Feminism and Religion

I’ve been in the midst of moving for almost a year, yet am still not finished with that onerous task.  My youngest son and family recently moved into the place I’ve called home since 1980.  I bought a small house in the vicinity and have just settled in after spending four months painting, cleaning, and hauling box after box to my new dwelling.  At the same time, I’ve been traveling back and forth to New Mexico busy with painting, cleaning, and remodeling my “retirement house.”

I’m tired.  Am also experiencing emotions that I thought I was impervious to.  I never perceived myself as somebody having an attachment to place, but a month or so before moving out of my old home, I began to feel nostalgic.  There was so much I didn’t want to leave behind–the woods, birds nesting in bushes around the property as well as on top of the front porch light, the wildlife (deer, opossum, rabbits), and neighbors far enough away so I didn’t have to hang curtains at the windows.

Just days before the agreed-upon date to turn the old home over to my son and family, I became emotionally distraught.  A friend suggested I read Oliver Sacks’ book, Gratitude.  Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) was a British neurologist who spent his professional life in the United States caring for people with brain “disorders” such as aphasia, Tourette Syndrome, amnesia, autism, and a host of other neurological diagnoses.

Gratitude is a slim volume featuring four essays written during the last few months of Dr. Sacks’ life.  In the second essay, “My Own Life,” he writes: “I cannot pretend I am without fear.  But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.  I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written.  I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”

I wanted to know more about Dr. Sacks’ life and promptly procured his memoir, On The Move  A Life, published just before he died in 2015.  I was struck by the apparent comfort he felt in his own skin as he went about living in the world.  He came from a fairly Orthodox Jewish family and realized during his teen years that he was gay.  When his mother discovered his homosexuality, she said, “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.”  He writes that she undoubtedly was referring to a text in Leviticus (Hebrew Bible) and although she never mentioned the incident again,” …her harsh words made me hate religion’s capacity for bigotry and cruelty.”

His mother’s view regarding his homosexuality didn’t seem to affect Dr. Sacks’ ability to get on with his adventures living on, what he calls, “this beautiful planet.”  He focused on his passions–medicine, literature, traveling, observing the natural world, swimming, lifting weights, and riding his motorcycle.  Along the way he met a wide variety of people (patients, colleagues, authors, and characters in books).  He squeezed gallons of nectar from those meaningful encounters.  Yet, I think his mother’s disgust regarding his sexual orientation must have cut him to the quick.  He included the incident in his last book, Gratitude.   Continue reading “Gratitude by Esther Nelson”