Getting God to get it.

 God just doesn’t understand how to be God. Good thing he's got people to explain it to him. – Uncle Albert.

​ Getting God to get it.  

My friend Axel has been reading Musonius.* “I was thinking I could work on my Greek,” he emails me, “expand its horizons. But I couldn’t find the Greek.

     “This is from the very beginning of Cynthia King’s translation,” he goes on. “I got it on my Kindle. It’s from the lecture ‘showing that one does not need to use many arguments to prove one’s point’: ‘It is a reasonable assumption that the gods need no argument to prove anything, because nothing is unclear or uncertain to them.’
     “Hold on to this. I’m going to call you,” the email ends.

 

Then, we’re on the phone. I’ve got the email on my screen. Axel goes on as patient as his impatience allows: “Do you see that? It is a reasonable assumption?”

     I nod. He hears me.
     “Yet there are how many Christian theologians and preachers who would agree? And how many go against it – entirely? Instead, they spend their time and their energy – their days and their nights, their sermons and their books – explaining over and over again – explaining to God! – how things really work? ‘Pay attention!’
     Or, if they aren’t working the way they’re supposed to, why aren’t they? How many times do they say to God, ‘Let me start again . . . ,’ thinking, ‘He’s just not getting it’? But he will. ‘Once more. Pay attention!’
     “Musonius’ assumption must be reasonable if God is God, not like those so ‘completely absurd and dull’ they need a hundred explanations. God gets it the first time. He gets it the zeroth time.
     “So, what’s up?” He pauses, Axel, sighs. I wait.

     “What?” he says.

     “What what?” I say. “I don’t know.”

     “Am I right or am I right?”

     “About what?”

     “Does God need us to explain to him how to be God?”

     “I’m guessing, ‘No.’”

     “So, why do we keep explaining it to him?”

     “I don’t know. What’s the Greek for absurd?” I ask.

     “I don’t know that. I told you, I don’t have the Greek.”

     “What would it be?”

     “I don’t know that either. There’s a word atopos.** It’s in Acts a couple of places and  can mean both something like ‘backward’ and something like ‘curious’ or ‘strange.’ Maybe ‘absurd’? I’m not sure. Forget I brought it up.”

     “Atopos. Forgotten.”

     “Literally, it would mean out of place or un-in-place. No, forget it.”

 

“Besides, you’re missing the point,” Axel says after a moment of atopos silence.

     “No, I haven’t,” I say. “You’re going to stop preaching to God.”

     “Shit,” Axel says. “Probably not. It’s what we do, isn’t it? Preachers especially.”
     “Tell God how to be God.”

     “Yeah.”

                                                                         04.23.21

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 * Gaius Musonius Rufus in Musonius Rufus: Lectures & Sayings (Revised Edition). Translated with an Introduction by Cynthia King. Edited with a Preface by William B. Irving3 Published 2011 by William B. Irvine at www.CreateSpace.com. Copyright 2010, 2011 by Cynthia King.

** a1topov

Graphic: Gaius Musonius Rufus at U.S.C. in 2016. Pastel from publicity photo.

 

George Maxwell Marksman, Jr. RIP

 George Maxwell Marksman, Jr., RIP  

From my sister Moira:

 

Dear Ted,
     I met another friend of yours, “Max,” he called himself, a big man with a happy mouth and sad, sad eyes. This was a while ago. He knew you from Birmingham days, he said. When was that? I don’t remember. Was I already dead? I can’t believe you ever lived in Alabama any more than I ever lived in Morocco or Spain.
     “When was that?” I said. He shrugged. He didn’t remember exactly. You were in your thirties maybe or early forties, both of you. He was also at Virginia Tech, he thought the same time I was. He’d told you he’d gone to Tech, and you said maybe I was there at the same time. But how could that be? He couldn’t be about your age and about my age both?
      But then: time is confusing, always, and more here where a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as a day. Still, two events years apart can’t be simultaneous, can they? Or?
     How much younger am I than you? Four years, right. If a thousand years are as a day, that’s less than a second. We’re twins if twins could be born .95 seconds apart, which I’m sure they can’t be.
     We talked about Tech though. Why we went there – he because his dad did and I because how do I know? It wasn’t the best fit for me. (I dropped out, remember.) We’re pretty sure we didn’t know each other; we couldn’t find any common memories except for general geography and a few professor’s names.
     He died of coronavirus, he said. “Tough luck,” I said – sympathetically! “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, well,” as if he were used to tough luck as if he didn’t have much experience of the other kind.
     “I really liked your brother,” he said. “He was a really smart guy.” That’s a refrain; I hear it from a lot of your friends. And I hear, too, a hint of doubt in their voices, maybe in the “reallys” like they are protesting too much. Or, I don’t know; maybe there’s something about how could you be both smart and likable? Or, maybe you were smart in the wrong way. When Max said it, then he shook his big head. He leaned over and lay it in his big hands. A full minute. He looked up. Stood up, slowly. “We’ll see each other again?” he said.
     “Yeah,” I said.

