My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.
From Lionel Blue
I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.
The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.
To change, to convert? Why bother?
I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.
During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
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