A Short Update on Digesting Wendell Berry

I’m reading Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America“. Seeing a number of Orthodox bloggers high regard for this author, I asked for a couple of his books for Christmas. Amazon is always easy for those who want to soothe the savage beast without leaving the comforts of home…and given that I expect few to cross the street on my behalf… much less go to a store, I try to reduce the burdens of the season. Yet the whole I’m sure is just another development I’m certain old Berry himself would decry. He indeed seems to suffer dyspepsia.

No, I’m not all that far along, but certainly further than many of the book reports I filed without chagrin as a fifth grader… so let me simply suggest that at this point, it seems well established that there’s not much about Americans and America and American life that old Mr. Berry takes much of a shine to. Maybe that’s why he’s either out in the field or busy at his keyboard… if he’s not still writing on an authentic piece of handmade paper with a home built quill pen. He has quite a number of insights to offer in this book for its day, though at least at this point, few seem particularly his alone. What does distinguish him is that the depth and breadth of his bile is sufficient to cause heartburn over just about each and everything imaginable…. all in one place. As a clarion call from the past and from a world changed in many ways – or so it seems – by this work…  its amazing. It’s one dimensional perhaps… but it is amazing.

And alone, it is amazing by not conforming to the stereotype book of this sort where the thesis is introduced and developed in thirty pages and then the rest of the work amounts to a data-package of anecdotes. So far, by contrast, Berry’s anger just seems to rivet on one aspect of life after another – even simply “the future”. So there’s little slowing down. Just more grist for the mill. And there’s no mistaking that if he had the opportunity, he’d love nothing better than to grind each and everyone of us non-farmers of the wrong sort down to make his bread. Of course he’d have to plant us first or use us as the fertilizer he thinks we are… but I’d doubt that would slow him down much. And yet all the same, the book has the perverse fascination of driving slowly by an auto accident… as an intrusion on someone else’s misfortune and anger, and I can’t stop reading.

More later.

In the Temple of the Lord

Here follows some thoughts on a sermon offered by Fr. Daniel Keller of Our Lady of Walsingham (AOC, Mesquite, Texas) for the reading on Luke 2:41-52. Fr. Dan came to Orthodoxy from a Roman Catholic upbringing, journeyed to Holy Cross seminary in Boston, and has been Orthodox since the early 1980’s. When not in Texas, he visits for worship and today blessed us with a sermon. Left me thinking and so I pass some of his thoughts through… as well as my own… to see if I missed something.

Fr. Dan spoke to us on the Holy Family’s journey to worship in Jerusalem when our Lord was twelve that led to the discovery of Jesus teaching in Temple in Jerusalem. He explained that the process of arriving home without a son was probably less extraordinary than it seems: Men and women would have walked separately, so not noticing that God had literally been left behind was probably every bit of the sort of, “I thought he was with you…”. This is the sort of crisis most parents dread.. but know well enough as part of the inevitable confusion of raising a family

So this is our lone snapshot of the Lord between His Nativity and the Wedding at Cana. And what we see is literally Christ busy about his Father’s business. Recollecting the two commandments on which hang the whole of the Law… the first of which was to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our mind and all our soul… and the second which is like unto it.. to love our neighbors as ourselves…. Fr. Dan notes this reminds us of the centrality of worship to the Christian life. For if even God the Son worships God the Father… think how much more we must do.

Fr. Dan also mentioned asking Fr. Alexander Schmemann at Holy Cross whether the second commandment was a consequence of the first… and received a nod that “this was precisely the meaning in the Greek original”. So unless we center our lives on worship, all our good works, efforts and love of our neighbors will ultimately fall flat… miss the mark.. and leave us despairing of our best efforts.

