Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/arts-cultural-critique/fiction/page/2/)
I was eating two slices of Oscar Meyer bologna that I’d topped with a squiggle of yellow mustard and squeezed between two slices of white Wonder bread. But he held a bulging thing housed between two dense slices of dark bread, a sandwich that was both pungent and foreign, about as unreal as anything I could recall.
The longer she read, the longer the effect seemed to last. One lamp. One bed. One smooth flat sky-blue pillow beneath her head. Inside a single cage of ribs, her heart stood still.
Climbing the tree had not been a thoughtless or impetuous action. The girl had taken a Jew’s harp, a handful of dried cranberries, a scrap of blue leather, feathers, a vial of silver and turquoise beads, a needle, some thread, other secret objects, some sacred, all carefully balanced in the lap of an oversized T-shirt that the girl turned alternately into a desk, a knapsack, a handkerchief for blowing her nose, while another T-shirt became a bandanna, a snood, and a white banner that declared most adamantly: “I will not surrender.”
A journey into spiritual experience and trauma may seem disorienting, like entering an ancient labyrinth. We push ahead into the twists and turns, concentrating so much on where we are going that we don’t notice the walls we are passing or the marks left on them by the generations who traveled before us. Even if we did stop, we might not be able to read and understand the markings. They may seem like remnants of a lost language, or one that we remember only through faint impressions. Perhaps many of the references in the main story of “A Journey of Passion” are familiar to you; others might sound remote, mixed with childhood associations or relatively meaningless to our modern lives.
We were gathered in front of our church for the Palm Sunday celebration, dressed in our best clothing, full of Sunday morning cheer, waiting for the priest to arrive and begin the service. It would begin outdoors, as it does at Roman Catholic churches, and many other Christian churches, around the world. I went to one of the tables where I could pick up a palm frond to wave aloft during the procession into the church. It was the beginning of the most sacred portion of the year, the climax of the Christian story.
Outside of Simon’s office, the hum of angels’ wings moved the air like an evening breeze. The pair, one young and one old — ageless really — but one wise, one unknowing, innocent, rested on the air and waited.
Some years ago I met a man who, over a single cup of ginger-mint tea, shook my deepest assumptions about the process of moral conversation. His name was Samuel Prana.
David arrived at the Indian restaurant a few minutes early and made his way past the ceramic statues of elephants and the colorful paintings of women in saris to a table in the rear. He’d chosen this place to meet Maya because it was quiet enough to talk. It had been a year since he’d seen her—and then only at a distance, with her husband—but recently he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Something remained unfinished between them, getting in the way of his closeness with Lee, the woman he now was dating. He’d emailed Maya and she answered right away, saying yes, she’d been thinking of him, too, and shouldn’t they get together.
LONG AGO A PRISON WAS DESIGNED, the Panopticon. Prisoners would be isolated in separate cells that were organized like a stack of rings around a central tower. By special devices, the inspector in the tower would be able to see each prisoner but the prisoners would not be able to see the inspector. The prisoners could never be certain whether they were being watched or nor. This combination of isolation and the sense of being observed was to lead to moral reflection and rehabilitation. Versions of the Panopticon were constructed from time to time; the most uncompromising was the experimental women’s prison at A–.