Comfort zones

Go outside your comfort zone, and where does it get you? I went outside mine a few weeks ago, to borrow from the library a novel written in the 21st century. Normally I have a theory and rules about that, i.e., they're not that good so don't bother.

I am sure this particular novelist is a lovely person but her novel confirmed my theory and rules. I abandoned it after thirty pages. It was familiar: written as if by someone who had attended too many writers' workshops, and been mentored and edited by people who had done too much the same. I believe -- another theory -- that they are all taught to fill pages by minutely describing action. She crosses her legs, the slick polyester lining of her knock-off wool pants catching at her unshaved legs. Lord, had it been that long? Since Matt left? That's me, not her. But you see how it goes.

When you borrow a clutch of novels from the library and the rest are Georgette Heyer and Norah Lofts and Barbara Pym, and yes I do read men novelists sometimes and yes I can see why Barbara Pym's seventh was rejected by her publishers since it does very much resemble the previous six, lots of middle aged scholarly women fluttering about the vicar, still, -- when you borrow books at least fifty years old and then this new one, you spot a change. I think you spot a depletion in educational background, in a depth of material to write about. More importantly, you spot a change in what I might call the effort of tone. "Attack" perhaps, as musicians are said to attack their instruments as they begin to play. You miss the sense of a writer merely transparently struggling to describe, in beautiful language, what has never been seen just this way before. What you get instead is the trained, workshop voice: a consensus having assured the novelist "just describe anything, once you get going it's all interesting and true." Meanwhile, because she has not dug into her own ideas, her soul if you like, we meet no people in her first thirty pages whom we can really see, and see no houses we can really enter.

Norah Lofts, to take a random example of fifty years ago, is different. She effaces herself from the story in Which Way to Bethlehem? (1965), sketching natural scenes of generations of people building a road by dropping stones in a muddy path each time they go to the well to fetch water; or of an old slave woman in ancient Korea trying to earn a little money telling fortunes, and unwittingly telling such accurate ones that her angry clients pay her almost nothing but lie awake all night aghast. Georgette Heyer, well, she is just Georgette Heyer. In the past I have abandoned her, when her downmarket characters' dialogue becomes too annoyingly well-researched to be borne. But one forgives her for her titles -- Regency Buck! -- and her ability to have a lofty lady on page one respond to deadly insult by lifting a lorgnette and exclaiming " 'This is indeed the language of the theatre!' " Things like that. I promise I will still try the occasional modern novel, but for a long time they have seemed so predictable. They just don't go well.

Part of the reading for the day happened to be -- the day's reading. Have you ever looked at the "Readings for the Week" in your parish bulletin (of course you have) and wondered, mercy, what holy rollers read the Bible just any old day? The readings are very specific and relate to each other, having been chosen for the purpose by whatever group of scholars assembles the Lectionary. On Monday, March 5, you might have read from the Gospel of Luke about that time the ex-neighbors tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

No kidding. We pick up the thread at Luke 4:27. He is in Nazareth, talking about no prophet meeting faithfulness in his own country.

"Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian [we had just read that story, from the Second Book of the Kings]." When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away. 

This is the sort of thing you encounter when you are either a convert or a returned prodigal. You dig, perhaps partly to distract yourself from the awareness of being outside a comfort zone. And this brings me to the topic of the newest Catholic internet sensation, Lizzie. Have you met her? She's a delight really, all of 23 years old, having been on YouTube "since I was sixteen, in 2011," and now having converted to Catholicism and, in tears of happy anguish, told all her hundreds of thousands of subscribers so. She's on the cover of Catholic Herald, which is a bit like being on the cover of Rolling Stone I suppose. She pulls nervously at her long bicolored hair while marveling to the camera how amazing Eusebius is. She is also planning to produce a video all about her upcoming first confession, which I hope someone will dissuade her from doing. Surely that would mean breaking the seal of the confessional. The recompense for this new obedience, however, could be that she may add it to the sparkling list of new sacrifices and obediences which she has shouldered already. I don't smirk, I think truly if the Holy Spirit is working astonishingly in anyone in this internet age, it is working in her.

Now at my end of the Catholic involvement spectrum, life is a bit more humdrum. On a clear late-winter night with the constellation Orion still reigning high overhead, I drive out to a local parish and find my way (with help) through cavernous dark "multipurpose rooms" and big stairwells to an upper conference room, where two women wait to give a talk on the characteristics of a vibrant church. How do we reach the non-churchgoers, the people who are content to be "spiritual but not religious," especially the young who tick the Religious Affiliation box "none"? They are kind and good but they explain the empty churches. And (one lifts one's lorgnette perhaps), can they be really happy?

Three more women enter. And that is all. We congratulate ourselves on the advantages of a small, intimate group, and get underway. As the hour or so moves on, I probably make a bit of a nuisance of myself by remarking the confident, counter-cultural "truth claims" of Islam, and by noting what we all look like to the kind, good "nones." We look sweet and out-of-touch. Why are we attracted to this meeting but no one else is? And never mind reaching the spiritual but not religious, what about the happily non-spiritual? I remember reading very recently that "it is always Satan's desire to persuade us that life with God is half a life." Is that persuasion easier now than ever?

Perhaps not necessarily. One of the women told us how many ex-Catholics are to be found at the rock-and-roll megachurch down the street. How do we get those people? They have found a vital comfort zone. So have our Muslim neighbors who, one of the women testified, begin training their children to memorize the Koran at age four, and whose mosques are filled. A silence. "Serve coffee," the nun joked. For that night, under the cold glittering spread of Orion, that was the best we could do. 

Small experiences, saved

Blonde, yellow and flaxen-streaked blonde, natural I think. Loose ponytail. A tiny bit past first youth, and knows it. All the rest is diamonds -- ears, fingers, throat -- and the polished white, paper-white teeth everyone seems to have now. It even, the polishing I mean, seems to change the way they talk, as if suddenly they have a new and attractive slight underbite; the polished-teeth people slightly thrust out their lower jaws, do you notice? and enunciate better. Once years ago I overheard a dental hygienist advise a young woman not to get them, because they look so odd. Now those of us with natural, dusky teeth look odd.

She wanted advice for wine for her dinner, and the man who normally gives her advice had the day off. "I could try," I offered. (I love the brief line from the fine character actor John Abbott in an old Star Trek episode called "Errand of Mercy." As Ayleborne he says humbly, "I am the head of our Council, perhaps I would do," when Kirk has landed on a planet Much Like Earth and asked who's in charge here. Of course it turns out that Ayleborne will more than "do," he is actually a projection of some sort of pure energy field, deigning to look human to give Kirk a "reference point.") Anyway, I offered to try the food and wine pairing game for La Blonde.

She was planning that night to cook roast pork with bacon gravy, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, and green beans. And her husband had said, to go along with that, she must "Get a big cab."

No, no, no. Why impose a fudgy, blueberry-spice Napa cabernet on that delicious meal? Instead buy a richly gossamer Chablis, or an Alsatian pinot blanc with that aromatic streak of honey down the middle, or get a fine sparkling wine from anywhere. If you must have red get an old ... no. I was going to say a Gran Reserva Rioja, an elegant brick colored Barolo, but no. No reds. 

I said all this with the utmost in Aylebornian humility. But of course it would not do. "My husband only drinks cabernet. We never drink whites. He said get a big cab."

Okay. I managed to ding the husband by selling the wife a Chateau St. Jean "Cinq Cepages," great, big, suitably expensive, but not -- completely -- a cab. And why has the Man with the Day Off, who always give her such good suggestions, not led her and her husband's shared palate elsewhere by now?

I really must cope with my lack of charity. It's the writer's stock in trade, though. How else can one observe the world from one's own irreplaceable and precious angle?

Spring wildlife has not really returned yet to the sloughs near here that we like so much. The water that will be covered with green lily pads in summer is now open and shining blue, with only the curving shores made of rank upon rank of last year's washed-beige reed stalks showing where land actually is. The woods beyond are an endless tangle of brown and sunlight. A bit of patience and a pair of binoculars were rewarded only with a river otter crashing out of the reeds and swimming through the cold water, then a red tailed hawk overhead, and a lone songbird nearby, like a dull dun sparrow with stripes on his head, that I don't know.

Do you remember the old movie The Greatest Story Ever Told? It's not so great -- see the intelligent review at the charmingly named DecentFilms.com --  but one part struck me as right and as giving information necessary to know. We see scenes of chaos in Jerusalem, as we are to understand it, just before Christ's time: everything and everyone is a whirl and a welter of brown and gray rags, violence, sickness, panic, and at the last, bloodied hands bringing up and steadying a lowing black calf for sacrifice, the huge knife under its neck. The camera swoops up and out to a bird's eye view of the city, with the Temple at its center, and then to white dots of people in a wilderness below and outside the walls, all journeying to the river where John the Baptist stands shouting "Repent!" Now any city anytime may be, in places, a welter of violence, sickness, and panic. But the strength of this visual teaching message, I thought, was good.

You will have to pardon me for "publishing" this, a bit unpolished. But I had an unfortunate event recently, wherein a blog post saved in draft was in fact utterly lost after hours of work. No very great loss, but still.  I learned that if you go ahead and publish, and then hit Ctrl and P, you can at least preserve the wonder of it all the old fashioned way, on paper.  

Against poverty

" 'Sell what you have and give to the poor, and come and follow me.' " And the young man went away sad, because he had many possessions.

