It's been a while, but at last

 Another parable 

I continue to hear stories from Scripture as parables. For aren’t they all finally, in one way or another, about “the kingdom of God”? Especially the stories the prophets tell: They are about what God is going to do when God gets around to doing it, sometimes now, sometimes later, and sometimes already? They begin really as Jesus’ parables do, “The kingdom of God - it’s like this, isn’t it?”

     In today’s lesson, from the first chapter of Malachi, what God has already been doing — it’s hating and loving; they are inextricably linked: Our little minds cannot separate them.

Who have ears, my children, let them hear.

The parable of the Jacob and Esau according to Malachi, the prophet.
Listen: 

 You can find links to other stories from that notorious biblical paraphrase, the Ted Riich Version, by clicking here: the TRV. You can read the parable here.

                                                                           08.17.23 

Homecoming

 Homecoming 

I had seventeen emails when we got home. One was from Gaspar Stephens, one of three people that read the blog regularly, or more or less regularly: “How was your trip? I thought you’d be writing about it?”
     “I might have been,” I wrote back, “but my laptop wasn’t working. But I will. Soon.”

Lebanon water tower, but in Missouri,
so not the one John fell from.

I also had a letter from Moira I talked to Dr. Feight about. She had gone to a movie with her friend Gretchen Moore and Gretchen’s friend John and Gretchen’s cousin John. Both Johns died young; both died in 1970, Friend John, just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota, by stepping on a land mine in Vietnam, and Cousin John in a drunken fall from a water tower between his sophomore and junior years at Emory & Henry. He was visiting a classmate in Illinois, the son of a Methodist minister. He died on the third day, and, according to Moira, “He remains a young and callow fellow but extremely handsome — almost as handsome, though not nearly as pretty, as Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the movie we saw.
      “You wouldn't imagine it would be shown here, would you? Not only because it is about male prostitution and grinding, not humble and uplifting poverty (like Naomi and Ruth’s or Mary and Joseph’s), but because it is the saddest damn movie ever made, at least that I’ve seen. And it’s sad because love doesn’t redeem anything at all, and hope leads exactly nowhere. So, to paraphrase The Apostle (as you call him), ‘Death on a bus, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is death on a bus.’
     “We went for coffee after the movie, but only your high-school buddy Phil Allingham was there, watching a baseball game. He’d never seen the movie, he said, and he’d never wanted to. Gretchen replied that she’d never seen a baseball game or ever wanted to. Phil didn’t care; he only turned back to watching his. Plus, I think she was lying.
     “Her friend John said after we sat down that he didn’t much like it — it was too grim. Hadn’t he died, ‘and gone to heaven,’ he added with a grin, ‘to escape such sordidness or, more to the point, to see how it had been redeemed?’ He didn’t want to be reminded that it hadn’t.
     “‘It’s where the Christian faith fails, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Christ has died to redeem the world, but it hasn’t changed a whit. People cannot escape the messes they have gotten themselves into. Or, if they do, it isn’t by the grace of God but either by dumb luck or because they know someone with money or influence or, more likely, both.’
     “‘If you had gone to Harvard instead of Carleton,’ Gretchen said, ‘you wouldn’t have died in Vietnam.’
     “‘I’d never have gone to Harvard,’ John answered.
     “‘Me neither,’ John the cousin said. ‘I was lucky to get into Emory.’
     “Afterward, Gretchen went away with her friend John, and her cousin John said he would walk me home if I liked. A worldly gesture — no need for it here — but I said, ‘Sure,’ he was so good to look at even if not as pretty as Jon Voight in the movie. He was about as bright as Joe Buck though, I would add if I weren’t obliged always to be kind.”

There is a P.S.: “Is Gretchen’s friend John right about the Christian faith, that it promises redemption but doesn’t truly deliver? Or maybe it just hasn’t delivered yet? That’s one theme in the New Testament, right? — Christ will come again and reverse every ill, and there will be peace and no more tears?
     “What do you think?”

