The Old Stories: Meditations on the Old Testament
I pick up an old habit. Walking by the River Tom and returning to my laptop to write what comes. I try to think today about Genesis, but start by looking at the river weather.
Today is special. Despite the fact they have put plastic dunce caps on all the pilings. They seemed to have missed one and
On the river, this morning,
a lone egret.
Lone attracts us.
More beautiful and rare
than the many ducks
that lie like stones on the little beach,
heads under wings.
Their sheeny green necks would be beautiful,
if there weren’t so many of them….
The geese are another matter. They are pests and we chase them away with teams of dogs. An earlier attempt was to run a noisy toy motorboat up and down the beach. Pests. Like the the shy and beautiful penned deer we used to bring breadcrusts when I was a child. Now there are too many of them. And they boldly eat our roses.
Today I am to meditate on the story of Abraham. He, I am told, is an archetype: A mythic figure, mythic, in the sense that he represents a deep truth. He probably never existed.
But I think he did exist. The writers—I am told there are three: the P writer who is concerned with pointing out the moral of the story, the other two who seem to be more concerned with reportage.
Neither is a novelist. I have consumed novels and tried to write them most of my life. Novelists are tricky. They make you believe in their characters through invention of details. These reporters are too grave to make up characters. Their thoroughly boring , to this novel reader, genealogies have no redeeming literary value as a present day critic would say. These characters were born of a particular mother, begat particular children, died at a certain age and place, stones were set up to mark the events; and that was it.
If any of them are tricky it is the P writer. He wants to make a point. But more of this later.
Today the water is so still
A leaf and a duck feather, lie on its
becalmed surface and deep below,
the cottony clouds
We have read Kierkegaard and are tied in knots over Abraham's sacrifice. The grave and literal reporters have Abraham proceed at stately pace to Mount Moriah. What is he thinking? The P writer is silent. Is Abraham wondering if he's deceived by Yahweh?. I remember Father Hartt one Sunday described Jesus as a “crazy aunt in the attic.”
Absurd, says Kierkegaard.
Two of our group are three years ahead of us. They have read Kierkegaard deeply. Faith in the face of absurdity wins. What is faith? Hope? says Laurie. Laurie and I are babes, in the first year.
Third year Mary Lou is not convinced. Kierkegaard has upset her. She prefers Hegel's dialectic. Laurie and I will hear more of this when we are older.
Abraham heard a Voice. The mentally ill hear voices. Is that the difference? Unlike the Egyptians and the Sumerians with their immovable cities and pyramids, when Abraham hears the Voice saying “Go forth, he picks up his family and his flocks and goes. If something needs to be remembered, he piles two or three stones.
Just this week I read of some schizophrenics who attend to their voices and follow the more sensible ones like, “Go mow your neighbor's grass.” Psychiatrists are paying attention too. Is there A Voice among the voices...?
Perhaps. For now I will trail after like the J writer. Hearing the story and remembering it.
This morning is blustery.
The clouds in their proper place
above the opposite bank.
The marsh grass and the goldenrod
have effloresced into plumes,
like the little waves that break on the sand.
The long legs of the marsh grass stand
in the tea colored water.
.
And Sarah is told she shall bear Isaac in her old age, and laughs. Abraham also laughs. I love this. The P writer can find no moral to this laughter. It is simply noted, like the begats.
All the berries out today along the river.
Purple gooseberry, red box, cloudy blue juniper,
and flaming bittersweet.
There is no wind whipping up the river,
only long rolling combers—advancing obliquely
from the little point opposite the harbor—
that intersect and form a soft weave
with another long set coming up the river
from the bay. Sweet and salty waters weaving.
Like their siblings we dislike the young Jacob and the young Joseph. Unlike their parents who favor them. Recent surveys indicate that most parents have a favored child. Rebecca actively schemes to have Jacob steal the birthright. In turn, Jacob loves Joseph best. What is involved here? Perhaps beauty?. Or even the beauty of the mother in the case of Joseph. The beauty of both Sarah and Rebecca are implied by the fear of their husbands that a prince of state will covet them and kill their husbands. Rachael attracts Jacob immediately and he is willing to work years to gain her. Or is it the precocity of the two young boys? In the case of Rebecca it's implied that she sees Jacob as the clever one of the twins. Jacob in turn may see promise in Joseph simply because of Rachael, but probably the boy gives signs of the distinguished man he will become.