In a way I am the young man who goes away sad, because I have many possessions. But I quarrel just slightly, if I may, with this idea that poverty in itself is good. Following Christ, yes. But after you  give away your wealth and follow Him, then there must be some other tasks you will do besides aiding the poor, because now you won't have any wealth to give. I suppose you go out and pester other people to give theirs. And then in the course of time everybody is poor and the religion is over.

People in study groups explain away the 'many possessions' line by saying it really means the parts of your life that "own" you. That's nicer to think about because you can just pick something spiritual or non-threatening. We all like our specific possessions don't we -- like Georgie with his bibelots, they are ours -- but this easier interpretation doesn't match the plain sense of the text. And I still quarrel with the exaltation of poverty itself. I have my grandmother's old Sunday missal, full of garish glossy mid-1950s paintings showing the Mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, and so on. Below the painting of the Nativity (third Joyful Mystery) is a prayer in which we contemplate the manger and ask God to grant us "the love of poverty."

I don't understand why. I was, for a time, what I consider "poor." Not hell-of-Sudan poor, but drowned in credit card debt and wearing my sister-in-laws' hand-me-downs when I was forty. It was not fun, peaceful, or holy. Yes, I know St. Francis of Assissi gave away everything and kissed lepers, and I know Pope St. John Paul II gave away his teaching salary, had no home and slept on a desk in his university office, but I can't help suspecting these people were free to do so because they didn't have to worry about survival. About gas bills and mortgages. Francis must have attracted followers whose wealthy families sponsored them out of pity, and anyway it was the Middle Ages, who wasn't poor? And by the time John Paul was a bishop and Pope his daily survival problems were over.

Only that's entirely silly and cynical, isn't it? Francis still had to eat even in 1220 (although it's unpleasant reading how much the saints denied themselves in food or sleep or both, and how young and worn out they tended to die -- coincidence, much?), and so did the future Pope in occupied Poland. Anyway that is the whole point of sainthood. It is something beyond the capacity of ordinary people: they were "free" to give everything and follow Me because they had superhuman faith and acted against their own best, worldly interests come what may. And they were rewarded with survival. The path to impoverished sainthood seems awfully circular, or just awful.

Even if we are not saints but ordinary people, I don't understand the hatred of ordinary possessions as such. Of course you can have too much meaningless stuff, and of course buying or collecting can be a bandage on an interior sore that needs more substantial attention. And you can't take it with you so why are you bothering, yes yes. But it also seems to me that God did not make an impoverished world.  If God loves poverty then why aren't all trees black, all flowers brown and all animals gray? It seems to me God takes pleasure in resplendent matter, in peacocks and tigers. And why is there art, and why is art human? It seems to me also that there is a certain grace and honor given to God in living as well as one can while remembering of course there is more to life than this -- and a daily grace and honor given to God includes appreciating and caring for possessions. If not, if poverty is the great ideal, then why not also sickness, dirtiness, or illiteracy? And if concern for possessions robs us of attention needed for grand things, prayer for example, why wouldn't poverty also rob us of that needed attention?

I don't see why one gigantic swathe of human nature which can be for the most part harmless and can lead to all sorts of good things, like oh I don't know the whole of Renaissance art for example, should be wrong. Now lots of "gigantic swathes of human nature can be for the most part harmless and lead to good things," and yet we don't ignore their darker sides do we. Interest in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll come to mind first I suppose. I get it. But the one carbuncle attaching to this condemnation of possessions, nowadays, is the eternal and triumphant liberal creed beside us and bestride us, which says Yes! Of course too much wealth is bad, and liking stuff is pathetic and unhealthy! We'll tell you how to redistribute it, to whom, and what you don't need, and we'll create the leadership and the laws to make sure this happens. Finally we'll see justice done! You agree, right? ... and that's the carbuncle. I think of it as a foreign growth that slows a ship down and diverts it, or perhaps grows all over it and smothers it. Or let me mix a metaphor: it's not so much a foreign growth but another master, which has a great deal too much power already and which, given the slightest obeisance or cooperation, does not like further dissent.

Anyway if we love poverty do we see the perfect Christian society in Venezuela? In North Korea? Sudan? Poverty is good, right? Don't we even speak of "God's poor," as if they were better people and he loved them more?

"Sell what you have and come and follow me" is one of those commands that no one, no one is going to try except the saints. Far from being like us and ordinary and relatable, they are very unlike us indeed. They will go on seeming so to me unless you can find me a middle class saint who kept all his stuff, enjoyed dusting his bibelots, and also gave something to the poor, and is still considered holy. I almost think it's the Gospel story itself that matters, as a story. It at least puts an ideal into mankind's collective head, or a diagnosis, for saints specially to use.

As far as the non-threatening interpretation of the text, allowing that the "possession" you must relinquish is some interior idol that owns you ("you know what it is," Bishop Barron says confidently in one of his talks, and I'm thinking -- I'm not sure I do ... cocktails?), after all I may know what mine is. Mine has always been the ambition to be a famous and influential writer, even (holy of holies) a full time writer earning my living by it. I don't think a day has gone by since I was twelve that I haven't thought, how can I approach that market or this, how can I get noticed here, there, or anywhere? After all, are we not obliged also to make use of our gifts, even in this huge world full of people trying to do the same? Now to give that possession away, and "follow Me" -- very well, that You can have. But it's paradoxically hard to do. You end up publishing your post about it, secretly thinking, ah, now, at last perhaps.

          

Dipping a toe in new water

My dear things -- my fatheads, remember? -- I hope you won't mind, but I want to dip my toe into a new ocean of a topic. I might carry on with a houseplant or cocktail from time to time, and no I didn't forget my decision to immerse myself in the 12th century -- almost the very day I started a new job, so sorry! -- but now, what with one thing and another, I have decided to learn about Gregorian chant.

I kid you not. You may recall I've delivered myself of scattershot opinions about music before. I am just coming away from a nice little vacation from retail work, therefore from the awful music that serves as retail's background noise almost everywhere; so the norm of awful, inescapable music is somewhat on my mind. I never noticed this soundtrack to all of American life until some years ago struggling into a French language textbook full of first-impression essays on the country. A writer in this book marveled at it.

Unfortunately, and here already we're talking about One Thing and Another, the modern Mass is similarly so well known as so full of poor music that I feel impelled to try to know what came before. We will certainly consult right away the fine and good-humored article "Can Bad Catholic Music be Stopped?" at Catholic Herald, and probably go on consulting it frequently and happily.

I should clarify. The topic of Gregorian chant is perhaps ninety per cent out of the blue, but not one hundred per cent for me. I read Rumer Godden's novel In This House of Brede a long time ago, too. In that alone lay a cursory education in the Divine Office, and its music, music, music. (The nuns get a new young postulant with a great high soprano voice. The choir mistress is thrilled to report to the abbess. " 'Mother! We can sing Gaude Maria Virgo again! Oh, Mother!' ") To be impelled: let's add it to our slowly growing list of twenty English words. Impel has the sense of being driven forward, unlike compel, which suggests driven together. From the Latin pellere, to drive. 

Now to begin I must assume you have made for yourself  a " 'Gregorian Chant for the Seasons of the Year' radio" on Pandora. If not, there is always YouTube. This is how we must begin our learning, in bits and pieces. Only it's a bit immediately discouraging, when you load in something random having used just those keywords Gaude Maria Virgo, to see the comments from the exhausted young people that pop up below your result. "OMG, had to listen to it for Music Appreciation class." "For real nothing like old white people music..."

What I had got from my keywords was the above clip, Alleluia, O Virga Mediatrix, the composer, Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179 -- the 12th century!). It is meant to be chanted at a certain time during the Mass: after an Old Testament reading and sometimes a New Testament epistle, comes a reading from a Gospel; before the Gospel the congregation prepares itself by standing and singing  "Alleluia." Or it used to. More often we sing "Hah-lay, Hah-lay, Hah-lay, LOOOOO-yah!" to a kind of foot-stompin' hoedown tune with crashing honky-tonk piano accompaniment. Gracing her much nicer, medieval Alleluia, Hildegarde wrote a short acclamation of the Virgin Mary, perhaps to be sung on a Marian feast day. Note the title is O Virga, branch, not O Virgo, virgin.

Alleluia! O virga mediatrix,
sancta viscera tua
mortem superaverunt
et venter tuus omnes creaturas
illuminavit
in pulchro flore de suavissima integritate
clausi pudoris tui
orto.

Alleluia! O branch and mediatrix,
your sacred flesh
has conquered death,
your womb all creatures
illumined
in beauty’s bloom from that exquisite purity
of your enclosèd modesty
sprung forth.

 The Latin and its translation are taken from The International Society of Hildegarde von Bingen Studies, which is also where we find the sheet music and a short reflection on the complex interweaving themes of words and music. Medieval people, the author writes, knew Biblical references to Aaron's flowering rod and the flowering branch of Jesse, and saw "the similarity of the two Latin words, virgo (virgin) and virga (branch or rod) ... [also] the illustration of salvation history as a tree of life rooted in those patriarchs and blossoming into the Virgin and the fruit of her womb was popular in medieval art."

Not only must we new learners address ourselves to that sort of background, it appears already we must learn some basic music. Like what a melisma is. "A succession of notes sung upon a single syllable," from the Greek melos, song. I did know one small thing about chant already, namely, that the more important or dense the meaning of the text, the more elaborate the singing will be. It's on purpose. You see how the last word orto, "sprung forth," is honored, by my count, with forty-seven notes thanks to its religious significance. That is going to require some memory skills, practice, and breath control.  

