Valedictory

 Valedictory 

Uncle Albert said last week he was taking a break from religion. “What do you mean? I don't understand,” I said.
     “To pursue paganism,” he said, tongue-in-cheek, I think. Still, I wanted to say, “Instead of Episcopalianism?” not quite tongue-in-cheek. But not even I am as meanly Puritan, as Calvinist, as that. Instead I said,
     “Do you want to join a coven?”
     “Oh, no!” he said. “Not organized paganism. How dreary!”
     Which was as far as the conversation went because I didn't know what to say next. But: “Okay,” I did say, and Uncle Albert said, “Okay.” And that was that until he brings it up again as I am afraid he will.

It was just as well since it meant I wouldn’t have to take him to Episcopalianism as Roz wanted to go to hear the Narrow Man — “one last time,” she said.
     “I don’t understand,” I said.
     “This is to be his last sermon,” Roz said, “his valedictory.”
     “How do you know that?”
     “He told me.”
     “Oh,” I said.

Sluggish Fan Presbyterian Church

It was at the same country church, where we’d heard him once before, and there was the same dust in the air almost four years later, the same fan blades turning so slowly they couldn’t move it.
     The sermon was from II Kings 2, the story of how Elisha succeeds Elijah as the prophet of God in Israel. I knew the story, but I didn’t need to have as the Narrow Man read it, and then he retold it, as Presbyterian preachers often do. Here is the story, but I promise you the preacher will retell it.

He reminded us that Elijah had already anointed Elisha sometime before,* but now it was time for Elijah to go and the younger prophet to take over.
     Elijah knows this, that it is time to go. Elisha knows this, that Elijah is going. Elijah would like, it seems, simply to fade away — or to disappear as suddenly as he appeared at the beginning of his story. And isn’t he always doing that, appearing here, disappearing there, appearing here again.
     But Elisha will not allow that this time — Elijah to fade away or to disappear without a trace. He has to see what is going to happen, through to the end of it. So he follows Elijah step by step the long length of his last day’s journey: To and from Gilgal to Bethel, to and from Bethel to Jericho, to and from Jericho to the Jordan, and dry-footed across to the other side — a trek of at least 14 “U.S. miles,” the Narrow Man said.
     Finally, Elijah wearies, it seems, both of the journey and of Elisha, and he finds himself asking, “Just what do you want? What? Really!” And Elisha replies, “a double share of your spirit,” by which he means the portion the eldest son would inherit from his father. We’re not sure exactly what Elijah makes of this, but he declares it to be “a hard thing,” though if Elisha stays alert to the end, then maybe. “Yes, okay!” Elijah says.
     And he does, Elisha, he watches to the end and somehow — this doesn’t seem physically possible to me, but it didn’t seem to bother the Narrow Man; at least, he didn’t comment on it — somehow Elisha does see Elijah disappear.

Elijah’s other followers, crouched on the other side of the river, the sons of the prophets, do not. What they do see as he returns is that Elisha has taken up the mantle of Elijah and that when he rolls it up as Elijah did and strikes the river as Elijah did, the waters part. And, unwillingly it seems, they gasp out, “The spirit of Elijah now rests on Elisha.”
     “I say unwillingly,” the Narrow man said, “because they do not, they will not, let Elijah go.” He has come and gone and come back again before. So, no! He can’t be gone for good. They need to go look for him — he has to be somewhere. Elijah disagrees, and at first he says, “No. Don’t bother.” But the sons of the prophets persist, and they shame him into saying, “Well, okay.” And they search for three days with 50 men; but they do not find Elijah. They will not find Elijah.
     “Because Elijah is gone,” the Narrow Man exclaimed. The succession narrative is not just about the successor; it is about the predecessor as well. Who knows that it is time to go and who goes. “This is not a political sermon, thought it could be,” the Narrow Man then said. And that is all he said.
     He sat down. We sang a hymn, “Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing.” And we went home.

