Sorry, sorry, sorry 2.

 Sorry, sorry, sorry 2. 
This “chapter” begins here.

Bel is like a Brewer’s sparrow, small and nervous, colorless and easy to overlook. But Brewer’ses are, nonetheless. They exist – to one another, to other sparrows; they have a place they take up, if modestly, in the world, a place that belongs to no other. Another email. _________________________________________________________________________________________

Isabel Monk                                                                                                  WED, MAY 31 6:30AM ó : 6
to Ted (crabbiolio@gmail.com)

I won’t take up much of your time, but I sense you are as interested in this as I am.
      I called to ask Axel about humility “as a virtue.” He admitted that it wasn’t a matter he’d given much thought to. He’d brooded over it but without thinking about it. Could he get back to me?
     If he would, I said, but I wasn’t sure (that he would), so I went by the church the next day; and I did manage to get by Lucy.* (Does she look like Justin Hawkins to you, too? Do you know who that is?)
     He had several piles of books on his desk. Is that what that huge desk is for, piles of books? And he had some open, big like concordances and dictionaries and encyclopedias. And looking into them, like a sorcerer into books of charms, he said something like this. (Imagine his voice, the way he hesitates so he won’t sound too glib – it’s a kind of humility in itself. Disobedient to the Sermon on the Mount, he is always hiding his light under a bushel. (And I’ve always liked him for that.) (But sorry, I’m rattling on!)) 

 He said: This is not me; it’s (and he spread his hands) my sources.
      In the Old Testament, humility has to do with social status. There are the humble, the lowly that the LORD will raise up, while the rich and the powerful (and arrogant) will be sent away empty. This isn’t everywhere, but it’s there. And the logical conclusion is that the king that is coming will not be like Solomon in all his glory; he will be like the servant in Isaiah’s songs; he will enter Jerusalem, riding not on a great white horse but a donkey, as Zechariah has it.
     He looked up out of his books. Okay so far? he said. And then he looked down again. No, he said. No. That sounds patronizing, doesn’t it? Of course, you get it. Nils [link/ put links in footnote?] used to preach that way, perfectly good sermons, but he was always stopping to ask, You see what I’m getting at, right? And he’d say whatever it was again. He got that from our father. He was the same way, always thinking what he was thinking was too smart to be understood.
     (I didn’t need to put that in, sorry! I am always getting off-track, especially when it comes to Axel.) (When I write, I mean: I get off-track. When I paint, I am always concise.) 

In the New Testament, Axel said, looking back up at me and back down again, gesturing again at the books to show it wasn’t him but his sources. Or, he said, that’s the way the New Testament reads it. The Messiah will not come in power but in weakness, not in arrogance but in humility. He will not conquer but be crucified. Having emptied himself, he will be humble, meaning immediately “obedient unto death,” but also meaning gentle. And his followers should be the same. Of course …. He looked up again: I’m going off-script, he said.
     Of course, we shall have to get them organized – the followers of Jesus. And that means some must have authority over others – and signs of authority. And you can’t run a church without funds, so while some may choose poverty – they may be humble in that Old Testament sense – the rich …. We have to figure out a way for them to be humble, too. So, it can be an attitude, humility; it doesn’t have to be a way of life.
      Eventually …. (This is still Axel, or my rendering of Axel.) Eventually, the original meaning, poor, will for all intents and purposes disappear. Traces of it will hold on in the liturgy; and it holds on in the phrase, “humble beginnings.” But humble beginnings always come to a glorious, rich, powerful, famous ending, don’t they? You may have had a good start and followed Jesus, or become like him, who had no roof over his head. But why would you do that when instead you could become Croesus or Caesar or Rockefeller or Carnegie and build a church almost as big as your house?
     Sorry! Axel said. He pretended to look in his books again, but he was just taking a breath. I’m preaching, aren’t I? Well, sorry, I’m not done. Whatever our start, we are all humbled at the last by death, though it is also true that some of us are buried in Potter’s Field and some of us lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
     Read again the parable of Dives and Lazarus. We’re back where we started, Axel said. 

And Isabel says, That’s enough. Sorry, sorry, sorry, for chewing on again. Thanks for reading this if you did.

                                                                         05.26.23

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  * About Bel and about Lucy and about Nils. Brewer’s sparrow.

La Rochefoucauld and Uriah Heep

 Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

 “Il arrive quelque fois des accident dans la vie, d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer,” Uncle Albert said.
     “La Rochefoucauld,” I said.
     “Yes, I know.”

“Did you read the blog?” I said, gobsmacked as the British say, because he never does.
      “Roz showed it to me.”
     “Did Roz read the blog?” I said, gobsmacked again, because she doesn’t either.  
     “Apparently.” 

La Rochefoucauld at Cannes 1971

I asked because I knew it was La Rochefoucauld only because of a conversation we’d had, Uncle Albert and I, some weeks ago. About humility. He had quoted La Rochefoucauld.
     I had said, “Something, something about having at times to be a fool – there are situations.”
     “Yes.”
      “And?”
     He took on his Zen master look. 