The water along the little pebbly beach
is the color of a smoky topaz and the plumes
on the marsh grass, silvery toward the coming winter.
Unlike the geese I have flown south. The plane dips its wing and below is the city of San Juan. As usual, all the Puerto Ricans cheer as we land. Another miracle of a safe arrival. The gringos aboard take this as the normal course of events, but not I, a nervous flyer.
I sleep in my grandson's bed and a new little dog barks at me for an hour. Se is a recently rescued stray puppy and still trembles at her good fortune.
Joseph's sons Manassa and Ephraim, are brought before the blind and dying Jacob for a blessing. Again, one of the progenitors decides against custom that the younger is to supplant the older, even though the father, Joseph, tries to guide the blind hand to Ephraim first. In this case there is no doting mother and father, with intimate knowledge of a child: Jacob has just recently recovered his child and the child's offspring. Here it is pure instinct, or pure godly interference.
Today I walk with Tazio and the new little dog to the park. Nature here is tightly bound up in paths and little geometric areas of plantings. The trees are so strange; one variety drops down ropey strands to the ground, where they implant themselves as roots. This causes them to a have massive trunks made up of these writhing roots. I need to know the name of this tree. The example in the park is quite enormous, but there are some in the city parks three times as massive. Another tree in this park, along with havingordinary branches, here and there along its boughs has thrown up a new tree, standing upright, with its own tiny branches.
Yaweh has given up on correcting his people, according to our commentator. He will use their failings to advance His plans, as in the case of the brothers dispatching Joseph with a caravan. It's clear that the failings he looks for are egotism, deceit, and the capacity for long term planning—something Esau clearly lacks.
I don't come to the little park with Tazio anymore, or the little dog that has firmly circumscribed her little family circle and fears any additions. Tazio has a new found freedom to come here by himself with the dog. I know he dreams of being an explorer in Africa as he inspects the ground for ancient bones. We used to share this dream. He was the archeologist and I carried the test tubes.
When I remember my own childhood freedom to lose myself all alone in acres of woods I think of most children today as being very deprived; but Tazio seems able to contemplate the bugs in a square foot foot of earth for very satisfying periods. I know he is dreaming alone when, an hour or so after our first walk, he tells me he needs to go out again, by himself.
I finished the Joseph stories and started on Exodus waiting for a delayed plane, but my mind runs behind. The commentators refer to the Joseph story as novel while the Abraham stories are called sagas. Why is this? Has the Priestly writer begun to acquire some of the tricks of the modern day novelist? Is the E writer taking more care to select his details in such a way to advance the story...? The group has no answer when I ask this question.
My mind lingers on the women: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel. They inspire a love that can enslave a man for fourteen years, as in the case of Rachel. And also deep attachment over long years, If these ladies were merely beautiful this would explain the enslavement but not the years of faithfulness in Abraham's case. Neither did they covet these women for their fruitfulness, as both Sarah and Rachel suffer years of barrenness; yet their children are waited for patiently by their fathers as the ones to carry the favored seed. The handmaidens always seem to be fertile, and yet they and their children are only of secondary importance.
I'm sure Sarah and Rachel were less patient. Barenness is a recurring theme in these stories, and we are meant to acknowledge it as a timeless burden for women.
And then there is Tamar, who tricks her father in law Judah into lying with her, thinking she is a prostitute. She is a resourceful woman like Rebecca who tricks her husband elaborately to help Jacob win the birthright. Tamar's cleverness is admired and praised by Judah She's a better man than I, he seems to say.
And Sara, my own Sara. More about her sometime.
Driving through El Condado, I see the Normandie Hotel is boarded up. This is very sad. I used to come here alone, and read from placards about its history.
It rose up here in the nineteen forties because a San Juan engineer of legendary wealth desired a whimsical French woman on a voyage between the Wars; and later, when their love ship, painted gray, a troop ship then, lay aslant and slowly slipping under mud of New York harbor, she had him build her first a floating replica, a yacht; and, later,this beached tribute: Fourteen decks, prow turned toward the Fortress of San Geronimo stern to Isla Verde.
