The Mom I Never Knew

I was on my way out to the back-roads and wooded areas Friday night looking for something interesting to videotape when I noticed there was some kind of parade about to start in town. I had no idea what it was about but decided to stick around and shoot some video of it, partly for kicks, and partly with the hope of selling some footage (that's always the hope!) to one of the local TV networks. Well, I wasn't able to get any of the news stations interested in my footage this time, but the outing wasn't completely wasted.

I parked a couple of blocks away from the city square and walked the remaining distance to the front of the courthouse lawn which sits right across from it. Actually, "square" is a bit of a misnomer since ours is a roundabout with a large fountain at its center. There were people lined up all around the fountain and main street, most with beach chairs they had brought, while others just sat on the curb or used blankets spread on the sidewalk.

I couldn't believe my luck! The courthouse front lawn rises above the sidewalk some ten feet or so, giving a perfect view down upon the street below. It's beautifully landscaped and shaded (this proved to be of some importance since it was over 90 degrees that evening) and has about a half dozen benches along with a most pleasant little water garden. For some odd reason, most folks had taken to the street and left the courthouse lawn nearly vacant but for a few young people mulling around. I noticed a pair of benches facing one another at just the right spot to set up my tripod. There was an elderly couple seated on one of them, and I began to chat with them as I set-up the rest of my gear.

The parade turned out to be one for the Shriner's Circus that will be here over the weekend they told me. They had a nephew who would be in the parade, but I think they mostly were just looking for a night out and something to do. They were quite friendly, although the woman was a little on the quiet side and seemed content to let her husband do most of the talking. I soon found out that this man, Bob, was originally from the same nearby town that I was from and where my dad grew-up as well, so we had a lot in common and did a good bit of reminiscing about the old days. At some point I made mention of something that one of my uncles used to do, and Bob realized I was talking about someone he knew. Once he realized what my last name was, and then found out who my parents were, his face began to beam a bit.

(Bob accidentally steps into a frame.)

It turned out that Bob knew almost everyone in my family from childhood and was once very good friends with both my mom and my dad when they were all three just teenagers. Actually, Bob and my mom were much more than friends. Apparently she was the "one that got away," and Bob was very nearly my father. Mom was very young at the time. He knew things about her childhood that I didn't. But there were also some things she didn't tell him.

My mom's parents divorced while she was very young. Both remarried. Her dad was a poor Tennessee share cropper and remained in the same small town all his life. Her mother remarried a man from Indiana and they eventually made their home there. But immediately after WWII, they lived in some other parts of the country, and one of them happened to be the same nearby town that my dad grew-up in. After a series of events (which I'll get into momentarily), mom decided to move in with her mother and stepdad here in Illinois when she was fourteen, while her brothers and sisters stayed behind in Tennessee. She had dropped out of school and was working as a cashier in a big St. Louis department store. It was during this time that she met Bob.

It was easy to tell that Bob really loved my mom. They dated for about a year until he joined the Navy and had to ship out. He wanted to pursue the Navy as a career (which he did) and was too young to get married he thought. So it was best to break thinks off and leave mom behind. I'm not sure how old he was then, but he told me that mom was still only fifteen. He said she cried and cried and begged him not to leave her there alone. He said the reason she felt alone was because both of her parents were terrible drunks. To make matters worse, they weren't getting along at the time. He told me that when they came home from work, grandma would leave the house headed for a bar in one direction, while Renos (her husband) would head for a different bar in the opposite direction, while mom was left to herself. They also had many terrible fights.

Mom had told me that her parents spent a lot of time in bars when she was younger, but I had no idea how bad it really was. Bob said it was about as bad as it gets. Quite honestly, I never knew what to believe half the time. Mom could embellish the truth with the best of them. But the more I learn about her, the more I can see that her lies were a defense system for her. She had a lot to be embarrassed about, including one important thing that she never told Bob.

Mom quit school in the 9th grade after she turned fourteen and ran off to get married to a Tennessee boy. It only lasted a couple of months and the marriage was annulled. I guess mom felt foolish and wanted to basically get out of town, and that's why she moved to Illinois with her mom and stepdad. Bob looked genuinely shocked when I told him that. Apparently she wanted to keep her short-lived marriage a secret. Who cold blame her?

