There is no joy in Mudville, hope has won out. Special edition.

Schist, Sandstone, Eschatology, Hope

in the World According to the Hopeful, and the Anglican Communion

Ted Riich, B.A., Lo.S.[i]

Abstract

Raving on about what I know next to nothing proves dissatisfying even to me. But the main points: Hope is a way of thinking that is of extraordinary value to the hopeful. Eschatology is the science of proving what they want is what everybody else should be wanting as well. Joy is forbidden as it is takes time away from praying for the future that ought to be. Neither should love of neighbor interfere with hope in any way.

About theology I may not know “schist from sandstone,” as Uncle Albert might put it.[ii] I can read the little words between the big words, and I have a dictionary to look up the words I don’t know what I want them to mean. But I usually do know; like many “real” theologians, I’m prescient that way. I know what should happen next.

          So, I’m an . . . eschatologist!

          Do I know what that means? Eschatology. It’s about the future and what comes with and from it. - ex or e [from, out of] + scatology : Though we live in shit, God in Christ will pull the faithful out of it; the unfaithful will fall even deeper in, burning and reeking forever. And ever. Or so, many of my more faithful friends have told me. That is their hope and salvation.

And I say (to myself), “Thank God they’re saved.” Then, “Thank God, too, you can’t trust hope.” Because home is empty. Or so I believe; and so I liked and posted Uncle Albert’s sentence:

All hope is vain, because the future is not only not yet, it is never yet.

Then, one of my more liberal friends, actually, phoned to say how wrong Uncle Albert was. “The future may be not yet, but it can’t be never yet,” he protested, “because it is already.” And: “It is precisely the promise of the future in which we live in the present. Indeed, we can live in the present only because we have a future promise in which we hope.” Or, something like that.

          I dared to say that it was my fear (based on experience) that living in the future actually keeps us from living in the present as effectively as living in the past does.

          “Pay attention,” I was told. “I didn’t say ‘living in the future’ but ‘living in the present in the promise of the future.’”

          “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure that ‘living in the present in the promise of the future’ as opposed to ‘living in the future’ [period] is not a distinction without a difference. But let’s say there is, a difference. What are we living toward? - our hope that we’re saved and everybody else is pretty much fracked over?”

          My liberal friend, remember – he says: “I wasn’t talking about judgment either. Hope, dammit, and the whole Moltmann thing, the idea that God is drawing the church first but all creation as well toward the future God has prepared for us, for it, from the beginning. In Jesus, incidentally. So the future calls us to live presently as Jesus would have us live - in hope.”

          “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

We hang up. I look up Moltmann [between modalism and monophysitism] in my dictionary. I get a glass of orange juice. I take a pill. I take a nap. All the while, even while I’m sleeping, I’m thinking “Bullshit.” My friend may know his theology. That is, he may know who Moltmann is, how many modes the Trinity truly has, and who they were (or weren’t) in Jesus-the-Christ,[iii] but he doesn’t know Jesus. The word “hope” never passes his (Jesus’) lips – in any of the gospels.[iv]

Which brings us to what is going on in the Anglican Communion, not that I know any more about that than I do about theology in general. So what follows is undoubtedly more schist and sandstone.

          But one way to see why the large majority of churches in the Communion just have to suspend the Episcopal Church in the United States from it is this: that majority thinks that if it doesn’t suspend these misguided americo-heretico-gayomarryingo pagans, the whole Church will go to hell in a handbasket. That would be its future. The horny goats could well drag God’s pure, chaste sheep down into eternal shingle with them.

          Hey, that could happen! At least, you’ve got to think through the possibility. Or, you’ve got to hope it through. It’s the same thing really, because hoping is a way of thinking; it’s a way of planning: it’s a way parsing,[v] in this case who’s going to be drowning in the shit or swimming in the ether (forever and ever, amen).

          So, the future gets in the way of the present. Once again: hope gets in the way of joy and love.[vi]

---

[i] Lost at Sea

[ii] There may be a reason not to put any stock in TRV stories from the Bible. [Link.] Or, it may be a reason to pay attention to them: I can’t have an axe to grind if I don’t have a grinder. (I can only have a bludgeon.)

[iii] Moltmann is a guy. There are no modes in the Trinity, because it doesn’t work that way, so none of them could have been in Jesus, but if they had been he would have been human anyway.

[iv] Hope is a Paul Jesus isn’t enough we’ve got to have a Christ and if we do he’s got to come again and if he comes again it’s got to be in judgment thing.

[v] Think it through carefully enough and you can make hope pretty certain. What all eschatologies have in common – those that frame them know what should happen. Now how do we make sure?

[vi] Paul gets in the way of Jesus once again – even among Anglicans!

 01.20.16 

Vats full of vino

 Stories from the TRV 

  

Yet another story of (good old) Jesus from the Ted Riich Version: “Vats Full of Vino” or “Let the Party Continue.” From John 2:1-11 . . . sort of.

For more TRV fun, click here.

 01.15.16 

 

Truth and hope - three from Uncle Albert

 Three from Uncle Albert 

 

Whatever you have heard, this is why we lie: it’s easier than telling the truth, which is more difficult to keep up with.

