jeanine deckers ~ seour sourire

remember this song?
take a listen ~ its from 1963
... lemme refresh your memory ...
"dominique, nique, nique..."




remember? perhaps you've seen the debbie reynolds movie, the singing nun? well, its about the lady, a dominican nun from belgium, who wrote and composed this song. mostly the details of her provided in the movie are sucra-coated - you know, fabricated. but, nonetheless, the song's interest lay just as much in the intrigue surrounding its composer and singer - a nun from a cloistered order prior to the second vatican council - as in its cute, catchy tune.

the song, of course, tells the story of dominique, founder of the dominican order, to which jeanine belonged. originally. she recorded the tape/album of some of her songs - including dominique - for her own personal use - for gift to family and friends. phillips, a record company, signed her up to a contract. the song dominique became an instant hit across europe. and on its release in america, sent that song 'louie, louie' into second spot on the billboard charts. jeanine appeared on the ed sullivan show, in a pre-taped segment. her growing fame and the publics fascination with this simple, pious nun from belgium, did not sit well with the mother superior of the convent ... nor with the church. the mother superior almost blocked jeanine's ed sullivan tape from airing. the convent/church did, however benefit from jeanine's success, given her obligation (vow of poverty which all religious must make) to give all her earnings to her order. the church even took the step of patenting the name 'seour sourire' -jeanine's stage name - making it impossible for her to use it after leaving the order. the church/convent failed, however, to pay any taxes on any of seour sourire's earnings. ever.



eventually jeanine gave up her musical career and fame. she never wanted fame ... never wanted to be a 'somebody' ... she only ever wrote and sang music and played her guitar (which she named soeur adele) as an expression of worship ... for g-d. she retreated back into her cloistered life to pursue her religious studies. in the late 60s, jeanine took a change of heart, no doubt influenced by the turmoil of change the second vatican council brought ... and also the increasing sexualization and rebeliousness of the 60s. she left the domincan convent, prior to making her final vows. soon after, the record company dropped her contract ... it seemed her status as a nun, and not so much her music, served as the magnet to draw interest toward her. she wrote a song in the 60s/70s praising the pill, and came out against the church's stance on the pill. she faded to obscurity ... never able to achieve the level of fame she reached with 'dominique.' and so she took to teaching autistic children, even opened a school with her lifelong friend annie pescher, also a former nun.

the two shared their post convent years together ... jeanine working on her art from time to time and even trying to revive her musical career in the late 70s/early 80s. her untimely and tragic demise occured as a result of the belgian government's demand that she pay $60,000 in back taxes for all her earlier earnings. she had no receipts to prove that she gave her earnings to the convent ... and so the government held her accountable for the heavy tax bill; they shut down her school, removing all hope and replacing it with only deep and heavy despair.

on march 29, 1985 the two women wrote their last letter together - a suicide note. and then they committed suicide by ingesting barbituates and alcohol. annie and jeanine begged g-d's mercy for taking their own lives; they had lost all hope and despair became too great for them both. g-d had seen them suffer, surely he would welcome them with open arms. they could not suffer anymore, simply could no longer endure. and so, they lost the light and succumbed to the despair. how anguishing must it have felt, for two deeply religious women to decide to take such an unimaginable action - take one's own life? how much struggle, torment, despair, and deep unrelenting suffering filled the lives of these ladies in the years that followed their departure from cloistered religious life? not to mention burdensome-ness of the obtuse rumors about their sexuality ... unfounded, as far as i can tell. and, at any rate, none of our fucking business (ha - excuse the pun).

so ... there's another tale in which the church just sucks the juices out of its individual prey ... and then tosses aside the remains. the financial part of this story just kills me ... really. along with the way in which we all make assumptions. along with the way the church just simply must squash absolutely every opposition that comes from within its own ranks. there's a word for that ... totalitarian comes to mind.

RIP ~ jeanine deckers ~ october 17.1933 to march 29, 1985

christopher hitchens

above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.

so writes christopher hitchens, in his book, god is not great: how religion poisons everything.

i saw hitchens the other night, on the hour. he made some shocking, but very valid points. such as: how we think, not what we think that matters more ... religion will destroy the world through the marriage of messianic ideology and apocolyptic technology. hitchens sees religion as a toxic-to-the-core celestial dictatorship. try as we may, we can never make it go away. but theoretically speaking we could domesticate the beast known as religion.

while i find hitchen's angry, almost vitriolic persona somewhat unbecoming, i do think he makes some excellent points. and ... i must admit, i laughed @ his cynical quip about the catholic church: "no child's behind left." and i laughed even harder when he quoted an american politician as follows: "if english was good enough for jesus its good enough for me." i mean ... if one wants to worship, s/he could at least inform oneself on the true details of one's belief ... read: jesus did not speak english, you fucking lug-nut!

