What’s in a Name?

I’m getting a lot of Google hits for “Barack means in Hebrew”.

I’m a big name geek. I love names. I think it comes from being blessed with six of them, meself (two first, three middle, and a last). The fact that Jim Beam and Jack Daniels were good friends in my high school cracks me up.

Names mean a lot. Christians take baptismal names to signify their change of life. Jewish people will change their names to signify transitions. When you hear of a kid named “Flower Jones” you kind of giggle, but a Japanese person who met “Hanna Jones” would also giggle, since hana is the daily use word for flower.

Barak is a Swahili derivative of an Arabic word, loosely transliterated as barakh in my Arabic-English dictionary. The word comes from the same derivation as the Hebrew word baruch.

In Hebrew and Arabic both it means ‘Blessings’.

Hussein is an Arabic name (duh). It means ‘beautiful’.

D’awwww. His parents named him Beautiful Blessings. That’s so sweet.

Mine named me Bitter Rose. (Mary=Bitter, Sue=Rose). Stop laughing, jackasses.

Obama is a name from Western Kenya, specifically the Luo people. It means ‘bending’ or ‘leaning’.

My last name means ‘Specific County in Scotland Where Most of the Immigrants to the US Were Illiterate And Therefore It Is Spelled Wrong’.

*shrugs*

(And now, in the interest of equal time, Hillary Rodham Clinton means “Merry- Dirty village - On the summit” and John Sidney McCain III means “God is Gracious - we can’t spell out St. Denis all the way so’s we’re going to write ‘Sidney’ instead - Son of Ian which is the way we spell ‘John’ in these parts”. Out of the three names, McCain has the more interesting name in my opinion, as he’s John son of John… and since he’s a III, he really is John son of John!)

*watches the rain fall*

God is teaching me a lesson today.

Yup.

She is teaching me a lesson about patience, about preparation, and about grabbing a jacket on the way out the door.

(She’s also laughing her ass off at me.)

On Hoaxes

The Crystal Skull. Oy, don’t get me started.

Yes, it’s the centerpiece of a summer blockbuster opening this weekend. Yes, I’m going to see the movie because Harrison Ford is sexyOMG.

No, I do not want to hear about your whacked-out spacemen created the Pyramids and all life on Earth but the Gubernmint is covering it up story.

Why? I’m a trained historian, duh. I actually took this most awesome class called “Ancient Mysteries” where our final was to take one chapter of Chariot of the Gods and disprove it using historical fact. Which was really, REALLY easy, even in a pre-Google world. Every student in this class learned to read 19th dynasty Egyptian hieroglyphics so we could read documents WRITTEN BY EGYPTIANS about how, exactly, THEY BUILT THE M-F’ING PYRAMIDS!

(We also got photos of the graffiti left on the Pyramids and read those in the original Egyptian. After that, bathroom walls nowadays are boring.)

(By the by, I picked the chapter about the Spaceman cave paintings, wherein a human figure had either a really big head or another circle around the head, which CotG called a ’space helmet’. I concluded in my final paragraph “In the future, fringe archaeologists will determine we all worshipped figures from space when they excavate Russian Orthodox churches and find all these people with circles around their heads, which are obviously 2-D space helmets.”)

ANYWAY! This wasn’t supposed to be a rant. But I get ranty when I’m smacked in the face with Bad History and Bad Archaeology. This was supposed to be a simple post pointing y’all to the mental_floss blog and their short, sweet, and AWESOME list of 10 Fake Archaeology Finds.

Included in the list:
1. The James Ossuary
2. The “oldest” star map
3. The Calaveras Skull
4. Etruscan terracotta warriors
5. Forged Persian Princess
6. Piltdown Man
7. Tiara of Saitaphernes
8. Mississippi State Capital Forgery
9. Cardiff Giant
10. Michigan Relics

Take THAT, Everywhere Else!

Apparently, I live in the largest US city to elect an openly gay mayor.

For those of you who don’t know, the City of Portland, Oregon has approximately 575,000 residents. And our Mayor-Elect is Sam Adams.

Who is no relation to the beer. He’s the Mayor-Elect of Beervana, though.

Pentecostal vs. Mystical

Seems to me that when I dream dreams and prophesy, people ’round here will call me ‘mystical’.

But when I did that back in my non-denom church, I was ‘pentecostal’.

Is there a difference? I don’t see one.

The following post does not endorse a candidate.

Matter of fact, since I’m not registered with a ‘major’ party in Oregon, my ballot that went in a few weeks ago was rather anemic in my choices.

No, I’m not going to tell you who I voted for in the mayoral race. It’s my right as an American citizen to exercise my freedom to tell you to bugger your nosy self off. Nyah.

But anyway, saw this over at Acts of Hope and thought it was kinda cool. My posting of it does not imply endorsement, however.

I’m having A Day.

Yup. A Day.

 

Wherein I am about three seconds and a file cabinet* away from quitting my job, selling all my worldly goods, declaring myself Mother Superior High Priestess Patootie of the Church Of the Wayhootle, and collecting alms to take myself to Las Vegas and ‘bless’ all the buffets with my tax-deductible presence.

