Blog to blog

Seems I've been a bit focused on things other than this blog of late. Among other things, helping Bekah to get ready for her semester in Kenya (with SIT, studying Health and Community Development) and taking her to Boston for her flight to Paris and on to Nairobi. Then it was fielding her phone calls and skype connections when her first flight to Nairobi was cancelled due to two flat tires.

We went to bed Saturday night knowing that she had set at least four different alarms in her hotel room at Charles de Gaulle in order to be sure to make it back to the airport for her second try at getting to Nairobi. When our phone rang at 5:30 a.m. Sunday finding me largely still asleep, I was awake enough to know that this was not a good sign. She should have been in the air to Nairobi.

No such luck. Her flight had been postponed again--this time because the crew was late arriving at the airport and the aircraft had not yet been checked for flight readiness. How reassuring.

I spent the next few hours repeatedly checking the Air France flight status website, watching as the the flight's scheduled departure got moved later and later in 10 minute increments, feeling powerless and fretful. At one point, I found myself thinking, "What if I considered the possibility that somehow it's better that this flight leaves late? What if I didn't chafe at this reality?" I don't know if this marked a step forward in maturity and wisdom, but it did open up a bit of open space.

Bekah did eventually get take off from Paris on Sunday. After calling SIT's headquarters in Vermont to be sure that someone would meet her in Nairobi, I did my best to get on with my day.

For some odd reason, neither Air France's website nor www.flightsarriving.com was able to confirm that her plane ever landed in Nairobi! We simply chose to assume that no news really was good news--that had something unthinkable happened, we would have heard, and that Bekah was fine and had connected with her SIT group in Nairobi.

How wonderful for David to receive an unexpected phone call from Bekah today, using a borrowed cell phone as the one she had just purchased was not working! And later my phone rang out with the sound of an arriving text--"Hi. Are you getting this? This is a test."

She's still far away, and for four months. But she's fine. And with the wondrous connecting thread of technology an option at least some of the time. I am grateful.

So now it's time to link blog to blog. One of Bekah's study abroad scholarship grants requires her to keep a blog, posting at least once a week. Here's the link for Bekah in Kenya. Enjoy!

Buddha H. Christ

Pardon me if I've already offended you with the title of this blog. If so, you could opt to read no further. But then, you may just find this a tiny bit enlightening, though not exactly in the Buddha's way of enlightenment. 

Not long ago Anna said that she and some of her friends had been discussing whether "Christ" was actually Jesus' last name  (they didn't think so). And of course I gave her a succinct yet eloquent mini-lecture on the fact that Christ is a title, from Greek, and what it means, etc. Actually, I probably told her more than she ever wanted to know and was not exactly spellbinding, but...whatever. I did also happen to mention that Christ as a last name gets a funny (and some would say, irreverent, disrespectful, and blasphemous) tweak in the expression, "Jesus H. Christ"! 

So I've been asking myself: where does that expression come from? A short trip to wikipedia offers up the following very interesting little explanation: 

"Jesus H. Christ is an example of slang serving as a mild profanity. The expression can be used in an angry, wry, sarcastic, cynical, exasperated, or even joking tone. The expression implies that the Christ is a surname rather than a title (Christ comes from the Greek christos meaning "anointed".) [For you punctuational types, wikipedia has the period inside the parentheses, thus leaving the actual sentence without a period!]

"The expression dates to at least the late 19th century, although according to Mark Twain, it was already old in 1850, and likely originates with the ancient Christian symbolism IHS (the Christogram). (Smith 1994, p. 332)

"Using the name of Jesus Christ as an oath has been common for many centuries, but the precise origins of the letter H in the expression Jesus H. Christ are obscure. While many explanations have been proposed, some serious and many humorous, the most widely accepted derivation is from the monogram of Christian symbolism. The symbol, derived from the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus..., is transliterated IHS, IHC, JHS, or JHC. Since the transliteration IHS gave rise to the backronym Iesus Hominum Salvator (Latin for "Jesus Savior of Men"), it is plausible that JHC similarly led to Jesus H. Christ. (Smith 1994, pp. 332-3)"

"Smith 1994", by the way, is Smith, Roger, "The H of Jesus H. Christ", American Speech 69 (3): 331-335. (Do you think somewhere there's a PhD dissertation on the topic?!)

I don't know about you, but I find that quite fascinating, entertaining, and maybe even enlightening! (Confession: despite being a bit of a language geek and learning a chunk of New Testament Greek in seminary, I never could manage to remember what the letters "IHS" stood for and why they are always elaborately embroidered on altar hangings and such. Now, finally, I think I will remember.)

Still, you may be wondering: where did the title of this blog post, Buddha H. Christ, come from? Well, a few nights back David enlisted my help in batting around possible names for a new blog he is thinking about starting, and he mentioned his hybrid religious identity (my words for it, not his) as both Christian and Zen practitioner. And in a moment of inspiration I said, "How about 'Buddha H. Christ'?" At which point we both lost our selves, and our recent bad moods, in laughter. In case you're wondering, I don't think that will be the name of his blog.