A taste of the Torah, the Bible, the Qur’an
I like to be the first person awake in my house. With three teenage children, this isn’t hard, especially at the weekend. I love to get a cup of coffee and look out the window. Most of the time, I will allow my Bible to fall open at Psalm 63. After years of training, it does this with a mind of its own.
This isn’t just any Bible. At the time my father died in 1979, when I was a month short of my eighteenth birthday, I stuck to my foolhardy plan to head off and join the Jesuit order, committing myself to a life of poverty, chastity, obedience and, as it turned out, joyous eccentricity. Mum knew I was in flight but she was stoic. We had been told to buy a certain edition of the Bible to take with us and Mum wanted to give that to me as a gift. She borrowed a copy to make sure she got the right one in the city. So, on a hot summer’s day, she dragged a bag with not one but two copies of this hefty tome through the streets of Sydney. The handle of the bag tore, so then she had to hold it to her like a baby, refusing all offers of help.
When she got home, she wrote in the front: ‘To dear Michael. In loving memory of your darling father, Gregory McGirr. Much love always, Mum. XO.’
The Bible has many pages and I have read most of them, some many times. But Psalm 63 is the place at which every new day starts for me:
My soul is thirsting for you,
My flesh is longing for you,
A land, parched, weary and waterless.
After so many years, I have not exhausted these ancient words, nor tired of them, nor given up on the search they celebrate, nor yet properly understood the vulnerability they call for. All these things are part of what makes the words sacred. They are attributed to the notoriously opportunistic King David, but who knows where they come from. The Psalms are said to be so beautiful because the predatory King David had every reason to be humble. Sure enough, the literary and historical search for the roots of these words, and many like them, is fascinating and I have often enjoyed the intellectual spadework of scriptural study, especially when it is peppered with rare linguistic spice. But nothing is sacred because it keeps academics amused. Scripture is sacred because of the life of the community that is nurtured by it. Just mouthing the words of Psalm 63 does something for me about watering the parched and weary land to which they refer. I guess by this stage of the game I could say them by heart but they belong in a book, which I treat with affection, even though it is frustrating and elusive and even though it is abused by people who want to ink their egos between the lines. A sacred text is always vulnerable. That is another part of what makes it sacred.
On my bed I think of you,
I meditate on you all night long,
For you have always helped me.
~
My Year 10 class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners, and especially western Christians, often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. I tell students and anyone else who expresses a mindless contempt for Islam that if they truly feel that way then they should have the strength of their convictions and stop using Arabic numerals. The reason we use Arabic numbers in the first place is that they embody a philosophical concept that was inaccessible to Roman numerals and that, indeed, was threatening to medieval Christianity. That is the idea of zero, the representation of nothing, the articulation of the void.
Zero is a wonderful image of eternity. If you try to divide anything by zero, you have an experience of both the eternal and the absurd right before your eyes, beneath the tip of a cheap pencil. Zero is a perfect circle with nothing to enclose: it has neither beginning nor end. Christians sometimes scratch their heads when Muslims speak of the impossibility of creating visual images of the divine. Mosques don’t have statues or pictures. But zero is, in fact, not a bad representation of the sacred.
Christianity tells stories; Islam finds designs, patterns, mosaics. These communities should love each other. Often enough it looks like there is zero chance of that. The prophet Muhammad was one of the liberators of history. It’s a pity that a small number of his followers are hell-bent, to use the expression literally, on poisoning their own water. I wouldn’t want Christianity judged by the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
I offer my students a more sympathetic account of the mysticism of Islam than they are likely to get from the media at large. We visit mosques. On one occasion, an imam explained the beliefs of Islam, then quickly moved on to a range of herbal cosmetics and medicines which he was selling, clearly as part of a pyramid scheme. There was comfort in knowing that dodgy practices could cross religious boundaries.
Another mosque, in a northern suburb, occupied a former showroom on top of nondescript shops. It was so plain that, looking for a minaret or a dome shining in the sun, we were twenty minutes late. The imam spoke simply about the need for community and belonging and a moral structure for living, precisely the messages we try to impart to the students on our side of the tracks. Someone asked about ‘jihad’. The imam explained that it has nothing to do with violence. The word means ‘struggle’. He hoped that all of us were engaged in the struggle to become the best people we could be. To achieve that, we needed both ancient wisdom and a contemporary community. It was important not to struggle against but to struggle with.
‘Why do we have to take off our shoes?’ asked one student.
‘It shows respect. Respect is one of the crutches we need to help us learn reverence.’
It was an interesting image.
‘No one runs to God. We only get there on crutches.’