The following year, mom started dating my dad while Bob was away, and the rest is history as they say. The one thing I can't get over is Bob sitting on the bench next to me, shaking his head, saying, "I felt so sorry for her." I never I my life heard anyone say they felt sorry for my mom before. She could be your best friend or your worst enemy. She had a temper and could be as selfish as any other woman, but she could also be very compassionate at times. She had a bad side, but I'm slowly beginning to see how the events in her life brought that out in her. The older I get, the stranger the world is.

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. That's an absolute lie. A day doesn't go by that I don't learn something new, or see an old thing in a new light. If it's like this now, I wonder what it will be like in Heaven where all things hidden are revealed? I'm sure that the afterlife will be full of new things and many surprises. But I suspect seeing the world we left behind through the eyes of God will be the biggest revelation of all.

The Cream Of Whose Jest?

During the early 1900s, James Branch Cabell wrote a long series of books throughout his life that were all tied together as part of a whole. The series is known as "The Biography of Manuel," and in it, at least one or more of the main characters is always a descendant of one Dom Manuel from the first book who thought he lived on through them. In the book I'll be commenting on here, The Cream of The Jest, it's his youngest daughter, Ettarre, who shows up, as she does in many of Cabell's other works. Speaking of characters, another who is nearly always present (as he is in this book) is Horvendile. In Cabell's other stories, Horvendile represents the author himself entering the tale. In Jest, however, Horvendile represents a fictitious author by the name of Felix Kennaston (who in turn may represent Cabell). These are the only two characters we're going to concern ourselves with because the others only play small supporting roles and have little to do with Cabell's philosophical and spiritual outlook, and this is what I'm mainly concerned with.

The main theme in all the stories from "The Biography of Manuel" is a quest for an object of beauty or happiness (usually a woman, and usually Ettarre) and almost, but not quite, attaining that goal. Thus, every book ends in loss but with the hope that some day happiness may yet be found.

Jest is a story about the dreams of a famous author by the name of Felix Kennaston and his then using those dreams as the basis for the stories he writes. These dreams take place in several different geographic locations, but most of them are in the land of Poictesme—a fictional province somewhere in Europe. When Kennaston enters his dreams, he does so as a different man, a much younger man by the name of Horvendile. Kennaston always finds Ettarre waiting for him in those dream worlds. And once there, he is never eager to return to what he perceives as a the mundane life of a middle-aged man in a loveless marriage during waking existence:

Thus he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name, than that of Horvendile.... It was droll that in his own country [waking life] he should be called Felix, since Felix meant "happy"; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there.

Kennaston invented the province of Poictesme and it's characters just as any writer of fiction invents the people and places in his books by way of imaginative day-dreams, the substance of which may be found in the heart of God as George MacDonald suggested. But Kennaston hasn't learned this yet, and he still believes that he himself is the force behind the world of imagination just as many inconsiderate people often do.

Imagine that you are wide awake in your dreams (as I have often been) and that you try to make the people who populate your dreams understand that you are from another world and that they are mere creations of your inner self... as many foolish psychologists have claimed.

"I will tell you," Horvendile replied, "though I much fear you will not understand—" He meditated shook his head, smilingly. "Indeed, how is it possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very far away from this land—in my country—a writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, he pretended to translate from an old manuscript written by an ancient clerk—called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile's part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of my dream, and these places have no existence save in my dreams, and fancies. And you, messire—and you also, madame—and dead Maugis here, and all the others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale's sake, in that romance which now draws to a close."

This statement appears early in the book during a day-dream as Kennaston walks through a garden. He is apparently thinking about his book and the things he will write in it and how he will end his story. It seems very odd that he would say such things to characters in a mere day-dream, a reverie. But at this point reality and imagination cross paths. Before he left his day-dream, Ettarre gave him half of something along the lines of a brooch which she wore as a pendant around her neck. (How she managed to break it in half is unknown since it's made of metal.) This brooch/pendant is called "the sigil of Scoteia." Of course a day-dream character can't give you an object that you can take back with you to waking reality. But as Kennaston walks in the moonlight he spots something glowing in the path and stoops down to pick up what is obviously the same half of the pendant which Ettarre had given him in the day-dream. He decides that he must have glanced at it much earlier in the day and then incorporated the likeness of the object into his reverie. Of course, this doesn't exactly turn out to be true as you'll find out later in the story.

