Eric The Blue

Re-re-googling the clergy

I went to St. Olaf College, which according to its web page has "a vibrant faith tradition," and perhaps mainly for that reason I was once acquainted with a lot of people who are now clergymen.  Sometimes I google the name of one of them and end up reading about how gay people are an abomination to God and that those who disagree are "holy blasphemers," et cetera, et cetera.  I mean this kind of thing.  In the interest of balance, I should report that a recent exercise in "googling the clergy" revealed that not all are wholly crazy.

Bill Gafkjen was a year ahead of me in high school and the best pitcher on our baseball team.  The second best pitcher was our all-around best player, so when Bill couldn't pitch, it usually meant there was an opening in our infield, which I got to fill.  We would have been a better team with two Gafkjens.  He is now the bishop of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and it appears to me that the Lutherans would be better off with another one of him, too.  You can tell he is a decent fellow by the spite he elicits from people who aren't.  Bill, apparently, is one of those whose general outlook on homosexual people is "liberal, not Biblical."  As far as I know, Jesus never breathed a syllable on the question, and he also seems on occasion a little light in the loafers himself--never marrying, never gobbing spit on the poor, never exhibiting an ounce of interest in NASCAR.  But I should let the fighting Lutherans duke it out.  I just want to say hooray for Bill for not being on the spittle-soaked, foam-flecked side.

When I was about twelve or thirteen, I played on a town baseball team coached by an older teen-ager, Cooper Wiggen.  Coop is now the pastor at a Methodist Church a couple miles from my home in south Minneapolis.  Googling his name, I discover that he is married to another Methodist minister, Elizabeth Macaulay, and that both of them have, at some risk to their careers, loudly supported same-sex marriage.  You can see them interviewed about their views here.

I don't know why ballplayers seem to make the sanest churchmen.

 

Royal thoughts

So his name is George!  How many possibilities were there?  It could have been Edward or William or Charles or Phillip, or George.  I'm pretty sure neither Jeremy nor Aiden, the evident favorites of the parents of my daughters' classmates, was in the running. 

Are you getting  the idea that I am precisely the type of insufferabe a-hole who insists upon advertising his high-minded disdain for all this royal nonsense?  Right on.  But let us give young George and everyone else the benefit of our sympathy.  Perhaps around ten or twelve years from now the Prince of Cambridge will be lying in bed late at night and thinking to himself, "I can't believe I have one life to live and I'm always going to be either heir to the throne or else the effing King of England.  Dammit!"

The Trayvon Martin case: Eric the Blue speaks at last

I wonder whether I'm being investigated by the blog police for having nothing to say about the Trayvon Martin case.  Well, over at the Powerline blog the philosophers are on the job and you can just put me down for a NOT at the end of all their inane commentary.  Here is John Hinderaker being dopey:

Note that from the earliest accounts, Martin has consistently been described as “unarmed,” as though that somehow negated any need for self-defense. But of course it didn’t. A weapon is the means by which a smaller, weaker person who is less skilled in fighting can defend himself. Women are generally in this position, but men often need a weapon to defend themselves against an “unarmed” opponent, too. Trayvon Martin was four inches taller than Zimmerman, and considered himself an expert fighter.

You have to want to believe this bilge.  I love the way the hulking Zimmerman steps into the role of the poor, defenseless woman who needs a gun.  He was four inches shorter than Martin!  Yes, John, that is why in boxing the fighters are placed in divisions according to height. 

We should all be thankful we live in a country that allows women and short men to carry around loaded guns for self-protection.  Unfortunately it seems that some taller men have begun carrying, to protect themselves from women and short men.  I suppose it is their right, too. But soon everyone will be packing.  I have an idea what women and short men are to do then.  More guns!  It's the solution to every problem.  It's remarkable that all the guns haven't yet limited gun violence in America to levels we observe in countries that don't love freedom.

 

Living words

What do you say to yourself when you self-talk?  I mean the words that crawl across the figurative screen in that figurative region known as the soul when, in some sort of duress, you want to remind yourself of what's important to you, a certain ideal you should strive to attain.  For a long time I have borrowed on these occasions some words that I came across in the editor's introduction to The Portable Chekhov:

In the end, this boy who had been born into the meanest and the most backward section of Russian society, the lower middle class, and who had not been immune to its vulgarities, managed to make his way into what E. M. Forster happily describes as "the aristocracy of the considerate, the sensitive, and the plucky."

