Catholicism – Borderless

By Farouk Gulsara

Charles Dickens was flying high by 1842. His books, Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and periodicals were selling like hot cakes on both sides of the Atlantic. With so many fans over in America, he decided to pay them a visit. What he saw in the second-largest fan base upset him for two reasons. Firstly, there was the issue of royalty. Publishers in America were printing his work left, right and centre. He received none of the returns due to him. Secondly, he was upset with the level of racism and their cavalier attitude towards slavery, even amongst the northern states.

Dickens could not stomach the dehumanisation of the black Americans. The vocal and expressive writer, who drew his readers to his craft in the first place, wrote in one of his later articles about his trip to America. He did not twist his words when he wrote verbatim in his American travelogues of slaveowners’ advertisements about their runaway slaves. In one of these advertisements, it read, “Ran away, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.”

A few years earlier, Britain had outlawed slavery, so the British felt a bit of moral superiority over the Americans.

The Americans did not take to this kindly. Dickens’ following few publications fared poorly.

Meanwhile, Britain was also changing.

It was industrialising as its Empire ventured far and wide to exotic lands. With that came the increasing gap between the poor and the rich. The poor remained short of money and short of education opportunities. With the development of science, religious belief took a back seat. Catholicism lost its favour. The Puritans were disillusioned with the material world.

The idea of Christmas and family togetherness was losing out. Work took up most of the time. There were no documented Christmas holidays. The ancient midwinter culture of Europeans had lost its lustre. Many of the Christmas iconographies were viewed as pagan in the UK and the US. The Puritans viewed life as hard, and having joy and fun was scorned. A small proportion of people still wanted to revive the spirit of Christmas.

Against this background, Dickens returned home. His following two books received a poor reception from readers. He resumed his social work, helping the marginalised. At that time, the prevailing view in the UK was that poverty was self-inflicted. The society felt that providing aid to the poor was counterproductive; it made them lazy. People deserved to go hungry for producing so many children, and the Malthusian theory that food demand would outstrip supply seemed to be coming true. The 1840s were known as the “hungry 40s.” Famine was looming.

Yet another layer of population, the reformists, took it upon themselves to help the downtrodden. Dickens was one of those souls. In Manchester, after giving an emotional lecture at a fundraiser to feed and educate poor children, he went for one of his famous long walks.

As he walked the streets, an idea struck him. He visualised a man who had lost all his compassion and had to be jolted back into a complete sense of his humanity. The story helped rebuild Christmas and the compassion that had been lost over the years. The rest, as they say, is history. A Christmas Carol reformed Victorian Britain.

Reference:

From Journey Through Time: 59. A Christmas Carol: The Book That Brought Back Christmas (Ep 1), 25 Dec 2025. Podcast

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

The Blue Dragonfly

Title: The Blue Dragonfly – healing through poetry

Author: Veronica Eley

Publisher: Hidden Brook Press, Ontario

grey blanket					[from Prelude]

earliest memory
driving along
a country road
in the back seat
wrapped
in a grey blanket
in the dark

separation
the side bars
on the hospital bed
two years old
pneumonia

fifteen-year-old girl
raped
police declare
emotionally disturbed
wrapped
in a grey blanket
taken home

disturbed
turbulent
the waters
the waves, the waves
are big, mommy
the cold, grey ocean
is deep
I lean against the railing
of the White Star Cunard liner
seven years old

railings
grey blanket
grey, grey 




secret monsters				[from Presentation]

when I am dog tired
deep down below
an ambiguous voice
declares itself

blasphemous language
often, with a highly sexual content
pokes out its unseemly head
to scream and thrash about

language from a deep abyss
dirty tributaries
foul-mouthed monsters
who live in my
subterranean landscapes

loud mouthed
the desire to smash and hurt
to feed the monster within
to let out a little vengeful steam
is the only way to calm the beast

in some ways
I live a life of pretence
hidden
shameful
feeding the snake within
with disgusting morsels

 
the bodhisattva				[from Altered States]

she wanders through the streets
a heart as big
as the whole outdoors
warding off criticisms
from voices long
ago dead

how do you
lose
rolling the dice of
compassion?
the fashion in the 90s
: to give
politically/correctly

the knife of deconstruction
blasts
beliefs, values, ideals
the high-rise
terminology
-laden
hierarchical
transcendent, dualistic
world
crumbles (post
-modernized)
leaving us with
No Thing, powering our appetites
to violent
pornographies

karma
equals Choice
equals Action
equals Identity

where does this yearning
come from? the bodhisattva’s loving
compassion, undifferentiated
interconnective, doing
and undoing

do we have any
other choice?
in our best dress
our Sunday best
our best frame of mind
-- compassionate be

I exist between myself
and you



mother						[from Home]

eternal mother
conniving tributary peace strategies
love and replenishment
look to the sun
the bare branches
outlining our destinies

reaching to the heavens
rooted in fertile ground
our arms reach upward
bare, rough and brown
the colour of the earth

take care, dear mother
look to the sunset
the glorious colours
I will be thinking of you

About the Book

The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry is a verse narrative of trauma and recovery, 120 poems organized into three acts: Secret Monsters, The Bodhisattva, and Mother. Distinguished by an intense affectivity of language, its poetry of metaphor, repetition, and internal rhyme, “rotating / like a wind chime / inside my body,” communicates a trance-like account of trauma, therapy, and personal growth. Resistance to Western rationality – camouflaging crimes of incest and rape – is a major theme. The poet’s encounter with an Indian psychiatrist heralds the discovery of “a comrade spirit / a healer” from another continent. In time, the poet becomes the bodhisattva herself, a compassionate witness to her own and the bravely lived stories of others, a “red trauma reverberating around the world.” Trauma theory links such suffering to creative language, re-invoking Aristotle’s conception of metaphor as uniquely bound to tragedy (to make the unspeakable speak). Is poetry and its poem then merely a “work of art”? Or is it a linguistic “magical toolkit,” with purpose to build a common, practical humanity free from pain?

About the Author

Born 1950, Manchester UK, Veronica Eley is an Adult literacy instructor, Toronto, 1994-2011, Master of Education, OISE-UT, Toronto, 2002. She retired inDartmouth, Nova Scotia, 2016. Her first book of poetry was published in 2021. – Poetry came to the author late in life through journaling and therapy (1998-2016), when she learned to “stream the inner spirit, the unconscious,” in a “fluid connection between my soul, brain, pen and paper.” Poems would give structure and pace to her feelings, sparking her “creative remembering” and recovery from trauma. Ideas of synchronicity and flow, an attunement to nature, and the stories of her immigrant and refugee students provided a rich support for telling her own story. The author’s family had migrated to Nova Scotia in 1952. Dislocation shock, charismatic Catholicism, and the metempsychotic memory of the cotton mills would repose themselves in the youngest child. A “trinity of traumas” personal to her would follow. Now the small-press publication of her book, aided by her acutely poetic camera, accumulates readers. The author declines interviews, as “the poems speak for themselves.”

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International