One thing you need to know, however, is that Kennaston finds that if he lies in bed and allows light to shine on the sigil at just such an angle, he will soon find himself in another world with Ettarre. The book never refers to the phrase "out of body," but we may assume that some such thing has happened. In any event, Kennaston finds himself, or at least his consciousness, in a different kind of reality, and unlike his day-dreams, he has no control over his destination, nor much of anything else.

"Things happen so in dreams," he observed. "I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares that I quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entree."

"No, I am real Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you."

And thus he comes to understand that this world is very different from the day-dream worlds he created, for here he surely is not the creator. But is she just teasing him? Is he really part of her dream? How does a dream character have the power to dream us into their worlds? He finally decides that neither is dreaming the other into existence, but rather, they are somehow equally a part of the same dream, and that the sigil has something to do with it. He also quickly comes to realize that something else is quite different from his mere day-dreams. In those, he could touch Ettarre. Here he cannot. If he tries to, the dream ends, and it's the same in every dream he has of her thereafter. This woman whom he thought he had invented through sheer will applied to imagination, and who he grows to love as such, has become untouchable. Even his travels through other worlds with Ettarre is something he believes he has unwittingly invented through that psychological fiction called the subconscious. He even begins to show some excitement about this newfound power he has.

"He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal,—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men's affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and that the exultance which possessed him was the by-product of an unstable dream.

It's not long after this that twice Kennaston is queried about his book—Men Who Loved Allison—both times by men who might be considered influential and/or powerful. They seem concerned about the sigil of Scoteia (Kennaston has written it into the story), and they talk of white pigeons (essentially doves) and hold small mirrors in their hand. One of these men is a Church Bishop by the name of Arkwright.

"Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?"

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. "No, sir," Kennaston answered...

"The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters," the prelate continued. "I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot without danger be entrusted to the vulgar."

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.

. . .

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke.... I could find it in my heart t o believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power.

"Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?"

Very still it was in the dark room....

Kennaston was horribly frightened....

So into the mix comes the suggestion of a secret society with an occult power that enables them to be in power the world over.

Upon first reading of the sigil I was taken aback at the name because typically I think of a sigil as a symbolic drawing used in magic. It later dawned on me however, that a sigil can also be something used as a seal like the signet rings kings used in ancient times, and that's what this pendant in the story is for. It's three inches in diameter (when both halves are together) and has a long line of reverse writing on it which will be read forward after the seal is stamped with the sigil. There's an illustration of the sigil on the book's frontispiece. The writing reads:

James Branch Cabell made this book so that he who wills may read the story of man's eternally unsatisfied hunger in search of beauty. Ettarre stays inaccessible always and her loveliness is his to look on only in his dreams. All men she must evade at the last and many are the ways of her evasions.

So Cabell is just having a little fun with the sigil's writing. There is some talk about the material that makes up the sigil, who manufactured it etc., but none of that is important. What's important is the fact that Kennaston eventually finds the other half of the sigil in waking life, and it belongs to a woman he knows quite well and whom he never would have suspected it belonged to. This discovery changes everything, as you will see, and reality takes yet another bizarre turn.

Cabell may owe something to Mark Twain's short story—My Platonic Sweetheart—written in 1898 (though not published until 1912, well after Twain's death). Cabell claimed to have written Jest sometime between 1911 and 1914. Both stories are essentially about a man who meets a woman during recurrent dreams who is the love of his life, (though not necessarily in the way you may be thinking). They always look a little different from dream to dream, yet they always find one another, and each knows the other straight away even though their names may have changed as well. In Twain's story, the man (Twain himself) is always seventeen and the girl fifteen no matter what Twain's age was in waking life. In Jest, Horvendile and Ettarre are also young in all of Kennaston's dreams except for one (as I recall anyway), while Kennaston is in late middle-age during waking life. We also find in both stories that our young couples occasionally travel to exotic localities in the Earth's past and meet historic figures.