Personal experience of a Thickheaded sort notes the truth of this is borne out in folks seized with a fervor to do good works… and how sometimes this fervor seizes and runs roughsod over  those intended to benefit, treating them as mere bystanders, inconsequential, and possibly even impediments between our intention to make a good name, or do a good work. So while there are more exceptions than stars in the sky, I concede Fr. Dan’s point that unless we truly love someone… we can’t really offer the sincere sort of enduring help without learning the sort of real circumspection, care and concern that honesty and integrity… a sincere sort of love entails.

But more than this tidbit, Fr. Dan offered that another point of this story is that there are only two types of Christians: Those who go to Church, and those who do not. He mentioned that Orthodox are under no obligation and receive no “credit” for going to services. What matters lies within our hearts and our buring desire to be a part of the Body at Church, a part of the offering of ourselves to God, and a part of the receiving of the body of Christ… for ourselves and for our neighbors. He made this point more elegantly and paradoxically than I can remember, but it was clear that his emphasis lay on the concern for those who do not feel this desire… and that they need ministering to as the work they are engaged in is far more difficult, and of far greater import in turning back the darkness. Surely there is forgiveness and good news that could be shared here.

Think of Jesus in the Temple. Many of us might think it a miracle of peaceful exchange, of questioning, listening, and answering rare enough among adults… but here led by a “mere” twelve-year-old. If we think about that… there must have been neither posturing nor fear… a true acceptance as among peers of stature. This is the Lord still in his youth, still in his “vulnerable years”, still as incarnate in weakness among us… and not the “threat” he would seem later. And this is a wonder my Bible notes seem silence about. This is the Jesus of much of contemporary Christianity… our friend and fellow… a cool sort of dude, but not necessarily God… more of a man above many… but still a man like any other. Maybe a role model… but then a man whose mystery is deepened by his sacrifice… and his martyrdom for a cause for which he was misunderstood.

If this really were the point, that this man-like-any-other were true, the story could just stop here. But this isn’t even the start… we’re not even at Cana, and this is just a vignette of a point from which much would be revealed, it’s a point of tension against which the future (if not the present) will stand in sharp relief. Here, we know Jesus only as a young man of promise and a man whose aspirations seem to lie within his family and their business.

So I wonder whether this vignette doesn’t serve almost as key to the texts, as a marker that separates the mystery of the intervening years on which the texts are silent – engaging only the language of God – from the revealation of the mysteries of the three-years’ ministry of which they do speak. But more than that, there seems a question posed as to what sort of person this youth would turn out to be, and how could the temper of the discussion at the Temple, the frame of heart and mind there serve to guide the intention of hearts that follow the text beyond this point. My guess is that it’s clearly something better done as it was here… in a group… maybe even in the Church.  Note that even his mother, our own Lady Theotokos wondered at this. Hmmmm..

On Denial, Descent, Darwin and The Remoteness of Being

The following material attached itself to an earlier post whose quoted saint objected and asked for a separate re-posting.  Now rightly miffed… he keeps putting my intercession request calls on “HOLD”  or  his receptionist keeps pushing the “FAST BUSY” button – I’m not sure which. But heck… it’s not as if I blame the guy. On the other hand, I wish he’d take my calls… but come to think of it… I’m pretty impressed with how fast he’s latched on to the technology… being dead and all these hundreds of years. Maybe if I  leave an iPhone on his icon? Nah. Anyway… looking things over… I thought as long as we’re payin’ for this anyway, we might as well post it… so here’s another looney tune I found. See what you think.

Doggone it if Darwin hasn’t been showing up in my mind more than he should. For what it’s worth, I think our problems with the guy don’t have much to do with science or religion… but more to do with having a doggone good dust-up…kind of like Ali vs. Frazier, Wolfman vs. Dracula, Godzilla vs. King Kong, Ultraman vs. Mothra….  I mean, we haven’t actually observed fish turn into dinosaurs or monkeys into men, but that doesn’t stop one group anymore than the other group will leave off the contention that Adam and the T-Rex used to drive over to the local Greasy Spoon together on Friday nights for ribs.

