Of course He is.

 Of course He is. 

from the introduction to Gregorius Gruntman’s commentary on Judges (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, forthcoming 2019, p. ix, still in preparation) —

_______________

Then, inevitably, the people of Israel did evil in the Lord’s sight. They forgot the Lord and went running after the Baals and the Asheroth, and the Lord grew angry and sold them into the hands of their enemies because of the evil they were doing. Their enemies oppressed them sorely. Until, when they could take no more of it, they cried out piteously. And the Lord pulled from among them a deliverer. The Spirit entered him, and he killed the bad king. Then the people could rise up and kill all the bad king’s armies, 10,000 men, all great fighters, because the Lord of hosts was with them. And the land about had rest for forty years, until the deliverer died, and the people of Israel forgot the Lord and again did evil.  And so forth.

The book of Judges is a test case. If we like our gods to be jealous, unrelentingly righteous, angry much of the time - with good reason - demanding, monogamous to the nth (and none of the phony-baloney “serial monogamy” stuff: That’s a contradiction in terms. Call it duogamy or triogamy or by its right name, serial polygamy, but “serial monogamy”? - pbbffftt*) - if we like our gods to be unbending, then we’ll like Judges.

     But if we like a god that gives the benefit of the doubt, that loves us warts and all - because we are, after all, good people for the most part, at least we try to be - a god that waffles a bit for our sake, then forget it. Skip over Judges, and 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings and . . . ; skip to . . . well, maybe the gospel of Mark, but only with the following verses omitted: 1:14a, 43-45; 2:6-10, 16-17a, 18-22, 28; 3:2, 4-5a, 19b, 20-35; 4:10-29, 34, 40-41; 5:13b, 17-20, 35-37, 40a, 43a; 6:3-6a, 10-11, 14-29, 52; 7:1-23, 36; 8:11-21, 30-38; 9:1, 6b, 9b-13, 14b, 15c, 18b-19, 28-29, 31-32, 33b-37, 41-50; 10:1-12, 13b-14a, 14c, 22-23, 24-31, 32b, 33-45; 11:13-21, 27-33; 12:2-9, 12-13, 15b and d; 12:18b, 24b, 27c; 12:34b - 15:44; 16:8, 10b-11, 13b-20.**

_______________

 * Click here.

** The affable Sw­ēdëistic version of the Gospel that omits those verses among others; “Mark’s Good News” [RSV], may be found here. Note: Gregorius Gruntman grew up in the Sw­ēdëistic Episcopalian tradition. His mother was suffragan bishop of the Synod of Oregon. He is the twin brother of Glorianna Gruntman.

10.27.18

Correspondences

 Correspondences 

“Do I hear rightly that you are getting letters from your dead sister?” Uncle Albert asked. [See here.] This was almost four months ago during the World Cup knock-out stage, a 92-degree day, smelling of dust and dead grass. The sun was a blur.

     There was some back and forth because I didn't want to know how he knew that but I knew I was going to ask. From Roz. And eventually, I admitted that I had been. Then, he wanted to know if I’d told Dr. Feight about them. I think he said, “Don’t you think you ought to talk to Feight?” And I’d said, “No, I don’t.” But then I’d said, “Well, maybe.” Maybe I should, I’d thought.

Today I did. “I’ve been getting letters from Moira,” I told Dr. Feight. “Uncle Albert thought I ought to talk to you about it. But this was some months ago,” I said. "Back in July."

     He asked what she wrote about, Dr. Feight.

     I told him, “Mostly about when she was Spain, but also about when she was in Morocco.”

     “But she was never in Spain, was she?” he asked. “Was she in Morocco?”

     “No,” I said. “Neither.”

     “Mmmm.”

     I said, “But she could have been, maybe. It could have been good for her. Spain anyway. I don’t know about Morocco.”

     “It could have saved her life, do you think?” he asked.

     “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

     I hesitated, then: “Spain anyway. I don’t know about Morocco.”

     “Mmmm,” he said.

“We’re getting a new car,” I said. “Well, it’s not exactly new. We’re buying it from friends who are leaving for Belgium. They’re like the Peter Finch character in that Paddy Chayevsky movie. They’re fed up, and they can’t take it anymore.”

