Piety?

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

I didn’t write a piece for the blog yesterday. The why is simple I got caught up with the waste of time that is Facebook.  Online I posted a picture of my writing space and then tagged all the weird stuff that occupies my desk.  Stupid reason not to write, but it is the real one.  

Tonight as I was lying on my bed I began to think about Spinoza.  Weird, eh?  Mostly I was thinking about the Marrano community of Spain.  Marranos were the new Christians that arose at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  In order not to be burned at the stake or tortured Jews would outwardly convert to Christianity, i.e. new Christians.  From best I can tell the term Marrano was derogatory and was applied to these converts by the established church hierarchy.  One text indicates term itself may be a bastardization of the word pig, the animal the Jews would not eat.  There conversions were viewed however with great suspicion with older established members of the Christian community.

I remembered reading about Spinoza being part of the descendents of this group.  One anecdote that has always remained with me is how confused things living as a closeted Jew/new Christian could get.  Where a Marrano would enter a cathedral a prayer would be said. The prayer was basically an Aramaic recitation that everything in the church was an abomination and anathema.  It concluded with a statement that the one God remained king.  The funny thing was that as the generations of a new Christian family remained in the church some and then often all of the private conduct of traditional Jewish customs and ceremony that were initially secretly carried out in their homes would disappear. Over the years, the decades and the generations many Marrano families actually become devout Christians.  

But still the family members recited the Aramaic sayings on their way into church that disavowed everything they were about to do in there.  They no longer knew the meaning but it was tradition. One writer indicated that some of these prayers were still recited with reverence by devout Catholics on the Iberian Peninsula into the early part of the last century.  

Struck me as kind of odd and I have on a number of occasions wondered about the meta issues involved.  Denying the God you are going to worship with true faith by the use of a prayer concocted based on your family’s ancient forced conversion seems pretty odd.  Does the act of offering the prayer negate your piety?  Does it mean that you are still Jewish?  I don’t have any answers but this is the kind of stuff I wonder about as I look at my Tibetan prayer flags that hang above my various Bibles and Christian prayer books.