This was a while ago, days, years, months, minutes – I don’t know. We’ve seen each other quite a few times since. Same place. Same bench in Harold Altman Park. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, how he kept bumbling into situations that were just beyond him, so he didn’t know what to make of where he’d come to, and looking back, he wasn’t sure how he got there. Quite the contrary, he was pretty sure – or almost sure – he’d set out for somewhere else. He had children he didn’t understand – one of them ended up in jail and the other he didn’t know where she was. He had a good job selling computers, but he never understood how they worked, and the newer models were always working differently from the older models, so he decided to go into social work, and that was a mistake, both working with people as confusing as his children and working for the government. And having to submit everything digitally.
     He loved the Bible, he said, and he knew there was a Promised Land, but he never got there. He died, he said, “at a service plaza on the wrong highway.” It was a phrase he’d rehearsed. He said it, stopped, looked at me. I looked back. And I did smile. And he lowered his big head into his hands. He looked up again after a minute. “And where am I now?” he said. “The former things aren’t all passed away.
     “Whatever they say.”

I don’t know what he means by that; I don’t think he knows. But he’s right. I meet people that knew you, and I meet people I knew. I see Lisa quite a bit to drink coffee, or she comes over late with a woman named Gretchen something for a glass of wine and an occasional funny cigarette. Evenings Agostino and I go for walks and hold hands. Lately, Max on the bench in the park.
     We don’t talk about anything you would think important, I don’t think. Certainly, we don’t talk about ideas, like theology or philosophy or science or technology. We do talk about love and hate, death, and sex – and I guess those are important, but we’re not talking about them as if they were. We’re remembering the boys and girls we loved, we’re remembering the women and men we tried not to hate, often unsuccessfully, we’re remembering how we died, how it felt and how it didn’t feel, how it was nothing like we expected; when we’re talking about sex, it’s not just sex the act but everything that goes into it – or maybe doesn’t [ha, ha!] – about . . . I don’t know.  Maybe it’s more that we talk about touch, now we no longer feel it physically. Like when (speaking of Spain) Agostino and I walk and we hold hands and it’s nice in a way. But it’s not real. We drink coffee to wake us up, but it doesn’t really. We drink wine to calm us down, but it doesn’t really. There’s only the memory: how coffee straightened our spines, how holding hands increased our heartbeats, how wine and weed made us both silly and wise. Conclusion (I guess): The memories are real, but we are not quite.

So, back to Max.
     I’m at the wrong-side-of-the-tracks café I come to sometimes with the pen and the writing paper they always seem to have on hand for me. It isn’t really on the wrong side of the tracks – there are no tracks – but has that feel. Homey. Less like a café than a diner. Let’s call it a diner.
     I don’t come here to be alone, but I’ve never not been the only customer. I get a Coke and a sugar doughnut, and I write you. That’s all I do here. The waitress’s name is Alma, and she looks kind of like Alma Johns – do you remember her, a class behind you, I think, three ahead of me – slinky, sexy, as if she might have a tattoo of a rose above her “lady parts” (even back then). But she’s always cheerful, this Alma, almost sweet. She brings me the pen and paper with my doughnut and Coke. “You’ll be wanting these,” she says.
     This is the second time I’ve come here after meeting Max in the park. I mean, I’ve met him other times, but this is the second time I’ve come here right after. A pattern has developed for our meetings. I arrive. He arrives not long after. He asks about you. I say you’re “fine,” whether I think you are or not. It’s not as if he doesn’t genuinely want to know about you, but it would upset him to know you weren’t fine, I think. Or, it would upset him even more than he’s upset already.