While Twain is able to hold his dream sweetheart and kiss her (though nothing more is mentioned), Horvendile cannot touch Ettarre. If he does, the dream ends and he awakens. Thus, while Horvendile deeply loves Ettarre, he can never have her as anything more than something like a friend, and yet something more special and quite uncommon than merely a friend. This may sound different from Twain and his dream girl, but Twain makes an odd remark in his account:

The affection which I felt for her and which she manifestly felt for me was a quite simple fact; but the quality of it was another matter. It was not the affection of brother and sister - it was closer than that, more clinging, more endearing, more reverent; and it was not the love of sweethearts, for there was no fire in it. It was somewhere between the two, and was finer than either, and more exquisite, more profoundly contenting. We often experience this strange and gracious thing in our dream-loves; and we remember it as a feature of our childhood-loves, too.

Journalist, Burton Rascoe, wrote in his introduction to the 1921 edition of Cabell's book—Chivalry: Dizain des Reines—the following:

It is perhaps of historical interest here to record the esteem in which Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it was rechristened on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist's request, and during the long days and nights of his last illness it was Mr. Cabell's books which gave Mark Twain his greatest joy.

So we know that late in the life of Samuel Clemens, he befriended Cabell, and even had some influence on his stories before he died. It is perhaps not unreasonable to consider that Jest may owe something to My Platonic Sweetheart.

What Jest has to say to us is really nothing more than the echo of what every great mystic had said before him—that reality isn't what we think it is. That there are binding strands which link waking existence to both the worlds of dream and imagination. At first Felix Kennaston's love for Ettarre is such that all he can think of are those dream worlds and being with her as a man loves a woman. But by the end of the tale, he begins to think more deeply about things like creation, life, and a creator. His dream lover becomes for him, just as those dream lovers did for so many other writers before him, a personification of God, for that's what the Helen of Troy motif represents for writers, dreamers, and lovers. She's the object of desire who symbolizes all that is beautiful, good, and perfect. She's always to be admired, but never to be owned. She was Beatrice to Dante. She was the Marble Lady to Anodos in George MacDonald's Phantastes. She was Mark Twain's Platonic Sweetheart.

She certainly takes center stage in many of my own dreams and probably in many of yours. I've been dreaming of my Helen for at least a decade now. I've never quite been able to have my dream lover either. We're always playing cat and mouse—always a little leery of one another. And yet we're always together. Not lovers, but more than friends. Yet the relationship is deeper than either lovers or friends as Twain said. It's only been during the past year or so that I've come to realize that she represents...well, many people at times, but on the highest level she's symbolic of the "Holy Other". Hers is a love we must all strive for, and I believe it is a love we will find if we keep knocking at love's door long enough. She is nothing less than God calling out to humanity saying, "Come and dine."

I'm not sure if Cabell's story expresses this in quite the way I would have hoped. For a time in his life, he did become interested in magic and secret societies. (The episode about the white pigeons and mirrors surely owes itself to the "magic mirror of Solomon" to some degree.) He seemed to move away from all that rather quickly though, and when none other than freemasonry's class clown, Aleister Crowley, tried to correspond with him, Cabell was cordial enough, but in private seemed very put off and had very little use for Crowley and his type. (Crowley did write an essay on Cabell that appeared in a Virginian publication called "The Reviewer" that was actually pretty accurate in most ways, but failed to truly understand what Cabell was trying to say on a deeper level.)

Mostly I find in Cabell's Kennaston someone whose search for Helen hadn't quite reached fruition yet. But, does anyone's this side of Heaven?

That'll Be 20 Our Fathers And 10 Hail Marys—Now Bend Over And Grab Your Ankles

Isaiah 40:1 & 2

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.

I ask you, is there anything at all in the NT that reads like the above? This is typical of OT thinking, and is the way we deal with people in the secular penal system today. Commit the crime—do the time.

But is this what Jesus taught or did? When a woman drew water from a well for him, and he told her about all her husbands among her many sins, did he then tell her to go sacrifice a lamb? Give money to the church? Did he repeat his now famous "Our Father" prayer for her and tell her to repeat it until she was sick of it to atone for her sins? Hardly. What he did was to atone for her at the cross.

