A song of simplicity

"One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard:
that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving."

Psalm 62:11-12

Grant us your love, oh God, that we would see your face in all Creation,
and grant us your strength, that Creation would see your face in us.

Where we are ascending from...

How hard to believe that we are still in just the beginning stages of this tragedy... We're still trying to figure out what even happened - rumors are flying and people are still numb with shock. People close to me are still finding out for the first time that there was a school shooting at Virginia Tech. This is the “before”: Before the in-depth police reports have been issued. Before the South Korean-hate groups are started by people who want someone to blame. Before we feel comfortable admitting that in our very darkest moments, we too are violent and hateful and capable of murder.

It's painful to imagine what the “after” will look like: the time when the flowers left at the site of the shooting are all decayed and swept away, when this will be yet another reason for heightened airport security and tighter gun control. The days after songs are played on the radio about the lives of the students who died and how heroic they were, and after the committees are formed to revise their school's emergency plan in case other students decide to try the same stunt.... how long until the authors make their thousands of dollars writing bestsellers about what turned this unsuspecting student into a deranged maniac who locked his classmates in a building and brutally murdered thirty three of them, taking his own life in the process?

And what beyond that? Is it foolish to look forward to a time when news of a mass murder is no longer passé? Can we really expect that someday there will be triumph over the power of darkness that so adamantly tries to drown us in grief? Can we even dare to dream of a world beyond bloodshed and alienation?

Sometimes I wonder at myself for saying yes, that there is a Prince of Peace and he is coming again to restore Creation, yes he will judge the living and the dead, and yes his Kingdom will have no end. I am baffled by this fire in my bones that fiercely refuses to cave in to despair. What reason have I to respond to this tale of violence with a refusal to beget more violence? Why can I dream only of healing these wounds with love?

“And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” Romans 5:5

"you put stones in the pocket of Quiet, to give it weight."

Today's lesson:

"It ain't that easy, but it ain't that hard... We just love with more love and we do the best we can."
- lyrics from a song by Wes Wilkes, a member of the recovery program at San Diego Rescue Mission. He gets it.

"Revelations"

Is the bible a book? Perhaps the answer depends on who is being asked. Tevye, a stout Jewish father in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” called the “the Good Book,” although he was referring just to the Tanakh, and he did habitually attribute his own enigmatic axioms to the wise authors of said book. (No Christians I know could ever be accused of such behavior…ahem.) On the other hand, James E. Bowley, referring to the same collection of Hebrew scriptures, makes his opposing opinion quite clear in his newly released Introduction to Hebrew Bible: A Guided Tour of Israel's Sacred Library. There he says plain as pie, “The Bible is Not a Book.” (It is a shame that entry 5 in the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of “book” is wrong, in that case: 5. Book. The Bible. They’ll have to go back and fix that.)

One may ask, at this point, what kind of book we are referring to. No one would contest, to be sure, that the Bible is a “set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers.” Nor is it a stretch to say definitively that the Bible is a “printed or written literary work,” or even that it is “regarded as a source of knowledge or understanding.” The real contention, the one that the esteemed Mr. Bowley is addressing, is whether the Bible composes a cohesive narrative or simply a collection of historical, literary, and moral documents. As noted before, Bowley is referring to the Hebrew scriptures, and to discuss whether or not those form a narrative is a topic for another day and another paper. For the sake of this discussion, we’ll pretend he was referring to the Christian bible, both Old and New Testaments, an assumption which will make this paper a much more lively and applicable endeavor.

Actually, the only Bible I know of that truly fits Bowley’s description is the one I have in my kitchen: the Pie and Pastry Bible. This massive volume contains recipes for every pastry delight known to Western Civilization, each of which contain more calories than a Jewish bagel shop. This “bible” was compiled by a renowned chef, Rose Levy Beranbaum, and according to followers of her confectionary cult, “The Pie and Pastry Bible is not just a bible. It's a textbook. An encyclopedia. She not only tells you what to do, but why you should do it. It requires concentration and careful reading. But if you follow her instructions, I promise that you'll bake some marvelous creations, as well as overcome many of the obstacles that home bakers face.”

From the titles, it’s relatively simple to see the difference between the Pie and Pastry Bible and the Holy Bible: one is intended for cooking, and one for establishing religious narrative. Once they are opened and used, however, it can become tricky to tell which is intended for which purpose. If both are viewed as collections of relevant material, as Bowley would prefer, then these bibles look remarkably similar – Unified compilations, divided into thematically linked sub-books of groups that contain individual recipes for “marvelous creations” and ways to “overcome many obstacles.” Pick any section you like - skip around even! Just throw in the required ingredients, and the result is a feel-good crowd pleaser. If by chance it doesn’t please the crowd, simply throw that recipe out and move on to the next one!

