Another parable?

 Waiting for God (OT)? 

Is the kingdom of God like the oracle the prophet Habakkuk saw?

Habakkuk by m ball

The prophet cried out to God, “How long?!” – “How long shall I cry for help and you not listen? How many times will I point out, ‘Violence,’ and you’ll do nothing? How long can I look on – pain, persecution, conflict; we're wading in blood - how long? The law can do nothing, it turns away. The wicked surround the innocent – and that is ‘justice.' 

    “Still, here I am, where you put me. Here I am. How long can you look on?”

Then the Lord appeared to the prophet and said – is the kingdom of heaven like this? – what God said, “Write this down. Write it in big letters so that people running can read it on their way by. There is a time that is coming. If it comes slowly, wait. There is a time that is coming.”

The prophet waited. Is the kingdom of God like this?

     Who have ears, let them hear.

10.31.16

Art Week (Day 5 - Nighthorks)

Subtitle: how to ruin metaphor.

Art Week (Day 4 - St. Francis' transvestite B & B)

There are no good dads, if sons are any indication:

Art Week (Day Three - Self-Portrait as the Sun)

Art Week (Day Two - Devil with a blue dress on)

Good golly, Miss Molly!

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*The First Temptation of Christ, ca. 1222. Miniature from an illuminated psalter now at Der Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen.

Art Week (Day One - Krispy Kreme)

Old masters re-interpreted -

Another parable

 The Parable of the Daughters and the Angels

Zeus woos Alcmene.

Genesis 6:1-7

Then, he said:

     “Is the kingdom of God like this? God made them, and they had daughters; and the daughters were so fair the angels desired them. And as the angels’ desire followed the daughters, so taking the daughters followed their desire. But the fault was not in the angels; it was in them and their daughters – so God determined; and God determined as well that their lives would be limited – theirs and their daughters’. No human would live more than 120 years.

     “Meanwhile, the daughters taken by the angels had children, and their children were tall and strong and afraid of nothing. When God saw they feared nothing, he was sorry that he had made man and woman and their fair, fair daughters. And God decided to cover the earth with the waters that covered the earth before creation – and man and woman – began.

     “I see you have ears. Are they hearing me?”

                                                             10.14.16

The Indian place that used to be

(If you haven't read what I posted earlier today, this won't make sense.)

  The Indian place that used to be at Division and Stepford 

I don’t pay Bob, because (so he says) he doesn’t have a license; but I buy his stupid frothy drinks. That way (so he says) I have something invested, and I’m more likely to follow through. And maybe I would be, if I thought he knew what he was doing.

The Gaza Bar & Grill

No one sits at the tables out front even in good weather,

because in our town you can't drink on the sidewalk.*

      But one of the exercises he gave me I keep at, when I remember, is around every so often to  find five positive things to say about whatever space I’m in. Like: I’m in the kitchen bathing my gluey eyelids with hot coffee; they’re opening, I look around, and through the amber haze I say: “It’s good to have a refrigerator and better to have hot water. It’s almost better still to have a chair at a table you can sit at with your coffee. The ceiling fan is off. And the radio: I can pretend NPR has lost its voice.”

     Now, on my way to meet Bob, I say: “Thank God I brought a jacket. And left my cell phone in another. Maybe I’ll be early enough I can get one drink up on him. My shoes match.”

The day I lost my foot and forearm and the skin was rolling off my torso like the sky off the heavens in Patmos John’s Revelation, I also lost my voice; but I didn’t know that, because there was no one to say anything to. I didn’t know I’d lost it until I got it back. That was after I’d found the foot and forearm and used the skin to glue them back in place. The phone rang, and when I answered I could talk.

     It was Tom Nashe, asking if we were still on for lunch.

We ate at the Indian place that closed not long after. That’s one thing I wanted to talk to Bob about. I thought he might remember the name – his wife is Indian. 

10.10.16

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 * Well, except to smoke.

Eyeless in Gaza

 Eyeless in Gaza   

A little more than two years ago,* I wrote about the day my foot came off and my forearm; skin on my torso was rolling up like window shades and blowing away like tumbleweed. I found the foot, eventually, in the clutter on my desk – and the part of the arm, fingers still wiggling, in a book I’d almost forgotten I had. It was marking my place where I’d stopped reading years before. The skin was stuck to the screens of two upstairs windows and worked miraculously like tape, so I got myself back together in time for an appointment I had for lunch, though I did miss a morning’s work.