~
In another mosque, Sherene Hassan, the founder of Melbourne’s Islamic Museum of Australia, tells us that there are about 6,200 verses in the Qur’an and less than a dozen suggest any kind of violence. Sometimes the Qur’an pacifies its biblical antecedents, such as in the way it retells the story of the world’s first murder, that of Abel by his brother Cain, an event that does not record history but, like so much in sacred texts, is more focussed on creating a future. The Qur’an’s version ends with the words: ‘the one who kills a soul…it is as if he killed the whole of mankind.’
Imam Mehmet Salih Dogan told us about his journey from Turkey and how he was proud of the work his wife was doing as a midwife in the enormous public hospital just across the road from where his community was trying to build a new mosque. ‘She helps bring life into the world. That is what Islam is all about. Bringing life to the world.’
The imam introduced us to a Year 10 student from the local high school, a young man in a cheap tracksuit. He wore his baseball hat backwards. We had to remove our shoes, but hats were acceptable. This chap had already committed a third of the Qur’an to memory. In Arabic. It poured out of him as if it was too much for a single body to contain.
‘Wow,’ said Shaun, one of our group, seldom short of a word. ‘That’s incredible.’
The boy explained that the word Qur’an meant ‘recitation’: it is a work that doesn’t yield its magic on the page, but only in being heard aloud within a community. His life’s goal was to memorise the entire book.
The Prophet Muhammad could neither read nor write, a fact often mentioned to support the belief that the Qur’an is divinely inspired. A better proof, in my view, is not so much how a book was created as what it, in turn, creates. All of my students were struck dumb by the commitment of this young man to the Qur’an and to the Arabic well from which it was drawn. I was having a holy struggle of my own to get some of them to read the fifty small pages of Mark’s Gospel, let alone commit any of it to memory.
Modern education is prone to neglect the importance of memory. This does not mean rote learning. It means taking something important into the fabric of your being. People who have memorised great poetry will speak about this. So will actors who have performed Shakespeare and other major texts, as well as pianists and singers who have remembered breathtaking works. Such things shape the memory and in turn shape the person. The memory is like a muscle. It needs to do heavy lifting to gain its strength and power. The act of memory requires humility; you have to surrender yourself. The great traditions of wisdom are inaccessible without it. Apps are handy. You can carry a thousand works of literature in your phone. But they will never be part of you.
The students always ask the same question. ‘Why do we have to remove our shoes?’ Shaun queried the imam.
‘Because when I smell your feet,’ he replied. ‘I know we share the same humanity.’
We all laughed.
‘And if we share the same humanity,’ he continued, ‘we can only share the same God.’
~
My favourite line in the Bible is ‘my tears have become my bread, by night, by day’, which is in Psalm 42. These words help me to understand my least-favourite line, which is also probably the most important. This is the one that contains the last words spoken by Jesus in Mark’s Gospel as he dies in horrendous circumstances: ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’
Mark’s Gospel was written thirty years after the events it describes, on the other side of the known world, in a language that none of the people in the story would have spoken. But these words are included in Aramaic, a hint that they are a genuine memory for the community, handed on by the women who witnessed the death of Jesus after his male friends had made themselves scarce. They are the same words as the first line of Psalm 22, which Jesus evidently knew so well that, as he was stripped of every human dignity, it was still part of him.
~
For at least four decades, Br Bernie, the prior of the Cistercian Abbey at Tarrawarra (see Chapter 16), has been part of a community that recites all one hundred and fifty Psalms every week. They start each day at 4 a.m. This is the time when we are all most vulnerable, and vulnerability is the door to the inner life of any sacred text and to any kind of intimacy, especially with the divine. There are times in life to be strong. There are just as many times not to be. Bernie says that the Psalms are like old friends. Their mood can change for him from one week to the next.
~
At my father’s funeral, we sang Psalm 139:
If I asked darkness to cover me,
And light to become night around me,
That darkness would not be dark to you,
Night would be as light as day.
Parts of scripture such as this are like a pebble in my shoe, constantly reminding me that there is more to life than just me and more to time than a linear progression of past, present and future. They prevent me striding around in my world, comfortable in what Shakespeare, in Measure for Measure, calls ‘a little brief authority’.
Encounters with the poor are the same. There might be reasons to think of community-service programs as a kind of tokenism. There might be even more reasons to think carefully about taking young people to the developing world to take part in what is sometimes known as voluntourism, a bit of work whose main outcome is to make the traveller feel okay about themselves and their part of an unjust world. I once visited a school in which students were reporting at assembly about a trip they had made to Cambodia. As part of the visit, the young people had helped to repair and paint a small hall for their host community.