It seems clear to me that reading the Holy Bible like a cookbook, as the “basic instructions before leaving earth,” is as backward as reading the Pie and Pastry Bible as the foundation for a religious narrative. Unmistakably, there are major differences between the two, the most pivotal of which is the fact that while the Pie and Pastry Bible does not (and should not) have a plot, the Holy Bible very much does have, and ought to be read in light of, an overarching and underpinning fabula of the interactions between the Creator and Creation.

There are two ways to re-view the Bible, or better, two perspectives, both of which are essential to understanding its complete structure. An accurate understanding of Scripture emerges from an understanding of its deep structure – the progression of the story of creation to the redemption of creation to the perfection of creation. Such an understanding can only be gained, however, in carefully taking in the Bible’s surface structure: interwoven stories of nations and churches and individuals, multi-narratives complete with foreshadowing, irony, symbolism, allegory, and metaphor, literary elements no good story is without. These elements are the source of the Bible’s deep structure. They help us understand that the Bible is a story – plot emerges, and conflict, and tension.

Thus, we see that the Bible is indeed a book – a story that opens with a poetic hymn of creation, and closes with a similarly artistic rendering of the culmination of creation. A visiting lecturer to Point Loma’s campus once highlighted the Christian paradox of being “caught between the already and the not yet.” We have our beginning, and we have our ending. Our burden is finding the way to get from one to the other, deciding what to do with the chapters that have already been written, and those that are still germinating.

The truth is, we Christians are in an ironic pickle – we are characters in story whose ending has been written before the story itself is finished, and I think it’s fair to say this sometimes leaves us with a vague feeling of disappointment at having spoiled our own ending. Furthermore, most of what we know about the eschaton is found in a nicely imaginative but irritatingly frivolous apocalyptic vision in the last chapter of the bible. We don’t know exactly how it’s getting here, when, or what it will look like when it comes – I myself make no concrete claims about the coming kingdom except that it’s coming! Thankfully, the content of the plot from now to the Apocalypse promises to be tremendously exciting if it is anything like the previous chapters, plus we have a host of already written stories that still need to be re-told and re-examined if we are to have any hope of learning from our mistakes and being faithful in the events to come.

Jacob's Ladder - please comment

Please share your thoughts on the story below - it is a work in progress...and the more I read it the more I revile it. So if you hate it too, please tell my why, so I can justify throwing it in the garbage. If you don't hate it, please tell me why, so I can toss and turn at night wondering why I hate this story so much.

Sorry - I'm really not so dramatic as all this, it's just that my roommate watched a Hilary Duff movie tonight, and I think Hilary's aura has infected my apartment. Ghostbusters is my only hope!

Jacob's Ladder

Jacob stared at the spotless patch of carpet where the Playstation used to be – a crushed section of pale blue that stood out pretentiously from its dingy bruise-colored surroundings, a sneering square of celestial purity. He heaved an aggravated sigh, cursed his uncle, and returned his sullen gaze to the television screen, where Steve Irwin was holding the tail of some fanged snake, going on and on about how perfectly safe he was. Jacob stifled a snigger – if Steve Irwin knew so much about handling danger, how come he was dead?

Dead. His stomach knotted as the word pulsed hollowly through his brain. He’d forgotten for a second and now the reality of what happened two weeks ago stormed him again. It really wasn’t Jacob’s fault, though. True, he hadn’t been at his station, but he’d spilled a full bag of Skittles all over the deck, and was trying to salvage them from the warm puddles of chlorine water threatening to dissolve them into a bleeding rainbow of sugar. He didn’t notice the spidery girl clinging desperately to her pink arm floatie, straining to keep her lips above the water. She had probably cried, bug-eyed, for help, but her thin protest was submerged in the roar of the pool’s other occupants, swarms of children all clamoring for attention, all desperate to be noticed. There was no way for her small brown voice to rise above the boisterous Tennessee vigor that crowded the pool alongside inner tubes and melting sunscreen and abandoned goggles. The other children paid no attention, but who could blame them? It’s just that children don’t understand death, Jacob reasoned. They just don’t have time for it.

