What's your Bible fuller of?

February 16, 2014
What’s your Bible fuller of?

We heard an interesting sermon this morning.  (I liked the preacher.  She preached well, sang beautifully, and was relaxed about the whole thing.  God may be perfect, but she doesn't have to be, so we don't either.)

          The preaching passage was 1 Corinthians, verses from chapters 1 and 3.  Paul is scolding those dunderheaded Greeks on the basis of a rumor.  “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that you’re arguing.”  If they are − if Chloe’s people aren’t just trying to stir the pot or rile the Apostle − the argument is about who one or another “belongs” to.  One is saying he belongs to Paul.  Another is saying she belongs to Apollos.  One belongs to Cephas and one even to Christ.

          Well, if belonging has to do with baptism, Paul will take himself out of the argument.  He didn’t baptize anyone, oh except Crispus and Gaius . . . and Stephanas and his family − at least, that’s all he remembers.  He’s not in the baptism business anyway.  He’s in the telling business.

          And let him tell you this . . . .

The preacher herself wasn’t much into what Paul was telling.  She was more interested in why these Corinthians were hanging on to their connections to Apollos or Cephas or Paul, not just Christ.  She thought the folks at Corinth attached themselves to one or another as kind of guarantors of their faith, that it was right as well as righteous.  Because it was from Apollos or Cephas or Paul that they learned the story.  They didn’t have Scripture.

Well, we do!  But are we then better off?  Or does it − or bits and pieces of It − become what we belong to now instead of Christ.  Whoever baptized us, a lot of us still belong to Paul, though some of us belong to the Synoptics, some of us to John’s gospel, some of us to Revelation and Daniel, and some of us to 2 Cephas 2 [selected verses].               "    "    "    "    (

          Which means we all end up belonging to ourselves.  Look again at 2 Timothy:

“All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” (OV)  

OR: “Every scripture inspired by God is useful for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (AV)

The verse is often cited as the last word on Scripture.  Well, maybe, sort of, because what it says isn’t entirely clear.  Both translations are possible.  Yes, your Bible may give the first, but we both know that it really, practically means the second.  And it’s up to us to judge what is truly inspired by God, and we will decide the way it was decided that 1 Timothy made it into Scripture at all, based on our particular purposes at the time.  I belong to Paul today, but I may need to be Cephas' tomorrow.  You can't tell what is going to happen; how can you tell who you're going to want to be?  Bob and weave.

W

Right at the gate

February 15, 2013
Right at the gate

Someone said once about my mother that the tragedy of her life was that she had to grow up; but it wasn’t a tragedy, only a sorrow. She seems to have thought she wouldn’t have to. Growing up was for her much older brother; since he managed it, let it be on her behalf as well as his.

          So when she married, she was a child bride, though she was older than my dad. Why they married “someone” may know; I don’t. They were in high school together. She was lovely as rain; when he came back from the war, all grown up, he dared ask her and she said yes.

          Then, she was pregnant; and before they’d been married a year I was born. And on her hands. Dad was too busy doing what men did then; children were under what-women-do.

          They didn’t, or at least I didn’t, require she be a woman to do it, an all-grown-up girl. That she bore me made her my mother, but she could treat me more as a little brother than a son. Note: “little brother,” not doll.

          Girls of her generation may have read to their dolls, but they didn’t get carried away with it. She spent − more than hours, more than days − months reading to me. I would sit on her lap or nestled into her side; or she would sit arm against me on the edge of my bed, and read and read and read. It wasn’t a chore; she was the older child that could read, I was the smaller child that listened.

          Is it true that if you want to know how anyone thinks about things, you should know what his mother read to him? Over and over my mother read to me from two books, a big blue book of Bible stories − probably Hurlbut’s − and a big maroon book of stories of King Arthur and his court. We spent a lot of time in Galilee and Albion.

It is a sorrow, growing up, or pretending you have. It’s not a great sorrow, though. It’s like tiptoeing around after you’ve broken something you shouldn’t have been near much less picked up, hoping against hope that if you’re really quiet you won’t get caught. Mom was better at that than I have been. But no one gets away with a whole hell of a lot. Not where we live.

          That’s because our Bible, unlike Hurlbut’s, is fuller of Paul than of Jesus. The Messiah suggests we become like children if we want to know what the kingdom of heaven is like. The Apostle says, “Screw that: put away childish things. Stop thinking like a boy. Stop acting like a boy. Grow up!” Be a man, doing what men do.

Y

W

Left at the gate

February 14, 2013
Left at the gate

Having dispatched D. R. Dudley’s book on Cynicism, I’m rambling my way through Goncharov’s Oblomov.  (Say that three times rapidly: rambling through Goncharov’s Oblomov.) It’s on a list I found on the Manchester Guardian website.  (Now to be found here.)