 

*Don’t ask.

Growing Season

A peculiar artifact of my family culture is the widespread belief amongst the matriarchs that I am unable to make good decisions.

This was decided when I was five years old.

Therefore, as I was incapable of making good judgements and decisions, they were made for me. What I would wear. What I would eat. When I could talk.

Every so often, my mother would attempt some self-determination thing and ask me to make a decision for myself. The most memorable one was senior year in high school, where I was told to decide where I would go to college.

I had a nervous breakdown.

My mother found the hidden stash of applications under a pile of dirty laundry well past the due date. After some berating (see, Mom didn’t know about the nervous breakdown, I was spending 10-15 hours a day at school for various activities and my friends were doing their best to shield me as I went mad), she asked, “What do you want to do now?”

“I want to go to Hayward,” I said. I had friends going there.  

The flat response: “You don’t want to go to Hayward. It’s ugly. Let me call Chico.”

I’ve got a BA from Chico State. Not a bad school, mind you, I enjoyed it there, but I have absolutely zero friends from that time. I was too shy to talk to anyone without the social buffer of another person I already knew.

Moving to Portland came out of left field, and I think that’s the only reason I got away with it. Getting up here was easy. Learning how to make decisions for myself was hard.

Learning it’s okay to make mistakes? Even harder. I’m finally getting a grasp on that, though. I’ve become rooted in the new (damp) soil here in the Northwest.

A long stretch of green faces those of us who use liturgical calendars. Ordinary Time. A time of growth, theoretically. Growth can be another word for ’slow’, though, in a Church context it can mean tiny steps.

That’s good for big trees that have been stable for several centuries. But for the little plants, the ones just barely rooted, they don’t grow in increments. They grow exponentially, turn around and they’re taller again and again.

It’s growing season. Let’s see what comes up.

Comfort, O Comfort my people!

My family sets a fair amount of spiritual stock in dreams. It’s part of our culture, even though we are as thouroughly assimilated as any family in America is going to get.

I dreamt last night of comfort. The details are blurred, as in all dreams, but I remember the overwhelming feeling of comfort and love. It wasn’t a solitary comfort, it was one shared between people, and the act of sharing doubled and redoubled it.

(Yes, I have been reading Dame Julian of Norwich’s Showings on the bus, in between playing Lego Star Wars on my DS. Much like C. S. Lewis, I am finding her v. v. dangerous. Like John of the Cross, I’m finding selective quoting by theologians and greeting card writers has softened her into something almost wholly unrecognizeable from the firey, flowery, passionate [in all senses of the word] woman who wrote in that cell in England.)

It’s not hard to trace where this dream came from. I spend pretty much all day hooked into my RSS reader. One of the last things I read last night was this post at Elizabeth+’s place.

A long time after watching the video, I thought to myself, “Only Methodists would protest in harmony.”

I didn’t think that at the time. It’s hard to think when your heart is breaking.

Especially when you thought it couldn’t break any more. Especially when you thought you’d come to terms with the rejection and built a new family just down the theological block.

Incompatible. It’s a word you expect out of the mouth of a Dalek, or a Borg. HAL, maybe.

The people who raised me, who blessed me, who loved on me every chance they got and saved me (and we’re not talking metaphorical happy-clappy-Come-to-Jesus saving, here, we’re talking if I hadn’t gone to that Methodist summer camp in 1993, I would be dead and long buried), have once again declared me incompatible.

I am incompatible.

I ask God for an answer, I get a dream.

I ask God for a Word, I get Isaiah 40.

Ok, you’re mostly Episcopalians. I’ll take pity on you. This is out of The Message.

“Comfort, oh comfort my people,”
says your God.
“Speak softly and tenderly to Jerusalem,
but also make it very clear
That she has served her sentence,
that her sin is taken care of—forgiven!
She’s been punished enough and more than enough,
and now it’s over and done with.”

Thunder in the desert!
“Prepare for God’s arrival!
Make the road straight and smooth,
a highway fit for our God.
Fill in the valleys,
level off the hills,
Smooth out the ruts,
clear out the rocks.
Then God’s bright glory will shine
and everyone will see it.
Yes. Just as God has said.”

A voice says, “Shout!”
I said, “What shall I shout?”

“These people are nothing but grass,
their love fragile as wildflowers.
The grass withers, the wildflowers fade,
if God so much as puffs on them.
Aren’t these people just so much grass?
True, the grass withers and the wildflowers fade,
but our God’s Word stands firm and forever.”

Climb a high mountain, Zion.
You’re the preacher of good news.
Raise your voice. Make it good and loud, Jerusalem.
You’re the preacher of good news.
Speak loud and clear. Don’t be timid!
Tell the cities of Judah,
“Look! Your God!”
Look at him! God, the Master, comes in power,
ready to go into action.
He is going to pay back his enemies
and reward those who have loved him.
Like a shepherd, he will care for his flock,
gathering the lambs in his arms,
Hugging them as he carries them,
leading the nursing ewes to good pasture.

Meditation for The Day

Jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam; Jesus wants me as a raging bitchmonster of doom.