2010 January 11 « Rev. Danny Fisher

Miep Gies (1909-2010)

Photo by Steve North for the Associated Press.

Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager’s diary not, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.

[...]

Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.

After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne’s scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944.

Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager’s privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the “helpers.”

Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne’s father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved — as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

“This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.

[...]

For her courage, Gies was bestowed with the “Righteous Gentile” title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. She has also been honored by the German Government, Dutch monarchy and educational institutions.

Nevertheless, Gies resisted being made a character study of heroism for the young.

“I don’t want to be considered a hero,” she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren.

“Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

A Gift of Dharma for 1.11.10

Today’s quote comes from the Venerable Samu Sunim, founder of the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom.

Born in Korea in 1941, he was orphaned by age eleven and lived homeless until the age of fifteen, when he was ordained into the Jogye Order at Pusan’s Pomo-sa. After going to Japan to avoid conscription, he found his way to North America. After establishing the Zen Lotus Society (now the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom) in New York, he moved to Montreal. His Wikipedia biography explains:

In 1971 he spent three years in retreat in Montreal, Canada and then began teaching. He reported to have had a vision in 1977 in which his deceased teacher (Solbong Sunim) came to him and gave Dharma transmission. He received a more traditional authorization as a Zen master from Weolha Sunim in 1983.

He has founded Zen centers in Toronto, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Mexico City. In 1985, he established the Maitreya Buddhist Seminary, which is “designed for people who aspire to become Buddhist teachers without renouncing their worldly life pursuits, as well as for people who are willing to undertake full monastic training in an urban setting.”

During my time at Naropa, I undertook a couple of retreats at the Chicago center, including one with Sunim. His good humor, curiousity, down-to-earth teaching style, and general approachableness left an indelible impression.

Here’s the quote, which appears on many pieces of literature published within the community.

Be quiet, look within and enjoy the healing power of silence. Let go of your sorrow and attachments. Your inner core and wisdom heart remain untouched either by insult or by praise. So have faith in your heart and trust yourself. Sit free from fear and worries. Rely on your true and sincere heart for your meditation. Pay attention and concentrate on your breath. Let peace and happiness prevail and spread through you. Remember that your life is intimately connected with all other life. May all beings benefit from your presence as a living embodiment of peace and happiness.

January 11, 2010

A Collective Awakening for the Future of Our Planet: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Message to the 2009 Parliament of World Religions

This via our dear friend Alisa Roadcup at the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions:

Thay Thich Nhat Hanh offers a special Dharma Talk to the 2009 Parliament of World Religions being held in Melbourne Australia. This very special and powerful talk, transmitted by video to hundereds of people in Australia, opens the doors of practice available through the Five Mindfulness Trainings. The Five Mindfulness Trainings offer a concrete path of practice that can lead to a collective awakening, that can transforming our hatred, fear and greed, in turn bringing healing to ourselves and our planet, solving the problems of climate change, terrorism, and poverty at their root.

Watch the video here.

(I previously posted about the audio version of this talk here.)

January 11, 2010

Today’s Brit Hume Report

Again, with regards to Brit Hume, you know the drill by now.

Now the updates…

First, the mighty Stephen Prothero sounded off with an excellent piece in the pages of USA Today this morning. In it, he focuses on one of the issues that has also bothered me the most about this whole flap:

My complaint about Hume is not that he is plumping for born-again Christianity. I have no problem with proselytizing, and watching a news anchor morph into a televangelist isn’t really all that different from watching a news anchor morph into an ideologue — something we’ve been witnessing for years. My complaint instead is that Hume is trashing a religion — “the Buddhism,” as he awkwardly calls it — about which he knows next to nothing.

Hume is doubtless speaking out of personal experience — the end of his first marriage, the suicide of his son — and you can tell by his voice that he comes not to bury Woods but to resurrect him. Nonetheless, news organizations do not tolerate financial reporters who don’t know the difference between a stock and a bond, or movie critics who have never heard of Steven Spielberg. Why should they tolerate a journalist mouthing off about a religion about which he knows next to nothing? Why should we? Religion is a prime mover in our world, and we need more discussion of it on television, not less. But unless that discussion is informed, it is, as the Bible says, “vanity of vanities.”

Get Religion discusses Hume, the reaction to his comments, and the “sacrament of the sneer.”

In her inaugural post for The Huffington Post, Susan Piver also shared her thoughts on the whole thing.

Ann Coulter also had some “thoughts” that probably aren’t worth discussing, but, over at The Reformed Buddhist, Kyle Lovett takes a whack at it anyway. Among other things, he draws a provocative comparison between Coulter and South Vietnam’s Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu.

Ross Douthat also has an opinion piece today in the New York Times about the situation, in which he writes:

…What Hume said wasn’t bigoted: Indeed, his claim about the difference between Buddhism and Christianity was perfectly defensible. Christians believe in a personal God who forgives sins. Buddhists, as a rule, do not.

Fair enough, but what certainly strikes me as offensive in Hume’s comments is the second part of what he said: that Tiger Woods needs to convert to Christianity “if he wants to make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.” What Hume seems to be saying implicitly is that total recovery and serving as an example to the world is not possible for Woods as a Buddhist. How is that not a bigoted thing to say?

Lastly, on a more amusing note, Red State Update has something to add (thanks to John Pappas at elephantjournal.com for the pointer):

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January 11, 2010

Nicholas Kristof on Religion and Women

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times‘ two-time Pulitizer Prize-winning columnist and reporter, has an extraordinary opinion piece in yesterday’s paper on the subject of “Religion and Women”. It’s a must-read. Here’s a powerful snippet from his opening:

Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?

It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.

Yet these kinds of abuses — along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work — arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.

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