mahfouz, as author, can, I think, and does. It's not at all my relationship with religion, but -- as with The Mysteries -- it's fascinating to read someone else's.
(I have one religious-allegorical complaint -- and it's not really my job to complain about this, seeing as how I am so very not Christian -- but ... conflating Mary Magdalene and Judas into one character? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. Doesn't having the Mary Magdalene figure betray Jesus kind of ... defeat the whole purpose of Mary Magdalene ...?)