And all this in the 12th-century Rhineland, which we shouldn't think of as some sort of Dark Age impenetrable green forest but we probably do. (Were they drinking riesling yet?) Given the professionalism of the soprano in our YouTube example, from whence -- we must ask -- could a 12th century German abbess expect to recruit the farm girl, wattle-and-daub nuns to sing this daunting material? Our cheerful author of "Can Bad Catholic Music be Stopped" has something interesting to relate.

In Britain and most of the West, we’ve lost the habit of communal singing. The only people required to sing together are primary school children, but it’s been decades since they were encouraged to stretch and develop their voices. As a music teacher told me the other day: 'Modern adults just can’t reach the high notes that the old hymns demanded. So they don’t even try.'

If medieval farm girls were presented to convents at the trainable age of ten as Hildegard of Bingen was, though granted she herself hailed from a manor, that might explain where the voices came from to sing Alleluia O Virga Mediatrix in 1150. How do we replicate that custom? For our part, we grapple only with hoedown Hah-lay-looo-yahs, or "Let There be Peace on Earth," its old sexist references to God the Father dutifully purged. And yet, encouragingly, who leads us in a cappella "Immaculate Marys" (the Lourdes Hymn)? Who even introduces the Latin Agnus Dei sometimes ("qui tollis peccata mundi")? The priest who is either quite old, -- or quite young.

On YouTube the bored very young roll their eyes at Hildegarde's "old white people music." They may never know what Dark Age peasants knew it meant. Meantime there are those few good-humored if testy blogs out there, commiserating on the singing of bad songs and the loss -- temporary, pray, a "Babylonian Captivity" -- of a heritage, an ocean, of complex Catholic musical beauty. The testiness and humor are encouraging too, in themselves, for in them are passion and wisdom. As a returning prodigal to the Mass, I read the testy warnings about "All Are Welcome" before being asked actually to turn to it in the hymnal. Frequently. "Probably what the devil sings to welcome souls to hell," a frustrated commenter had snorted. At the same website a man fumes about it all being traceable to the smarmy 1970s, "that kidney stone of a decade."
 
I like that, too. (They pass.) Only the English language could express that. Kidney: from the ME kidenei; < ?. Strange. That means no known derivation.

Testimonies, doors, buildings

Part 7, and the wrap up. 

One more testimony you must give, which might seem pusillanimous too, is that Christianity does supersede Judaism after all. It must, to have any real meaning. As in the Christmas carol, if there is a way to be good, and happy, and free of the errors of your time, and pardoned of sin and even yes immortal in your body, it is because he appeared, and the soul felt its worth. But this won’t make much sense unless you begin with the background of a (most extravagant) God who has loved and had a teaching plan for humanity for all time, slowly selecting one patriarch, family, tribe, and nation, to lay the vital ground work. Without the groundwork, Jesus is just another holy man from a certain place and time. There would be no reason why a Christ might not come from ancient Luoyang. But if he came from one nation, whose rituals and studies are fine but insular, whose moral laws are excellent but lead on to no daily mystic comfort and no personal promise except a sort of group satisfaction at the end of time, then it makes sense that his gigantic life must burst out of that nation, and supersede it. That is painful. We are back to the God who breaks promises – or to precious recastings of bewildered prophets. But if not, then Christ was not whom the apostles and martyrs knew. Truth has to matter. And it has to be somewhere, yes in a building.

We come to the act of re-opening the door. Having decided it’s pusillanimous not to acknowledge that the Gospels built your world, besieged by the Gospels’ enemies, I don’t know how to explain walking through a door at all except to say that sitting at home intellectually assenting seems not enough. It’s always personal. As for the choice of door, I was never a seeker in a vague way. Pageantry and ritual beckon, as do the familiarities of childhood. (Once or twice I watched the Mass for Shut-ins, partly to forestall explanations to people. It is just as I remember. And it is much like Jewish services, too, in the ineluctable presence of middle aged, musical women. They do everything, especially sing. “What have we done for the homeless?” they warbled carefully one Saturday. I wanted to shout at the tv. What have you done about Islam?)

But which door, and why? It’s almost as if cradle Catholics have a choice of Catholic doors. That must startle the potential convert and I am glad I’m not one. If I had started from nothing and plunged into my style of unabridged-books, natural-fabric research, I might have been in for some very intense and unsatisfying years. Because you see you can go to YouTube and find anything.

There are priests who regard our Vatican II, fifty years on, as the disaster from which only God can save us. They argue well. Try meeting the late Father Gregory Hesse, or the then-young Fathers Donald Sanborn and William Jenkins, discussing indefectibility and magisterium on old serious talk shows uploaded from a television station in Ohio in the 1980s. “The Novus Ordo is an anti-Mass – everything stripped in it, reversed – you’ve never heard of the Ottaviani intervention because the revolutionaries did not want you to.”* There have cropped up in the last fifty years alphabet-soup traditionalist Catholic societies, SSPX, FSSP, in communion with Rome or possibly not, scattered around the world conducting Latin Masses without lay help or crashing jamboree music. Father Sanborn is now a bishop – of what church, by whose authority? – Father Jenkins still has an actor’s voice, not golden or silver but maybe bronze, and an actor’s looks.

I listen and learn a little. If I were truly a convert I might worry. Which Catholic church? I might worry about joining people who consider themselves the saving remnant, and are in Ohio besides. I would balk at having to hunt out the occasional Latin Mass in grand old churches in bad old neighborhoods, curiously also where one finds old courthouses and hospitals, other relics of order in a different time. And yet I would also want the truth and I would probably be busy consulting old jettisoned books, diving down the rabbit hole of authenticity.

It must have to do with one’s overdrugged vision, drained of color, but none of that for me. I’m back at the church that is available to me, in the parish where I live, because at this strange time in history one wants to have chosen sides honestly but mostly it’s a relief to accept a birthright, and anonymity in it. The jamboree music will surely pass.

In the Catholic Church, alphabet soup sects and all, one pursues the most outlandishly courageous and heroic attack at life, at one’s allotment of it on this speck in the cosmos, that could ever be. From creation to apocalypse to every book and every saint and to every extravagant notion (pick one), God as bread in every church, personal immortality, and so on – there can be no structure more crazily designed for our profit. The soul feels its worth.

But I pause over the seekers, the converts. I was going to write a short story about a middle-aged woman, maybe diagnosed with something bad, who has all these jumbled thoughts in her head but still wants to sign up for what is true. I was going to call it “You Boys Will Never Get This Figured Out in My Lifetime.” It’s a rude title, I wish you wouldn’t make me write it.

And that's how the summer intern essay ended. Of course, bless her heart, there is no way she got this far.


*Letter to Pope Paul VI written by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, et.al., in June 1969, accompanying a study outlining objections to the Novus Ordo or New Mass. "The faithful never, absolutely never, asked for changes in the liturgy to make the Mass easier to understand."   

Spookiness

The summer intern essay, part 6.

He teaches a ferocious morality, laws pared down to a perfect core. Child, your sins are forgiven, but mind the details. Not just murder but anger is wrong. Not just adultery but looking is wrong. Love your enemies. Forgive since you are forgiven. Be perfect. The combination of moral ferocity and forgiveness from another quarter – himself – must mean an eternal protection from the insane new rules of any era. The state or your neighbor or professor is not your master.

He is shrewd. No it would not make sense for him to drive out demons by the power of Satan, for why would Satan drive out himself? If then he drove them out by the spirit of God, then yes the kingdom of God is upon you (Matt. 12). Spooky scenes ring true. The only people who recognize him even as he approaches are those “possessed by demons.” I don’t understand this, but it makes sense that evil knows its enemy and must testify. They answer him as evil would. “What is your name?” “Legion.” 

 Investigating for the first time in decades the Gospels’ teaching stories cannot be the end of it. After them comes Passion and Resurrection. I don’t quite understand the logical jumps from moral teachings to: Child your sins are forgiven to: crucifixion equating to: future pardon if you believe all the foregoing: circularly, forever – a perpetual motion machine? – but the Resurrection also brings with it eyewitness avowals. The old proofs never change. Why would eyewitnesses to a dead man risen, go on later to their own executions affirming a sad lie? And the affirming and the testifying go on and on, century upon century, echoes of the big bang. Even if you timidly insist on the “Resurrection story,” it still built the West. It codified all the teaching and mercy and spookiness that made the soul feel its worth, as “know thyself” and even Sh’ma Yisrael did not. 

You may have thought it noble and truthful to wait to say I told you so at the end of time, to continue to live in the civilization that Christ and his Christians built. “This really wasn’t ever sound – what an unfair turn – but I’ll accept it as background.” But I came to think that’s kind of pusillanimous.

Yes, it probably would be like this

Or, what didn't get past the summer intern, part 5. 

If given all this you return to the Gospels as perhaps the plinth of the civilization, even if you don’t like the whole god-from-a-young-maiden trope, what do you find they are about, and what did the main character say or do? He is at minimum the most important person who has ever lived. Here are eyewitness records. It would be as if someone had been around to chronicle the Big Bang, and all its echoes. If you like origins and authenticity, well here you go.

As you read, even from the first few chapters of the first gospel, what starts to build is a sort of backward-assembling mental apparatus that reaches into the books and muses, well – yes – if a god, if God, came to earth, it probably would be like this. He doesn’t hover massively over the Roman Forum, telling Caesar what to do, although that might have been useful. Anyway why not Alexandria, why not Luoyang? Rather, he comes to an impoverished speck of earth on this speck of a planet whose smallness and greatness we do and do not grasp. He does the most important thing he possibly could, which is be human, like wonderful us. He knows family and friendship and death. He lives all except marriage, which also makes sense, since one God even in his full humanity cannot have a spouse. (But then why a mother?) A wife would imply children, and the one God cannot … oh wait.