From the Southern Baptist Hebrew Prophets Hall of Fame

Roz drove because she always drives. I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t say anything either. Uncle Albert didn’t ask anything when we got home.
     In fact, he had a visitor, Maggie, who used to live with him before COVID. She’d since graduated online and gotten a job with Maxine Waters.
     I started to say that the preacher had spoken of the Representative in the morning sermon, but Roz somehow guessed what I was going to say before it was half out of my mouth and stopped me: Had Maggie and Uncle Albert had anything to eat? she asked.
    
                                                                       06.28.22
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 * I Kings 19:19-21.

A knock on the door.

  A knock on the door. 

I looked out the window. It was Axel. I thought, “Thank God, not Nils,” then felt bad for thinking that. But I was glad it was Axel, the older brother, that I saw at  the front door,
holding his hat like at the back door on one of those public television Brit soap operas that call themselves series.
     “Do you want to get a beer?” Axel asked.
     “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Not that! I just finished lunch.”
     “Pretend you're in Germany.”
     “I’d rather have a Guinness.”
     “Pretend you’re in Ireland.”
     “Let me check on Uncle Albert.”
     “He could come with,” Axel said. “Could he?”
     “Yes. We would have to drive. But let me check. I don’t think he’ll want to.”

He didn’t, he was on his phone. I signaled I was going out, did he want to come? He shook his head. I held up my phone, meaning call me if you need anything. He nodded.

The Gaza (from the archives). You can drink outside now.
The city changed the rules during the pandemic.

We drove anyway, to the Gaza. And dove in out of the dusty daylight. The light inside makes you feel as if you are underwater, and the air-conditioning makes you feel like it’s cold water you’re under. There are chairs out front, but they were right on the street.
     Axel wanted to tell me about a parishioner that had stopped by his office that morning.
     “I thought you took Mondays off,” I said.
     “No, Fridays.”
     “Oh.”

This parishioner had asked Axel, “Can you recover your faith after you’ve lost it?” And he  had answered, “Can you lose your faith after it has found you?”
     “I know, you were thinking about the perseverance of the saints,” I said. And Axel said, “Yes. But he wasn’t.” And he went on:

   ‘So,’ I said, ‘When did this start?’
   ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was the day before yesterday, but maybe when I was nine. Until then, I had no sense of myself, only that I was small and powerless, but that was okay. Dependent. Also okay. I didn’t wish, like Eve, to be more. Let God be God, and I could be me. It was good. Not that I would have used those words, those categories. But that was how I felt, I think. I did know about Eve.’ He paused.
     ‘So, say it started when I was nine; and pieces kept falling away, a small piece in high school, another piece in college, in graduate school another. And so on. Until now . . . .’ he paused again. ‘I’m 56 if you were going to ask. 9 + 47.’
   ‘And now it is gone?’
   ‘Yes, I think it is. It is,’ he said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Axel said. Because he didn’t know what to say. And the 56-year-old man went on.

   ‘When I ask if it is possible, I mean without becoming tendentious.’
   ‘And that means what?’
   ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in my catechism, the question What is faith like? is answered in a paraphrase of First Corinthians whatever-it-is: Faith is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude; it is not irritable or resentful; it is forgiving. Of the faithful and the unfaithful alike. it doesn’t boast. It doesn’t wave its hand in the air, bursting with the answer. It waits until it is called on then says, quietly, what it knows and what it doesn’t know. For it doesn’t know all things, whatever some of the faithful claim for it.’ He paused. ‘The forgiven faithful, let it be said.’

 “He had been looking right at me,” Axel said. “Then, he looked away, at the books behind my head.”

   ‘Thirteen,’ I said. ‘First Corinthians 13.’
   ‘I don’t think Paul wrote it.’
   ‘No. I don’t think so either.’
   ‘Any more than he wrote Romans whatever-it-is, Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not this or that or sixteen other things. That sounds a little more like him, Paul, but I don’t think it is either.’
   ‘Maybe not.’