To be a member of that club--that "aristocracy"--seems a worthy goal to keep before one's eyes.  Reading along yesterday in The New York Review, in an article about Janet Malcolm's latest, I came across a single sentence, quoted from the book under review, that I like about as well:

The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral.

Maybe all that earnestness could be lightened up with a few jokes but I think she's a long way in a good direction. 

Books of the Bible: Mark

The first three books printed in the New Testament--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they tell essentially the same story in the same way, often with almost identical words.  (Syn-optic: "to see together.")  One way to account for the similarities is to hold that God dictated the same words to three evangelists, who, being all capable secretaries, took it down accurately and thus ended with very similar results.  There is another explanation that arises when one places the texts side-by side and reads very closely.  Almost all of Mark's content is in both Matthew and Luke.  Most of the remaining part of Mark--the part that's not in both Matthew and Luke--is in one or the other.  Further, when Mark and Matthew differ with respect to sequence, Luke invariably follows Mark; and when Mark and Luke diverge, Matthew also follows Mark.  Scholars thus posit that the similarities between these three gospels are the result of a literary relationship known as "the priority of Mark."  It means only that Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke, working independently, both used Mark as a source. 

Though it's embarrassing for fundamentalists, subjecting the gospel narratives to the methods used by scholars of other ancient texts gets results.  (The magical thinking, on the other hand, is a dead end: all you can do is keep invoking the magic.)  We learn something of the mind of Shakespeare by comparing the plays he wrote with the sources from which he drew the plots.  What themes does he bring to the fore?  What does he omit?  If a character is changed, in what way?  When the source is left behind, so that events are being invented by Shakespeare, what do we then observe?  The literary relationship between the Synoptic Gospels makes them amenable to this kind of analysis.  If we know Mark, it will help us to comprehend the distinctive traits of the gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke.

So what should be said about Mark?  Such an obvious point as its comparative brevity is a good place to start.  The beginnings and ends of the other synoptics--the nativity stories and the appearances of Jesus after Easter morning---are absent.  The ending of Mark is problematic.  It's widely recognized that what follows 16:8 is from a later editor who was put off by the abrupt, bewildering conclusion.  Three women go to the tomb to anoint the body.  We shall only note in passing that, since Jesus had supposedly been dead already for a day and two nights, it seems they were tardy.  They worry about how they will deal with the gigantic stone that blocked entry to the tomb, but, upon arrival, find that it has already been rolled away.  A man dressed in white is inside and announces that Jesus is risen.  Then the last words we have from the pen of the author of Mark: "And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Well, even if they hadn't been afraid, who would believe them?  Some scholars think the real ending to the gospel has been lost, or that Mark for some reason couldn't finish it, or that something about it caused it to be suppressed, but I have to declare my allegiance to a conclusion that acknowledges we are at a remove from ordinary human experience.  The women were stunned and afraid, then: Curtain.  This is the ending for those of us who were always annoyed by the way the preachers and Sunday school teachers made a villain out of doubting Thomas.  We are just to accept with equanimity?  Really?  It seems you should have to allow that the story has some highly unusual elements. 

The jump-stop ending is matched in its way by the opening in which Jesus, already an adult, is baptized by John the Baptist and then begins his ministry immediately upon the arrest of the Baptizer.  There is a certain parallelism at work here, for of course Jesus too will be arrested,and both men are killed.  The author deploys the same somewhat idiosyncratic diction when describing what happens to John and Jesus.  In 1:7 John "preached" and at 1:14 he is "delivered up," at which time Jesus immediately begins his "preaching" before he is himself "delivered into the hands of men" (9:31) and "delivered to the chief priests" (10:33).  (The Revised Standard Version alternately renders the same Greek verb as "deliver" and "arrest.")  Then, in the thirteenth chapter, which forms an apocalyptic discourse, Jesus says that before the end of time

. . . the gospel must first be preached to all nations.  And when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious. . . .

