ritual

It was a wet Friday morning as we set out from our hotel for Friday prayers, so we had some problems keeping our “chadors” in place – an extra layer of black cloth which we was draped around us, but required careful clutching to keep it in place and out of the puddles. We felt that this immediately marked us out as Westerners, as the local women seemed to wear their chadors with ease and dignity.

As a new mosque is being constructed which is large enough to hold the number of people who attend Friday prayers, they are at the moment being help in Tehran university. Once off the bus the women were ushered in a separate direction to the men. We were shown into a small booth warmed by a kerosene stove to await security clearance. The lady guarding the booth was in the middle of her tea break, but offered to share with us the cake and tea she had – and then engaged us in conversations, curious to know where we were from.

Friday Prayers at Tehran University: Photo by Daniel Smith

Friday prayers at Tehran University’s converted, covered football (soccer) stadium places us at the heart of the intersection between Iran’s public and its political and religious leadership. There would be few places in American society where Church and State, politics and society, preaching and teaching would be so closely linked since the pre-revolutionary days of the 16th and 17th Centuries, when the Puritan pulpit would have played a similar role of defining values, creating cohesion, and admonishing adherence.

It's Friday in Iran, which is the holy day, and therefore the Fellowship of Reconciliation's peace delegation will spend a fairly quiet day. In a message to FOR yesterday, delegation leader Mark Johnson reported:

"This morning six of us began the day at St. Peter's Evangelical Church and the synod offices of the Evangelical Church, a short walk from our hotel. We visited with Rev. Saygez Benyamin, one of three ordained Evangelical Pastors in Iran today. We had nearly an hour's discussion on the status of Christians in Iran today, the aspirations and interests of those in his community, and a tour of their library of some 5,000 volumes (which is currently being catalogued by interns from the Islamic University studying library sciences).

From Rabbi Arthur Waskow come these suggestions for eight days of environmental action to commemorate Hanukkah:

Day 1: Personal/Household: Call your electric-power utility to switch to wind-powered electricity. (For each home, 100% wind-power reduces CO2 emissions the same as not driving 20,000 miles in one year.)

Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah. Although I did not actually light the candles on my menorah at home, I did make latkes from scratch - a first for me! Here's a photo of a friend's candles tonight:

I love this time of September! In Minnesota, where I live, it is the time of year for holding on and letting go of The Lake. This means both the experience – swimming, boating, beaching – and the idea itself, that is, the idea of vacation, la vida facil, a perpetual summer.

When I was a kid, we would wait for my Dad to get home from teaching high school, probably around 4 in the afternoon, and then assess the situation: Can we go the lake another day? This was the holding on.