“So, what do you respond?” Dr. Feight said softly after I had lapsed into silence. The silence must either have lasted or have been “pregnant,” because he seldom speaks. When he does, it is softly, as if he doesn’t want to wake me if I have fallen asleep. But I hadn’t. Still, I waited. Sometimes, probably out of sheer cussedness, you want people to have to wait with you.
     “I was going to ask Axel — Axel Sundstrøm — what he thought,” I said. “Or Uncle Albert. But I decided not to.”
     “Oh?”
     “What I think?”
     He didn’t say anything more, which I took to mean “yes.” Or he was making me wait,which I didn’t.
     “My first thought was that we had never given redemption a chance. We couldn’t embrace Jesus — love and peace and healing, and concern for the poor and oppressed — at least not so that we were willing to give up wealth and power, all wealth and power. And pride. All pride.
     “Then I thought, though this is much the same thing: ‘Whose fault is that?’ Christ could not redeem the world because in Jesus of Nazareth God came not in power but in weakness, and the world could never embrace that. The few followers that did maybe were soon pushed aside by those that knew better. You don’t get on in the world without organizing, and you can’t organize without a hierarchy, a power structure. Power, then, cannot be truly shared, much less no-power — what is that anyway? And before long, the Jerusalem disciples would claim a monopoly on baptism by the spirit, Peter is judging Ananias and Sapphira, and Paul is judging everyone, including Peter, never mind that he is going to be the first Pope at Rome.
     “Then, I was thinking, ‘Who was the second?’”
     “Linus,” Dr. Feight said. Softly.

                                                                         08.04.23

Sunday morning

 Sunday morning  

Sunday morning. Some weeks ago but not that many. Still in bed. Listening to the air-conditioning cough, wake up.
     “What time is it?” Roz said.
     “Where’s your phone?”
     “Downstairs. Charging.”
     “I don’t know,” I said. “Still early.”

“Are you and Albert going to church?” She rolled over and punched me in the shoulder. “Do you go to church any more?”
     “Good question. Not often, do we?”
     “Doesn’t seem like it. Why not?” Her eyes look out of focus without her glasses as if they weren’t to help her see but to help you to see her. Her voice is always clear, though, from waking to sleeping and waking — even in sleep, clear.
     “It’s a lot of work for one thing, especially for him. But for both of us. Getting ready, getting out the door, getting in the doors, getting home again. . . . Then, what do we find when we get there? It’s like we’re still in the time of cholera. Masks. The wine in paper cups. The homilies a desperate attempt at good cheer. ‘God is working his purposes out.’”
     “It’s one thing when he depends on the rich to succor the widows and orphans and the sojourners in the land. It’s another when he allows the comfortable to get such bad colds they sometimes die,” Roz said.
     “Yes,” I said. “I guess,” I said. “Something like that.”

the bathroom clock

“But it’s over, isn’t it? Didn’t I read that we’re back to no excess of deaths?”
     “Whatever that means. Are we?” I got up, went to the bathroom. I came back. “So are we back to an excess of life?” I said at the same time Roz was saying, “What time is it, then?”
     “Six-thirty on the clock in the bathroom.”
     “Not at church, apparently,” she said.
     “What?”
     “Are you back to an excess of life? Or an abundance? At church?”
     “No,” I said. “No,” thinking we sang like we were already dead and time meant nothing at all so why count?
                                                                         07.19.23

 In the beginning 
The apocalypse, part one.

 

 

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Eventually, the word got a capital letter – because it was God.
     Later, God’s capital letter was taken away, and given to others. Indeed, many took it upon themselves.

07.13.23

 

A 3rd letter

 A 3rd letter, and a 3rd person coda  

Moira, before she died
(though not long)

Dear Ted,    
     Who told me you were reading Freud? What in God’s name for? I am about to ask, when I think, “He is amusing, isn’t he, dear old Sigmund?” — always abuilding, a house of straw and sticks, altering the plans as he goes, changing the purpose of the rooms he's built already, tearing down walls between them at the same time he is building new walls within them. Adding rooms, adding stories. And now his disciples are coming around him with mud, glues, and cements, trying to keep the structure from collapsing. A philosophy like rock ‘n’ roll. I make fun, but only because he thought of himself as a scientist, not as the fabulist he is, and one constantly changing his mind about where his story was going.
     Speaking of stories, where is yours going? Are you only going to rip off my letters? They may fill space, but it won’t move matters forward, will it? Aren’t you only building rooms that will turn into storage closets?
     But enough about you. What about me?  I keep to my pattern, which is nevertheless porous enough that all kinds of things, new and old, exciting and indifferent, can seep in; some can even widen a weak space and rush in. Yet the house built on rock will not fall.
     Today, for example. I woke up as usual. I ate breakfast as usual while Potato, the cat, wandered in and out of the window over the kitchen table. I put on my coral-red dress with its million white buttons down the front and walked barefoot to the park, where I sat with a sobbing Max. Then, I started to Alma’s to write you
     when it began to rain. So, I ducked into a magic store I had never noticed before, run, it turned out, by Søren of Søren, Kris (for Kristian), and Hamlet, who also have an interest in the store but are never there. “It’s pretty much all me,” Søren said, “here 24/7.”
     “So, you’re pretty easy to find,” I said. He said, “Yes, why?” I shook my head. [But see here.] “Show me something I might be interested in,” I said.
     “Are you easily fooled?”
     “Probably so.”
     And he showed me some tricks with spongy balls that appeared and disappeared, multiplied and hung in the air. And I laughed, and he laughed at my laughing.
     “Do I know you?” he asked after the gravity-defying climax.
     “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a friend of Alma. In fact, we went to high school together, Alma and I. I know Kris when I see him.”
     “But not Hamlet,” he said, more as a statement of fact than a question.
     “No,” I said. “At least not so far.” And I looked out the window, and the rain had stopped. “Gotta go,” I said though I didn’t “gotta go.” But I did go — on to Alma’s for pen and paper to write to you. Which she brought to my booth with my coffee.
     “I didn’t know Søren had a magic store,” I said. “Does he?” She didn’t sound interested.
     And that is my day so far. I am back “in pattern.” I’ll walk this to campus mail, hoping for a letter from you that won’t be there. But there will be one soon after you get this, I hope.
                                                                                                                                     Love, Moira
                                                        _______________________________