Still the Gospel record rings true. Heedless people would flock to him for healing and then walk away in joy, often not bothering a whit about his teachings. Crowds would frantically rush, unled, to block his escape across the lake because they wanted their chance to be cured. Normal people would sit around and expect to be fed. His friends would deny him at the crisis. Of all reasons to die, well yes, what is worse or more typical than the human way of execution by “authority,” which is mortal itself. And what gift would humanity like to be given, if not absolution from wrongdoing, from guilt, and then bodily life after death? “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

I say blandly it would be like this because I have two more ideas in mind as background. One is the Christmas carol O Holy Night: “He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.” I wonder if that line alone does not sum up Christianity and its good news. Does Islam teach the soul its worth, or the authoritarian tatters of Western liberalism either?

 The other idea I have in mind comes from a beautiful coffee table book I used to own about astronomy. It was full of gorgeous pictures, color tinted, from the Hubble telescope. Galaxies, clouds, clusters of clouds of galaxies incomprehensibly huge, incomprehensibly far away. Half way through the book, I thought, “It only has meaning because we know. It’s just information – pictures on a page.”

The great universe is focused only on us and it has no meaning except that we are here to live and think about it. Have you any indication that the pictures in the coffee table book amount to anything else? In Renoir My Father Jean Renoir quotes his father the painter as scoffing, “that fool Galileo. Tells us we’re not the center of the universe, and no one behaves as if it were true.” Our backward-assembling mental apparatus returns to the Gospels to find out, after healing and feeding heedless clamoring people, what the Son of Man said about behavior.

What didn't get past the summer intern: how to be a religious badass

Part 2. Of course there's more.

Believers will leer in turn at this fresh groping after truisms. “Of course it’s Christianity.” But for me it makes a new thought, that what has been lost is an ability to credit the Gospels with what we have. People call Western civilization Judeo-Christian, but most Westerners are not Jews. We have also a great heritage from classical antiquity, but we’re not reading Aristotle all day. If there is any legacy that churchgoers at any rate are exposed to regularly, it would be the Bible. For churchgoers that means the Gospels. In turn we mean the life and person of Jesus, not mere compassionate teacher and nice man but Lord and Savior.

Who was he, yes what did he teach, that Islam did not, such that Christian or even Christian-informed Western (liberal) men respectfully open doors for women, and Muslim men shroud them? What groundwork did he lay, such that tearing it up means a new culture based on the holiness of abortion and gay marriage?

As for the personal side. (It is still there.) What the individual seeker wants, even if he knows enough to know things like Buddhism would be too foreign to pursue, is to “sign up for what is true.” The phrase comes from a Prager University video.

For a long time I thought Judaism must be it. The Old Testament’s stout evidence of the God who does not change his mind appealed. So did the fact of patriarchs and prophets saying things which already had a meaning for centuries, before anxious and sometimes it seems, precious recastings into a new they secretly meant Jesus mold. I liked its healthy freedom from the main pagan trope, tales of gods fathering gods on mortal women. And I have a great yen for origins, for authenticity. Show me always natural fabrics, from-scratch recipes, unabridged books. I desire to peer through the palimpsest. What was the first writing? Why was it erased?

I am sure a Catholic high school education circa 1980 helped to chop off at soil-level what was naturally a religious personality, and might even have remained a Catholic one. There is a lot to enjoy and be proud of in the supernatural pageantry of the Church and in its tactile pleasures too. All those saints’ days and litanies and solemnities; holy cards, angels, the rosary. Gregorian chant, next to which I sometimes think all music is cacophony.

But gardeners call it damping-off, when seedlings fall over and die in a moldy soil. Damping off happens, I should say, when you learn that all the Gospel stories were made up years later, to make Jesus seem like a god. Our Vatican II stands, all of it, like a break of scorched earth itself. When the liturgy admires Jews as “first to hear God’s word,” you reflect. Very well, how are they wrong? Especially when the record seems to show Jewish behavior as a group across millennia is very good, even without belief in vicarious redemption. Judaism can seem more humane than Christianity. No Jew proclaims “no man can come to the Father except through me.” There is a freedom to it: the new convert likes the expression “Israel will be vindicated at the end of time.” You can look forward to being that speck in space then, shouting “I knew it all along!” God is not Jove, to mate with women. God does not change his promises. Notice the only people of antiquity whom a Greek or a Pharaoh would recognize are, spookily, still here.

Let me add something that only occurred to me very recently. Even with these religious sums and, if you were ever a convert, more of your own added up under the credit and not debit column, almost no one would convert to Judaism today, were it not for the existence of the state of Israel. I am glad the state lives – having been brought into being without a Messiah, mind you, which was once the crux of it – but we converts and ex-converts cannot deny that Medinat Yisrael with an army and everything makes the Jew badass. That’s fun. I am talking about a generation like mine, children of World War II veterans, grown up vaguely aware of Israeli heroisms like Entebbe and the Ethiopian airlift. Further generations brought up on college BDS campaigns may never darken a temple’s door. A hundred years ago, splendid credit column or no, the Jew in turn might have seemed only cringing and Oriental and weird. For the bulk of history before that he would have seemed much worse. Unjoinable. I wish it had all been friendlier back in those days, but it was not.

Changing and changing about, or -- what didn't get past the summer intern

Part 1. Well of course there's more. 

I sit down for the third time in my life to write about my religious experience. This may be a dangerous thing, since each of the previous two times, I made a decision, announced on paper, which in fact so served to clear my head that I instantly turned around and did the opposite. At 25 I wrote about accepting my native Catholicism, got published, and turned Jewish. At 40 I at length digested my Jewish “journey,” got published, and found that after all it had become too thin a gruel to live on. And shortly left. With no pained or weepy explanations to my friends there, which was remiss of me. I did get a few phone calls, which I ignored. Which was remiss of me.

In The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom wrote that in his teaching experience, “students who had had a really serious fling with drugs, and gotten over it,” seemed emptied out of much ability to experience much else with freshness or enthusiasm. “It was as if their vision had been drained of color.” Religious experiments, changing and changing about, may be like that. I remember cleverly telling my journal, after all my efforts now it was over, that one might say the Master of all and I had agreed to shake hands and say no more about it.

That was ten years ago. I find I would like religion in my life again, or rather no, that isn’t quite how it begins anew. It is almost no longer personal. And I was never a “seeker” in some vague way. I never approached Buddhism or anything else. What has happened to the whole Western world has been two things, Islam’s rise and liberalism’s fall. (Now anything further that I write touching these two topics will be derivative, just other people’s observations and conclusions on politics or “elite agendas,” so you must excuse me if I seem to fling off the occasional truism.) Islam’s violence is an everyday shock and Western liberalism seems to have nothing left in its tank but a kind of leering, white-eyed boredom causing it to decide idiotic things like there aren’t two sexes anymore, and to administer the resulting lawsuits. If the latter half of this observation, about Western collapse, did not use to be so, what has been lost or forgotten and where did it come from?

Stories that are now moot; or -- Two women, one house; or -- Three English words: privacy, nice, and moot

Moot. From the ME [Middle English] mote, via OE [Olde English] mot, gemot, a meeting, and prob. ON [Old Norse] mot, both from the IE [Indo-European] base mod, to encounter -- "an early English assembly of freemen to administer justice, decide community problems, etc.;" ... "a discussion or argument ... subject to debate" ... finally, "so hypothetical as to be meaningless." As in, a moot point.  

Many years ago there was some kerfuffle in my family about my grandmother perhaps moving in with us. I was perhaps sixteen, my parents in their fifties. She did move in, briefly, but it didn't work out. When the mistake became inarguable my father ruefully and sympathetically sighed and said, as if it was the wisdom of the ages -- "Two women cannot live in the same house."

It was the wisdom of the ages. He was standing in the kitchen as he said it, so I think of him also as saying "two women cannot run the same kitchen."

I proceed carefully because the analogy I am going to draw will link ever so discreetly to the workplace, and I remember the famed blogger "Dooce" who got fired from her day job for just such writing. To be sure, that was in the primordial ages of the internet, when privacy still mattered perhaps, and when there were so few bloggers that all five or six of them stood out, and their bosses read them and got mad. Things have changed, completely, by now. Everybody blogs, or has moved on to Instagram and Snapchat. Privacy is unknown (from the ME priuace, pryvat, by way of the L privatus, "belonging to oneself, not to the state" (ah hah!); from privare, to separate, "prob. akin to the OL pri, see PRIME"). How do I know the dangers of blogging indiscreetly are less? Dooce herself, Heather Armstrong, relates breezily that now "blogging is so flush with money" that the writers of them, no longer five or six but numberless, simply skip over telling the "messy" personal stories which earned them their salaries at first (no kidding?), and instead "curate," "monetize" images of their lives, a la Instagram. I'll say. Remember the beautiful young fashionista who directed me to a fashion blog for seventy-year-olds? She had a baby. She now therefore understands all about refugees, through nursing her infant son and wondering how she would ever do that, and get fresh diapers and things, if she were a refugee. News reports seem to show that most of the strong young men who are refugees have other concerns, but we move on.