It was diminished by then by grander vessels, but was a jewel restored. Art Deco columns lined the galleries that encircled the oval dining hall where white clad waiters
silently set out fruit bowls and cleared the decks for luncheon as I used to come in to cool myself after crossing of the yellow bridge from El Condado
The crumbling yellow bridge is gone now. Replaced by sleek steel structure. Also the plywood wall. In El Condado, the old must go. Two new giant hotels have gone up, and the cranes are moved elsewhere.
Today I receive an Email from L with a photo of our candle and opening prayer. I feel connected now. Thank you Laurie.
The more I think of the Exodus, however, the more Jacob and Joseph come to me. They are such real people, who cry over losses and forgive and ask forgiveness with painful effort.
The are so like us.
I wonder, since God gave up on perfecting his people and used their faults to advance His Plan, if he is still using us in this way. Congress is behaving so badly. What will it lead to? They are putting the president into corners, just like Moses pushed the Pharaoh.
To the point of letting his people go.
Politics has been around a long time, and the Hebrews at first seemed to select their leaders for their wiles and cleverness.
Moses isn't clever though, He admits it to Yahweh, so Yahweh must provide most of the showy magic with rods and plagues, etc.
Both Joseph and Moses spent many years within the Pharaoh's court. That must have influenced them. It is only when Moses goes to his father-in-law in the countryside that he sees what is happening to the Hebrews.
II
No straw for the bricks. No teachers for the schools, no money for the unemployed. No doctors for the near-poor. Find your own straw and still produce as before. Have the privileged classes ever behaved otherwise.
We collect shells at the little beach at the foot of the bridge in El Condado. The yellow bridge is gone, but across the bay is an old fort and a piece of the old wall, sticking up here and there on the grounds of the Hilton Hotel.
I pick up a chunk of the old wall, compressed ocre clay mixed with shells and pebbles and odd flecks of purple,
Before Tazio was born, I used to be much more adventurous. I came here regularly to go to an AA meeting. Afterward I would stop at the Normandie to look at the black and white photos of the French woman in her recreations. I was attracted to that place because, unlike the Hilton and the new bridge, it had a story.
The Frenchwoman liked costumes and cavorts in some of the photos in gipsy skirts, and in others in naval uniform, or in toreador pants and spangled.shirt. It is said that when the Normandie was inaugurated she scandalized the public bathing naked in its pool.
Also I admired the art deco capitals of the columns, their stylized fronds and ocean waves. Art Deco. An unlikely English flowering. Were those precious PreRafaelites havingopium dreams of these tropics, where floral. fronds and arcs imitate artifice:
the giant hibiscus bowls, the bird of paradise’s reverse curves, the trefoil philodendron,
hieratic ferns, and sword like palms--I thought of Spanish cards, the cups, the coins, the
swords--that threw their shadow against a yellow wall? This tropical flora sublimated into these capitals arching like palms over a cool dining hall where waiters used to stand at attention?
Into that love between two wars…?
I remember my feet burning in their sandals. I would take them off and walk on the Frenchwoman’s cool tiles, remembering how, long ago, a child, I was taken through the Holland Tunnel to see that gray wartime hulk, heeled over at its pier before it slipped beneath the Hudson
The pieces of the old wall are for my daughter's garden. They too have a story.
And Pharaoh hardened his heart, and Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. Reading these stories with their repeated rhythms I can't help the spirituals of the African slaves and the black churches coming to my mind. What a deep connection they must have felt to these slave stories.
Passover.
It's all about remembering About ritual eating and remembering. .
We lived for several years next door to a Jewish family who invited us to share Passover with them. Though we moved away and returned, the custom was picked again and continued for many years. The Greenbergs were very informal worshippers, kept the rituals at home, like the first Hebrews, and rarely went to a synagogue. It was a happy event; where we ate and laughed and drank the ritual wine and the children became a bit tipsy..But we also talked about each food, as we ate, recalling its significance, following a little booklet with pages that had to be turned backward. The bone, the egg, and the bitter herbs sat in the middle of the table, and I remember thinking the egg was perhaps the forerunner of the Easter egg.
