Gospel Singing, Tahitian Style

Video Find of the Day

Polyphonic song in the service of the Lord, in the Tahitian language. Throughout Polynesia Himene means Christian hymns in the native language. The word is borrowed from the word "hymn", but the music is always only half European. In this case, as these are Tahitians, the European half is mainly French. I believe I can hear the French influence in Tahitian Himene as well as in most other Tahitian music. (Note that in the first and last video, all the singers are dressed just like French peasants from the period of Gauguin & Van Gogh.) I can also hear the ocean, which is never far away.

Tamarii Papara for Himene Tarava Tahiti at Heiva 1989



A humorous song, the description says, but I don't know what it's about yet:

Ute Arearea by Tamarii Rautea Heiva 1994



Tahaa I Te Pia Tarea for Himene Tarava Raromatai in 1989

Gloria

Video Find of the Day

We got a submission this month at Real Change that suggested that there is so much violence in our streets because we all aren't Christian enough. Well, I'm not Christian enough by any measure, and I'm not shooting or beating anyone.

Yet. Maybe I'm violent in potentia.

Anyway, when people go on about how Christian I'm not, I think of the Greater Glory of God, and one thought leads to another, and...

Vivaldi - Gloria - 1 - Gloria in excelsis Deo

I'm a Non-Buddhist, Too

I had a free ticket to see the Dalai Lama at Seattle's Qwest Field. I gave it away to do my Saturday job selling papers to vendors, so as not to require a mad last minute search for a substitute for me. Many vendors went, as did the beloved Anitra (worst vendor ever, in terms of sales) and fellow "editor" Cecil the Vendor, who together reported back to me at the end of the day over fish and chips.

According to their reports and others, what I missed was a crowd of 50,000, speeches from politicians obviously trying to cash in on The Lama's good image, very bad acoustics (the word used most often was reverb) which added to The Lama's accent made for a largely incomprehensible speech. This is what I expected, which was why I wasn't too sad about not getting to go.

What I didn't miss was a lovely exchange with an avid Christian (I'll call him AC) back in the office before the whole thing.

While a dozen or so vendors were gathering at the office to get their free tickets and bus down to the event together, AC was showing off his hand-made cross and making it very well understood that although he was going to see a Buddhist, HE was a Christian. He was being so clear and vocal about his Christianity, in contrast to what the Dalai Lama is, that I started to wonder why he was going. How would he be able to hear, even with perfect acoustics? He must not be going for the purpose of hearing.

He got into a discussion with another fellow "editor" Stan Burriss, who got the benefit of the ticket I would have used. In the course of the discussion AC plied Stan for his religious faith, and Stan told him he was Christian. Then Stan pointed to Anitra and said if you're looking for a non-Christian, talk to her, or words to that affect. This illustrates one of Stan B's problems. Anitra has told him many times she counts herself Christian, but he always forgets each time within the hour.

So as Anitra and Stan left early, she called back to AC and said, she's a Christian -- it's her husband sitting behind the desk there that's the non-Christian.

Just great. It's like the Cavalry is at the teepee and the Captain says, "Any Injuns in there?" and my squaw says "I'm Danish. You're probably looking for my husband. I'll fetch him out." It's like Columbo is at the door, and says, "I just have a few questions to ask," and my woman says, "Oh I'm not good at questions, I'll get you my husband. He can be out as soon as he finishes cleaning the blood off his butcher knife." Way to go, Anitra. Good teamwork.

Truly I kid, but sure enough, after a break in vendor activity a few minutes later meant AC could have my undivided attention, he sat directly across from me and said, "So, what's your beef with Christianity?"

I wanted to tell him that the only beef I have with Christianity is that way too many Christians think that is a decent question. All he knows at this point is that I'm non-Christian, he doesn't know what I am, I haven't expressed any animosity toward his religion, he hasn't done me the formal courtesy of asking about mine, and if he did I couldn't explain it to him in less than a week. I didn't say any of that. I said, "I don't have a beef with Christianity. I just am what I am. Why do you have a beef with what I am?" To that he said he didn't have a beef, he loved me, he loves everybody, I was his Brother, etc.

But he does have a beef with non-Christians, because he sees them universally as rejecting his God, and isn't interested in who they are.

During the debriefing Cecil said that as the Dalai Lama appeared AC shouted something like "JESUS WALKED ON WATER!"

So my suspicion was right. He didn't go to hear.

Escape Attempt

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The night of Aunt Alta's arrival, I woke up as Alex after everyone else was in bed -- around 1 AM. Alex went out looking for a jumping-off place.

I talked about these before in Heavens and Heavens, July 7, 2007. They are special places from which the soul of a deceased person can leap and, provided they leap in the right direction, land in a heaven.

Alex/Alaka'i decided to try and speed things up. He would skip the requirement that the soul be of the recently deceased variety. The thinking was, the kind of heavens that you could enter into by leaping from a jumping-off place would not be the Christian kind. Let the Christians go to their cold heaven in the sky and congregate amongst themselves. Alex would go to a Hawaiian heaven where there would presumably be no Christians, and therefore no one like Alta, no one like my Mother, no one like my Father, and no one like the dozens of jerks who told me when I complained about my parents' abuse that I was evil because I wasn't honoring my Mother and Father.

So it was a way of going to Hawaii without a plane or a boat. Just jump off a suitable high perch and with luck you land in the temporary abode of dead Hawaiians. You'll be reincarnated eventually, but meanwhile you're in good company.