There is nothing I've ever come across in the NT that shows anyone doing anything to atone for their sins. Only Jesus made an atonement—once and forevermore. No penitence was, or is, necessary. Repentance—yes. Penitence and atonement—no. "To obey is better than sacrifice." "Go, and sin no more." This is the NT recipe. Jesus says to let him worry about penitence and atonement. That's his job, and the toughest of all jobs it was/is. He did away with our atoning and penitence at the cross. Will someone please tell me why the Catholic Church decided to defile the cross by trying to undo everything the cross was ever about?

The Catholic Church is very big on penitence. This is carried out by atonement and absolution. The atonement is a kind of punishment handed out by the priests, usually nothing more than a rather dull and mundane repetition of prayers over and over. This is unbiblical, pointless, and anti-Christian. I've yet to find anything within Catholic doctrine that links any NT teachings of Christ with punishments being meted out by priests. He told his disciples to forgive people's sins—not to punish them. Even the woman brought before him on grounds of adultery was forgiven and sent on her way. Jesus made no demands of penitence by way of punishment with her, nor with anyone else that we're aware of. He simply says, go and sin no more. However, he also says to pay our debts and the like, so I think he certainly expects retributions to be paid for harming people or damaging their property in our sinning. But beyond that, he just wants us to stop sinning, to be better people, to try our best. Why the change? Jesus taught us something completely new at the time, to be good servants, to constantly look for ways to serve others. Could it be that our good works take the place of any need for punishments and sacrifices? Isn't a good deed a sacrifice in itself? And of course, all atonement was settled at the cross.

The Catholic Church has not only rejected the work of the cross by their demands of penitence, they've done it in a harmful way in my opinion. Does it really make any sense whatsoever to make prayer a form of punishment!? Demanding people to pray the same repetitious prayers over and over as a form of punishment can only serve to make those same people hate prayer! What good thing could possibly come from it? Mark tells us that Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, went and prayed that the agony of the cross might in some way not have to happen, but to let that "cup pass" from him. A short time later it says he went back and prayed "the same thing." So yes, it appears even Jesus prayed the same prayer at least once, though I doubt he used the exact same words. But he was in distress at the time, and had every reason to be. We often find ourselves praying without ceasing during times of distress, and truthfully, it's during those times that our prayers seem to be answered most fully. But this is very different from vain, repetitious prayers as mere punishments—something that belittles the work of the cross. Something like praying the Rosary may be a good thing, though repetitious, if done in the proper frame of mind and spirit. But it should never be a punishment.

Personally, I think Catholics would be better off to avoid confession, and especially not to send their children to confession, lest you want them to grow-up hating prayer, the very thing they ought to learn to love doing most. Prayer, when done properly, transcends the hard turf of materiality, passes through the thin places (made thin by the power of the resurrection), and seeks out the Light of Heaven. Prayer is our only connection with our origin. It's a call home from a homesick boy at camp-Earth.

Why The Bible Is Different

About fifteen years ago I began to read a lot of writings from the Mesopotamia. I also read a lot of American Indian myths and quite a bit of Hindu writings. After a year or so of this little journey, one thing became abundantly clear. There is nothing like the bible despite its faults.

The first thing I ever read by Plato was The Republic. Two things struck me about it. The first was that Plato actually chastised the writings of Homer and others who had presented the Greek gods as being corrupt. He actually suggested changing them! (The stories—not the gods). The second was that Plato believed in the gods, but didn't seem to believe much at all that had been written about them. You'll find this is true of most Greeks from his time and the later Romans as well. Almost none of them believed their mythology to be non-fiction, let alone journalism. They knew the stories were made-up. They had festivals and celebrations based around these stories at times because they enjoyed the parties. The wine ran like a river at them. No wonder they had such respect for so detestable a character as Bacchus! Their mythology was nothing but fun and games for them. It was like reading comic books. They just weren't taken seriously.

We might say something similar concerning Plato's writings about Socrates. I doubt that anyone believed these stories about Socrates were anything other than Plato's own tales being put into the mouth of his hero and teacher. It might be true that Socrates said many of the things Plato wrote, but obviously Plato invented the bulk of the dialog that went with it. Of course no one could put down from memory long conversations that took place between people years earlier, so Plato had to invent most of the conversations and probably many of the settings and characters as well. Nobody minded this because this was the way stories were passed down in those days. They got the gist of things right more often than not, and that was all that was important. Virtually 90% of everything you'll ever read from ancient authors that involved real people was heavily embellished and fictionalized. In fact, if other of Socrates' peers hadn't also written about him, most of us today would probably think he never really existed at all and was just a character Plato invented from scratch.