so ... on a good day the whole concept of religion ... the supernatural ... the spiritual confuses me. and then people like hitchens, his buddy dawkins weigh in on the 'con' side and that other dude alastair mcgrath weighs in on the 'pro' side. and then dubya starts telling us about evil and how he must champion humanity by 'smokin out' the evil. and then there's islam ~ no need to comment on all the conflict and confusion raging in that religion. and then there's christianity ~ accusing islam of wantin' to take over the world, when it [i.e. christianity] already has!

i mean, what else do you call it when the religious holidays of ONE PARTICULAR RELIGION become embedded into the cultural fabric of at least an entire hemisphere of the world? do i need to remind anyone that judaism, islam, nor hinduism honour either christmas and easter? that despite friday and saturday being the 'day of rest' for judaism and islam, christianity's 'day of rest' finds itself enshrined into our law as a definitive, nationwide weekly holiday?

don't get me wrong, here. i'm not really knocking the notion that anyone believes ... or the specific doctrine of any particular belief. that's pointless. i mean to express here my doubt that any human-formed - and therefore political - establishment could ever represent the supernal being. i see religion as serving different purposes for different types of believers. religion provides the guts of that intimate connection between one's philosophical view of truth and one's spiritual self. whatever religious perspective one chooses to weave into his/her cultural matrix speaks to his/her larger view of truth, the universe, humanity, and how life got here. essentially, religion must serve a purpose if we cling to it so fearfully. what purpose? you decide.

1. religion as a social construct

• a manifestation of some psychological or moral pathology?
• a pernicious and deliberate falsehood, spread and encouraged by rulers and clerics in their own interests, in an effort exercise control over others?
• seeing religions as marginally useful constructs which encode instructions or habits useful for survival in a society
• seeing religion as ‘the opium of the masses’

2. religion as progressing toward a higher truth

• reflections of an essential truth?
• seeing religious truth as relative, due to its varied cultural application and/or expression
• seeing prophets as messengers of god — individuals given to extraordinary spiritual insight during periods of social decay and acting as purveyors of balance and social survival.
• seeing religion as evolving over time in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis-great awakening paradigm

3. religion as absolute truth

• the exclusivist view
• one belief system … one holy book … one supreme being
• seeing all things and individuals incongruent with the one belief system as ignorant, devious, false, misguided
• a sort of arrogant view of truth (”our view is the RIGHT view, all others are wrong”)
• providing an unwavering perspective that requires individuals to conform to its truth

i do not have the answers ... i don't have the questions, either. but i think that whatever a person believes, its never so cut and dry and absolute and neat and tidy and the same everyday. i think the mistake devout people make lies in denying any opposition to their perspective. to deny opposition makes one sort of a totalitarian. it closes the mind. it closes the spirit. it closes off the entire grand possibility of intellectual expansion.

so ... i guess i just think, for those who believe in heaven and hell, ' stop telling me i'm going to hell for blaspheming. concentrate on how you plan to get into heaven. concentrate on the fact that, some days, keeping one's faith seems as easy as squeezing a fat man through the eye of a needle. and the more any of us berate another for a different belief, the more distant our own faith becomes, if we had one to begin with. even atheism requires belief and faith, in case anyone's wondering.

lately, i find i've spent much of my time squeezing that fat man into the eye of my own faith's embroidery needle. i know ... intrinisically i know ... of a supernal existence. i've felt it. and ... that's an intimate matter ~ each individual has their own concept and experience with the supernal force(s). still, i wonder, each day ~ will this path take me where i want to go? ah ~ but, my dear Self ... you must wait until you get there to find out. and so it goes.

in other news ~ note the change. i felt the need for minimalism for a while. so ... no sidebar, no links, no bling. just a blog. and a tiny bit of eye candy. so, call this the naked blog, if you want ... for a while anyway.

in search of ? a contemplative post

i feel it. as i read more and more about judaic thinking, principles, the torah. my soul revels in the compassion for g-d, for humanity, that flies from each word.

In stark contrast to Christian dogma -- where marriage is seen as a concession to the weakness of the flesh, and celibacy is extolled as a virtue -- the Torah accords matrimony an exalted and holy position.

what a difference this makes! such a difference ... i will not elaborate much further at this point, but just say that my soul feels liberated at the underlying sentiment of the torah wrt marriage and sexuality. repression has no place in the torah. in fact, it commands healthy sexual intimacy for all married couples. one removes the villainous tinge from sex and sexuality when one promotes open healthy expression as natural and necessary, rather than a grotesque manifestation of human weakness.

think on it. how many rabbi's are sexual predators? and how many so-called catholic men of the cloth are sexual predators or deviants? and how does a man, a celibate man who has no family experience whatever, possess the experience and knowledge and wisdom to guide his laiety in matters of family living, child rearing, marital strife? what counsel could such a repressed, oppressed and sheltered man provide an average person?