Later, the next day I think, I said, “Are you suggesting that a willingness to be publicly foolish could be a sign of humility?”
     “What do you think,” he said.
      “It could be,” I said, “if it’s not a case, like with comics, of being foolish to say ‘Look at me, look at me. I’m foolish. Damned good at, it too, aren’t I?’” I said: “It can’t be a strategy.”
     “Or part of the plot?” he said.
     “Humility as a strategy isn’t humility,” I said. “It’s something quite else.” I found myself practically shouting: “It’s hypocrisy.”
      “Uriah Heep,” Uncle Albert said.
                                                                            05.26.23

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

 Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

Isabel Monk                                                                                                  WED, MAY 24 6:30AM ó : 6
to Ted (crabbiolio@gmail.com)

I am so sorry if I chewed your ear off yesterday. I have been worrying about that since we talked. Or I talked at you. I shouldn't get so upset about things I can do nothing about. I accuse other people of being prideful, but then I am. - Bel
____________________________________________________________________________________

Ted Riich                                                                                                     WED, MAY 24 3:30PM ó : 6
to Isabel (imonk@yabyum.org)

How long did you "chew"? – five minutes? And my ears agreed with your mouth.
     I have two friends who have – in one case intentionally and in the other I believe un-, rather by sheer good luck – memorized hundreds and thousands of lines of poetry. If called up, I could recite, besides nursery rhymes, psalms, and limericks, maybe 39 lines total. But among them would be these, an accidental credo:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

The first two or three lines are a bit irritating, I must admit. But from there on: "They'd advertise," because they always do. But "How public – like a Frog" may be my favorite five words ever strung together.

Ted
____________________________________________________________________________________

The virtues of humility. The virtue of humility. How to write about either one? — but especially the last. There is the immediate thought, that humility has never been a virtue, at least not one that anyone has truly believed in. No one has championed it without tongue firmly in cheek, at least not for him- or herself. And to claim it is arrogance.
     So I am stymied.
                                                                            05.26.23

Don't call me Al.

 Don’t call me Al. 

“What do you have to do with this Go Around Back blog?” I ran into Bel Monk this morning on the corner of Center and Division, where the Methodist church is. “He’s a friend of yours, this Tom Nashe, not an illusion?” She hesitated. “Or delusion,” she said.
     “No,” I said. “No. He’s as real as you or I.”

“Song Sparrow”
4" x 5"

“No doubt,” she said.
     She said, “I liked this week’s, the President as Gumby, dammit. But I have been thinking about the one of Al Sharpton as a circus ringmaster. I agree, I guess, with what I take to have been the intention, what an egoistic, publicity hound he is: ‘Look at me. Look at me! Look at me!!’ Look at how angry I am, too. There are, I take it, people that enjoy that. They enjoy being angry, especially if it gets attention, and they enjoy infuriating others. There is the attention.”
     She looked around to see if anyone was looking at her now. Center and Division is a busy corner but in a not busy at all town, especially mid Tuesday morning. She looked back at me. “Am I keeping you from anything?
     “I’m sorry if I am.” I said she wasn’t. I wanted to ask her how the Buddhism was coming and to remind me of the name of it, but I didn’t. “I am not one of those either that doesn’t care what other people think. You know, ‘It’s what I am. What you see is what you get with me!’ That kind of statement seems to me both the height of egoism and a lie.” She looked at me for agreement; I nodded.
     “You see what I mean, don’t you?” I nodded again because I knew she was going to explain. “Because this I is also all the things you don’t see. This includes all the things you don’t see, especially the things you don’t see, because the I is hiding them from you. The I is lying on the face of it: ‘What you see is what you get!’ is a pathological lie, but there are other pathologies beneath. ‘Oh, you don’t want to go there, honey!’ This is the same one talking that has said so certainly, ‘What you see is what you get.’”
      She stopped, looked up and down the street again, up and down Center and up and down Division, then back at me, down at her feet, and back at me. “Granted,” she said, “we are all masses of contradictions. But a little modesty, please.” She paused. “Humility, I know, is too much to ask for.”
     “Certainly among public figures,” I said.
     “Yes, or among the wealthy, even the middle class, among intellectuals, in the clergy, in law enforcement, these so-called ‘influencers.’  Where are the meek to inherit the earth? Where are the poor in spirit; no one will see God.” She started giggling. “Don’t tell Axel I said this, but doesn’t even Jesus get up on his high horse from time to time?
     “I probably shouldn’t say it to you. But in the Gospel of John, for example. Actually he is up there from the beginning, and he never really gets down.”
     I looked at her. She was embarrassed and defiant at the same time. I thought, “Like her little paintings; it was the perfect description: embarrassed and defiant at the same time.” I smiled before I could stop myself: her latests of sparrows smaller than the birds themselves. And she was looking at me:
     “What?”
     “Nothing,” I said.