CS Lewis said that part of what convinced him of the truth of Jesus was that the stories about him in the four biblical gospels read more like a person's diary, and at times even outright journalism. The writers seemed to just be reporting the facts of what they saw and heard. That doesn't mean there wasn't any sort of embellishing of those stories. They weren't written until decades after the Resurrection. I doubt very much if any of the early churchmen took the stories and all those long conversations, such as the sermon on the mount, as being told verbatim. Like Plato, the gospel writers probably had to invent some of the dialog. They obviously couldn't remember long conversations from decades gone by, and since no one's memory is perfect, this accounts for their versions of certain events all being at least slightly different. It's probably also true that later writers like Mathew and Luke took the earlier gospel of Mark/Peter for reference in their own writings. John's gospel is of course very different from the others. And it may be that some things in those gospels were simply made-up. This is especially true of Mathew's gospel. We don't know for sure. Did the virgin birth really happen? I've personally always doubted it. I think it's quite possible that Mathew and Luke both invented this to keep up with the Romans around them who had many heroes that were said to have been born of a union between a god and a mortal. Could it be that these writers were only human and caved in to peer pressure? After all, aside from Mathew and Luke, no other NT book makes mention of the virgin birth at all. My question is, does it matter? Can't we be happy and live the lives God wants us to live whether the virgin birth story is true or not? What possible effect could that have on my life? None that I can think of. But embellishments aside, the gospel stories mostly do not read like fiction. They mostly read like true stories about real people. You simply don't get the impression of "fiction" when you read them.

One of the more important discoveries that came from my reading ancient texts was how honest the Jewish writers seemed by comparison. I recall a guy named Peter that I mentioned this to one day, and I really think it was the biggest part of what made him re-evaluate his life and get back into the Christianity he had known as a boy. Pete was very interested in all things Egyptian. He had even been to Egypt a few times. He, like a lot of people, was convinced that the Egyptians were an advanced race just like those fables of Atlantis. I mentioned to him that the biblical writings seemed the most truthful of all ancient manuscripts to me because the bible actually told you all the bad things the Jews ever did right from the beginning. Adam and Eve messed up. Solomon built temples in the "high places". Cain killed Able. David and Bathsheba. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. On and on. Kings and Chronicles will tell you not only the great achievements of Israel's kings, but they'll also tell you every little thing they did wrong. I've yet to come across any other ancient writings anywhere in the world that did that. I told Pete to go and read all the Egyptian priestly writings and then come back and tell me all the bad things the Egyptians did. He thought about that for a very long while and realized he obviously wouldn't come back with very much. There's simply nothing about them that seems realistic. And it's the same with their gods. Who on earth would read the stories about Horus, Osiris, or Isis and believe them to be anything but fiction? If you read those writings along with those from the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians and others, they read as though they had never lost a war and how all the peoples of the Earth were subject to them. We know they're dishonest because their neighbors wrote entirely different accounts about them (and the writings of all their neighbors matched). Where do other ancient texts tell you all the bad things they and their forefathers did? I've yet to come across such a book.

The Jewish writings were simply like nothing else on earth. That doesn't mean they're completely accurate or that God inspired them all. But where we find truth, we find at least a glimpse of the Divine, and you simply won't find that kind of honestly where people are actually self deprecating in any other ancient work. Homer and Virgil probably came closest, but it was seldom the actions of their own people they condemned. It was the actions of their gods!

At any rate, this has been one of the more effective arguments I've used for years when talking about Christianity to people. The self deprecating honesty of the Jews sets their writings apart from all other ancient peoples. I don't think anyone said it before me fifteen years ago, though someone certainly may have. But you're welcome to take this argument and make it your own just as several people already have.