and now, in my convoluted thought pattern, this takes me to the issue of jesus. the being whom christians call the 'christ' .... the messiah. i have done, and continue to do, some reading on the divinity of jesus. on his message. the notion of jesus as divine does, when one delves into the facts of the matter, seem at odds with various prophecies that existed regarding the messiah. ie - one of many small seemingly insignificant details - jesus, not being joseph's biological son according the gospels, does not then descend from the davidic line, then does he? puzzling.

when it logically causes one to call prophecies into question. is not the word of g-d constant and unchanging for all time? and does it not evoke confusion, to think of g-d in a human form? and ... on top of all this consider the social dynamics of the time. the followers which jesus picked did not follow the laws of their faith - had a diminished experiential knowledge and understanding than, say, your average judean jew would have possessed. and ... at the risk of superimposing 21st century values upon an ancient society, i want to ask - what of all the families that jesus basically encouraged his followers to abandon? i wonder ... its suspect. so many things just don't add up.

so ... that's some of it. i can say now that i don't believe in the divinity of jesus ... that he is the messiah. that's not to say he was not an important figure in judaic thinking ... just that calling him a 'son of g-d (man)' does not imply his divinity - it imples a titled traditionally bestowed upon ancient sages/rabbis - a title of respect, a title which honours a man for his wisdom in interpreting the law of g-d.

and ... well, given that jesus appeared himself sort of conflicted about the torah, i think it would even be a stretch to call him 'son of g-d (man).' one must remember, that to the jewish diaspora of his time, jesus seemed as revolutionary and extreme as, say, osama to the mainstream muslims. a charismatic, maverick outspoken individual who aspires to lead a revolution against the status quo and who represents manipulative disrespect for the law of g-d.

God and religion ~ the jury's out

yep. i can safely say that here. i dunno. honestly. what the fuck do i regard as fact? what the fuck do i regard as fiction? years and years of blind, merciless and cruel ::exclusionary:: indoctrination have left a gaping burn hole on my heart. on my soul. along with suspicion. and defiance of the existing self-delegated authorities. and then … the JC figure pops into my head.
i’m thinking of JC. a maverick of his era, for sure. shunned, in fact, condemned, by the religious authorities of that time for heresy, blaspheming. not married, in an era which expected, required even, men his age to marry. and he kept companionship with several other males. what. what. what, would we think of such an individual by today’s standards? would we think he’s gay? and … does it matter? and … does JC matter? i mean, in the grande scheme of things?
does it frighten us to apply contemporary standards to ancient biblical times? does it assist us in advancing our goals? i have awareness that i’ve used “US” here. only for convenience, really. i don’t consider myself part of that US. but, the old paradigm, seared into one’s being, ain’t so easy to erase from this self. at any rate, what of applying today’s standards to societies that existed millenia ago? if this makes mohammed a pedophile, then surely, it must also make joseph and god himself one, too. for … mary was but a child, by today’s standards - barely old enough to give consent to any sexual union - be it with another human or with the holy spirit. and now back to my comparison of societal standards … does it make JC gay?
and this leads to a very interesting thought that catholicism - i keep myself closed in the catholic box here because that’s the paradigm i know very well - has based itself upon sexual repression. one only need look to the horrific abuse at mount cashel school for boys in the maritimes to face the ugliness of catholicism’s dirty little secrets. dirty. that’s a word i think of when i think catholic. manipulation. of the power dynamic. oppressive. in its subjugation. of the flesh. of humanity. this subjugation of sexuality. this repression of a most powerful and most beautiful primordial behaviour. don’t you think its twisted? sick? DYSFUNCTIONAL? i wonder … did JC intended for his ‘church’ to erect itself in this manner? did he intend for his institution to grow to such largess as currently? and with such carnage?
of the world today. of so-called christians today. what would JC think? what would he feel? if he could see? see into the reality of human existence? and the hypocrisy of christianity. christians who burned joan of arc at the stake. and then several hundred years later canonized her to sainthood. hypocrisy. hearts filled with hatred. all in the name of JC. what would he think? would he give a free express pass thru heaven’s pearly gates, to all those mothers who abandoned their dying, AIDS-ravaged sons? would he give out special edition halos to all those who exclude others in his name? would men who rape little boys receive an exemption from condemnation because they wear a roman collar?
i wonder. i wonder. that’s all. i guess that makes me a heretic, then?

thinking about religion

ok. so, first post about this stuff. i’m trying something new. religion. theism. its shaped my person. the child i was once. the woman i’ve become. i don’t subscribe to a religion, really. in my mind the jury’s out on this god thing.
furthermore i think all those out there who pad their own egos and self interest in the name of their god are just as guilty as those they condemn as sinners, blasphemers and fallen angels. case in point - the vatican. just some other types of politicians. exploiting the belief system of the masses to forward their own political and personal agendas.
ok. that’s all i’m gonna say for a first post.
oh wait. one more thing. i wonder why is it forbidden to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge? what is it that god does not want us to know? that’s where i’m at with religion and belief in god.