As Alex I wondered around Fort Devens in the middle of the night looking for a jumping-off place. The only thing I had to go on was that it should be a tree or a cliff, and I should expect to find the spirits of children about it.

I couldn't find the spirits of children around any of the actual trees I looked at. They were just trees. There were no cliffs, per se. So it was looking desperate after a couple of hours of searching.

But suddenly, unexpectedly, I came into my school's playground. I hadn't realized I was in the neighborhood of the school. I just stepped out of of some woods and was there. And I saw the jungle gym in the middle of it, and I saw (or felt) the spirits of children.

I had a flash of insight. "Of course!" I thought, "This is America! In America everything is made of metal and plastic! Why shouldn't the jumping-off trees be metal?"

So I climbed up to the top of the jungle gym. It was awkward because my right arm was in the sling. At the top I tried to guess which way I should jump in order for the earth to open up and let me fall into my heaven.

I'm not entirely sure what happened next. Did I jump? Or did I lose my hold with my left hand and fall by accident? It might have been a combination of the two. I may have started to jump, leaned into it, changed my mind in mid-execution, and lost my hold because of the leaning.

Anyway, I fell. I landed on my head, and became unconscious. It was about 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I would have died, probably, if the school janitor hadn't come to take care of some off-time business that morning. He arrived around dawn having some stuff to do that he wanted to get out of the way before the start of the school week, and he happened to notice me lying in the gravel at the foot of the jungle gym and called for an ambulance.

Baby Got Book

Video Find of the Day

So, just 20 minutes ago I was reading about GodTube.com, the Christian imitation of YouTube where Christians can hang out and never face a threatening non-Christian idea, because proselytizing is strictly forbidden when non-Christians do it. (You Christians go ahead, that's what it's there for. Like you need to proselytize so badly you have to set up places where you can even proselytize each other.)

From my perspective GodTube is another video resource. Let's say I'm looking for something with a Christian flavor. Especially a Protestant, Fundamentalist, non-Mormon flavor. Am I going to look for it on YouTube by using a keyword search on "christian" and spend an hour wading through all the other crapola that might be good but isn't what I'm aiming for, or do I let GodTube narrow the search for me?

Well, that's what I did this time.

Baby Got Book

Heavens and Heavens

I had a conversation about heaven and hell with my Hawaiian friends. It was sometime after my 3rd birthday. I had asked my Mother if we were Christian, because Lono had said we probably were and I wanted to be sure. My Mother assured me that I was Christian, as I had been baptised. I told her I didn't know what that meant, so she told me I'd had water sprinkled on me.

"That makes you Christian?"

"Yes. It means you will go to heaven if you keep being good."

"Where's heaven?"

"It's a place in the sky where everybody is happy all the time."

"Where in the sky?"

"I don't know; ask your Father when he gets home."

Instead, I reported back to Lani and Lono, because they gave reliably clearer answers. I said we were definitely Christian, but the heaven thing needed explaining.

They tried, but it made no sense to me. "It's a place in the sky." OK, how do I get there? I don't fly. "God carries you up." Right. So if it's in the sky, why can't I see it on a clear day? "It's invisible." Right. So how can I have fun there if I can't see all the fun things you get to play with, cause everything's invisible? "You don't have fun, God just makes you happy." How? "He puts happiness inside you." Why do I have to go to the sky for that? "The alternative is Hell. You don't want that."

I asked what Kahiko had to say about all this. They told me that ancient Hawaiians didn't make such things a big central issue of their worship. I said, yeah, but they think something about it, right?

So Lani said that some people believed in reincarnation and some didn't. He said that of those that believe in reincarnation some believe you take a rest between lives and some don't. Of those that think that you rest between lives, there's general agreement folks don't rest all in the same place. So there isn't heaven and hell, there's heavens and more heavens, different ones for different people.

Of course we sidetracked for an explanation of "reincarnation". I then wanted to know if all the Hawaiian heavens were invisible heavens scattered around throughout the sky, and I was told that, no, they were where you couldn't see them because they were all in the ground.

But isn't that where Hell is? Doesn't that mean Hawaiian heavens are all hell? No, Lani said (with some exasperation now), because Hawaiians don't regard the Earth as evil the way Christians do.

OK then, how do I get to one of these heavens, I said.

Lani told me about jumping-off places. After you're dead your soul goes wandering around until you find a high place, called a jumping-off place, where if you jump off from it in the right direction the ground will open up for you and you will fall into your own special heaven.

If you jump the wrong way? The ground doesn't open and your soul is broken in the fall, and is doomed to linger at that spot forever, wishing it had chosen better.

How do you know which way to jump? You don't. But you'll know when you've found a jumping-off place because there will be the souls of dead children all around the bottom waiting for you to get ready to jump so they can shout directions to you and try to trick you into jumping the wrong way, just to be mean (as children often are.)

It's a lovely horror story which visited some real living anguish upon me several years later when I took it too seriously. I'll save that for another time but for now, here is a painting I made in the 90s of a jumping-off tree pretty much as I envisioned it hearing the story. Just the faces of the broken souls appear out of the darkness. The tree glows because it calls the dead soul to climb up into it, to jump from it. The children's souls at the bottom, trying to confuse the jumper, are brightly colored by mana that the dead can see.


At the lower left some demons haunting the jumper are hanging about. Our jumper ought to jump into the middle of them. That's the trick. By the way, the smiling demon at the far lower left will smile for you upside-down, too.