          I was skating the net, looking for “comic novels,” because I’m sick and tired of woe. I’m always sick and tired of woe; I never think tragedy describes the way the world works. (Nor does “winning through,” which is why I refuse to read memoirs. If you think you’ve won through: first, if you have to write about it, you’re wrong, you haven’t; second, if you have to write about it, for God’s sake, keep the manuscript to yourself.) 

          You have to look for comic novels, because they’re hard to find. Who has the guts and the skill to write them, to write about life without going all brave or maudlin?  But here, on the Guardian's list of 1000 novels you ought to have read, was at least a small sublist of (maybe 150) comic novels. Many, like Saki’s very, very clever The Unsufferable Bassington, I’d never heard of. I had heard of Oblomov, whose protagonist is the prototype of “the superfluous man,” but I’d never really looked for it.

          I have it now on Kindle. It’s not – it can’t be – the best translation available.  But it’s good enough I can see the comedy.  The Guardian warns that comic novels aren’t always that funny. And they aren’t; but they do always take woe, even tragedy, lightly, with salt. I don’t know how else you survive. You’ve got to be brave and win through, I guess.

          I know I’m going on about this. But why does anyone want to be brave? Better a live dog than a dead lion, as the saying goes; better Milton Berle than Pat Tilley. And win through to what? Does your life change because you’ve come to the decision that you don’t have to forgive your parents? One of comedy’s gifts: it reminds us that life doesn’t change. It just goes on and on, one damn – and crazy! unpredictable, never to be resolved – thing after another. You grow up, you don’t forgive your parents, then you die.

Of course, I could be wrong. Surely I am. It’s the brave and the serious, the ones that win through, that are held up as examples to be followed.  But that, I suspect, is because it’s the kind of people that read memoirs that want to tell us how to live our lives.

W

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

February 13, 2013
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down

Ash Wednesday. When we repent of our sins and think for forty days we can do without, at least one or two of them.

***

In the last chapter of the first part of Oblomov, however Ilya Ilyich idealizes aspects of his childhood, he is less sorrowful that he is no longer a child than he is indifferent to having become a man.

Among those things we are indifferent to in our childhood are the days and the weeks and the months, for we live in the seasons and to and from the great feasts and festivals − family birthdays, Christmas, Easter, when the pool opens and closes. We are largely indifferent to the world outside our world; we don’t imagine that anyone − except in books − lives any differently from the way we do. And since there is no reason to envy anyone in a book, there is nothing to be envious of. We are indifferent to the nature of the world we live in, for we have conceded the mystery of it: how birds fly and trees get and lose their leaves, how snow falls and rises again − “the air and water and forest and field [are all] alike under the sway of the supernatural,” as Oblomov says. So are our friends, the heroes of fairy tales, legends, the Bible. So are we.

Then!  

          Goncharov suggests that sadness will come, when we realize that the world is “ordered according to a simple plan” − the moon is not cheese and the sun is not butter; Thor does not hammer out thunder, Zeus does not scatter the lightning; the dead will not rise; giants will be imprisoned in side-shows and imps confined to circus tents. The year will be divided into months and the months into weeks and the weeks into days. Each day will have twenty-four hours. Each hour − and each minute − will have a number.

          The child’s world is not so easily measured, it wanders; but the daze in which it roams − or floats − does not confuse but delights.

Then!  

          We put away childish things. We foreswear confusion. And we lose our knack for delight. That, at least, is what my mother thought without thinking; it is what she taught me without my learning it.

 W

On any given Sunday

February 9 (or 2 or 16), 2014

On any given Sunday

Last night, the same awkward dreams of getting lost; and this morning, waking up little rested to begin the day reading the same old snark at the same old news feeds. To whom we are superior today, who never go lost: Woody Allen, Vladimir Putin, indeed all of Russia. We could have choreographed a better opening ceremony. We could have danced a better dance, sung a better song; we could have run rings around the rings.

          For, thanks be to God, we are superior to all things, and there is no manner of thing we could not have done better. There is nothing awry in our lives, except your inability to go back and do as we say you should have. (Please know: “Thanks be to God” is a verbal tic. For God, if he exist, is an incompetent fool compared to our hindsight, our knowledge-of-the-way-things-shouldhavebeen. Haec diximus.)

Anywhere else than our writing desk is the hinterland, the way it is depicted in “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith”: women in shapeless sacks, kerchiefs wound about their heads; men in overalls and crumpled stove-pipe hats; toothless children; simpletons all. G-d-, if we couldn’t run New Jersey, West Virginia, and the Olympic games – all at once – better than the thousands of buffoons now in charge. So give three cheers and one cheer more for the mighty pundits of the op-press corps.