     Do you know of a woman, a medieval saint (maybe?), called Margery Kempe? Apparently, she wept almost constantly – was it for the sins of the world? Christ died for them, yet they continued? To be wept over. That’s what Max says, but he also says he’s not sure he’s got it exactly right.
     Anyway, he says first, “Do you mind?” And I say, “No,” because I don’t. I don’t understand entirely, but I don’t mind. And he leans over and he puts his head in his hands and begins sobbing. It’s real! His shoulders shake and tears fall between his fingers onto the dusty ground in front of the bench. I put my hand on the back of his neck. I just let it rest there until he’s done –fifteen or twenty minutes or ten or fifteen years later. Then, he sits up, and he smiles, and he says, “Thank you.” I say, “Okay.” And we sit awhile longer. He started weeping, he said, for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, including the shooter. The anniversary of that’s coming up, isn’t it? But then he found it wasn’t just that. Like Margery Kempe, he was weeping for the whole world – “and for heaven, too,” he said.
     It just comes on him, not just when he sits down on the bench with me, but always here it does. He’s sorry. He’s glad though I say I don’t mind – “even if you do!” he says. I say, “No, I don’t,” because I know there is much to weep about, and I’m glad for him to be doing it. It’s an odd thing to say, but he is good at it, much better than I would be.
     After he’s done, he smiles. He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand – he has such dark circles under them like he doesn’t sleep well – do you remember that about him? He says, “Revelation 21:4.” Then he says, “I’m glad I met you, at least now if not then” – meaning at Tech. “Me, too,” I say. And he gets up and wanders away, hands in his pockets.
     And today, finally, I came here to Alma’s Rose Diner to write you about him. I should have before, but you know how I lose track of time.
                                                                                       Love, Moira

This isn’t the longest letter I’ve ever had from anybody, but it’s close.

 

                                                                        03.17.21

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* Links to about Moira and other letters her are here.
“Margery Kempe” free to use and share from The University of British Columbia.

According to Barth

 According to Barth  

from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012, p. 231) – 

     From the late second- or early third-century manuscript known as KATA BARQOLOMAION. The manuscript is incomplete, but what there is of it is quite readable. The only narrative is a brief version of the passion in Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-ma’am style. The rest of the manuscript is sayings in no order that anyone that doesn’t have an ax to grind can discern. Many but by no means all the sayings are prefaced with εἶπεν ὁ υἱὸς.

     This, which directly precedes the narrative, is not:

 τὸ ἀσφαλὲς περί τούτοn γινώσκεται εἰ μὴ εἷς ὁ πατήρ.

The real reason for this is known only by the father.

 

Commentary

Almost all the sayings in KATA BARQOLOMAION resemble this one. That is, they depend on pronouns without antecedents. The manuscript is then the treasure or the bane of dogmatists, depending on how much or how little confidence they have in their power to interpret (or decide) what Bartholomew must be saying. Mostly, their confidence is considerable. (One notable exception is the Kristovian scholar Popa Radu, whose essay “Min Papaglar,” [“A Thousand Hats”] in Festschrift für Kishmish Kopuk is a triumph of intelligent confusion.)

     For example, what “this” refers to here God only knows, yet more than a few sectarian scholars are certain they do as well. Argenbright, who knows what Scripture means whatever the words say, avers it has to do with the timing for the apocalypse, which has been delayed. [See Mark 13:31-32.] Chapman, on the other hand, asserts that it refers to a healing that has failed or been denied. [See Mark 7:24-27; 9:17-28.]

     For my part: Consider the case of Pyrrho of Elis, who claimed that certainty was impossible and had to be protected by his friends from walking off cliffs because he couldn’t trust his own senses.

                                                                                 04.10.21

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*Bonus: m ball’s sketch of Bartholomew in PAINT JOY by Doodle Joy Studio. Click on the image to have it jump out at you!

For links to other biblical commentary from Rantrage, click here.