In sum I think I may link my dad's wisdom of the ages, from a girlhood kitchen to a current workplace, without worrying too much that it will be seen and will offend. Besides, my small tale of one woman coming into a job and supplanting another woman who thought the job was hers, can be quickly told. Here's the real interest -- is it possible to read someone else's thoughts?

Of course you can guess people's thoughts by their behavior. The annoyed sigh, the rough picking up of a phone when the newcomer is not familiar with all the buttons; months later, the soft "tsk-tsk-tsk" (so faint I almost don't think I heard it), and the pointed walking away, when a certain plan is not what the Other would have allowed.

But can you read someone's thoughts merely through the air, when behavior is nice enough? (Nice: interestingly, a word derived from the Latin nescire, to be ignorant, as in ne, not, + scire,  to know, see SCIENCE. In ME the word nice meant "strange, lazy, and foolish," and has since gone from what I think of as eighteenth-century-novel meanings -- delicate, precise, subtle, "minutely accurate" -- to our own "generalized term of approval" for anything pleasant.) Is it, mind-reading, a vital human ability or is it just imagination? I remember learning somewhere the psychological opinion, the result of a survey perhaps, that most people perceive positive comments as neutral, and neutral comments as negative. We hear "you have a pretty houseplant" as houseplants are pretty and we hear "houseplants are pretty" as ... yes, but not yours. Now in my workplace we both of us have pleasant, light conversations about family or romance or the weather, and yet our hearts don't seem to be in it, not remotely. But am I right, and can I therefore read thoughts, and she the same? Or am I hearing positive-as-neutral and neutral-as-negative, and she the same? Of course the tsk-tsks and the pointed walking aways do linger in the memory. I'm sure whatever I've done lingers in hers. I exist, mostly.

One great proof of two people not getting on must be the absence of good-natured everyday mockery between them. There wasn't much of that sort of fun when Grandmother moved in. If you know someone well enough to see his flaws but still enjoy his company, happy mockery is possible. Lacking same, mockery is too dangerous a ground to tread on. I wouldn't dream of making light fun of my co-worker who thinks I have her job, and she the same. We're just nice. 

It matters because if something could be done to improve the relationship, if we could stop reading or sending thoughts or if we could dismiss it all as imagination, then that would be good. So much more relaxing, so much less silly. A certain amount of bitter, piquant excitement would be lost, which I am sorry to say does keep human feuds boiling doesn't it, whether between persons or families or nations probably. Love can cool, perhaps it matures, but hate is always fresh and fun, always righteous. We don't hate, my co worker and I. How else could we talk nicely? But I see workplace hatred elsewhere and so I see the freshness and the excitement of it every day. So do we all, if we look at the news.  

Which brings me to this: now don't blanch: we laugh along when Harriet the Spy asks "what kind of a pill brings a Bible to the beach?" (or lugs the Bible into everything) but this does shape our civilization. You have heard it was said, do not kill; I say, do not be angry at all ... you have heard, do not commit adultery; I say, do not even look; ... love your enemy, greet more than just your brother; be perfect. All this is from the gospel of Matthew, chapter 5 only. Here we have instructions not just to control our behavior but, almost ferociously, to amend and control our thoughts.

Why on earth? Unless yes of course they can be read, and they are the source of everything?

Years ago Grandmother eventually moved in with independent granddaughters, and later, when it was inevitable, to a nursing home. Two days ago co-worker got the news that she is moving on, too. So it's all moot. "An assembly of freemen ... debatable ... so hypothetical as to be meaningless."

" 'Judge ye' "

But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye; for we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard. Acts 4: 19-20.

Sometimes you do come across the most remarkable things on the interwebs. Last night PJMedia posted an article about the state of Massachusetts now forcing " 'LBGT accomodation' " on churches in that state, in other words, the churches like any other institutions with buildings and bathrooms must deny that men are men and women, women, and ensure that the bathrooms are open to all. More, congregants are not to be permitted to criticize the matter. Churches tolerating such "harassment" could be sued under anti-discrimination laws.

Down in the comments section, which yes are full of sad angry trolls, as on every site, bickering at each other, nevertheless I found an extraordinary bit of information. You do find those, too, written by your talented fellow citizens who probably should be in elected office or running newsrooms but who, for many reasons, are not. This one commenter said, regarding Massachusetts demanding obeisance about our apparatchik-run insanity du jour, that "the great Christian response is Acts 4:19."

I looked up the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 4, verse 19, and found the quote above. "Whether it is right in the sight of God to obey you more than God, you decide; but we can only say what we have seen and heard."

Peter and John were answering the authority figures of their day, who demanded they stop talking about Jesus even though an entire crowd in Jerusalem had just seen them heal a paralyzed man, in (the resurrected) Jesus' name, and walk with him into the Temple precincts. But even that background story is less striking, for our purposes for the moment I think, than the utter subtlety and truth of the Apostles' response to authority's eternal demand: which in the end always seems to be, Shut up and obey. Their answer, "whether we should listen to you more than God, you decide. But we must say what we have seen and heard;" is simply an announcement of reality; of truth, because God has not made an absurd world. To look about you and see and hear, and to testify, is to testify to truth, and therefore to God. It's also to testify to the ordinary person's ability to see truth. And therefore to have authority. G. K. Chesterton notices that this is one of the things Christianity's critics dislike about it. Orthodoxy tends to stick with you even if you didn't like his sing-song paradoxes as you drove to work listening to his book on tape a few months ago.

In these two sentences in Acts, the Apostles also put the onus on authority to declare whether or not it deserves Godlike hearkening. "Judge ye." Authority must either shamefacedly say, No we do not, which negates them; or, pompously, Yes we do, which is false. Peter and John thus give us a refreshing dismissal of the webs that authority so often catch us in -- especially our modern liberal world's teaching, nanny state authority, coolly eliding, um, "God" -- when it insists that we sit up before its demands and discuss and explain why we think we should remain in error as in the bad old days, when people had unjust thoughts. No, no discussion. "You," authority, "judge" your rank. Of course it does, shamefaced or not. Don't forget the apostles must have known the risk they were taking. Authority executed every one of them except John just for a start.

So the interesting problem of authority hating truth, and hating the ordinary man's testifying to it, seems to be very old. Our quandary seems to be, what risks we take in refusing debate, but throwing truth in their laps, to do as they like with. 

Three odd new ideas, and the ancestral castle -- Llantilio!

Here are three strange new ideas: which I will try to summarize as clearly as possible, because although I read politics, when I try to write it, I turn unoriginal and merely end up repeating other people. These ideas may not be altogether correct, but they are certainly startling. Namely,

• that global "free trade"*** is a bad thing, while nation-by-nation protectionist tariffs are better for the nations that enact them. Free trade, it seems, may be a kind of free-for-all craft fair, where no one pays an entry fee to set up a booth. The result is that most of the goods for sale are junk hawked by the impoverished, who have few other job choices because borderless "free trade" has also prompted their old employers to close up shop and reopen only in the cheapest sections of the vast fairgrounds. Protectionist tariffs, on the other hand, are like the fees charged by any self-respecting town (or park district or hotel ballroom manager) to vendors to get in and sell. The fees fill the host's treasury let's hope, vendors have reason to stay in town, hire good help, and mind their and their neighbors' booths -- and the quality of goods rises above stolen shampoo and razor blades;
• that capitalism** is all very well as far as economic liberty is concerned, but once it married the modern state (which had already destroyed the medieval church and its curbs on human folly and sin) it helped birth the modern man; the modern man who does little else but buy stuff, and obey the authority that swept into the vacuum of religion: government, down to the last license plate renewal sticker and to the baking of correct cakes. Now I deny part of this dreary old complaint. There is nothing wrong with the pleasure of owning nice things. Queen Victoria, a great moral character, posed all hers and photographed them so people could see what she owned, art and knickknacks and such. Besides, if you turn righteous about the tragic emptiness of mere possessions, pretty soon you're leaning over your neighbor's fence and deciding he owns too much crap. That way lies, Georgie Pillson who loved his bibelots would say, mere "Bolshy" (Bolshevik, communist) attitudes. As to the other, the vacuum of religion filled by government diktat, yes, I see that. We seem to obey just about as readily as the medieval serf trudging his grain to the lord's mill. What has capitalism done to our inner life, to the soul that read Milton and said no to kings? 
• and third and most startling of all comes the idea that Abraham Lincoln*  -- Lincoln, I say -- was a bad apple very much responsible for the pitiless, authoritarian nanny-state that is Washington, D.C. At first it's hard to know whether a person who believes this resides in the far-left or the far-right fever swamps. It almost seems an opinion outside even those bounds of sanity, unless you are a Southerner, since they of course do have special issues about A.L. Coincidentally or not, the scholars who don't like him also refer to the Civil War as "the War for Southern Independence." What they seem to be saying nowadays, politically, is not that slavery was good, but that when Lincoln harnessed the power of the federal government to stomp out Rebellion, he also stomped out the Constitution which took its legitimacy from the people ratifying it --or not -- not from "demigods" in Philadelphia who, through it, had bestowed upon us in 1787 perfect, inescapable rule. After Lincoln, no more secession talk. You're in. The nation is all, and if you disagree you are overwhelmed and killed. The same scholars who dislike him note that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and threw newspapermen in jail. And yet he always gets the benefit of the (incidentally, liberal) authoritarian's excuse, that it was all for a higher cause. He felt compassion.             