‘I had never seen such poverty,’ said one girl. ‘I had never imagined people lived like that. But we knew we were making a difference. We left feeling good.’
This addiction to feeling good is a problem. Surely if we ask our young people to experience something troubling, we should want them to feel troubled. The soul of education is being strangled by a monster called anxiety. Real education is all about risk. It is a risk, after all, to learn how to read, because reading will inevitably bring ideas into your life that upset your apple cart. If we expose our young to something bad and orchestrate the situation so they end up feeling good, we are allowing them to hide inside a lie that says their life is all about themselves. For me, the greatest challenge of education is to lead young people to a place of such vulnerable strength that they can surrender their ego and find the freedom that lies beyond its grasp in lives of service and gritty love.
Nevertheless, an experience of how most of the world lives can transform lives. Aged twenty-three, I was sent by the Jesuit order to live for three weeks in a slum in Jakarta. The order thought I’d had a pretty cushy life up till then and they were right. That experience has been a pebble in my shoe for well over thirty years. It is uncomfortable but I am glad it is there. I would love the students I teach to experience this.
So I was more than grateful to have been able to visit East Africa with a group of young people in 2014. We were unable to land in Nairobi because of security concerns. So we had to take a minibus overland from Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania, to the place we were visiting in Kenya. It was a distance of nine hundred kilometres on some rough roads.
The bus was a broken-winded old hack. It had a fluoro sign at the front bearing its name: Thanks Dear. The driver, whose name was Goodluck, turned the key in the ignition and the engine gave an irritable cough as though it was annoyed at being disturbed. Eventually, it spluttered into life. The vehicle seemed to have poor lungs. It was a smoker. Clouds billowed from its exhaust.
A quick look inside and we began counting seats. There was no roof rack. We’d be lucky if we could squeeze all our gear into the back row. After that, there wouldn’t be enough places for everyone. Goodluck’s co-pilot, Bahati, appeared and everyone smiled and shook hands but I couldn’t help thinking that he’d need another seat. Then two more helpers turned up, as well. It was going to be a very crowded trip.
‘Maybe we should think of running,’ said Roland.
Minibuses provoke claustrophobia in some people but this was not Roland’s problem. He had grown up in the back of a Toyota LandCruiser. There were seven kids in his family, including a young cousin who, for various reasons, had grown up with them and was as much part of the fabric of life as any sibling. They were used to squashing in. It was part of life.
No, Roland was thinking of running because, like Timas Harik (see Chapter 23), who was a couple of years older than him, he found freedom in running. He had run eight hundred metres in 1.54. A bit slower than Timas but no jog. At the big interschool athletics competition the year before, Roland took the final leg of the 4 × 800 metres relay. It was a tough race. Another member of his team was shortly to run an Olympic qualifying time for the distance but the competition was equally as good. Unfortunately, Roland’s relay team came second by an ankle. He can replay every step of that race from memory.
‘Were you disappointed?’
‘I was. It took me a long, long time to get over it.’
‘Really. How long did it take?’
Roland thought carefully. ‘I reckon it took a couple of hours.’
Now he was ready to run not eight hundred metres but eight hundred kilometres. ‘I reckon we can do it,’ he said.
He showed me a tattoo on his hip that he had recently acquired. It said, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled—John 14.1.’
‘It’s my favourite verse,’ he said.
I told him that a phrase such as ‘don’t worry’, or ‘do not be afraid’, or ‘do not let your hearts be troubled’, occurs in the Bible on three hundred and sixty-five occasions, one for each day of the year. Dealing with anxiety is one of the great themes of all sacred texts.
We got the bus and it was fine.
~
A sacred text will close itself off if it is read in anger. It will lock its doors against those who use it to prove a point. It will turn a deaf ear to the opinions of those who know what it means in the first place. It will mock those who think that they are the centre of the universe. It will scorn the self-righteous. But it will open itself to a mind and heart that can be honest about the rough and tumble of life. It will flower in laughter and pain. Psalm 131 says:
Truly I have set my soul
In silence and peace
A weaned child on its mother’s breast
Even so is my soul.
~
One of the biblical stories that fascinates me most concerns a risky traveller, the prophet Elijah, a figure revered in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Elijah stood up to King Ahab, who gave his name to the central character of Moby-Dick (see Chapter 28). After a flight of forty days and forty nights through the wilderness, during which time things got so bad that Elijah huddled under a furze bush and wished he were dead, the prophet reaches Mt Horeb. There he takes shelter in a cave for the night. A mighty wind goes past, then there is an earthquake and then a fire. God is present in none of these dramatic happenings. But then there is a gentle breeze and that feels more like God. Elijah covers his face and comes out of his cave.