These Seder meals were perhaps the first time eating became connected with remembering for me. Of course The Eucharist is about eating,but somehow failed to capture my imagination as a child, or even as an adult. Once my son at age seven or so started attending a mission school where a whole loaf of bread was passed around. He had been going to Roman Mass until then; so noted in a loud voice that “you got more to eat here.”
It was mostly a failure of my own imagination, but the Presbyterian custom of the tiny cup of grapejuice and the square of stale Wonder Bread passed up and down the pews once a month wasn't quite enough notice taken, not really enough to eat in my case.
.
All substance, is energy, whirling atoms, science says. Knowing this makes the little meal of bread and wine possible for me to celebrate. I must believe the Transubstantiation possible, As Moses accepted the burning bush without science. All substance is holy, I say to myself, now before taking the Host.
And electrons at great distance can be linked. The books on physics where, mending my ignorance, I look for Yahweh, tell me this. This enables prayer.
The song and dance of Miriam. Before Christmas I went to a choral concert where a selection of many Magnificats were sung. Our Spanish class has also learned the words from the Spanish version of the Book of Common Prayer in preparation for a celebration of the Virgin of Guadeloupe. Here is another beautiful song sung by a woman, one of the old Testament prophetesses. A long time ago I read in Henry Adam's Mt St Michel and Chartres that Mary was considered Mistress of the Seven Liberal Arts. While the men are busy with war, women are freer to cultivate these arts and create these poems to freedom.
And Justice. Those in bondage are freed. The lowly are exalted
Shakers danced. David danced. Hasids danced. They are still dancing presumably in Lakewood, just eight miles up the road from where I live. They look so formal and forbidding in their black clothing, but their women are as beautiful as Sarah was. The singing of the Hasids begins with the founder, The Baal Shem Tov who in his feckless youth was given the task of leading children to and from school. He sings as he leads them, often off the road and into the woods.
Buber's grandfather followed a Hasidic rite, and in his twenties Buber began to study its history. He found in the legends a way of embracing both the dailiness and sensuousness of physical world, calling down the spiritual to fill it with exaltation. The holy within the ordinary
It's heartening to know that Buber lived his theology, lived it in community with others. Not a usual thing with philosophers.
The zaddiks whose lives Buber chronicled accepted magic. This can be scary. But among them the magic was circumscribed by responsibility. In this sense Abraham and Moses were responsible men. Upright men. Their magic came out of dialog with Yaweh
One of the legends of the Baal Shem Tov tells how like Moses, who complained of a speech impediment, the Baal Shem Tov, also stammered.: His mind, we are told, was so absorbed in his dialog with Yahweh that sometimes he forgot how to speak to his followers. His leadership “began in stammering, and a stammering bore it onward.”
Be Still, the Israelites are told before crossing the Sea of Reeds. These words came to me once when I needed them.
The Law.
First comes Yahweh's seeking out of the Israelites, and his proofs that He is both powerful in their defense and ascendant over other gods. Then comes The Law.
It has always moved me, the thought of this People wandering in a desert wilderness and asking themselves, How shall we live? What take for our own and what not take? What eat and what not eat? How treat our wives, our concubines, our children? How treat the sojourner in our midst?
They didn't have to answer these questions. Societies before and after them ignored most ofthequestions, and somehow thrived at least briefly. Moses' followers who forged an idol in his absence thought they could get along well enough with the old customs governed by lesser gods.
Is it a human need to regard The Law as coming from Yahweh? Can a society thrive with secular laws? That seems to be the conflict playing out in the heartland of our country, come to the forefront now in the Iowa Caucuses. Secular is the new hated word. The heartland longs to post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses, to see our founders as God-possessed. I have doubts about this and am usually quite intolerant of such obsessing, but can understand it.
It is interesting to note the importance of the Sabbath; how its repeated telling of the old stories has held the Jewish People together through all of their dispersions. When I first came to Christ Church choir there was a soprano soloist who read mystery novels during the readings and the sermon and this bothered me. Somehow, I thought, she was robbing herself, that I was robbing myself when I was bored and didn't listen. How overcome this?