“Wait,” I said. “Two things. You were sitting behind your desk?”
     “Yes, why?”
     “And you said about Romans 8 ‘maybe not’?”
     “I did. But then he said   ‘Nothing, it says. Nothing in creation. Not even the loss of faith, maybe?’ And he started to laugh. But it wasn’t loss of faith, he said, that he had come to talk about. Recovery of faith. The faith of his catechism, he said,

   ‘That I might be able to recovery if God didn’t get too pushy about it. Or God’s minions. God wouldn’t get too pushy. Or God’s minions in me,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
   ‘I’m not one of God’s minions?’ I said.
   ‘Maybe. But not one of the pushy ones, I don’t think.’ But then he stood up. ‘So, good,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
   ‘Por nada,’ I said.

And he left. He looked like he was going to sit down again after I had said por nada instead of you’re welcome. It did slow him down, and I waited for him to sit. But he didn’t. He left.
     “And that’s the way it ended? I said.
     “Yes. I guess it is.”
                                                                       06.06.22
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 * The brothers Sundstrøm. See here and here. About my reaction: Nils always has to be in the center of things. Axel is standing along the wall. With me.
     For another post about loss of faith (and Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter). see here.

Critique of Reason

  Critique of Reason 

Roz was out front, watering some plants she’d recently put in, “because it’s going to get hot, and it’s not going to rain.” Then, I could hear her talking to someone over the stone retaining wall, standing below her on the sidewalk, maybe Hill, our next door neighbor — I couldn’t see. But then I thought I heard her ask, “Are you a geologist?” So it wasn’t Hill.
     “Who was that?” I asked when she came in.
     “I don’t know. He was looking at our wall.”
     “But not a geologist.”
     “No. A mason, actually.”
     “What did he think of the wall?”
     “It’s good,” she said. “He says it’s good. We don’t need to do anything about it.” She sounded disappointed; she likes to worry about the wall. “He was nice,” she said, “though he was also lost — on the wrong street!
     “It was all I could do not to turn the hose on him.”

Then, as she was going back out to go to work, she asked me to begin picking up my books. “Just begin,” she said. “Don’t make a big production of it,” because I have books everywhere. I get them from the library or I buy them from online or I get them down from one of sixteen shelves of books in every room, books I've read, some three and four times, and books I haven’t read once, even the first page of. I get them out for one reason or another, to see if I can find something I am pretty sure is in there or, mostly, because I haven’t read them and it suddenly occurs to me ought to. Then, when I turn to the first page, I begin to remember why I didn’t.
     On the coffee table in the den were Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason in a massive orange (orange! like a college football jersey) paperback and on top of it a collection of Socrates’ gassing about this and that, including how it is beyond doubt, we must concede! that our souls pre-existed our bodies. Otherwise, how could we know anything at all? The Socrates stories are in  a series from the Classics Club, hardbacks the color of wet straw with the titles on the bindings in red and gold of which I have also the volume, Aristotle, On Man in the Universe but none of the others.
     I’ve read the first half of Sloterdijk twice; but there, halfway through, I get stuck. We are reading The Symposium in my book group, so I had been reading the other of Plato’s stories in the book, leading up to it, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. And I was stuck halfway through that.

I separated the two books, laid them side by side on the dark table, steaming like clods of horse manure in the road, I thought.
     Because philosophers must steam, mustn’t they? because they can’t shut up because, if they did, how could anyone else know they are the smartest kid in class? That includes the teacher: Why does he keep trying to prove he’s the smartest kid: he’s not a kid for one thing, but he’s not the smartest for another. Meanwhile, the second smartest kid is wishing both would shut up and he could get a word. It would be one that would absolutely stump them, if he could think of it. The trouble is he can’t, and he is burning because he knows he will later when he’s walking home, or he will at his desk when he’s looking over his notes studying for finals.

So it wasn't the manure but the steaming that I was getting at. Don't, please, see it the other way around.
     Outside, the sun was hardening in the sky, and hardening the sky itself to better trap the heat below. Roz was right: it was going to be warm, even warmer than the thermometer would say.

06.03.22