“I wasn’t saying he was ever anything like Al Sharpton,” she said.
     “No,” I said. “No more than Al Sharpton was anything like Jesus.”

05.24.23

lectio, lectionis

 lectio, lectionis 

I got this email this morning. The subject line was “for Albert.”

“It’s not that Albert can’t get his own dam email,” was my first reaction. But then I thought the sender — in that line was revurquhart@1pc.org — probably didn’t know that, or couldn’t believe it.
     The long-time reader has met Urquhart, the long-time “rev” at First Presbyterian Church. The meeting was brief, at Alva McAllen’s funeral (though not at her wake — he wasn’t invited). 

Jerome, nursing his usual headache

It doesn’t require an invitation to join Uncle Albert’s lectio divina group, not that it is his; if it were, it might well be by invitation only, and we wouldn’t have this morning’s email. [About lectio, or what I know about lectio, see here and here.] But with the St. Jude’s group, you just have to arrive and (as I understand it) follow the protocol, which is probably called something else. It seems to be: read and shut up and listen to the gong and talk, and read and shut up and gong, and so forth. I know: I don’t know what I am talking about. But as I understand it, there are also rules about the talking. Lectio is not a Bible study; it is a way of . . . I don’t know, you understand, but you talk one at a time and only once each time, and you don’t get heady. Which is impossible for Urquhart, who believes in exegesis more than Jesus. He may hold his tongue during the silences, though his knee is bobbing up and down, but after the gong he’ll be talking about parts of speech and rules of rhetoric and varying translations instead of insights or feelings, if he can’t be hushed up.
     “Rose will hush him up if she’s there though,” Uncle Albert said, when I told him he had an email from revurqu. “What’s that blowhard got to say?” he said first. Then, “Something, no doubt, he was burning to say last night if Rose hadn’t been there.
     “Can you print it out?”

The email:

Perhaps of interest re Luke 12:22-31, which we read last night in the NIV (New International Version). What NIV translates “For the pagan world runs after such things,” the RSV (Revised Standard Version) has “For all the nations of the world seek these things.” The Greek is ταῦτα γὰρ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη τοῦ κόσμου ἐπιζητοῦσιν — “all the nations of the world”! The verb is, as literally as we can get, “seek after.”

 

The “Do not worry, do not worry, do not worry” of the NIV is “Do not be anxious, do not be anxious, . . .” in RSV. The Greek word is μεριμνᾶω, which in classical Greek “has the same wealth of meaning as the English ‘to care,’” my mammoth Theological Dictionary of the New Testament tells me. Thus, it can mean “to care for someone or something,” as children or a bed of roses. It can mean “to be care-full or anxious,” to be concerned about something. In that sense, it often has a future sense that suggests a striving after something, even to be ambitious for it.
 

Jerome's Latin is Nolite soliciti esse — Refuse to be concerned/worried/disturbed/apprehensive. Not solicitous. At least, that has a different connotation to me. And the French (Pourquoi pas? Calvin was French, I'm sure you remember.) This is the Jerusalem Bible: Ne vous inquiétez pas . . . .

Finally, for your delectation, there is this short poem by Countee Cullen, entitled “For Daughters of Magdalen”:

Ours is the ancient story:
       Delicate flowers of sin,
Lilies, arrayed in glory,
       That would not toil or spin.

 

“Is that where it ends?” Uncle Albert asked, handing the printout back to me.
     “Yes, did you want more? That’s where it ends.”
     He shook his head. “With ‘spin’?” he said.
     “Yes.”
                                                                            05.17.23

A final word

 A final word  

 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. 437) –

 Appendix viii — Concluding with a bit of whimsy.

In the zany cult classic, Archaeologisticus (1974), the hero Luke Marion, played by Dwayne Hickman, discovers a fragment of a scroll we shall learn later in the movie is Pseudo-Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem II, which contains — not in Tertullian’s Latin or even his less-often-used Greek but in hieroglyphics! — what follows. (Shining his flashlight on the torn papyrus, Marion reads haltingly at first, then ever more confidently and finally fluently, into English.):

Jesus was in the synagogue, and the reading from the scroll was this: ‘While the people were in the wilderness they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. And those that found him gather sticks brought him to Moses and to Aaron and to the whole congregation. At first they held him because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, The man shall be put to death; the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.’*
     Afterwards, Nathanael, who had been in the synagogue with him, asked Jesus, ‘Is the kingdom of heaven like this?’ And Jesus said, ‘No. It has never been like this.’

Commentary

How does that also zany Gospel of John end? Let me paraphrase: There are many other things Jesus said or may have said or someone thought he should have said. But if every one of them were to be collected and commented on, the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.

05.01.22

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* The reading is from Numbers 15, verses 32 -36. For links to other biblical commentary from Rantrage, click here.