So why do folks care so much about these things? Beats me. Perhaps it’s just good clean fun for some to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to others – the fire marshals among us – it just looks foolish. I don’t know why… but since everyone goes there eventually… and the theater’s almost empty… let’s give it a holler.

One of the things I found myself thankful for this past holiday season was the discovery of the Thickheaded modification to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. This isn’t so much a modification to the Theory… as it is a modification to the discussion of it.  I mean… I’m not going to get drawn into wading where you think I’m going…’cause I may be Thickheaded… but I’m also not smart. No, the Thickheaded modification suggests that I have really no idea about how we keep getting into this mess and seem to stay here almost 100 years after they made “Inherit the Wind”… but the discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution still seems no closer to sanity now then it was then.  Substitute Global Climate Change or one of its variants… and you can the see the same craziness in alternate form… on both sides.

So what’s a couple billion people to do? Well… it starts with re-examining how the whole thing started. Y’know… the first dust-up. The fact is.. I think people just “forgot” what really happened. I mean.. y’know… a glass or two or more of champagne after picking up a Nobel prize, a casual off-the-cuff remark like “drinks on the house” , and the first thing you know… the fog machine’s in overdrive… and you wind-up with a much, much better story.

No… see what I think really happened with this theory is that it had nothing to do with “observing” Finches…. and more to do with TV Remotes. I mean it was “the playoffs” and there you are with this honking new SatTV set you just got for Christmas – widescreen HD and all – to help pass those long, “lonely” days on Gallapogos in the middle of stinkin’ nowhere… and you can’t get the doggone thing to work…. much less figure out which remote goes with the sound box, the DVD, the BluRay, and whether to switch to AV-2 or HDMI-3.

The adventure of course began with a search for the all-in-one-remote… y’know the REAL Holy Grail of Techworld… but there you are. And just to make matters worse… you’re a scientist… a virtual real-life Geek , you STILL can’t get these things to work, people have expectations… and you’re feeling the heat of not meeting them. Adding to the pressure… your neighbors… the folks “invited” over for dinner and the game…  they’re beginning to look like they might be island cannibals. Uh huh. Might not be… but they are well-armed… and blowing a gasket in the ol’ noggin’  could go badly… best case you’re a disabled geek; worst case “in the soup”.  And if that’s not enough… your only instructions are written by people who don’t actually hook these things up for a living or speak the language… so where’s a teenager when you need him? I mean what’s with this new fangled “double-the-double wire” connector, cutting out the usual recognizable plugs, and leaving you stranded in the “T-T-T-erminal Zone”?

The “guests” are already halfway through the pretzels, they’re guzzling all the brew, and seriously grousing about who’s gonna do the run back to blarney for more… or “Y’know… we could just … y’know…  eat the host?”.  But they really don’t look Orthodox. .. so maybe they mean something else. Darwin’s just sittin’ there… using some choice language his grandmother didn’t know he knew and wondering out loud whose idea it was to leave the kids in merry old… ” an’ just when you finally figure out a use for them “she” pops them in boarding school… so here we are about to get eaten ’cause there’s nothin’ on the telly…”. And just when all seems lost, in flies this Finch, lands on the “>” button, whacks the HD controller on  to “HDMI-1″, pecks out “666″ on the Cable controller and flies off.

Now this is all very, very significant to all the oh-so literal Bible geeks and we’ll cover that in the next chapter of Science vs. Religion Rock’em Sock’em Robots… but for now, it’s enough to know that ol’ Darwin himself said, “Bloomin’ handy that Finch was… I mean the game comes on, the guests are happy, and I’m y’know a “genius” (makes quote marks with his fingers and laughs)”.

But what’s he do next? ‘Course he ups and jumps in the golf cart with his new main squeeze (officially in letters home to the wife she a “Kimodo Dragon” but locals always called her Hot Sally),  takes a couple of “whu-hoo” victory laps around the island…  belting out the ever-polular frat-boy anthem of “When you are King you are King” in full Yul Brenneresque… But you can bet that’s not what he wrote in his “formal oh-so-stuffy” journal.

