Bible Tuesday

 Bible Tuesday*: checking back 

Sometimes I look back over what I’ve written, mostly to see what I’ve been doing. Otherwise, I forget. Or I’ve already forgotten, so I look back to remember.

     Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I read the prophet Amos again. Then, this morning, when Roz came down to breakfast, just as she was sitting down, I said in my best race-track announcer’s voice, “Prepare to meet thy God!”

     We were having our usual toast and coffee. We should eat more and better, but we don’t.

     “Where did that come from?” Roz said.

Lions and bears

     “I don’t know.”

     “Amos,” Roz said.

     “Oh. Right.”

     “Do you know how I know that?”

     “No.”

     “You told me.”

     “ . . . . ”

     “I saw that sign down near Marion.”

     “Oh?”

     “Remember. It was a month and a half ago, maybe a little more. You said you were going to write about it.”

     “Oh,” I said again.

And after breakfast and Roz was gone and I had policed the kitchen, I looked it up. And I had written about it; and I read what I had written, and I remembered.

     And I thought:

From the point of view of Jeroboam, king of Israel, and Amaziah, high priest at Bethel, there isn’t much to say for Amos, the self-proclaimed prophet (a tree-trimmer cum shepherd by trade), a nuisance, a meddler, who showed up suddenly from a place where there was plenty enough for him to piss on about, he didn’t have to come to your place - especially, he didn’t need to come uninvited to your place - to carp at you, make threats, scare people; he could have stayed home and played the outraged Puritan there.

     We don’t do this often enough, I don’t think: We don’t imagine the Bible from another point of view. The book is Amos, we decide; the words are Amos’s that God has shown him. And we take him at his word, or his words, as if there could be no other way to take him or them. We don’t think about how important Amaziah’s job is to him though we know he has a wife and children. We don’t think about how little the king of Israel wants to hear from a prophet from Judah. We don’t think. We forget there could be other points of view.

     But there have to be, right? We’re as dull-witted as Amos’ sheep if we don’t look around to see other points of view. Or we’re as blindly pious as his tree-saws but not as sharp: “Piety thrives on lack of imagination.” Who said that?

11.05.19

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 * This week Bible Friday comes on a Tuesday. It can come any day. A Thursday. A Monday. There were no reasons for these aberrations. Roz believes I don’t know what day of the week it is because when she asks me, I say, “I don’t know.” But I can always look it up.

     I do look it up before I go anywhere. Or, I try to. I don’t want to drop by Axel Sundstrøm’s office on a Sunday morning, for example, or go to the dentist on a Tuesday if my appointment is for Thursday. True, there’s no reason to know the day if you aren’t going out - or if you’re only going for a walk or a drive or to the 24-hour drug store for a Coke or some Gingko.

     (I wrote “Gingko” just for the sound of it. I don’t ingest. I don’t even know what it does - or is, for that matter. I doubt Amos knew either; he doesn’t mention it. But God could have given it to him in a vision he didn’t write down. “The priests of Bethel are like the gingko tree, its leaves torn off and chewed to heal the mind, yet they do no healing.”)

     Forgive the rambling. I’ve put it both below the line and small - below the line, for who reads below the line? - and small, so you could easily skip it.