What we wish to be true is far dearer to us than what we know to be true.

All hope is vain, because the future is not only not yet, it is never yet.

 01.12.16 

 

Cousin, Cousin

 Cousin, Cousin 

If Calvin can write a commentary on a Synopsis of the Gospels, or whatever he calls it, surely I can follow one story through one gospel. We all skip around anyway, looking for what we want to find. Here’s what I found looking through the story of Jesus and his cousin John in Luke’s gospel: a mess – because John doesn’t have a clue, though like most of us he thinks he does: he thinks he has more than a clue; he’s pretty damn sure he has the truth.

I’ve called this Cousin, Cousin. It jumps through Luke 1, 3, 6, and 7. 

To find more stories from the TRV, Ted Riich Version of the Bible, click here.

 01.11.16

 

1st month, 8th day; 7-league boots

   1st month, 8th day; 7-league boots, limping   

Friday limps over the Blue Ridge into the Valley, one of its seven-league boots filling with blood. Jaw set, face blank with pain. Dull with cold. Limping.

She wouldn’t leave it alone, the woman with the wide mouth, the big blinking eyes, the big sinking breasts. She wanted what was hers, whatever it took.

Friday came limping into the Valley. She took it.

They go down into the water, Jesus and John. John pushes Jesus under. He bobs up, springs up out of the water, running shivering, half-naked into the sunlight. A dove flutters over, stuttering in the voice of God: “My son. Don’t doubt it.”

     Why should we? – we never doubted the prophets.

“Yeah, Dick – the words are silly; but it’s got a good beat, you can dance to it. Eight. I give it an eight.”

 01.08.16 

featuring Chris Christie as the Incredible Hulk

Fore, you stupid #@$^*!!

featuring Chris Christie as the Incredible Hulk

It’s really too cold to play golf where I live. That doesn’t prevent my sometime friend and golf partner Hamlin Moody from badgering me to play with him – because he doesn’t like to play alone. And he sometimes succeeds, on the warmer of the too cold days, because for both of us, the raw weather provides several good excuses for playing poorly: you lose “touch” as your hands lose feeling; it’s hard to take a free swing when you’re wearing so many layers; the ball doesn’t travel as far in the cold air, and it doesn’t roll any more than it does in the lush of summer, probably less as muddy as it seems to get even in the fairways; the greens, the color of mucus are harder to read, and just harder – they won’t hold anything.

     Not that either of us plays that much worse than we normally do; we just have more excuses for not playing as well as we think we should. I could play better incidentally, Moody says, if I were more “aggressive.” “You’re not half-bad,” he says, “but you could be better, if you were more aggressive.”

     I put “aggressive” in quotes, because here it’s golf jargon. I put it in sneer quotes, because it’s jargon I happen to dislike. Indeed, I dislike “aggressive” so much I wonder if I can play aggressively. According to my dictionary (Google-Smith’s Collegiate), the first meaning of aggression (from the early 1600s) is “unprovoked attack.” Why do I want to attack a piece of real estate that has done nothing to me? I don’t want to make war against the course, I want to play it.  I want to play it like a fish I plan to throw back; I want to play with it like a childhood friend.

     This is golf. It’s not football or lacrosse, UFC or GOP.

To me “aggression” is always angry. Maybe that’s why it’s entered the golf vocabulary; we’re all almost always angry these days, even golfers, who of all athletes have the least reason to be . . . and therefore the least reason to vote Republican.

     I’m not even pretending to make sense here, but here are some thoughts on anger that make sense to me. (They’re all by dead white males – don’t think I’m not aware of that. But most golfers I know are dead white males, so they apply to us at least. Actually, most of the Republicans that I know are dead white males, so they could also take note.)

They could note that anger impairs judgment, according to Aristotle. The emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments . . . . Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. – Rhetoric 1378^a20. That the best way to deal with it is not full speed ahead, take action immediately – carpet-bomb the entire Middle East with Chris Christie; according to Seneca, the best way to deal with anger is “hesitation.” Seek this concession from anger right away, not to gain its pardon, but that it may evidence some discrimination. The fist blows of anger are heavy, but if it waits [if you make it wait] it will think again. - On Anger II, 27.

          And it may concede, as Aquinas did, that revenge did no one any real good. Better to sorrow than to take revenge. And better, I say, to laugh than to sorrow. If Montaigne is right, we may not take revenge in any case; rather revenge may well take us. Anger does for sure. Aristotle says that anger sometimes serves as a weapon for virtue and valor. That may be, but it is a weapon whose use is novel. For we move other weapons, this one moves us; our hand does not guide it, it guides our hand; it holds us, we do not hold it. - Essays II, 31 “Of Anger.”

But if we do not hold it, we’ll grab it too, too quickly; and we won’t let it let us go, especially if we’re running for office. For anger is especially for the mighty. But, Proverbs 16:32: He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. A city or a county or a state or the Electoral College, especially when he could be playing golf. Though it's not bombing . . . anybody.

 01.07.16