There are our three odd new ideas. I trowel them in here, thinking they might serve as mulch for our mental gardening project, Blogging the Gospels. For it is to the Gospels that we return, in answer to the challenge of these ideas. (Re: Lincoln. "The first shall be last, and the last, first"?) Do these short books have answers for the business of buying and selling, for the purpose of life outside business, do they have answers about government or liberty? If we, as modern people, seem to be so strangely unfree, what did freedom once mean and where did it come from? And can the Gospels civilize the hordes invading America and all Europe, against our will and at our governments' beckoning?

 

Above, please note a building which can seem even more haunting than it looks, if we think of it as dating from a time of strange freedoms we no longer know. Oh, I don't say it wasn't built to supervise a conquered population. I don't deny that circa 1216 dental care did not exist and Jews were too often expelled from too many towns. But it is possible to gaze at those towers and vaguely, vaguely imagine a time when something liberating overlay all. It may only have been as simple a fact as that even the lords of castles then, even kings, acknowledged an authority source, and a potentially punishing one, above themselves. I think it might have been the Gospels. Now, in our liberated West, no more of that.

A bleak but powerful late winter view, isn't it? The photo is of White Castle, in Wales, and comes from the blog Codlins and Cream. I have mentioned her before. She took a day trip there recently.

I have decided that this is my ancestral castle. Well, why not? You have only to go back a few generations before your family tree spreads out exponentially to include scores and hundreds of people, and then thousands and millions. "Arithmetical ancestors," Henry Adams called them in Mont St. Michel and Chartres. Your own, private four grandparents may recognize you and be enchanted to see you when you all meet in heaven, but after that all bets are off. Who knows but your many-times-great grandparents may shout in delight, and rush to take upon their knee as it were, people whom you would have been horrified to know in life. Is there jealousy beyond the veil? At any rate why not claim as your own, then, this pile once echoing to the commands of Hubert de Burgh? Its Welsh name is "Llantilio." Can't you just see that word as the title of a middle-aged-ladies' medieval romance novel? It's splashed in white script across the cover. The background painting is all rich sunshine, beautifully perspectived green hills, a towering pile, and a girl with flowing hair and royal blue kirtle on horseback approaching it at noonday. Llantilio!

I can. It's the year 1216. (My teeth probably hurt. I have been taught the Jews are a cursed race. I don't live in a society such that a daring man "pleasures" me in a side chapel during Mass.) I am sitting on the companion slope to the one before me in the picture, leading down to the river. Or no, that must be the moat, and I stand on a bridge overlooking it; overlooking it, and the tower and section of the wall -- my father's wall -- opposite.

Everything is freshly built. I marvel at the gleaming whitewash, and at the depth of the foundations that must have been dug to support those walls. It will stand a thousand years and more. Of course I'm in love with Gryfyth ap Summat, the foreman in charge of all the works, he with his deep brown beard and brown eyes. But I am the daughter of a march lord, and so I may not look at a vile person however handsome ... (is this what they call flash fiction?). And I can't possibly trace my ancestry back to the cook or the tenant farmers plowing all around, because what's the pleasuring in that? As an aside, do I also know freedom, because I know the Gospels?

Curiously, I happened to find -- it's me again, not the medieval miss of White Castle -- in the library yesterday a novel which is essentially male historical romance fiction. The House of Special Purpose, by John Boyne (Doubleday, 2009). Even the cover glows with a sort of male equivalent of the flowing-hair-and-horses art given to Particia Bracewell and Elizabeth Chadwick. We see an off-center detail shot of a real nineteenth-century oil portrait, all dark blue and olive-gray: some man in military uniform, and yellow and red roses below. I've gotten well underway reading the story. It seems good, if simple. (I'm sorry but I don't believe in the scene of the young girl chancing to look up while disembarking a yacht at dusk, to espy the hero in a distant third floor window.) Scanning a bit ahead, I think the plot is actually going to concern the hero's memories of guarding the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia during the reign of the last Czar. The romance publishing industry belonging so very much to women, it's interesting to see what a man writer does when given his head.  

Also. This is the second modern novel I have plucked, at random, in the last month from the shelves of a nice suburban library, in which it seems to me that the authors -- whatsoever their subject matter -- clearly prove early on that they know on which side the publishing industry's ideological bread is buttered. In the first, Death and Mr. Pickwick, we already have two teen boys kissing on page 64 of an 800 page book; in this of Boyne's, we have an elderly Russian monarchist refugee in London, in 1979, bizarrely slapping down "that awful Thatcher woman" on page 16 out of 470. I can't believe the two snippets (and that's all they are) are coincidence. I believe these writers know they have to get past their share of twenty-five-year-old editorial interns wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, who have utterly rigid ideas about what liberation is. And just imagine "pitching" them a book idea on blogging the Gospels -- on what the Gospels have meant to the West. Incomprehensible. They think all that nonsense is done, and their ideas will last a thousand years.




*** "Trump is right on trade," by Patrick Buchanan, Feb. 16, 2016.
**"Capitalism: the conservative illusion," by Jack Trotter, Chronicles Magazine, Feb. 4, 2016.
 *"The Strange Case of the Missing Constitution," by Clyde Wilson, Chronicles Magazine, Nov. 1, 2007.

Again with the Tuesday night stream-of-consciousness thing. Matthew 8

As for the stream of consciousness, well, why not? -- I have just embarked on an email correspondence with a (relatively) well-known British writer, with whom either I shall have an interesting Victorian-style letter exchange for a time, or who has been told by his publishers "do some marketing" and is fulfilling that mandate only for as long as he must, -- at any rate under this impetus I have been dashing off "a budget of news" of a morning, and find the haste and ease of it charming at evensong too;

-- our old friend Tom Wark at Fermentation has just said that the heyday of the wine blog and probably the personal blog is over, if we may judge by the decline in google searches for those terms since the glory years of 2009-2010; people who wish to share anything have long since turned to social media, Facebook especially, to say it faster. So one feels one may write anything one likes, as no agent or editor is likely trolling the internet looking for smart, focused niches;

-- tomorrow, February 10, marks the anniversary of the wedding of Queen Victoria to Albert, or as she liked to call him sometimes, "DEAREST PERFECT ALBERT." 1840. I just love Queen Victoria. Such a dumpy, loving, decisive but melodramatic little force of nature she must have been. The dumpy soul nevertheless wrote frankly of "being clasped by him in the sacred hours of the night" and bore nine children to prove it; struck her hand to her head and melodramatically shrieked "My reason! my reason!" when she feared her grandfather King George III's madness was coming out in her; yet had an intellect and a character piercing enough to make Bismarck mop his brow and gasp "mein Gott, that is a woman" upon surviving his first dealing with her. She held up her late husband's miniature portrait, when traveling, before the fine sights of Europe that they had not been able to see together, as if that symbolic act counted as a joint vacation (in the eyes of God I am sure it did -- now that is faith); and yet she was worldly enough to purr, "a rose in front, child -- for the sake of the footmen" when she noticed her blooming granddaughters showing too much cleavage in the drawing room.

A hundred and seventy six years ago, young Victoria, aged twenty, lay awake in raptures we presume on the eve of her true life's beginning. How odd, when you think of it, that the earth's completing of one hundred and seventy six orbits around the sun should serve to make time pass, such that people grow and age, and die. This is not to be morbid, but simply to notice. A science fiction plot or at least the background to one, lies here also. Some near-deathless alien creature, all wings and eyes, should also be puzzled by this. The Earthman hero would be at a loss to explain.

Now to blogging the sources. Matthew, chapter 8. Jesus performs four major cures of named characters, the leper, the centurion's servant, Peter's mother-in-law, and the two "Gadarene demoniacs," whose demons he drives into a herd of swine who then rush down into the sea and drown. Amid other healings, he also calms the storm at sea and dissuades two potential disciples from following him who won't be able to handle the life. After all this, "the whole town came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him they begged him to leave their district."

This is odd, almost shocking. Wouldn't they beg him to stay? Who wants demoniacs around, "so savage no one could travel by that road," who does not want to be cured of leprosy by a word? There is the ring of truth to this mass reaction, however: a normal human fear of something beyond freakishness, and a desire to protect against it.

There is also some major point being made in the elaboration of the story of the centurion's servant. Other characters in the Gospel so far simply ask for healing, and are granted it. The centurion speaks the wonderful words, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and my servant will be healed," and he goes on without a break to describe authority. He is subject to authority himself, and he commands soldiers and slaves. It's upon hearing this that Jesus exclaims on the centurion's "faith," and of course heals the servant by long distance in that hour. But faith in what? In Jesus' own place in a proper progression of authority?

Rain, music, Matthew 7 -- stream-of-conscious-ing the sources

People hate bad weather, but I think there are times when rain, cold, whipping winds and darkness can be very comfortable. That is, of course, when you are home safe, have the evening free before you plus the following day, and can indulge yourself with a cocktail, Chopin, some cheeses and the cat. She walks repeatedly, delicately around the computer keyboard, purring and stretching a back leg just so. One must peer over her arched back, and around her big fluffy tail, just so. Do you know the photo of the medieval cat's inky pawprints, discovered on the pages of a 15th century manuscript in Dubrovnik? Dubrovnik is in Croatia, rather a famous ancient city. It used to be called Ragusa, and is, so they say, the most beautiful medieval walled city in the world.

Image from National Geographic

I hope the cat in the year 1400-and-something was gently steered off the book to the stone-flagged floor, there to be given a distracting treat, and not flung headlong out a clerestory window by an enraged scribe. I myself have a second cat who is not nearly so graceful as the first, especially around computer keyboards.

