from "the Ted Riich group"

Ringing out the old . . .

  Ringing out the old . . .  and ringing it back in again.                     

I can fairly easily – smoothly, glidingly, quick-as-a-winkingly – go lost. Now I have some vague sense of where I am, what I am doing, what is next; then, gone. Next is not at all what I thought it would be.

I am trying to stick and move, jab and duck away that I am taking so many blows to the body, because I leave myself unconsciously open, boom, bang, boom, boom; and the time arrives with one last one that my stamina, my strength, my faith, and my hope just run out. I go white with fatigue, and I crumple to the mat.

     I’m not out. I can sense light, if I can’t quite see it. I can hear . . . something. I can feel the pain pushing out from my diaphragm to the soles of my feet and the crown of my head, to the tips of my fingers and my toes, then rushing back into my spleen again. But I can’t stand. I can’t move. I can’t even blink until the light begins shimmying and rubbing its fists into my eyes and I close them to squeeze out the tears.

And they clear enough I can read.

     I finish the last few pages Sailor & Lula; and I look with aching head into Matthew 2, where the prophecies are fulfilled: the son of God goes down into and sojourns in so he can be called out of Egypt; all the other babies in the nursery are hacked to bloody bits, so their mothers – all named Rachel – can weep.

     The illogic – the sadistic senselessness - of the story: Don’t make no nevermind about that. The point is that the prophecies, wherever they came from, in whatever way they’ve been cobbled together, however their original sense has been twisted into another – the prophecies are fulfilled!

     At what cost? Cost not just in the children that are sacrificed – an incident not recorded, incidentally, in the fairly detailed historical accounts we have of Herod the Great. Cost not just in children destroyed but in the trustworthiness of Matthew’s account.

     If his writing hadn’t become Scripture, would we read beyond these 11 verses of chapter 2? Wouldn’t we just put the book down? “Unbelievable, we’d wag our heads, thinking “Why press on, when you can’t credit the story the man is telling?” I mean: Is the fulfillment of a prophecy found in an obscure corner of Jeremiah – about the Babylonian exile - worth this bizarre, savage tweak to the story of Jesus? The savior comes into the world, but not for the innocent children of Bethlehem? God has no power to save against the paranoia of a petty, pissant Roman client king.

Right at the end of Sailor & Lula, Lula writes, “I am ready for an answer why there is endless madness and suffering on the planet all I know is everything been out of control from the beginning.” The failure – let’s be honest – of both reason and revelation is this: they imagine a universe in order from the beginning. And, Lula looks around through common-sense eyes and sees that if there was someone or something trying to control the controls, one was never in sane and/or the other was never in whack.

“With God,” we say in church, “nothing is impossible.” Then we come on this “slaughter of the innocents,” and we have to think, “If nothing is impossible with Him, why didn’t He save them?”

     (One jackass commentator I found suggested – as if it were any consolation – that, well, Bethlehem was a small town; the number of children under the age of two was probably no more than a dozen. I’m feeling better already, though if that was true, God is that much more to blame: how much easier to warn a dozen families or hide – even make invisible – a dozen infants than, say, a hundred?)

     But the evil intentions of piddly Herod – death! – defeat the will of so-called almighty God – life and life abundant! This Sunday the preacher that wanted to defend the Latter wound up muttering something about human freedom and yet . . .

     At that point I stopped listening. In fact, I got up, only half-hoping the folks around me might think I had to relieve myself (though I did feign that kind of uncomfortable, apologetic face.) I walked straight through the narthex and out the front door. A faraway siren. The sun trying to warm a greasy sky. A pair of pigeons clucking on the line across the street, singing “God in his heaven and all the same with the world, everything still been out of control from the beginning. Amen.”

     Amen. And Noël, Noël. Godt Nyttår.