     “Network,” Dr. Feight said.

     “Yes.” I knew that; I'd only forgotten it for a minute. “Only they’re - our friends - they’re just going to get away altogether. But they can’t take their car - it’s a Chevy Volt - so we’re buying it.”

     “Why Belgium?” he asked. He was being unusually talkative - inquisitive.

     “I’m not sure exactly. Outside Brussels somewhere. He lived there at one time, maybe.” I wasn’t sure, but I’d heard something like that. Belgium, or Denmark. He’d lived somewhere.

“It’s a maroon-burgundy color,” I said. “The car. Our old one is about to give out. We don’t need two cars, but we’ll keep it until it does.” Give out, I meant.

     “That’s where Heart of Darkness begins,” he said. “In Brussels.”

     “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said. I knew it, but I hadn’t thought about it.

10.25.18

Above the salt.

 Above the salt. 

Monday, when we were driving to my appointment with Dr. Feight - because I still see him twice a week, and Uncle Albert almost always goes with me:

Fall is finally sidling in, but cautiously - it fears bully summer’s return. But Monday it is cooler than it has been - outside; it is much too warm in the car: Uncle Albert fears the cold more than fall fears the heat, so I ran the heater on the way to pick him, and he's turned it up on his side. He says, “It smells like dill in here, or cumin.”

     “I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that dill doesn’t smell like cumin or cumin like dill.

     “It’s because you have the heat turned up too high,” I said.

seating chart on a bed of dill

“Do you believe what you said before?” Uncle Albert asked.

     “When?”

     “The other day. Friday,” he said.

     “What? What did I say?”

     “That atheism was a luxury and that not only were the rich different from you and me but that with regard to me and you they were purblind, obtuses, the French might say.”

     “Yes,” I said. “Purblind, purdeaf, unsmelling, unfeeling, tasteless. First class air. The business car - train. Doormen to keep the streets out of the building, lobbies to keep them away from the elevators, elevators to keep them from going upstairs, and maids to chase out anything that gets by the doormen and elevators. Also to change the sheets every morning and get the children off to their private school. Buy only the best gin and the best tonic and wear only cotton and wool.

     “They carry oranges, the meat taken out and stuffed with cloves, through the airport as Cardinal Wolsey did through London. As soon as the proles are seated on their flight, the attendant draws the curtain to keep us out of their bathrooms.

     “So what they think they understand about us is completely without objective evidence. It’s not in their ears or on their fingers or their tongues - it's all in their thinking. All in theory,” I said.

     “You really believe that?” Uncle Albert said.

     “Yes.”
 
“Roper, right?” Uncle Albert said after a minute or two. He meant my reference to Wolsey.
     “Yes,” I said.

10.17.18

Monday morning quarterbacking.

 Monday morning quarterbacking. 

We thought he might be there to tell us about our rector Susan, who was still in, Uncle Albert’s term, “M.I.A.” He (Albert) had emailed her earlier in the week, but as yet he’d heard nothing back. And likely everyone there - the true members of the parish - everyone but the two of us knew where she was. No one looked worried.

     Maybe the bishop, a little. But his worry may have had to do with the reading from the gospel on which he was going to preach. It’s the one where the rich young man comes to Jesus wanting to know what he must do to “inherit eternal” - or, I’d say, true - “life.” And Jesus suggests keeping the law: “Do not kill. Do not steal, commit adultery, lie.” But the young man does that, he assures Jesus. “Well, there’s one more thing,” Jesus says. “Sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” “That’s not one, that’s three more things,” the young must be thinking as he walks heavily away. The gospeleer adds that his step his heavy because he is rich.

     “How hard for the rich to do that,” Jesus tells his disciples, meaning inherit eternal, true life. “Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” he says. And they’re thinking, “Who can, then?” If the rich can’t somehow bribe their way in, who can and how?

      The bishop is as nonplussed as disciples; he looks all at once uneasy in all his finery, carrying his gold-painted crook, wearing his improbable hat. Even if he puts the gilded crook aside and takes off the high hat, to preach, he is still wrapped in his splendid white robe, around his neck is still this stiff stole, shot through with gold and emerald and ruby thread.

