And another random collections of photos, leaving only the Canal Grande for one or two future posts.
More Venetian impressions
Here are some more, rather random, impressions from our Venice trip. One of the many things I love about Italian culture is its eye for beauty. Even the typeface used on road signs is aesthetically pleasing.
Fifty Shades yet again
On my continuing journey through Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach, I have just come across a new highlight. It’s Susie Orbach’s contribution, entitled ‘A Love Letter to Feminism’. Like some of the other authors, she thinks back to the 1970s and how women were ‘daring to think and enact new ways of learning and living’.
I was particularly interested in her reflections on the fears these women had to face. ‘We began to appreciate how much patriarchy was a structure undermining us’, she says, ‘within and between women, as much as a political force outside us’. And again: ‘Internal psychological chains kept us in check and away from being as full as we could be.’
Orbach notes that she could have lived like so many women before her. But she counts herself lucky that she didn’t. Feminism, she says, gave her a proper life:
Without feminism, life’s challenges could and would have stained my individual experiences – as [they] for so many of my mother’s generation – turning them sour and bitter, rather than into places of learning. Without feminism I couldn’t have understood my personal dilemmas. Nor would I have had the capacity to reflect.
I was also moved by her comments on friendships that made it possible for her and other women to ‘think and enact new ways’:
exhilarating friendships took centre stage. They were a hammock underpinning our personal and collective struggles. We helped each other find and tell our stories as we were reshaping ourselves. Inside friendship we found ways to tackle our hesitancies, our fears, our insecurities, our shame and self-doubt.
To choose freely
What all women deserve is to be able to choose freely the lives they want to lead, free of oppression and exploitation, filled with opportunity to be who they want to be. It is all about human rights.
Having shared the key aims of feminism and explored feminist-critical interpretation of the Bible for a number of years, I am continuing to enjoy Fifty Shades of Feminism. As already said, the contributions are short, but what makes them interesting for me is at least partly the fact that they have been written by such a diverse group of women.
The quote above is from a contribution by Helena Kennedy, who, as a barrister, Labour member of the House of Lords and an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues, also has interesting things to say about how the law, having traditionally been made by men, has dealt with the world from a male perspective.
A deeply contested demand
One of the fascinating aspects of Fifty Shades of Feminism, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach, are the reflections on what has been achieved over the last few decades.
Liz Kelly, for instance, in a contribution entitled, ‘Changing it Up: Sexual Violence Three Decades On’, talks about ‘the deeply contested seventh demand’ of the British Women’s Liberation Movement regarding violence against women. The demand was:
Freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of male violence. An end to the laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women.
That this should have been ‘deeply contested’ almost seems bizarre today. And indeed Kelly goes on to say:
In thinking about this piece, I tried to remember just why this statement was considered so divisive in the late 1970s: few would contest its content today …
One would hope so and yet the idea of male dominance sadly seems difficult to eradicate in some parts of society.
Secret places inside this violent world
Time for some more of Rumi’s poetry, again in the translation of Coleman Barks, from Bridge to the Soul: Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart.
I am sure I have said this before, but Rumi has been an amazing discovery for me. There is profound spiritual insight in the words of this Sufi master, and there is so much here that speaks to me at such a deep level. Some of it puts into words my own recent journey in ways that I could never have managed myself. Other parts express some of my deepest hopes and longings. And then there are many wonderful insights about God, love, friendship etc.
If only more people would read Rumi’s poetry. It would open their eyes to quite a different side of Islam. But then, he apparently is the most widely read poet in America today. There is still hope then …
We must die to become true human beings.
From gardens to the gardener,
from grieving to a wedding feast.We tremble like leaves about to let go.
There is no avoiding pain,
or feeling exiled, or the taste of dust.
I can truly relate to those reflections on dying, grieving, letting go, experiencing pain and the taste of dust.
When someone feels jealous,
I am inside the hurt and the need to possess.When anyone is sick,
I feel feverish and dizzy.
This I find comforting: that God is inside the hurt of those who need to possess others. And that he is inside our sickness.
For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
…
Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.
‘Imagination cannot contain the absolute’. Quite. No point to even try!
No more holding back. Be reckless.
Tell your love to everybody.…
Stand up. The prostrating
part of prayer is over.…
the beloved is absence
as well as this fullness.
I love that attitude to praying and loving God.
Be a helpful friend,
and you will become a green tree
with always new fruit,
always deeper journeys into love.
Worth aspiring to …
Learned theologians do not teach love.
Love is nothing but gladness and kindness.…
When you see a scowling face,
it is not a lover’s.
Rumi really does understand true love.
Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.Reason says, Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.Love says, There are.
…
Lovers feel a truth inside themselves
that rational people keep denying.
This is just brilliant stuff, so true and so well expressed. Secret places in a violent world where you make transactions with beauty – that’s truly wonderful and how I wish to live.
Karl Möller 