 ***

Why are we all so full of hate, or at least its self-righteous cousin, contempt? Why are we all so small of soul we can’t imagine anyone’s motives ever approaching pure? – our own excepted, of course.

          (I’m tempted this Sunday morning to blame it on the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Paul, who could not love all humankind alike but had to have his favorites to whom he gave the Law or the Gospel with which not only to judge themselves but all others besides.)

***

Wit is one thing; humor is quite another. Witty self-deprecation is nothing like true modesty.  (It is actually closer to overweening pride. “Look: I can make fun of myself.  No, look.  Here!” Don’t look away, don’t dare look away. Look here. Look! Aren’t I being funny about myself?)

          Modesty recognizes the ambiguous nature of our life among others. Witty self-deprecation pays no attention to others at all. Look. Here.

          Modesty doesn’t judge lest it be judged. Witty s-d holds the self up as the rule. I can be self-deprecating because my ideal (true) self is – let’s put false modesty aside – the measure of all things. “Everyone has his prejudices but, thanks be to God, mine are the right ones.” (True, I chuckle when I say that, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I can laugh at myself, we have established that – and you may join in and laugh with me. But do not laugh at me; don’t let your laughing with me go on a millisecond after my own laughter stops.)

***

I am tempted to blame Yahweh, and I begin wondering again about the wisdom of polytheism (as Ovid, e.g., describes it), acknowledging – even invoking (as well as evoking) – ambiguity. The gods may be as jealous as Yahweh, I begin to write; but they can’t be. The jealousy of one is mocked and tempered by the jealousy of another – tempered, yes, even thwarted. So every little corner of the world becomes mysterious and every people in every corner chosen by one deity or another.

          “Everyone may have his prejudices, but thanks to the god of this place, mine are the right ones . . . at least here. When we come to your place . . . .” 

***

From the doesn’t-happen-often-enough department. The story of Calchas, whose wisdom helped guide the Greeks through the Trojan War. But! Chalchas “was undone by his [resulting] high opinion of himself. Challenged to a guessing contest by Mopsus, he failed to estimate the number of figs in a tree. When his opponent guessed correctly, Calchas strangled on his own vanity.” (Evslin's Gods, Demigods & Demons, 30)

          Think of vanity as both overweening pride and complete emptiness, so that the vain soothsayer, prognosticator, politico, pundit having puffed forth so much carbon dioxide finds he cannot breathe; he chokes and the one that claims to see goes blind from lack of oxygen to his mighty brain.

Y

Thanks to Bob Hodgell for the wonderful "Words, Words, Words."

W

The reason is . . .

Jacques Callot: Les Grandes Misère de la Guerre’

February 3, 2009

The reason is . . .

The day begins well, sunny and mild.  I think I may play a few holes of golf in the late afternoon in memoriam John Updike.  He hasn’t added one word to the world’s store this week, but the world – though you might imagine it would be – is no lighter for it.  The day begins sunny and mild, but by three it’s cold and cloudy and by five it’s snowing.  By the time I take the dog for his walk, there’s an inch and a half on the ground.  Its beauty is skin deep.  Beneath the white the grass is gray, the ground is soft and wet.  By the time we’re home my shoes are leaking, my socks are wet, my feet are pods of sweating ice.  I shovel and sweep the walks only so they’ll be slipperier by morning.

This is the way life slips by these days.  Walking from here to there, talking on the phone, meeting people.  Nice people for the most part but not particularly good.  None of us is either wise enough or wide enough to be truly good.  Those that try to be – to get above niceness – go about it the wrong way, because good isn’t above niceness, it’s  in another direction.

          I’ve been reading Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity.  Her world is much wider than mine, she is much wiser than I; but she still doesn’t understand good.  Her examples of goodness are of  nice - and talented, of course.  They’re very bright and they’re thinking hard; but they can’t break through by thinking.  Good is not nice or bright or talented or reasonable.

                             Dulness best solves

                             The tease and doubt of shelling,

                             And Chance’s strange arithmetic         [Wilfred Owen, “Insensibility”]*

Y

*Read the full poem at poemtree.com.

This is only the first section of the poem.  To read it in its entirety, click here.

W

Sunday morning

February 2, 2014

Sunday morning

We dress – we dress up – and go.  Every week we forget why.  But it’s a comfort –a quiet joy – to arrive among people we know and don’t know, that know and don’t know us.  Everyone from grayest to pinkest is freshly scrubbed and neatly pressed; they smell clean.  They smile with their teeth.

          We find a place at the back.  And we sit with them; and we stand with them, to say the Creed, to sing the songs that tell us their bits of the old, old story.  And we hear again how God chooses the lowly and lonely to save the world though it doesn’t care to be saved.

          We leave – now we’re smiling as we shake the preacher’s hand – then go to fill up and drive through the car wash.  So we come back clean.

W