Nope. Not a trace of the remotes, the game, the party, the hot chick, the cannibals… the whole nine meters (it was the UK after all)… and he makes up this whole bit about himself as some sort of proto-Marlin Perkins kind-of-a-dude hiding out in a game shelter like a homeless guy in some National Geographic flick and he’s a “naturalist” rather than a football hooligan… but there you go. Don’t believe it if you must,  but we got it straight from Dwinster his-own-self… y’know … “him-who-used-to-be-monkey”  (makes quote marks with fingers again)… news you can trust… cocktails at ten, police tape at eleven. “

But instead… all we get ten minutes later behind a keyboard, is this bling… I mean buh-bing… and we’re all backwater developments stuck in some evolutionary dead-end off a chain with Finches at the top. Then… just to make matters worse, he can’t spell so we’re stuck here generations later in biology classes we don’t even like and calling species “genus” when what he meant wasfor us to call him “genius”… ’cause he’s it, and we’re not.

No, I’m still not sure how the monkeys get into it – ’cause there weren’t even on the stinkin’ island – unless it’s like another of those Hollywood sets where they land Apollo on “the moon”. So I guess you’re just going to have to ask the journalists who weren’t there to explain how they messed up another one of those “guy-runs-into-tree-with-golf cart” stories and made it sound like some sort of scientific discovery mission… but don’t expect much. I mean… it’s already in print… so like, it’s true, right?

But at last we understand that the whole of this mess really had more to do with “fairness” in terms of “getting even” with the guy who “poached the last chips’n'dip and started grousing about the game on TV ’cause he didn’t want to stand by the pool and talk about last night’s Bridezilla make-over fashion-cooking-horror show…  and so pressured this poor Darwin guy to hurry it up and “do some science … turn on the game… or just do something… anything … even a card trick… ” And even though the D-man had no real intention in the first place… and thought he was just on the island to test out some new camping gear for L.L. Bean or something… another similarly challenged guy asks if you’ll forgive me, “What would Darwin do?” and the rest is mystery.

Ah… but you ask… what is the Thickheaded Corrollary to the modification of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution? Seems I kind of skipped over that.  Simple: Evolution has to go down a few blind alleys and it’s just my luck to be stuck in one…. with a couple of remotes to spare…. batteries not included… and instructions that don’t make sense:

“Call me a Lemur, but no, it wasn’t exactly a choice. I guess I’d pictured going for something with a little more edge to it… more like… Fighting Chipmunk or Smokin’ Squirrel… but this is all they had… so here I am.”

On the other hand… bad as things get sometimes… I’m not exactly sure I want to be caught in an alley with actual functioning eyeballs either. Yep… to me it sounds more like a Stephen King idea and a bad one at that. Gives me the creeps…. but maybe it beats the proverbial dead-end. Only this leaves me with the thought… just what  exactly is it that makes a dead-end Proverbial? Maybe it’s something to do with a convention somewhere…. like one filled with uncapitalized atheists… but a convention that nevertheless seems to sound better than Psalmodic. I mean when things are going badly… isn’t the last thing you need a couple of BeeGees doing the Psalms? One positively shudders at the thought… two cringe  on their knees… and three… well…

So let’s sum up if we can: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution still pains us so much today because at heart, we know the secret…  and a hundred plus years later we still can’t figure out the remotes any better than he could… only he had a Finch and we don’t. Moreover….necessity is the mother of not getting eaten by cannibals. So the record shows he got it precisely backwards… more like Devolution…. and so as a result, we sense a remoteness in our being, a remoteness from order, and a remoteness from God…. as if He takes instruction like some sort of short order cook charged with fashioning a world to our liking… one where we can not only NOT find the remotes, but can’t make them work either. But He doesn’t do that, we’re left confused… and it must be that Darwin guy messed things up.