When I was in sixth grade in public school, Mrs Kenworthy used to have us sing a hymn and then say the pledge to the flag. On some occasions I felt a little tingle of patriotism, of belonging to a people during this ritual
It is interesting to note the importance of the Sabbath, ,how its repeated rituals have held the Jewish people together through all of their dispersions
When I fail to listen to the readings and daydream through the sermons, I am robbing myself. How overcome this? I am like Moses’ followers, always backsliding.
The casuistic laws have much to do with restitution. If I steal your ass and it dies, I must return to you two asses. The dead ass is mine in the case that it died of natural causes. I’m sure cases like these would have made wonderful courtroom drama TV
Both types of law are rather common sense. You have a feeling that the Hebrews had already been following most of them, or at least been aware of breaking them. The stricture against idols is the the most sophisticated. It seems to follow from the prohibition against even giving a name to Y-H., thus forcing a spiritualization of the deity, a very advanced mental exercise to my mind.
Walked yesterday in the Botanical Gardens of the U of Puerto Rico. Very beautiful taming of this overlush vegetation. There is a reproduction of Monet’s garden at Giverny.
Tazio found a hairy spider under a rock. He thinks it’s a tarantula.
I Try to think of Exodus but can’t, taken up with these enormous fann shape, heart ahape leaves, graceful curving fronds.
I’ve beenwatching too much MSNBC. and pick these two commands out of the reading’.
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil
Thou shalt take no gift for the gift blindeth the wise
How subtle, how pertinent to these Republican primaries. I used to wonder how Adolph Hitler could lead so many Germans astray. We are all Germans I think now when I see the Tea Party crowds and their hate filled signs.. /
Tazio is with his friend today at a museum. He tells me this friend has a passion for animals like his own.. They don’t stop talking a minute when they’re together. When he was in his reptile phase I used to tell him I liked mammals best. Katchoo is a wonderful booster for mammals.
We think she is so beautiful and looks just like a Jack Russell Terrier. When we told this to the vet he looked her over for a while, then said “She’s a Puerto Rican Dog.
Long walk on the beach with Sara this afternoon. Ocean Park is a very hippy place
Full of dogs, vendors and terrifying parasailers
My last day here. I set to slow cook the beef and noodles in a souce of Coke and Onion soup mix that Carla made for us one night. Like the Seder with the Greenburgs, it is a substantial meal eaten in friendship. I sound as if the way to faith is through my stomach.
Tomorrow I’ll se my river again, my cat Lola, and my friends, including the poets from the Coffee House, whom Laurie has been looking after in my absence.
My river, I had a friend who used to walk with me in Mount Feake Cemetery by the Charles River when I lived in Waltham, Massachusetts. I called it my river too, and she challenged me.
“It’s not your river.”
“Yes it is,” I told her, “it’s mine because I love it”. Then to her amusement I .would go on hyperbolically to admit to owning Peddocks Island in Boston Haror where we used to camp, the Green Line that took us to the Bayliner that dropped us off there, the Bayliner itself—my boat—as well as the marble rest room at the Marriott hotel where we washed up after our camping. trip.
No one here challenges me when I call the RiverToms “my river”
Yesterday it was dark gray and too windy to go down there, but today theriver is deep blue and the air milder.
Other than blue the only color is the tawny plumes of the sawgrass and the tea colored water washing over the yellow pebbles, leaving a fringe of pine needles as it withdraws. The tide is out so the long combers of the exiting fresh water is the only current.
Last night at our meeting as I was talking about the battles to conquer Canaan, after the period in the wilderness, Donna asked me if I approved of all this warfare and I had to say it bothered me, particularly the looting. Yet the tribes seemed to me to have a peculiar humanity in all the strictures they laid on themselves, or Yaweh laid on them.
Even the looting had its strictures and when one tribesman took the booty for his individual use he was punished. I thought of American Exceptionalism whose cause the right seems to uphold in our foreign policy and likened the tribes to us. We are special we used to think of ourselves until our many inconclusive wars outdid us in the minds of many.
The laws and traditions which Moses repeatedly reminded his people about and urged them to teach to their children, were less to distinguish themselves from others than to .remind themselves who they were, to bind them together, and many of them are admirable. Even the lex talonis is an advance over ancient ways of retribution. Measured by this standard what can one say of our shock and awe of bombing Iraq?