The Power Of Servant-hood

When I was young I used to love playing jazz. I was convinced there was some higher power in music you could magically tap into if you were in the right frame of mind. But when I got older I realized that you couldn't play your way out of a really bad mood. And I also came to know that music is mostly just numbers. It could bring a certain state of pleasantness to the mind, but it was merely a sense of beauty that's not so different from the same sense of beauty Einstein saw in a perfect equation built upon—you guessed it—numbers. Furthermore, I'm convinced that art in painting also draws upon this balance of numbers. Even in writing and storytelling there's a certain meter that's pleasant to the ear. Poets realized this thousands of years ago, and so they divided sentence structures into repeating rhythmic lines, so numbers is still a part of it all. Writing and storytelling can go considerably deeper than other art forms though because words can express thoughts in a more exacting detail. Not only can you paint a picture with words, you can tell what the picture means. I think that's why Christ came to Earth as a storyteller rather than a musician, a painter, or a sculptor. He wanted to make the best use of the limited amount of time he had to be here in the flesh. But as much as we like to read about the things he said, the stories he told, and the philosophies he conveyed, this was really something that only took up a small portion of his time. The vast majority of it was taken up with playing the role of a servant.

The bible tells over and over of how Jesus healed everyone that came to him. Can you imagine how much time that took to go to each person individually and heal them? And unlike most physicians today, he actually made quite a few house calls. When he wasn't healing the sick he was feeding the poor, making wine at weddings, calming storms, even playing with people's children. John says this in the very last sentence of his gospel: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." You'll notice he said that Jesus did many other things, not that he said many other things. That in fact, he did so many things that it would be impossible to tell about them all.

Something that's become quite popular today among Christians is meditation. They think that if they can just get into the right mode of consciousness that God will bless them for it and reveal all the secrets of the universe or some such thing. And for sure, there is something to be said for quieting the mind and allowing God to fill it. That may in fact be what the Sabbath is all about. But even so, the Sabbath comes but one day per week. Jesus spent time in prayer, and he spent time teaching and storytelling. But the vast majority of his time was spent in work. It was spent serving others day in and day out. He could have healed all the sick on the face of the Earth and fed all the poor with the wave of his hand. Instead he chose to take the hard road and make an example for us to follow in meeting people's needs individually by the sweat of his brow. I can envision Jesus on many hot summer afternoons refusing to leave a place until every one of the thousands who came to him had their needs met. I can see him drenched in sweat, knees aching, back hunched over till he looked like death, all out of love for others to the point of placing their needs before his own.

The bible tells us time and again that the only good religion is the one that defends the cause of the orphan, the widow, the poor etc. I don't care how well you know your bible, or how much time you spend in prayer or meditation. If you aren't sweating and aching in the service of others, you don't yet know Christ, and all your prayers and bible studies are futile.

Job 14

Job 14
1 “Mortals, born of woman,
are of few days and full of trouble.
2 They spring up like flowers and wither away;
like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.
3 Do you fix your eye on them?
Will you bring them before you for judgment?
4 Who can bring what is pure from the impure?
No one!
5 A person’s days are determined;
you have decreed the number of his months
and have set limits he cannot exceed.
6 So look away from him and let him alone,
till he has put in his time like a hired laborer.

7 “At least there is hope for a tree:
If it is cut down, it will sprout again,
and its new shoots will not fail.
8 Its roots may grow old in the ground
and its stump die in the soil,
9 yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth shoots like a plant.
10 But a man dies and is laid low;
he breathes his last and is no more.
11 As the water of a lake dries up
or a riverbed becomes parched and dry,
12 so he lies down and does not rise;
till the heavens are no more, people will not awake
or be roused from their sleep.

13 “If only you would hide me in the grave
and conceal me till your anger has passed!
If only you would set me a time
and then remember me!
14 If someone dies, will they live again?
All the days of my hard service
I will wait for my renewal to come.
15 You will call and I will answer you;
you will long for the creature your hands have made.
16 Surely then you will count my steps
but not keep track of my sin.
17 My offenses will be sealed up in a bag;
you will cover over my sin.

18 “But as a mountain erodes and crumbles
and as a rock is moved from its place,
19 as water wears away stones
and torrents wash away the soil,
so you destroy a person’s hope.
20 You overpower them once for all, and they are gone;
you change their countenance and send them away.
21 If their children are honored, they do not know it;
if their offspring are brought low, they do not see it.
22 They feel but the pain of their own bodies
and mourn only for themselves.”