And I often think, during election years especially, that someone should find a way to popularize the riposte, "You're in Dubrovnik, I don't hear you," as an acknowledged formula to deflate poltroon candidates, rambling bully professors, malicious journalists, straw-man debate opponents, hectoring trolls, and other such people who chloroform debate while pretending to advance it. You're in Dubrovnik -- I don't hear you would be a way of saying, you eternally lie and I no longer expend any energy for you about that. The little speech is one that Mia Farrow's character says towards the end of Rosemary's Baby. She looks straight ahead and grips a knife I think, as she confronts all the people in her apartment building, and life, who are devil worshipers and are after her "little Andy or Jenny." Chief among the coven are the too-solicitous old neighbor couple, who at this climactic scene are supposed to be vacationing innocently in Dubrovnik, but clearly are not because there they are in the room. They attempt to soothe and reprove her. She speaks the liberating words.

"You're in Dubrovnik. I don't hear you."

The rain has stopped, but the weatherman says a freeze is settling in, so we are even cozier. The Chopin has been a recording of the complete Nocturnes, which you may access on YouTube; our pianist here, one Brigitte Engerer, (1952-2012). She was known for being little-known to the public but hugely respected by peers, for being "always chicly turned out," and for chain-smoking Gauloises.

What else better to do with the rest of the evening than Blog the Sources? We have reached Matthew, chapter 7. Let us see what, just what, the Sources will give to us on any ordinary rainy dark Tuesday night in February. Revelation, is it now? We will indulge in pure stream of consciousness reactions.

"Judge not, lest ye be judged." The instruction not to criticize or really judge another person -- followed by the explanation that whatever "mote" or speck you see in your brother's eye, the "beam" in yours is far bigger -- must have had a civilizing influence. Condemnation and then violence can always hack away at one another. Perhaps what has a chance to stop both is an internal control: "I have no right to condemn, I have my fellow's fault ten times over."

And yet this instruction is followed by "do not cast your pearls before swine," i.e. don't offer precious things to people who can't appreciate them. Precious spiritual or intellectual things, correct? Instructions, even? -- since who owns pearls? But isn't that itself a judgment?

"Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you shall find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Now here we come to something. Is this a new definition or understanding of God? God who is personally present, a petition or a thought away from every human being. We know of the God whom Abraham argues with over the punishment coming to Sodom and Gomorrah, the God with whom Moses spoke "face to face." We have heard of Elijah's "still small voice." and of God who told Jeremiah, "before I formed you in the womb I knew you." Now God himself is a kind of parable: the father who will far less "give his son a stone when he asks for bread," than a human father, "wicked" as he humanly is, would do.

"Therefore." All it takes is one word, missing in modern translations and present in the King James, to draw together the chapter into a lesson. Yes yes, don't judge other people, ask and you shall receive, "do to others whatever you would have them do to you," yes we get it. But no. No, "therefore all things that ye would men do to you, do also to them." We are not talking about random sweet-natured deeds. If you want life to be coherent, then approach its component parts coherently: do not judge your fellow man, and ask of God what you want, and therefore -- keeping the coherent pattern -- behave toward your fellow man as you want him to behave to you. You are already beyond mere non-judgment. If he too is living coherently, if he too just got done asking God for what he wants, and is now facing the world and his business therefore doing unto others, etc. "This is the law and the prophets."

But who actually can do this? The instructions seem simple and sensible enough. No sooner does Jesus vouchsafe them, though, than he gives in quick succession four short word-pictures (flash fiction, shall we say?) about 1) the difficulty of entering "at the narrow gate," about 2) recognizing good and rotten trees by their sound and rotten fruits and of course he means much more than trees, about 3) even "disciples" who do what he does -- drive out demons, do "mighty deeds" "in his name" ("wonderful works," the King James says, which seems less cartoonish than mighty deeds) -- being rejected by him at the end, finally about 4) the "wise man" who acts on his teaching being like a man who builds a house on a solid foundation.

Why the narrow gate, the exclusivity? He seems almost gleeful about it.

 And "when Jesus finished, the crowds were astonished, for he taught as one with authority, and not as the scribes." I'll bet they were.

Now YouTube has segued into Clair de Lune, Debussy, and both cats are asleep.        

Blogging the sources: Matthew 6 -- Hidden things

To sum up the first half of this chapter: when you give alms, pray, or fast, do not do so publicly or with ostentation. "Like pagans and hypocrites." Rather, do them quietly and in secret, so that God only, "your Father who sees in secret," sees. (The Our Father prayer is inserted here.) He will repay you, "openly" the King James translation assures us. "Lay up treasure in heaven."

Well and good. Next, what of the strange verses about the eye being "the lamp of the body"?

"If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be."  

This seems flip-flopped. In our health-obsessed age, it seems more obvious to say that if your body is sound, your eye will be filled with light, in other words that it will reflect your good health. Just because a person's eye is "bad," his "whole body will be in darkness"? Really? Are the blind or, good grief, the nearsighted then full of darkness, spiritually? For surely it's that, implied.

Once again the King James Version helps. It translates "if your eye is evil," not just bad. Earlier this week my children (they're grown up) and I were talking about the stupid or degrading stuff you can see on Facebook sometimes, and of the unpleasant habits and consequences of life in general you see in hospital emergency rooms. My kids have interesting jobs. The latest video on Facebook is of the clown throwing a pie in a woman's face while both pass each other on a pair of side-by-side, up and down escalators somewhere. While he goes down afterwards, she in a fury tries to chase him even while her escalator is carrying her helplessly up. Of course he makes large faces, gestures shock, and such. It's meant to be funny. I like to foresee the next chapter, in which one of the clown's victims does something to send him to an emergency room. Or even better, puts on greasepaint and a red nose and sits in a chair outside his apartment building for, oh, I don't know -- years. Yes, an eye that takes in evil things can seem to fill the body with darkness. Perhaps that's what the Master meant.

Now about God, mammon, food, clothes, and worry about the future. If "mammon" means money and we're told we can't "serve" both God and mammon, isn't that what modern pundits call a false choice? Why is money bad when money not only buys food and health for me, but also constitutes alms for the poor? As for not being "anxious about what you will eat or what you will wear," it's passages like these that require annotators to assure us, in the fine print, that "Jesus does not deny the reality of human needs." Thank goodness. True that worry will not add a moment to one's lifespan -- "one cubit to his stature," the KJV says, which I like better -- but though the birds of the sky may not sow or reap, leading us to take comfort in the fact that they go on living, it's not exactly the case either that "your heavenly Father feeds them" just magically. They do spend most of their time scrounging for food. Are we supposed to do that, too? He just got through telling us we're better than they are. An odd thought in itself, in these days of PETA and our really sentimental love of animals. No clown would throw a pie in a dog's face. That would be mean.

Not to harp on the King James Bible, but I do think its poetry clarifies bizarre spiritual instructions like these better than firm modern prose. Besides, in using the KJV you can also enjoy spotting trivia. While we try to understand why not to worry, below, please find 1) the title of an old Sidney Poitier movie, and 2) a favorite Bertie Wooster quote, about the members of the Drones' Club, Freddie Threepwood and all, "toiling not, neither do they spin." Bertie is always nattering on about how he won a Scripture Prize in school.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

"Shall he not much more clothe you" implies spiritual care a bit more readily than "will he not much more provide for you." To provide for is workaday. One can be clothed with many things, even ye of little faith. Pro-vide comes from the Latin, meaning "before seeing." Clothe is all English, cloth, back to Old English clath and clitha, poultice, from an Indo-European root meaning to stick or adhere. "See CLAY." The matter of man.

Hidden prayers, hidden darkness in the body, hidden needs perhaps. Needs beyond the obvious, shared by mere birds and "pagans." And then about that. Isn't Jesus, Mr. Compassion, a little judgmental?

Blogging the sources, skipping ahead

We left off with Matthew chapter 5, in which we noticed "it begins" -- Jesus demands perfect behavior. But now we are going to skip ahead just a little, because amazingly, since beginning our project the West's sources have already shown through in two episodes, one out in the world and one under my own observation.

A word here about the name Jesus. Do you also find yourself uneasy saying or writing the name repeatedly? It seems flip, unthinking, to do so. Yet what else can one do? You may know the little joke about the Catholic priest who attends Protestant worship services for the first time with a Protestant friend. As the service goes on and the pastor warms to his sermon, Father grows more and more uncomfortable. Finally he leans over to his friend and whispers, "he could at least call him Mr. Jesus." To write "Christ" seems better, but so far in our reading of Matthew, that is not his name. What did his disciples call him? Often "Lord," as it happens.

We left off with Matthew 5. Here is the first distraction that is going to make us skip ahead: a terrible story about a young Muslim woman beaten to death by a mob last March in Afghanistan. At long last, in December 2015, the trials of her murderers and all the bystanders and all the police who did nothing for her, were finished. The results were essentially either straight acquittals or slaps on the wrist for everyone. She had been falsely accused of burning a Koran -- by "a fortuneteller" and by the caretaker of a local Muslim shrine -- and that was that. The last paragraph of the story, which Breitbart relayed from the New York Times, uncovers the real reason for the woman's lynching. "An investigation found she had confronted men who were themselves dishonoring the shrine by trafficking in amulets and, more clandestinely, Viagra and condoms."