So there is this recurring pattern of preaching and being delivered up--first John, then Jesus when John is gone, then the first Christians when Jesus is gone. This is a distinctly Markan characteristic and it seems to be of a piece with the rush, rush, rush of his brief narrative.  Jesus is perpetually busy, preaching and teaching and healing, out on the water in a boat or being transfigured in the hills, always on the move to a new place.  It has become almost a commonplace to note that one of the author's favorite words is "immediately": in 678 verses, it occurs about forty times in the Revised Standard Version. 

Why the hurry?  It's because the time is short.  "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power" (9:1). The other gospel narratives allow for a longer view.  There is a straightforward reason for this.  They were written at a later date, and it hadn't happened.

The preponderance of scholarly opinion assigns the authorship to an unknown Christian writing in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.  The pithiest statement of this view is from the New Testament scholar Norman Perrin, who, citing the opening of chapter 13--

 As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

--observes that "it is standard to date an apocalyptic work by the latest historical incident it refers to as prophecy." If the Gospel of Mark was off on the timing of the Second Coming, it at least was inerrant when predicting events that had already happened. 

 

A joke

Were it not for my father-in-law, nobody would ever tell me a joke.  That, and the alcohol-themed Christmas gifts, explain my man-crush.  Here is a recent specimen.

A young couple, engaged to be married, are tragically killed in an accident.  Hang with me, it gets even funnier. 

At heaven's gate, they are inspired to ask St Peter whether it is possible to be married in paradise.  He says he can't remember being asked that question before.  Would they mind waiting in the vestibule while he gets an answer for them?

A day passes, and another and another.  After a week, St Peter finally returns.  "Yes," he says, "you can be married here in heaven."

During the long wait, however, the young couple had had some terrestrial thoughts.  What if love cooled?  Feeling a little embarrased, the man nevertheless put their new question to St Peter: "Is it possible to get a divorce in heaven?"

St Peter was exasperated by the question.  "Geesh," he said.  "It took me a whole week to find a clergyman.  Now you want me to look for a lawyer, too?"

Two saints

In religion news, the current pope is beatifying--awkward verb meaning: to make a saint--two of his predecessors, John Paul II and John XXIII.  The latter, who was pope in the early 1960s, convened the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Church, kicking and screaming, into the nineteenth century.  If the last fifty years of reactionary pronouncements and policies are an indication, it was too much too fast.  Masses performed in the living language of the congregants!  The backlash was inevitable, and today you need not know Latin to be at least dimly aware of the Church's catholic benightedness, an expanse that blankets all matters sexual.  The Church of Rome and America's Republican party may be the last two institutions for which contraception is controversial.

Edmund Wilson, who in his journals expresses exasperation with Christian theology, was an unlikely admirer of Pope John.  Beset by geriatric complaints, and feeling that death was near, his journal for the 1960s includes this:

The knowledge that death is not far away, that I shall soon disappear like a puff of smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble.  It is harder to take human life seriously, including one's own passions and achievements and efforts.  In my tendency toward this state of mind, I have found Pope John fortifying.  When over 80 and knowing he is doomed [by cancer], he gives all the energy left him to his council which will modernize the Church.

If Pope Francis and Edmund Wilson agree, it must be true.  The case of John Paul, however, made me read closely the news articles detailing the prerequisites for becoming a saint.  It seems you have to be credited, from beyond the grave, with not one but two miracles.  In the case of John Paul, a French nun  was cured of Parkinson's disease after praying to John Paul.  The required second miracle occurred when, having prayed for relief to John Paul, a Costa Rican woman inexplicably recovered from a serious brain injury.  I know it would be indelicate to speculate about the number of people who prayed for relief to John Paul only to have their diseases follow the normal course predicted by medical science.  People love miracles and do not want to make it too hard to believe in them.  Anyway, it most certainly is not the case that, with sainthood on the line, the Vatican accepts hearsay testimony.  According to a CNN account,

Patrick Kelly, executive director of the Blessed John Paul II Shrine in Washington, explained the church's process for investigating reported miracles.

"A team of doctors first examine the miracle.  Secondly, the team of theologians look at the miracles, and then they discuss amongst themselves the legitimacy and all the facts surrounding the miracles," he said.

With all that teamwork, a snafu must be quite a remote possibility.