“This is the third-in-row letter from your dead sister,” Axel said. “Have you lost interest in the living?”
     “No, of course not,” Ted replied.
     “But?” he asked.
     “I don’t know what to write about them. There is very little movement these days, and I don’t know what they are thinking.”
     “Do you never speculate?” Axel said and looked at Ted, who looked at him, puzzled as if he didn’t understand the question. So, he (Axel) interrupted his (Ted’s) silence. “No, I don’t think you do.”

                                                                    07.04.23
    

Captain Marvell and the Danes

 Another letter: Captain Marvell and the Danes 

Dear Ted,    
     When are you going to write to me? You could at least tell me what is going on that you can’t put your fingers on a keyboard, that you can’t pick up a pen and apply it to a page. I could guess, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to guess wrong, or to be right.
     In the meantime, I will write you. I’ll start with the walk I took this morning, which took me through many of the places you know about. I’ll begin silly! — I walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, where I sat down at the table to drink a mug of coffee and eat a cinnamon roll. And I walked from the kitchen back to the bedroom to get dressed, jeans and a t-shirt and socks and tennis shoes.
     It’s a spring-like day, a bit cloudy, a bit cool; it feels as if it may rain later. Typical Tuesday weather. The rain, if it comes, will be light, and I will be inside somewhere if I don’t want to be rained on.
     I walked to campus mail as if I had already written this letter and had (finally) heard back from you, so there was a letter to be retrieved and read. But I hadn’t written this letter, had I? And you are not writing (at all). So, I sat disappointed (insofar as I am allowed to be disappointed) in the first floor lounge of the Union and tried to console myself with the little Muses Library collection of Andrew Marvell I found in the hip-pocket of my jeans. I sat lonely: it was as if I were the only one in the entire building. And I read “Clorinda and Damon,” where she attempts to seduce him with the thinliest-veiled metaphor — her “little bell” tinkling “within its concave shell.” My goodness! Yet he manages to resist because he has . . . politics to pursue: the world calls him away from the pleasures of her pudendum — goodness, gracious sakes alive! (Here, I have a question: How can Pan represent the world? I don't understand that. Please, explain.)
     Then, a boy came in that I know a little, a “friend” of Alma’s, Kris with a K — for Kristian, I think — who, I have heard, knew Kierkegaard, at least by sight, and who died (Kristian, I mean) in a trolley accident in København. But he only asked me if I had seen a friend of his, Søren (not Kierkegaard). They were supposed to meet, he thought, here? I didn’t know Søren, I said, but no one had been around since I had come in. At least, I hadn’t seen, or heard, anyone. He said,
     “What are you reading?”
     “Marvell,” I said, holding up the little white and lilac book.
     He stuck out his tongue. “Ah!” he said, ending in a guttural: “Aach.” Then, “Bye.” And he left.
     Soon after, unable to discern what Damon was up to exactly, I left, too. I put Marvell back into my right hip pocket, and I walked back by my house and through the park to Alma’s for coffee and paper and a pen to write the letter I had gone to campus mail to find your response to. This one.
     “I ran into Kris from Denmark,” I told Alma.
     “Was he looking for Søren?” She laughed. Apparently, they are acting, along with another Dane, Hamlet (I kid you not!) in an improvised, Nordic(!) version of Waiting for Godot. Alma “knows” all of them, she says. “Nice boys.”
     I say, “You’re doing better than Clorinda.” She says, “What?” but as a perfunctory, if I may put it that way. She doesn’t wait for an answer but leaves me with my coffee and writing materials.
     And I use them to write this letter to you about my walk thus far and my walk to come: I will go from here with this letter to you in its envelope in the Muses’ Marvell in my back pocket back to the park. I'll stop here, sitting on “my” bench, and I’ll read “Bermudas” with its “eternal Spring,” which “enamells every thing,” and where we are “Safe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage.” What does that mean, the “Prelat’s rage”? — my notes don’t tell me, but you, the theologian/literary scholar/religious historian, will help me out, won’t you? (Yes, please write.)
      Mac will come shambling by to cry on my shoulder. But he won’t know. After that, the crying on my shoulder for a little long-while, I’ll walk back to campus mail to post this in the OUTGOING MAIL slot.
     And that will be that!  Love,
                                                                Moira

