Big Bucks, Tiny Hearts

September 12, 2014
Another Parable of Jesus 

It's hard to know how strange Jesus' parables would be if Matthew, Mark, and Luke had kept their sensible hands off them - Matthew particularly. But, I imagine something like what follows.  The situation: Peter is being all pious about forgiveness. The Law says to forgive three times or, maybe, four; he suggests seven. Jesus shakes his head and tells the parable, which may have something to do with what Peter has said, or not. It may have something to do with his piousness, or . . . yes, it does.  And ours. I think.

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Cousin Cousine

September 10, 2014

Cousin Cousine 

This was some time ago: Uncle Albert was telling me about a cousin of his. “I don’t know if she’s a real cousin,” he was saying, raising his voice an octave and taking on a Southern drawl, “but she was more like a sister anyway, when we were growing up.”

This cousin lived not far from me, he was saying. And, he was right about that, no more than an hour’s drive; so last Sunday afternoon, when Roz had to work, I went to see her. The nursing home was tucked behind a strip-shopping mall with a pizza place, a gym, an auto parts place, and the local ABC store and only a few weeds in the parking lot.  None of the stores were open: you shouldn’t be eating, drinking, working up a sweat, or on your car on Sunday (when, it seems to me, you could be doing all four).

   I could see the woman through the door, both propped up and leaning over in her wheel chair. She had on a bright cadet-blue sweater, a long tan skirt that buttoned up the front, thick stockings and heavy shoes. The top of her head, all I could see of her head, was the color of day-old snow.

     I knocked, walked in. There was another woman with her sitting solidly on the single bed, high-waisted jeans and a t-shirt with Love is a Gift on the front, all her features sewn tightly into the middle of her wide face. “Who are you?” she asked.

     Since it seemed, suddenly, too difficult to explain, I tried a trick Tom Nashe taught me – from his journalism days, he said. I said:

     “I’m Ted,” as if, of course I am. “Who are you?”

     “Becca.”

     “ . . . . ”

     “Her daughter!” Your turn!

Here, I thought, is where Jim Blaine would start a shaggy dog story, but I couldn’t find a place to begin; so I ask her if she’s heard her mother, whose head hasn’t moved – it’s still falling into her lap – heard her mother talk of a Cousin Albert.

     “No!” She hasn’t.

     “I see,” I say, backing out the door. “Well, maybe I can visit another time,” thinking “after the Rapture.” I’ll be here anyway.

Breaking every rule of good sense, when I get home I call Uncle A.

     “I went to see your cousin Etty today.”

     “Who?”

     “Etty.”

     “Never heard of an Etty.”

     “The one that was ‘like a sister,’ you said.”

     “Never had a sister – you know that.”

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"There, the guy who's got religion'll . . . "

September 8, 2010
Tell you if your sin's original.

“Ah my favorite nephew!” The letter from Uncle Albert begins with the usual salutation. He wishes he could have written this (what follows); he has tried to rewrite it without being guilty of wholesale theft; but he cannot. Yet, what if he did steal it? Why should that bother him at his age? Doesn’t it absolve him?

    From Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains:

Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them, it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.

My conclusion [Uncle A writes] is that Norris shouldn’t be made to repent. What would be the purpose of making him do so? What good would it do him? Repentance has value for the young: it “purges”; they can come through “uplifted.” But the weight of repentance only burdens the old; it grinds us down, it makes us “wretched,” we p-diddy our pants.

    So, why should the old consider their sins – either present or past? There’s no good reason, nothing to be gained by it. But neither should we consider the sins of the young (or of the world). Here, then, is our task vis à vis sin, repentance, and judgment: we undertake to learn to live without them. What harm can our feeble sinning do (if we are not in show business or politics, pretending we are still young, convincing ourselves against all indications that our bodies be still firm* and our minds still supple)? What good is repentance if it only makes us incontinent? As for judging, what good does that do either? If it doesn’t make us wretched, it riles us up.

    Granted, this is an impossible undertaking – especially the judging part. Imagine us as so many Sisyphi, arthritic fingers rolling marbles up a slanted table, only to lose control of them before we can get them to the top. 

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*Uncle Albert still holds to the subjunctive for all conditions contrary to fact as he sees it.

Church of Dreams

September 7, 20014
Sunday Morning 

If only two . . . .

In our dreams we went to a service – it began just before dawn – in a ragged tent at the end of a grass road, where pasture turned to woods. There were only two people there when we arrived, and no more came. The lay person read from Matthew 18, and the priest – a fierce, pitiable Tiresias, half-man and half-woman, angry and wise – explained the failure of the church. Jesus had said that “if any two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my father which is in heaven” (v. 19); but since Paul had shamed Peter at Antioch and boasted of it to the Galatians, no two could agree; therefore, no true prayers had been made and none of the church’s petitions could be answered. 

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Random Harvest

August 33, 2014

New Feature on The Ambiguities

Random entries* from “a work in progress,” Gaspar Stephens’ Neo Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology (forthcoming from Balthazar Stephens Press).

Limnades [Gk. limna/dev]. According to Smith (Dictionary of Roman Biography and Mythology, 1880), “a class of inferior female deities” (italics mine) – which designation, no doubt retroactively contributed to the limnades’ irritable dispositions.  Water-nymphs, inhabiting lakes, streams, and marshes, they could see into the hearts of men come to a tryst with their lovers.  Luring the unsuspecting stupes by imitating the voices of those they’d come to meet, the nymphs pulled them into the water, then drowned and ate them.  They ate hard-hearted men for dinner and gentle-hearted men for dessert, false-hearted men for lunch and true-hearted men at tea.  In today’s godless and etiolated world, they seem to be confined to golf course water hazards and the fishing holes of unlucky anglers, where they continue to waste away, barely subsisting on a diet of curses and sighs.

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     * Our motto: “Everything is random, and there is nothing that not random is.”