But he pushes on - what can he do? And he offers comfort because with God “nothing is impossible,” even the impossible, he's pretty sure, is possible with God. And he tells a story of how he once scored a goal in under-12s soccer and his father took him out after for ice cream. If that is possible for a father that might well give his sons a serpent instead of a fish, then surely God can bequeath life to Episcopalians.

Uncle Albert comes home with me though there is no Premier League football this weekend. He sits in what has become his chair and listens to Pat Matheny while I swap the laundry Roz has started from washer to dryer and she puts together an English breakfast, bacon and sausage and tomato and mushrooms and beans, egg sunny-side up. We eat like the rich.

Afterward, I ask Uncle Albert if he wants to stay to watch “American football.”

     “The Washington Football Club,” I say, “plays at one.”

     “You don’t use the team name,” Uncle Albert says. “Thank you.” But he’ll pass.

He’s a wise man. I take him home. I come back. Roz leaves to play penny-ante poker with former-Southern-Baptist friends, a newly forming ritual. I shift another load of laundry and put the lunch dishes into the dishwasher.

     I turn on the game. I’m watching a second, or is it a third, or which part of which third? when she returns.

“The center is the only down lineman that
handles the ball.” - from The Alabama Crimson
Tide ‘Playbook’ for Young Fans by Gene Stallings

I never cease to be amazed at how much professional football I can watch when I care nothing about any of the teams. It’s why I can switch from game to game to game because I have no real interest in the outcomes. Then something unexpected happens - insofar as that is possible - and I find myself ginning up into caring about what I don’t even find interesting.

     It doesn’t help if I remind myself that American football is the stupidest of all the so-called “ball” games. Can the reader think of another in which four players of the team on offense - with the ball - can never touch it? A game in which the ball is not shaped like a ball at all but a bulbous turd? It’s the color of a turd, it’s the texture of a turd so the center can center it and the quarterback can grip it properly. He, the center, is the only “down lineman” that can touch the ball but only to squeeze it out or shoot it back to the tiny (six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-thirty-pound) brain, which does not, however, respond as a normal brain does to instructions it is receiving from a normal body or from outside such a body but as the brains of saints and hermits do, following disembodied voices planted in his garishly painted oversized skull.

     And the passing of the turd is only the beginning of the inane mayhem that follows.

                                                                                                 Selah.

10.15.18

Loss of faith.

 Loss of faith. 

“It was a long time ago,” Uncle Albert was saying, “probably in the early fifties, I read Orwell; so I don’t remember any of it very well. Animal Farm first, I think, then 1984, then Down and Out and Burmese Days, Homage to Catalonia, Wigan Pier. But I went to bed last night and I woke up this morning thinking about A Clergyman’s Daughter. Did you ever read that?”

     “No,” I said.

     “I was going to ask you what you remembered.”

     “Oh,” I said. “What were you thinking about it?”

     “That you should read it if you hadn’t, so we could talk about it.”

     “Oh,” I said.

“It’s a good book for you,” Uncle Albert said, “if I remember it correctly.”

     “What’s it about?”

     “A loss of faith, if I remember right - a loss of faith that just steals up on the main character, the daughter. I was trying to remember her name this morning,” he said. “I think it was Dorothy,” he said. “She’s the dutiful daughter of her rector father, doing half his work now her mother’s dead. Then, something happens. She blacks out while working late at night on some church project, sewing costumes for a pageant or something like that. And she comes to in back-alley London, dressed in rags and completely unaware of who she was. Not who she is because she’s someone else now. She joins a ‘gang’ of sorts, and they go on the road. They’re on their way to Kent, I think it is, where they’re harvesting hops and they hope to get work. They do. It’s all very rough.

     “Then, somehow, her memory comes back to her. She writes her father, but he doesn’t answer directly. She somehow gets connected with an uncle that has connections, and he gets her a job teaching in a girls’ school, a horrid place. Schools are always horrid places in Orwell, even more horrid than hops fields or London streets.