Or, that will be that, except for this p.s.: If Godot ([God]) is God, who never comes (unless he is Pozzo, which I don’t think is the case), then isn’t Kris, Søren, and Hamlet’s play more absurd than Beckett’s, acted out here where God is both everywhere and all in all? Where God is not to be avoided!? Another puzzle for you to consider. Another reason for you to write me.

                                                                      06.28.23

From Moira about Carson

from my dead sister Moira

 From Moira about Carson 

Dear Ted,
     I have just escaped from a lengthy conversation with your old girlfriend, Trudy Monae. I mentioned to her at some point, days and ages ago, that you were reading Carson McCullers. She’s a big fan apparently, and she rushed off immediately to re-read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and Ballad of the Sad Café, and she was full of each part and overflowing with the sum of the parts, and . . . “conversation” is the wrong word. She had prepared a lecture.
     Fortunately, she is a good lecturer. Still, I only pretended to take notes. But you can imagine her at the rostrum and me in my school desk with enthusiastically inviting smile, enthusiastically nodding head, enthusiastically wrinkled brow, and the rest. I am the model student I never was (nor, frankly, wished to be).
     The sum of the lecture, as I understood it: McCullers is the master, or she is the mistress — in both senses, of head and of illicit lover — of the ridiculous. Her children are ridiculously gifted, as children tend to be, and her adults are ridiculously one-sided, even monomaniacal, as gifted children tend to become. So, they behave ridiculously. We all do, when it comes down to it, so much so that even ridiculously gifted children can’t figure us out. Again, that is as I understand it; I didn’t take notes.
     There was the lecture. And then there was an opportunity for questions; and one girl asked a ridiculously long hypothetical: you know, if so and so and this and that and if this and that and the other and if all the tea did come from China, then wouldn't it follow that . . . ? And Trudy said, “No, not at all,” and there were no more questions. The bell rang. Several sighs. And it was time for lunch.

Do I remember correctly that “ridiculous” comes from the Latin for laugh or laughter? Hmmm. Ridicule suggests derision to me, almost scornful (not even almost, just scornful-period) mockery. But when we call something ridiculous, we aren’t scorning it; we are only thinking it is funny, curious, absurd, preposterous — some combination of those. Am I right? And am I right about this(?): There is, not only in McCullers’ fiction but in the “real world,” an odd nobility in being ridiculous. We respect people for being ridiculous, especially openly ridiculous, because we are all secretly ridiculous. I except politicians, pundits, and preachers. Prigs. (I am tempted to except stand-up comedians as well though I am not sure I can say why. I am probably something you said to me at some point.)
     Anyway, that was my “morning.” Then I met some people you knew and some people you don’t know in the park for a picnic lunch. We had bologna sandwiches with plenty of mayonnaise because eating “badly” isn’t going to kill us. Lots of sweet white wine, the cheaper the better. And white cake with white icing for dessert. Then, we all lay down on the grass to take a nap, and when we woke up, everyone was gone.

But we are getting back together tonight to go see Reflections in a Golden Eye, the movie, since you so highly recommended it. [Not true!] I think we’re going to see the original “golden” version, and we’re going to a theater where we can turn the music off if we want to. We can even watch it simultaneously with music and without — also golden and in technicolor — if we want. Don’t ask me how that works, I can’t explain it (though something to do with the expansion and contraction of time).
     So, that is it! Write me soon. Love,
                                                                Moira
                                                                      06.22.23