Well… I don’t know about you, but my set of remotes is no Garden of Eden … and I’m wondering just what it would have looked like if the chips had indeed run out before the Finch flew on to the scene… the cannibals had found the just-so-tasty saute for a dude… and the game never came on….. Would life have stayed the same… or would we be clicking out on chalkboards instead of computer keys? We’ll never know.. but hey… I’m glad it worked out for the D-man .

Another Psaltery Thought or Two

In reading over St. Ephraim’s psalter and its better known Old Testament inspiration, I began to wonder about the course through which the rendition of the psalms into English has wandered. For example, I have long preferred the Lancelot Andrewes “King James Version” – and not just because it was part of my fifth grade memory – literally the first piece we ever memorized, but because it’s always seemed more poetic. Thomas Cranmer’s rendition in the Book of Common Prayer runs a close second… but it is this same Twenty-Third psalm where he just doesn’t quite cut the mustard. And so this seems to be where I look first at a new Bible… can I pray that twenty-third, or does it leave me feeling like I’m in typing class? The sad fact is that in some respects, the plain language movement in the Roman Catholic church left me at the side of the road thinking there just had to be more. As one priest I know complained with respect to a group he’d joined praying the hours, “They seriously can’t expect people to pray some of that language.” And though that was another time and another place, in my hubris, I concurred and put the effort aside.

But if we do care about the language we use for prayer, then many subsequent translations just seem unworthy by comparison… though in truth I haven’t done the survey work. I mean once you’ve tried the Reader’s Digest “dumb it down” approach… once… you’re through. To paraphrase James Bond, “Once is Definitely Enough.” Yet Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest” fails to explain the proliferation of the least fit… other than that there must be something wrong with my perspective on what should survive. Imagine that. Hmmm. Well, at least initially it seemed more appropriate to think of the old adage that “Bad money chases out the bad”… by which is meant that debased currency will result in hoarding of the more valued… and thus only the poor coinage circulates. But that overstates the case, too.

Then there was last spring’s infamous Bible Study class. Fact is, it seems to engendered something of a reluctant change of heart…  leading me to admit of greater diversity on the subject. Of course it helps being Orthodox… as part of that “decision” for me involved letting go of my tenacious hold on the lilting KJV language no matter how archaic it might seem. Sure enough, the Antiochian Western Rite does not require this sort of “give up”… but the decision for Orthodoxy ultimately is not about a rite, but about a faith and relationship with Jesus Christ…. and I love both rites…. but at least officially… was able to keep “my” KJV.

But in the Bible Study, we delved in to the language of the Gospels and issues with translation from Greek into English… and contrasted the job with that done into Slavonic where the sense of irony, the idiom, and the image were “better” maintained. Much comment was made about “using someone else’s language leading us to think someone else’s thoughts” and our need for the Orthodox Church to insist that its Bible reflect its worship. Yes, this even included handwringing over the word “worship” and its etymology… so we did the whole bit. And yes, we also did the by now overly familiar pet peeve over “evil” vs. “evil one” in The Lord’s Prayer… for the zillionth time.

So I got it, and was ready to finally relay, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Indeed, I capitulated and started seeking out some better translations. In the end, I settled for “minor corrections” with better notes.  So now I’ve got this really over-powering book of the Gospels that’s longer than the new OT and NT version of the Orthodox Study Bible combined… ’cause of all those notes. And by my sophmoric gearhead, thicker’s better, right? And those notes… longer than the actual text… I mean they’re great… and cover all the things our lecturer suggested needed covering… though with a lighter hand in terms of actually making changes to language we already know. So my understanding ought to quadrupple or something… if I could actually squeeze out the time to read them. And the text… but that’s another issue with my motivation.

