On the fifth day of Christmas,

 On the fifth day of Christmas, 

someone sent to me an anonymous note, “Repent!” Otherwise I was surely going to hell if I had denied the Virgin Birth. Which I had not.

Back when I was still teaching Sunday School from time to time, a couple stopped me in the park. Or, they stopped in the park – I was sitting on a bench, waiting for Godot.Then, they were in front of me.
     The man said, “Vernon Josephs,” and he nodded at his wife: “Celeste.” And she said, “This is Ebeneezer,” indicating the dog, who sat down at the mention of his name.
     The man said, “We were in your Sunday School class, when was it Cel?”
     “It was last month. No, the month before, the 21st.”
     “Yes, and this bothered us,” Vernon said. And it was the business of the Virgin Birth, that I had denied it. Only I hadn’t. I am not sure what made them believe I had. Probably I had argued again that what we believed in was God, not Doctrine, and I had used the Virgin Birth as an example. I was constantly doing stupid, limp-brained shit like this because it bothered me that we did believe in Doctrine instead of in God, because God was a nuisance, not fitting in any drawer we had handy. Better, at least clearer, safer, to believe in the drawers themselves.
     In any case, I had bothered Vernon and Celeste. Being tolerant people, they decided to let it go – they would just go to Sunday School somewhere else. But then, when they saw me in the park, they thought they might say something. Perhaps, given the chance, I’d repent, and all would be well and every manner of thing would be well. (This, incidentally, is the kind of thing that mystics believe in because, again, God is too inconvenient.)

It was a warm day, but I was wearing a windbreaker, it wasn’t yet warm enough for me. Vernon and Celeste were in short sleeves and matching denim-blue ball caps with “Wheaton College” logos. Their eyes were blue though lighter than the caps, of course. And the dog’s leash – also blue. I thought afterward that blue was Mary’s color, and the color of hope. And my least favorite.
     Their point was how could we believe in God, especially that Christ was God if we didn't believe in the Virgin Birth?
     And I thought, “Don’t resist.” So, I nodded. “You're right, of course,” I said, meaning whatever they wanted it to mean. But they could see that I wasn’t agreeing. I was still the limp-brained heretic they knew I was and they wanted me to be. So Celeste said, “I know you’ll think about it,” though her tone suggested she was fairly certain I would not. And she and Vernon left, extremely satisfied.

 Did you know, dear reader, that Plato was also born of a virgin? So Diogenes Laertius informs us in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Moreover, though Mary, mother of Jesus, was descended from a long line of priests, Plato’s mother Perictone, was descended from a god, Poseidon. And her son’s conception just came about; there was no intervention of the holy ghost – just boom!
     Which was also the case for Dreama Ridpath, a cheerleader from Radford that made the news when I was in third grade. Granted her son didn’t go on to preach the Sermon on the Mount or write The Republic. He did, however, play football at Virginia Tech before going on to a successful career selling insurance in Dublin. Successful but brief, he also died young.
     When I say that Dreama made the news, I mean the local news and maybe just the word-of-mouth news. If the story was in the county weekly, it wasn’t picked up by the Washington Post or the New York Times or even the Roanoke papers.
     Even locally, as I remember, nobody believed it, much less in it. On the other hand, I never read or heard later that it was disproved.
     It wasn’t disproved, it just disappeared. My point, if I have one, gentle reader, is this: How often does this kind of thing happen outside the Jerusalem-Athens axis and we never hear about it? More often than we think I am guessing. There is more than is dreamt of in our religions and philosophies.

A new The Ambiguities policy.
     Roz worries that I can wander out of the shallow end of the pool when I don’t know how to swim – she’s right, I don’t. So she thinks I should check out what I am going to post before I post it. I showed this, then, to Uncle Albert before I put it up here.
     “This is nuts,” he said.
     “Yes, I know,” I said. He was clearly thinking what I was thinking: “What made me think Vernon and Celeste had given up so easily.”
                                                                          12.29.21