Is there anything more beautiful in all the books in all the world? The entire chapter of Job 14 is utterly perfect. "So look away from him and let him alone, till he has put in his time like a hired laborer." People are always praying for God's intervening into the affairs of mortals, but Job knew better. Miracles are rare. They're supposed to be. More often than not it feels as though God created the world and then walked away from it. Job felt it too. It's like when a kid leaves the nest and has to make his own way in the world. The parent has to let them go. That's what God did when he created the universe. He made it for us, and then let us go, knowing full well that we'd return to him one day. Maybe we demanded our freedom. But we had to experience material life with all the joys and all the pains that go with it if we were ever to be anything more than mere puppets.

You have to read Job with the same honesty he had when he said these things. One moment he's full of understanding. The next he's full of questions that almost end in despair. One moment he's certain of his place in the world. The next he feels abandoned: "Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble." He's wiser and more honest than any man the world has ever known. Theologians, philosophers, and psychologists try to make God fit into their own life's context. Job will have none of this. Some questions were meant to go unanswered, and he knows it. But it doesn't stop the questioner from making his queries known. Life is certainty followed by uncertainty over and over in a never ending cycle till: "All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come." Job bottom lines it for us. Most people think life is about survival, first of the self, then of the human race as a whole. But that's not at all what life is for. Life is about work, but not in self survival. It's about finding joy in service to others and letting go of the self. The Christian life is antithetical to politics. Politics is about getting what you want, whereas the Christian has no self and instead says, "How may I serve you?" We had Jesus to teach us this. Job had to figure it out on his own. There was never a mortal like Job.

Holy Synchronicities

One point I've been trying to drive home with people for nearly twenty years now is that God doesn't care what your opinions about him or the bible are. That's not what's meant when Christ talks about believing in him or having faith. Belief and opinion simply do not equate. He didn't say that if you believe he exists you can gain entrance to Heaven. When he uses terms like belief and faith, what he's always talking about is something along the lines of putting your hope and trust in him.

Well either someone's been listening to me, or what is more likely the case, God plants seeds in several people simultaneously for the sowing. I've always thought the latter to be true. That is, God plants certain notions and inclinations in people here and there the world over when he wants to make a point or bring about a change rather than relying on just one person to do it alone. Besides, if only one person was given the message it might swell his head and make him think he's special or better than others. God's too good a parent to set someone up for moral failure (except for on certain occasions when he's trying to teach us our shortcomings).

I'm finishing up on Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet. Now there are some things I have a great aversion to in Card's writing style. He's a stream of consciousness writer, and that generally means (and certainly means in Card's case) an author constantly telling you exactly what his characters are thinking instead of allowing you the satisfaction of figuring it out yourself. But regardless of writing style, Card does make some potent points now and then, and in the final book of the series, Children Of The Mind, he writes the following:

"I certainly do too believe in God," said Ender, annoyed.

"Oh, you're willing to concede God's existence, but that's not what I meant. I mean believe in him the way a mother means it when she says to her son, I believe in you. She's not saying she believes that he exists—what is that worth?—she's saying she believes in his future, she trusts that he'll do all the good that is in him to do. She puts the future in his hands, that's how she believes in him. You don't believe in Christ that way Andrew, [Ender]. ... You aren't leaving anything up to God. You don't believe in him."

Card says it better than I ever did. This in fact is exactly why I've taken to writing fiction and is also the reason Christ taught short stories known as parables to his followers. You can set up situations between characters to express a moral truth in such a way as to make the reader see it more clearly, make it seep in more deeply. It's what writing's all about, expressing the things God places within you to others, and doing it with the best clarity and simplicity you can muster. Simplicity has been the key to what God's been trying to bring out of me as of late. Oddly, writers tend to think that filling pages with indecipherable terms and six syllable words will gain them respectability in their profession, but it seldom works out that way. We have a whole genre of literature called Literary Fiction which is devoted to exactly that, and the amount of memorable works that have come from that field are infinitesimal. It's all just lofty words with no heart in them more often than not. If you're expressing something from God, you should want as many people as possible to understand and learn from it, and that means clarity and simplicity. God will bless that.

And pay attention to those holy synchronicities when they crop up in your life. It usually means you're on the right track.