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