12.28.15

hamsterinwheelisms

 hamsterinwheelisms                        

i

the dog peacefully asleep on the couch he’s not allowed to sleep on

ii

eight words from Faulkner: “the magnolia-faced woman was a little plumper now” (Absalom, Absalom)

iii

fal·li·bi·lism : ^lfal-lĭ-bə-li-zəm  “ . . . the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge that you do not satisfactorily know already; . . . no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness.” (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1, sec. 1.13)

 12.20.15 

Lord, I don't want to be a "Christian"

 Lord, I don't want to be a “Christian”                                         

 I live in a small late-19th-century house in a small fictional town not far from where Woodrow Wilson

“Who are you looking at, boy?”

was born. These days I want to hasten to add: he wasn’t brought up around here. “He’s really from South Carolina,” I want to say, as if no Valley-of-Virginian of his generation could possibly think the way he did, who said about reconstruction that it was detested “not because the Republican Party was . . . but because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded,” and who believed that segregation was “not humiliating but a benefit,” no “distinctly to the advantage of” any belonging to that ignorant and inferior people.

     I live in a small late-19th-century house in a small fictional town not much farther from where Jerry Falwell, Jr. was born and brought up, who said recently (jokingly!) that if “some of those people in that community center [in San Bernardino] had what I have in my back pocket right now [meaning a handgun] . . . Well . . . I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.”

Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian preacherman. Falwell’s father was a Baptist preacherman. Wilson was president of a great Christian university; so is the younger Falwell.

ii

I am declaring here and now that I no longer want to be a Christian if Wilson was one, if Falwell is one. I am assuming they were/are, taking them at their word. In which case, I am from now on reserving the term “Christian” for those that proclaim they are, profess they are, professing, professional Christians - institutional Christians, graduates of Christian colleges certain about their God’s race and nationality and their own righteousness and the triumphal futures such a God has reserved for them.

     I am taking the term “follower of Jesus” for any that try to do that, follow Jesus, whatever their claims. However, I will assume none of these followers have concealed weapons permits, since the purpose of a concealed weapon is not to have to turn the other cheek; I will assume that none of these followers despise anyone Jesus would not despise, rather they will try with all might and main to love all Jesus would love.

iii

So, to paraphrase the old spiritual,

Lord, I don’t want to be a Christian . . .

Lord, I don’t want to be more holy . . .

Lord I want to be more loving . . .

Lord, I want to be like Jesus . . .

. . . not like Woodrow or Jerry or Pat or Billy – or Aimee or Tammy Faye – or anyone else. But knowing, Lord, I will fail, I will not judge anyone. Only, over there, please put your damned gun down and your hateful tongue back in your mouth.

12.07.15

The road to Jerusalem

 The road to Jerusalem 

Luke provides this context for the parable we have come to call “The Good Samaritan”:  A lawyer stands up from a crowd Jesus is teaching and asks him a series of questions, the last of which - according to Luke is “Who is my neighbor?” in answer to which Jesus tells the parable.

     But what if the lawyer doesn’t ask last, “Who is my neighbor?” but “How does one walk through the world – it’s a mess?” and Jesus tells the same parable:

     “A man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and left him for dead. It happened that a priest was going down the same road in the other direction, and when he saw the bloody, beaten man, he crossed the road – he walked around him on the other side. And Levite, also going to Jerusalem, when he came to where the man, bloody and beaten, was, did the same thing: he crossed the road and passed by on the other side.

     “Then a Samaritan on the same road came to where the man was, but he stopped to see if he might still be alive. He was! And the Samaritan wrapped up his wounds, put him on his donkey, and carried him to an inn that happened to be nearby.

     “He spent the night with the man, who told him what had happened to him. Indeed, they talked of all manner of things. The next day, the Samaritan took money out of his purse and gave it to the innkeeper, saying,‘Use this to take care of the man until I get back.’”

     Then, Jesus looked at the lawyer. And the lawyer said, “What?” And Jesus said, “Why are you always walking a straight line to Jerusalem?” And the lawyer said, “What?”

     If you have ears, let them hear.

12.04.15