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