     When I woke up this morning I couldn’t see, and I didn’t know how I would find my eyes without them; but they hadn’t gone anywhere – it was just that my eyelids were glommed shut. A hot cup of coffee applied directly to the sockets usually takes care of that.

Bob, puttin' on the Freud

I called Bob, my amateur therapist,** while the lids were coming unglued. Did he want to join me for a drink*** today after work? “I’m not working,” he said.

     “I know,” I said, “but I am.”

     “So, why are you calling me from home?”

10.10.16

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  * See here.

 ** And here, and here.

*** And here, and here.

Devil with a blue dress on

 Devil with a blue dress on 

This (below) was in my Twitter feed this morning – or something like it was.

"Pick that up!"

     It sent me to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, looking for that scene, set in Italy somewhere. Leverkühn, the composer, is recording his meeting with the devil, whose reality he is inclined to – or he wishes – to doubt. So, they have been arguing. One of Leverkuhn’s arguments against His - the Devil’s; the third-person pronouns are always capitalized – against His reality is that He (the devil) tells him (Leverkühn) nothing about himself that he does not already know. Is it conversation? The composer could just as well be talking to himself, hallucinating because he has been ill. The devil counters that he hasn’t been that ill; besides, why wouldn't He know all that Leverkühn knows?

     Another argument occurs to the composer. Earlier the Devil has responded to his question, “What should I call you?” “Anything you like except Dicis-et-non-facis,” that is, You-say-but-you-do-not-do. So now Leverkühn addresses Him as Dicis-et-non-es, You-say-but-you-are-not, because the Devil would not be there, in Italy; that’s not where he would have “searched [Leverkühn] out . . . in alien Italy of all places,” where Leverkühn challenges, “you are quite out of your realm and enjoy not the least popularity?” It would be absurd for the devil to come to him there. He might well have come to him in Kaisersachern, where Leverkühn grew up, or in Wittenberg, or on the Wartburg. “But surely not here, under a heathen Catholic sky!”

     But it’s not a matter of religion, the Devil replies; though perhaps He is more Protestant than Roman Catholic. It is certainly not a matter of place, at least geographically! If Leverkühn is free to roam, why not He? Didn’t they grow up together, neither in sunny Italy – both where the winters were dark and cold and the people huddled indoors and inside themselves? “Where I am,” He concludes, “there is Kaisersachern.”  
     So He says to all of us born north of the 36th parallel. Where you are, born in Dover, NJ. There I was; here I am.

10.07.16

Don't wear make-up

 “Don’t wear make-up – your laughter and tears will wash it away.”* 

I’m not a reliable witness, always at the edge of confusion, swatting at the mist. Here’s the little I thought I could see.

We seldom take a weekend off, but we did this, and we wandered Sunday morning into the nearest church 

Yesterday's bringer of Good News

to our downtown hotel, where some sort of conference was coming to an end, “How Beautiful the Feet!” The sermon then was like a keynote address.

     It was based on 2 Timothy 1:2-7a, read in a way that assured us the preacher was one that took the Bible seriously: “Follow along,” she was saying in effect, “and you will see it must say what I am about to tell you.” That is,

How delightful it was to be a Christian. Nothing could be more so. And we should be delighted; we were to congratulate ourselves and one another on our great good fortune.

I had heard this line before, I admit, but not since junior high Bible camp, though there it was a staple.

I hadn’t come into church, I’m afraid, in a self-congratulatory mood or to be congratulated, and I left, I confess, less than delighted. But then I find myself these days increasingly less interested in being a “Christian" than in trying to figure out what old Jesus was up to and how far it’s possible for anyone today to be up to something similar – or as similar as a follower of Jesus could ever be. It’s not a venture, incidentally, I’m optimistic about.

But she was a beautiful woman, beautifully made up to look perfectly natural, and she spoke very well, with great conviction.

10.03.16

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 * line in the bulletin, about “Today’s Bringer of Good News”