Welcome to 1387
Happy New Year! With the spring equinox this week, the Persian New Year – 1387- arrives. No Ruz, as it’s called, is officially a five day holiday and unofficially a two week vacation when even national newspapers quit publishing and most institutions shutdown. People traditionally travel to their home villages, older people bearing gifts for younger ones, reuniting and feasting together.
Anchored in old Zoroastrian traditions, the grand festivities of No Ruz were old when Kings Dariush, Xerxes, and Cyrus ruled Persia. Majestic bas-reliefs at Persepolis (its building begun by Dariush the Great in about 518 BC, just for No Ruz ceremonies)show 21 delegations (Arabs, Medes, Indians, Parthians, Elamites…) bearing New Year’s tributes for the king. I remember a line of Armenians, holding their gifts in their arms, waiting to approach the throne. Cypress trees, ever green, ever living, were before and behind them as they marched through No Ruz long ago.
On Wednesday night ("New Year's eve") there was celebrating with small bonfires all over our city. Fires were lit in the streets and people jumped over them to symbolize leaving the past and its troubles behind, and being purified in one’s leap of faith into a new year.
In Iran families often display seven items (beginning with the “s” sound) on a table in their home for good luck. The display should have apples, garlic, a gold coin, goldfish in a bowl, vinegar, seeds that have sprouted and a mirror. Mothers should eat a hard boiled egg for every child they have. It is best not to return to work until after the 13th day of No Ruz (considered unlucky) has passed.
And then there is shared food—one of the most lovely features of Iranian hospitality. One cooks to receive guests. One cooks and gives food to strangers. One cooks for the poor. One can, if in a hurry, buy delicious roasted chickens in the market to take home. (To order a cooked chicken, one asks in Farsi for “Yek (1) Kentucky.” I recently perused a holiday menu posted outside a restaurant : camel meat stew with potatoes, chicken with saffron gravy, beef stew with pomegranates and walnuts, rose water with sugar and saffron, tea with cardamom, cinnamon and ginger.
No Ruz is also a time to remember one’s neighbor. “Are you traveling for No Ruz?” we are being asked daily. “Will you come home with us?” (to Tehran, Kashan, Damavand, the Caspian Sea). “When? Why not? If you don’t we will miss you too much.” The word for neighbor in Farsi is “hamsayeh”, meaning “also (my) shadow.” A neighbor is part of one’s being, one’s heart, one’s concern, one’s own shadow. Our friends in Iran live like they mean this.
No Ruz is about to begin and Holy Week has arrived, for Christians on the western calendar. Holy Week is an invitation to a different kind of metamorphosis. “He
was,” wrote Isaiah, during Israel’s sixth century BC exile in Babylon and Persia, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief…. He was wounded for our transgressions crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment of the whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (chapter 53). Holy Week, for Christians, is a hinge of time from which we reflect on what it means to suffer redemptively, to be prepared to lay down one’s life for one’s beloved friends, to endure persecution nonviolently, praying that God will pardon one’s enemies, to trust completely in the promise of all Abrahamic faiths: the resurrection of the dead. And soon it will be Easter Sunday, when everything is made new once again.
Anchored in old Zoroastrian traditions, the grand festivities of No Ruz were old when Kings Dariush, Xerxes, and Cyrus ruled Persia. Majestic bas-reliefs at Persepolis (its building begun by Dariush the Great in about 518 BC, just for No Ruz ceremonies)show 21 delegations (Arabs, Medes, Indians, Parthians, Elamites…) bearing New Year’s tributes for the king. I remember a line of Armenians, holding their gifts in their arms, waiting to approach the throne. Cypress trees, ever green, ever living, were before and behind them as they marched through No Ruz long ago.
On Wednesday night ("New Year's eve") there was celebrating with small bonfires all over our city. Fires were lit in the streets and people jumped over them to symbolize leaving the past and its troubles behind, and being purified in one’s leap of faith into a new year.
In Iran families often display seven items (beginning with the “s” sound) on a table in their home for good luck. The display should have apples, garlic, a gold coin, goldfish in a bowl, vinegar, seeds that have sprouted and a mirror. Mothers should eat a hard boiled egg for every child they have. It is best not to return to work until after the 13th day of No Ruz (considered unlucky) has passed.
And then there is shared food—one of the most lovely features of Iranian hospitality. One cooks to receive guests. One cooks and gives food to strangers. One cooks for the poor. One can, if in a hurry, buy delicious roasted chickens in the market to take home. (To order a cooked chicken, one asks in Farsi for “Yek (1) Kentucky.” I recently perused a holiday menu posted outside a restaurant : camel meat stew with potatoes, chicken with saffron gravy, beef stew with pomegranates and walnuts, rose water with sugar and saffron, tea with cardamom, cinnamon and ginger.
No Ruz is also a time to remember one’s neighbor. “Are you traveling for No Ruz?” we are being asked daily. “Will you come home with us?” (to Tehran, Kashan, Damavand, the Caspian Sea). “When? Why not? If you don’t we will miss you too much.” The word for neighbor in Farsi is “hamsayeh”, meaning “also (my) shadow.” A neighbor is part of one’s being, one’s heart, one’s concern, one’s own shadow. Our friends in Iran live like they mean this.
No Ruz is about to begin and Holy Week has arrived, for Christians on the western calendar. Holy Week is an invitation to a different kind of metamorphosis. “He
was,” wrote Isaiah, during Israel’s sixth century BC exile in Babylon and Persia, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief…. He was wounded for our transgressions crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the punishment of the whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (chapter 53). Holy Week, for Christians, is a hinge of time from which we reflect on what it means to suffer redemptively, to be prepared to lay down one’s life for one’s beloved friends, to endure persecution nonviolently, praying that God will pardon one’s enemies, to trust completely in the promise of all Abrahamic faiths: the resurrection of the dead. And soon it will be Easter Sunday, when everything is made new once again.
posted by Quakers in Qom at 4:45 AM
1 Comments:
I gave Daryl and Cindy Byler a hug the other day at church- thinking warm thought of my Quakers in Qom as they talked about their MCC work in church :).
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