The laws regarding treatment of the stranger in their midst are admirable. Many things about the dietary laws seem impossibly detailed, but the way of butchering animals is another wise stricture in that it the animal itself is recognized, and its killing made a sacrament.
Thou shalt not yoke an ox with an ass.
Was ever a community put into such a harness before or since?.
.
Deborah sings
I sing as Miriam sang at the drowning the chariots of Egypt. As women sing, who go not to battle with a sword, as I foresee Hannah shall sing, and another called Mary shall sing years hence. Men battle and women sing.
I see that all shall be well, that one of my sex shall kill the king who flees, The king of these tribes who are a Thorn in our Flesh. She shall treat him as Yahweh has instructed our people in regard to the Stranger in our Midst and offer him milk and a warm blanket. He shall sleep the sleep of the succored in the tent of Jael who decends from the assassin Cain. One of my sex shall kill with a hammer and stake through the temple And I at Barak’s bidding shall go, a woman into the battle. Unwomanly, at Yahweh’s bidding, women shall become as men and pierce flesh; and, like Jacob, contrive even against kinsmen to put suspicion to sleep.
This morning is cold
and, after rain, the canvas covers on
the few boats left in the water
are steaming in the sun.
and the tops of the pilings
smoke like chimney pots
Rain and fog.
Beyond three round buoys, the river,
and the place where I know the point is,
and the docks opposite
and the steeple on the library
All gone.
into a pregnant fog
Nearsignted. I run by the ghostly
Sailboat anchored beyond the motorboats, and see
only the floating debris below:
A styrofoam cup upside down
on leaden water.
The Israelites clamor for a king and Samuel gives them one. Saul is good looking. It’s the first physical description I can recall. Also it is the first time lots are drawn. Are luck and good looks all a king needs? Evidently not. For Saul wastes no time in losing Samuel’s faith in him..
The priestly and the political. I am reading and hearing too much of this in the news. The president, according to some, in an effort to provide women with contraception has tread on the toes of Rome. And a candidate is saying that the fencing off of religion from the public square makes him want to throw up.
The Israelites need a better way of bringing their forces together than the hacking up of an ox and distributing the pieces to all the tribes. The desert mysticism does not serve them well as a settled people. So, a king, Saul. Samuel’s choice is ratified by lots. Unlike the patriarchs, Saul is described physically. He is kingly: tall and comely. We still look for this in leaders. At first he is humble and waits on Samuel’s orders. Once Samuel doesn’t show up in time and he goes into battle anyway and then fails to control the cherem, the ritual looting. Saul is impatient, impulsive. Not really fit to be a commander. Another time he makes his men go to battle after fasting. He doesn’t show common sense. And he uses religious rituals perfunctorily The no man’s land between the secular and the religious is full of traps; you can read it in the headlines right now. So Saul must go. He is a young man when he is chosen and has a grown son when he is rejected, so he must have led successfully for many years in spite of his faults.
The last two evenings I read the story of Ruth and the early days of David in one wonderful sweep. It was a breakthrough to read in this way, leaving me to reflect, well, sweepingly.
First the language. I persist, despite assurances that it is less accurate than later versions, in reading the King James The language of the Elizabethans is somehow our language dressed up in formal clothes, so as to be able to speak of high and grave matters, like Lear and his daughters, and at the same time bald and bawdy, like Falstaff. The young men who follow Nabal into battle against David are described as those “that piss against the wall,” I must find out how that is translated in. .later versions. Mary Lou, who loves frank speech will find this interesting.
And then the two rapt loves between two women, Ruth and Naomi; followed by the love of David for Jonathan…”Passing the love of woman.”
When the King James speaks of one person approaching another with the expression “Came unto. This is used both for sex and conversation. And somehow makes this commerce telling and binding.
The past two days have been too windy to visit my river. Today is breezy but warmer so I go down. The ripples coming down diagonally from the river are forming a tiny weave with the tide coming up from the bay and the sun casts a pattern of like a snakeskin on the golden pebbles beneath the waters.