So there is a rub here, and modest steps are worth taking. But… and I mean I’m not sure how newsworthy this really is…  duh…  my take on it is that the language thing at the end of the day may be of less concern than that we’re actually reading these texts. You might not want something with goofy androgynous language or other changes that have a serious impact on understanding the story… but it is easy to go over board. Been there, done that. I still think it’s fair to say  there’s no particular reason to settle for pedestrian language… but there’s equally no reason to allow the meaning to be obscured. But if the key thrust in transformation is less about specific language than about the image formed in the mind, then perhaps our respect for the meaning, the spirit of the text, should trump our hold on the literal language, or the “power” of expression. Maybe some of us might even be circumspect enough to not demand poetry, power, and its like… y’know… ’cause all the passions stirred up in the heart… well… they could be a problem, huh?

Maybe the answer seems to lie in the simple notion that I’ve gone down this road so that you don’t have to, and now you can just go back about your routine.  I mean… the gain in understanding is less than one might wish for… it’s there, it’s solid, but maybe we would do just as well to get Rosetta Stone, learn Greek, and avoid the intermediaries? You make the call.

But since I don’t have the language gene, I’ve gone with the flow… and I’ve lately “flowed over” to reading the Psalms in “American English”.. by which the authors mean something just short of Hemingway’s terseness. And without addressing their preference for the Masoretic over the Septuagint in terms of their sources…. the project claims to have endeavored to match the imagery and reserve of the Hebrew of the period. And the result immediately conveys a clarity the KJV requires an accompanying text like Fr. Pat Reardon’s to deliver. So all I can say is, “Hmmmm.”

As further ID… the text was completed in 1966 by the Monks of New Skete and chanted, revised, and chanted some more over the intervening 18 years before publication, and there has been a sincere effort to match the text to its original intention, and sung in worship. I’ve even tried this when the house is empty… but it needs some notation to be more than guesswork… and my dog hates guesswork…. and chanting leaves him guessing about when we’re actually going to the kitchen and filling the bowl.  But it is something of a pleasure to see that these things can be managed…. that clarity and poetic power (to my traditionalist ears) do not have to be estranged.

So there you are: Transformation from textual snob of one sort, to textual snob of another. I don’t know if that’s better or not… but it is different… so it must be a transformation of sorts, huh? Yep, I learned something. Yet all the same, I wonder from the yellowed pages of my “new” copy whether “demand” ever materialized… or the whether the judgment of (publishing) history has already been rendered… as much as this confession inevitably renders a judgment on this writer. Moi. Now, can we all say, “Hmmmmm?”

Both Man and God…

Turning back to one of my favorite of St. Ephraim the Syrian’s “Spiritual Psalter” psalms last night (I’m not quite through it the first time yet), I read one past it… ’cause it looked “hot”, too. And I was immediately thankful to have stumbled precisely on to the… well… absolutely seasonal passage I’ve excerpted here:

We confess one and the same individual as perfect God and perfect Man.

He is God the Word Which was flesh.

For if He was not flesh, why was Mary chosen?

And if He is not God, whom does Gabriel call Lord?

If He was not flesh, who was laid in a manger?

And if He is not God, whom did the angels who came down from heaven glorify?

If He was not flesh, who was wrapped in swaddling clothes?

And if He is not God, in whose honor did the star appear?

If He was not flesh, whom did Simeon hold in his arms?

And if He is not God, to whom did Simeon say: Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace?

If He was not flesh, whom did Joseph take when he fled into Egypt?

And if He is not God, who fulfilled the prophesy: Out of Egypt have I called my Son?

If He was not flesh, whom did John baptize?

And if He is not God, to whom did the Father say: This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased?

Psalm 23

St. Ephraim continues in a beautiful, rhettorical essay summarizing the Gospels in this psalm… but I’ve stopped here with the Baptism of our Lord.  Now I haven’t given much thought to the ordering of St. Ephraim’s psalms, but I would be willing to roll the dice and say, “Uh… gee… I’m sure he probably thought that through.” And it would make a wonderful study. But I digress.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, Nativity and preparation for Baptism.