Jacob himself hardly believed in death, for all those videos he was made to watch about first aid during lifeguard training. Glass stabbed in people’s toes, bloody gashes in suspiciously kosher locations: Why were these people always getting cut in the least interesting places? The forearms and knees are so third grade; he thought someone should make a video in which someone’s gut was flayed open, or their ear chopped off. Real emergencies looked more like what happened in the arcade games he played in the lobby of the hotel where his mother worked – digital bodies peppered with bullets lining the streets, digital blood spraying the windshields of digital cars – Jacob would try to shoot mostly bad guys, but occasionally an innocent bystander or two would go down, and he would smirk even as he winced at the anguished digital moans of the dying. After all, the fact of life is that you win some, you lose some. Life is about avoiding as much bad stuff as possible, and trying to enjoy the good. And that afternoon at the pool, Jacob had concentrated intently on the good: scurrying across the rough cement, scooping up clumps of drowning candies and adding them in great handfuls of strawberry, orange, and lemon to his already stuffed mouth.

Now he would swear off candy altogether if it would do anything to appease the hurricane of emotion that was ravaging the town. Already two weeks since that little girl died, and he was still hiding at his uncle’s ranch to avoid being mobbed by gangs of angry parents, angry bosses, angry town officials, angry friends. Even his dumpy old bachelor uncle was angry, and had punished him by taking the Playstation, the mini-fridge, and the computer out of the old barn where Jacob was now forced to pass his days watching idiot snake-handlers petting the bellies of poisonous vipers. Jacob’s legs jigged with pent up frustration. He was terribly antsy to get back to the arcade, but the thought of another interrogation by his boss made him weak with anxiety. With an air of heavy resignation Jacob left his place on the couch and shuffled to his bedroom to hunt for something to take the edge off his misery and confinement. He remembered he’d stashed some candy in his bedroom when he’d first arrived, but now he couldn’t remember where he’d hid it, or even if there was any left.

Jacob made his way past the plaster Indian Chief who stared accusingly from under his lampshade on the bedside table, and came to the looming dresser, which hunched like a gargoyle above the rest of his uncle’s garage sale furniture. He leaned toward the grainy mirror that hung above it reflecting the cavernous room, and saw a pale and dowdy zombie looming toward him with desperation written on its face. This was pathetic. Jacob turned from his reflection and gave an irritated yank on the top drawer. It had rained earlier in the week, and the badly insulated back room had gotten damp, so all the wood was swollen and groaned and creaked like some second-rate horror flick. He began with the top drawer - lighters, change, bottle caps, receipts, empty cigarette packs. Next were socks and rumpled underwear, then a drawer that should’ve held jeans but was empty because he hadn’t gotten around to doing laundry, now T-shirts and some dirty magazines hidden underneath. He looked resignedly at the bottom drawer – it was heavy, maybe off its tracks. Jacob tugged and the whole bureau tipped forward with a shudder.

He heard Skittles scattering inside, and a fat bead of drool eased onto his lower lip as he anticipated the comforting sweetness inside. He braced one hand against the bureau, gripped the drawer’s dirty bronze handle with the other, and roughly yanked until he could just barely shove his hand inside the opening. He squeezed his arm into the drawer’s musty darkness, congratulating himself on having found his hidden stash.

Before he reached it, however, a sudden and agonizingly rude pain between his ring finger and pinky finger caused Jacob to scream and jerk his hand toward himself, only to find it stuck in the narrow opening. He tried in vain to take his hand out, but was too shocked by pain and fright to relax his muscles enough to pull free. A second time he felt a sharp stabbing, this time in his fleshy middle finger. He began to shriek in panic, desperately begging for someone to help, but he knew even as he shouted that it was in vain: his uncle wouldn’t be home till six.

Great swirling waves of numbness pitched Jacob to the floor, and the dark walls whirled around him like towels in a dryer. His fingers scrabbled at the matted carpet as he wheezed through his rapidly tightening throat… now his swollen tongue was making it impossible for him to breathe, let alone call for help. He gasped against the oppressive tide of nausea that swept over him, staring helplessly at the plaster Indian Chief, who leered back down at him. Jacob would not blink – he locked his eyes in a staring contest with the Chief. The light bulb protruding from the Chief’s headdress zoomed into close focus, now shot up into the farthest corner of the room, now approached again, slowly growing brighter. Jacob’s eyes burned as he gazed fixedly at the vision of hot glowing wires that grew waveringly larger. A fat tear slid to his chin. His lips contorted into a silent infant wail as his eyes finally grew accustomed to the harsh light. Jacob tasted something sweet.