It is interesting that David loves Saul almost as much as he loves Jonathan, never losing his respect for.him in spite of Saul coming three times against him. David’s gentleness is breathtaking. The scene in the cave where David raises his sword against the unsuspecting Saul and then simply cuts off a piece of his garment is so delicate after all the hacking and bloodletting we are expecting.
Another sweep I was aware of is the thread of Jesse’s family. There are so many names it’s hard to pick these up; but I remember Tamar the seductress who tricks Judah into giving her a child, whose descendants include Ruth and David.
David is beautiful, outwardly—a ruddy and comely shepherd boy—and inwardly. None of the characters we’ve read about up till now have been so lovingly described, and in such detail. Except for the song of Solomon, there is no physical description of anyone, not even Jesus.”
Samuel is so important. Even after death Saul calls him up to know his fate. But then is sent to the fortune teller of Endor, a woman who seems to know nothing of Yaweh, but tells him the truth nevertheless.
Magic outside of Yaweh worship is forbidden. But nowhere are we told it is unable to reproduce the feats of the prophets. It is probably a sign of disrespect on the part of Samuel,s ghost to send Saul off to a witch.
A fair windy day on the river this morning
Even though there are signs of an unnaturally early spring, the colors are still winter's:
the silvery sheen of the weathered board walk, the soft gold of the plumes on the sawgrass, matched by the gold of the pebbles under the amber water.
Last night we looked up “those who piss against a wall” in versions other that the King James and found it was translated as either “males”, or ”men”. I become frustrated trying to explain why I am attached to the former. Now I try to explain it to myself by thinking it's because it's more primitive, more outspoken, as the Israelites and even the Elizabethans are to us. The little extra time it takes to figure out the expression pays off somehow, reminds me of my more primitive self at four years old when, at a picnic, I observed a little boy pissing against a tree
Perhaps we need to set these stories back into our own youth, into an earlier age to properly understand them
Speaking of long ago:
My quandary to set up a theological reflection last week—my reflections seem to have a delay factor, so that a resolution took until an early morning pillow thought about two weeks after the discussion—was a long ago memory of taking some sort of personality test upon preparing for graduation from college many years ago: one of the questions I got stuck on was “Do you consider the Bible a work of literature or the word of God? I couldn't answer. I was in love with literature at that period of my life. I had strayed from faith but never become an atheist. Still I couldn't choose. I resented the question. Why must one choose? It still baffled me today and I brought it up periodically through my life. Once someone said that the test just wanted a top of your head reaction, that I should have answered without thinking so much.
That didn't satisfy me. Neither did our group discussion. The connection to Tradition brought forth the saying about being luke warm. Was it from Paul?
In any case, I put it out of my mind, as I have for decades;and this morning I woke with a thought from Teilhard de Chardin:.
“Everything that rises must converge.”
Flannery O'Connor took it for the title of one of her stories. It satisfied me completely as an answer to the riddle of that question.
In this age of the internet, I look back on Teilhard as being a modern day prophet when he spoke of a “thinking net” encircling our globe.
Science and faith, too, must rise and converge. That I believe with almost total assurance. About ten years ago, with no background in science I began reading about the new biology and the new physics, and, barely understanding, saw the beginning of convergence with the ancient beliefs.
At that time, I wrote this poem:
The Shadow Gross National Product
Where does it all go?
Sonatas memorized
Clarinet lessons
Sixteen years worth
Thirty years of
Diaries kept faithfully
Novels in drawers
Out of print
Foreign travel
Photos of
Sketchbooks filled
With long ago nudes, and
Poems on napkins and in
Albums
Painful letters,
Initials carved in trees—ah these
Last longest…
Chemistry notes
Separations negotiated…
Or excruciatingly ripped away
Like bandages from wounds…?
The town dump, you say
Or senescent memory
Or, more sentimentally, in memory
Of friends, descendents…
Not what I mean.
I mean the exquisite learning
Such efforts
Such efforts are said
To alter synapses but
Synapses short circuit don’t they
Blow out
In that final effort?
But no,
It must, I say,
All be preserved
Somewhere
In the germ plasma
I say
In the sub atomic particles
I say
Awaiting confirmation
From cosmologists,
Biologists.
They are my
Theologians