The sources of a civilization matter. Here, in Afghanistan, is a culture whose men have no knowledge of the story of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the Temple. It's not that their knowing it would have spared this woman's life, or that Westerners don't get up rabid mobs sometimes. But if the condom-peddlers she confronted had had the story of the moneychangers in their backgrounds, they might -- might -- have reacted to her with some kind of shamefacedness. They might not have been there at all. If she had lived to press charges, her account of their unsavory practices at a holy place might have rung bells of memory and of righteous association, even in the courtroom.

The men who killed her also don't know the phrase "let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone" -- the words Jesus speaks to the mob when he saves the adulteress from stoning. Again, it's not that the murderers' merely knowing the phrase would have spared her life, or that Westerners don't get up rabid mobs. But a civilization that has that story bred into its soul has some kind of respect for life and especially for the lone woman surrounded by howling men. I don't know exactly where in the Gospels these stories occur, I could look it up in a moment and so can you; the point is, the stories are in my head and the death of Farkhunda Malikzada appalls because in my civilization, thank God, her death is offensive and not normal. My parents sent me to Sunday school. Men and women who don't have these stories in their heads, in their souls, behave in ways we still, for the moment, find shocking. (Consider. Why did a Westerner report on the condom-selling?) They think they are just.
 
As for the second distraction that makes us skip ahead, the one under my own observation -- well. Let's just say, you shouldn't tell people what you earn. Especially don't tell your co-workers. The reaction is going to be deeply human. Everyone is "upset," but as they lean over and share the gossip, the feeling you sense is rather a joyous and fascinated rage. Maybe it's what the Afghan mob felt, on a much more deadly scale. "He makes X dollars, and I've been here longer, and he does nothing."

And yet Jesus gave our civilization the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20). Summarized, the story tells of a landowner who hires three or four sets of day-laborers to work for him. Some he hires at dawn, some at noon, some still later. When they all come for their wages that evening, he pays them out beginning with the last-hired. They get the same money as, and for far less work done than, the men hired at dawn. These latter complain about unfairness. The landowner sensibly points out, "you agreed to your wage when I hired you. What if I choose to be generous with those whom I hired last? Am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?"

The point of the parable is of course something more than money -- the first shall be last and the last, first, in the "kingdom of heaven," whatever that is -- but on a literal level it's still eerie. Did Jesus, then, understand capitalism? Did he understand contract law? I seem to remember Sunday school teachers (CCD, we called it) emphasizing only that the Master was tolerant and non-judgmental, loved the poor, was long-haired and kind. Almost by definition, a '70s hippie. Or is the upshot of this story that, when you are upset, you the retail staff, you the Afghan mob -- you must nonetheless control yourself?

Blogging the West ... and some wine

We don't always have to be extremely serious, although the times seem to require it most of the time.

I find that I like my wines these days to be as light as possible -- for their type, that is; I am not asking for flawed or exhausted productions, just subtle ones. McKinley Springs 2010 Washington state cabernet sauvignon is just so. It pours in the glass as clear as jelly, and goes on to impress not with fruit basket metaphors but with a refreshingness all its own. "It's just wine." Retail, about $20.

The same is true for Valpolicella. Choose your producer. This one was Buglioni. Retail, about $15.

 
Now, back to blogging the West's sources.

Matthew, chapters 3 and 4. Very weird. In chapter 3, which is all of three paragraphs, John the Baptist appears out of nowhere, immersing throngs of people in the Jordan River "as they acknowledged their sins." He rebukes the authority figures of his day, the familiar can't-have-one-without-the-other duo of Pharisees and Sadducees, warning them that mere baptism without good deeds is useless. And he predicts the coming of one "who will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire," whose sandals he, John, is not worthy to carry. Jesus then comes to him -- also practically out of nowhere, for chapter 2 ended with his toddlerhood -- asks to be and is baptized like the crowds, despite John's reservation that "I need to be baptized by you, and yet you come to me."

Chapter 4 is weirder still. Jesus goes out to the desert, fasts for forty days, and then is tempted by the devil three times. We might say he had three confrontations with him or three visions of him, but Matthew describes simple, daylight activities with simple verbs: the devil "took him," "showed him." "tempted him." The two quote scripture at one another, which sounds irreverent but that is what they do, and when Jesus refuses all "the tempter's" blandishments, the tempter goes away. Next, reality obtrudes. "When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee." Whatever pause this gave him, he got over it. Quickly Matthew tells us that he began to preach in John's own words -- 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand' -- to call disciples, and to travel, teach, and above all cure the sick. "His fame spread to all of Syria ... and great crowds followed him."

Who arrested John? What is going on in this land such that hordes of people rove about, following mystics and stepping right up for new religious rituals -- baptism -- that, like the mystics, seem to have emerged from out of nowhere? What is the kingdom of heaven, and why don't the crowds ask what it is? Who is in charge here?                                                                                                                                                                                        

Blogging the West's sources: Matthew 1 and 2

A few weeks ago, my fatheads will remember, we decided to start a project called "blogging the source of Western civilization." No kidding. To get started we accepted the premise that the West is in free fall, that for a variety of reasons it resembles -- once again to mix up images and invent new ones -- a (wealthy) car crash victim whose unconscious (not yet dead) body is being fought over by two entirely malicious and predatory witnesses, namely Islam and the progressive, jackbooted, nanny-state left. What these two would do to each other should the crash victim really die, and all his wealth monetary and otherwise die with him, is a different question.

(We know full well that the jackbooted, nanny-state left is itself a Western phenomenon. But we think it's fair to say, that the phenomenon has come so far from its putative origins in utopian compassion and outrage at injustice, has become so drunk with power and yet so smug with complacency, that it belongs to the West in the same way cancer belongs to the human body. As I write I am listening to a Christmas concert whose conductors introduced it by purring about "Christmas themes" of peace in the face of "gun violence," and of being "at peace with the earth.")

So we wanted to explore the roots of the West's achievements and liberties. How it got to that car on that road. We decided that this means tracing the achievements and liberties back to "natural law" and the Bible, and ultimately especially to the Gospels. This is because we're struck by Charles Murray's contention that it has largely been Christian exaltation of the individual that has stoked Western advancement, and because the Gospels must be almost the only bedrock Western text still working in many people's lives. I think more people are still going to church than are reading Plato or Shakespeare. If the West is hanging by a thread, it seems to be this one. Let us see what the thread is made of, and what a tugging and a pulling on it seem to prompt people attached to it to do.

Opening the Gospels means opening a book I have not looked at it twenty-five years, so as I said at the outset of the project, despite some deep messing about with religion and folkways in the past, I will be approaching it practically as an ignoramus. Perhaps that's whom it was meant for.

So.

The Gospel of Matthew. We'll approach this as an exercise in note-taking.

Chapters 1 and 2 --

Does the opening genealogy, "fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian exile," etc., indicate that Matthew regards Jesus as already so well known that, of course, people will want to know his place in world history? And, look how vital Matthew expects the Babylonian exile to be in people's, in the Jews', historical sense. It was as far removed from them in time as Joan of Arc is from us. On the other hand, we are aware of her ....

I seem to remember being taught that the genealogy was also intended to show Jesus as of royal descent. But if so, doesn't it rather defeat the purpose to trace this genealogy down to the Messiah's foster father?

I don't like my translation's clumsy "became the father of" to replace the good old King James Version's begat. In fact I read the two side by side, a paper copy of the New American Bible on the table, and an internet tab open to the King James, so that the seventeenth century edition may possibly correct the twentieth-century one. I feel sure the progressive, jackbooted left has long since infiltrated Bible translation, with an intent to administer and shape response to a dangerous book carefully in their image, as determinedly as the King James translators, in a much more Christian age, ever desired to get the word of God accurate from a Hebrew or Greek book into English for salvation's sake. Regarding especially the good old feminist complaints about all the man talk in the Bible, Father and sons and brotherhood and brethren and so forth, and how exclusionary and unkind to women it all is, the New American's translators say "the primary concern in this revision is fidelity to what the text says." Good. Also,

Discriminatory language should be eliminated insofar as possible whenever it is unfaithful to the meaning of the New Testament, but the text should not be altered in order to adjust it to contemporary concerns. 

Good. But if that has been so then why the need to avow it? Those kinds of vows lead to questions about curious discrepancies, when it turns out that the older version from a benighted, unfeminist age seems to be more inclusive in its language. For example today's translation of Matthew 2:16 says, of the Massacre of the Infants/Innocents, that upon being duped of his chance to kill the newborn Jesus, Herod ordered all the boys in Bethlehem slaughtered. The King James translation says he ordered all the children killed. There is a difference in English between boys and children. Did Herod kill the girls too? Dramatically it makes sense -- terrified mothers might have tried to pretend their babies were all girls and Herod might have foreseen that. And what of the difference between infant and innocent? Any animal species breeds infants. 'Innocent' carries additional connotations. What is the Greek word? I trust the Jacobeans to tell me, more than I trust moderns.      

Now. What of all the dreams? I count five. Four came to Joseph to instruct him what to do concerning marrying Mary, taking the family to Egypt to escape Herod, returning to the land of Israel after the monster's death, and then settling specifically in Galilee, outside the jurisdiction of Herod's son Archelaus. The fifth dream came to the Magi, warning them not to report to Herod on the newborn Jesus' location. That sounds like silly spy game stuff, but it is what the book says. "They returned to their country by another way" (Matthew 2:12). I always liked the fairy-tale simplicity of that.

And one more thing about the Massacre of the Innocents. Right away, in the next chapter, we will leap into Jesus' adult life and the beginning of, well, everything. Was Jesus aware of this holocaust in his toddlerhood, and will he ever mention it?