     “Eventually, I don’t remember how, she gets back to wherever she began - Suffolk? - her father’s drudge again. But somehow in there, I think it’s when she’s in the school, she realizes she’s lost her faith. It’s not because of anything that’s happened to her; maybe it’s not so much that she’s lost it - it’s just gone. Something has changed in the chemistry of her brain, in the climate her thoughts live in, and it’s extirpated.”

I looked at him. “Extirpated?” I said.

     “Like birds, when all of a sudden they’re no longer in a habitat they’ve always been in before.”

     “Oh,” I said. Then: “So why does she go back to her father?”

     “That’s what I was trying to remember,” Uncle Albert said. “She has another option. There’s an old roué of sorts that has had his eye on her for a while; and he’s willing even to marry her if he can take her away. But it’s not really an option, because she can’t stand to be touched.

     “Besides, I was remembering this morning - I couldn’t last night, but it came to me this morning, and I think I have it right. Besides, she thinks that ‘the Christian way of life’ is really what she knows, whatever she believes. And besides, she realizes, she can be helpful to the poor, miserable people of her father’s parish, who need their faith, however confused, even misguided, it is. She realizes that atheism is for the privileged, the exceptionally fortunate.”

     “Those that fly first-class,” I said.

     “What?”

     “I was thinking the other day,” I said. “Why do I listen to pundits and politicians, Talkers, that fly first-class or ride in the business car on the train? They know nothing about me. Why do I pay any attention to people that went to Harvard or Yale and have lived in the Northeast ever since? They live in a different climate altogether. They don’t think the way I do, and they have no idea about the way I think.”

     “I went to Yale,” Uncle Albert said.

But I don’t think he did. He didn’t, I decided. He was only saying he did to see what I’d say.

10.12.18

Logic chopping.

 Logic chopping.

Tom Nashe rejoins us after a long absence to comment from time to time on the state of punditry in America.

I haven’t mentioned Tom’s illness because he asked me not to. “If I were really sick,” he said at one point, “I’d say go ahead. But I’m only sick-and-tired.” This was some time ago before he left for South Dakota to spend a month in a foreign land with Venitia Pettice’s parents: “To try to learn a new language,” he said. (On South Dakotan, see here.)

     The month turned into two, turned into four, turned into four times four. Two weeks ago he returned to his one-room apartment in Lexingford, “a wiser, happier man,” he told me.

     “I am ready to read the papers again,” he said, “though I am not ready to watch television or listen to the radio.”

     “Are you ready to write again?” I asked.

     “No,” he said, “but I might try from time to time anyway. Do a bit of logic-chopping if nothing else.”

Thus ... (See here.) (And welcome back, Tom!)

10.10.18

Hack, hack.

 Hack, hack. 

Sunday.

Our rector, Susan the former Miss Virginia, is absent. She’s been gone a lot lately. Uncle Albert doesn’t like that, he says, scuffling to his feet as the substitute priest walks in.

     “I don’t like this guy either,” he adds barely sotto voce: “We should go.” This guy: “Father Grace” (spelled G-R-A-Y-S, short for Grayson) Tate, a round little man, barely five-feet high, shaped like a doll-baby, round and almost perfectly symmetrical: doughy - round head; round body; round, abnormally short arms and legs. And a man of doll-like faith - never inconvenient because never curious, circular, uninterested in thought, miserably cheerful and utterly sincere. It’s the sincerity that bothers Uncle Albert the most, I think. Nobody could be so sincere that wasn’t either constantly drunk or obtuse. But:

     “We can’t go,” I say.

     “Why not?” he says.

     “We’re here,” I say. “We’re sitting here.”

     “We’re standing here,” Uncle Albert says.

And he begins coughing. “Stop it!” I said. He keeps coughing, a rasping, wooden hack; and though it sounds nothing but fake to me, we leave to sympathetic looks. To his credit, Uncle Albert keeps at it, though with less and less vigor, until we get to the car. Then, he stops. He swallows. He helps as I help him into the car, shaking my head.

     Shaking my head.

     “Look at it this way,” he says. “We’ll get home for the Cardiff – Burnley kickoff. Think of that. And we won’t have to listen to that blubber bubble blabber.”

     I had to admit it. “Well, there is that,” I said, meaning the match, not the bubble blabber.

10.03.18