Requiem

Last Wednesday, late afternoon, my wife got the call. Her father's number, but not his voice, “Are you Karen's daughter?” Yes. “Well, I'm very sorry to tell you, but she's died.” My wife had spoken with her just the evening before: small talk, without foreshadowing.

We were on next available flight. Her father had been swept into Texas's adult protective services. We'd spend the next three days canceling inessential services at their house, and getting him released to my wife's custody. We flew back with him on Sunday, and had him admitted to a trusted assisted living facility nearby. He's only asked a couple of times about his wife, who he loved and protected fiercely for fifty years. In the last few years, their roles had reversed, and she'd become his caretaker and his protector, a constant companion as he slid unsteadily into dementia. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, which stole him from her, and her from him.

Karen lived big in her own way. She was passionate about country music and line dancing. She was a constant ambassador for a lifestyle and a set of values that often left me feeling like an anthropologist in my own country, perplexed but curious, “What are the natives doing?”

They grew up Protestant, conventional and unfervent in their faith. They were not church people when I knew them, yet they raised daughters who are rocks in their congregations, one Lutheran, one Catholic. Her funeral will take place in the context of a Catholic mass, courtesy of her son-in-law the deacon. He'll become a de facto member of our faith community, and again be receiving the body and blood of our Savior, as he did in his youth, as if the intervening decades of love and loss were but a dream. And the Bible that has rested on his nightstand since his confirmation rests beside him still, dog-eared and tattered, next to a photo of him and his vibrant wife, who now rests in peace.

Peace

Images of Creation

I have a new blog up that I'm going to use for my astronomical hobby. If you're interested, please visit Images of Creation.

Leviticus 19:1-18

This Sunday's lectionary readings were from Proper 25 of the Year A Revised Common Lectionary. They included a brief reading from Leviticus, intended (as the Old Testament readings usually are) to support the Gospel reading. The reading was discontinuous: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18. I'd like to consider the whole, and then the envelope.

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. You shall each revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the LORD your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the LORD your God.

When you offer a sacrifice of well-being to the LORD, offer it in such a way that it is acceptable on your behalf. It shall be eaten on the same day you offer it, or on the next day; and anything left over until the third day shall be consumed in fire. If it is eaten at all on the third day, it is an abomination; it will not be acceptable. All who eat it shall be subject to punishment, because they have profaned what is holy to the LORD; and any such person shall be cut off from the people.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:1–18 NRSV)

In the first place, I'd like to characterize the reading. This is, it seems to me, a freer rendering of the ten commandments, with more by way of illustration.

But it seems to me that this is a surprisingly important passage, especially for being in a book that is so seldom read. I'll start by picking a view things out.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 19:9–10 NRSV)

Here we have, of course, the scriptural warrant for the tradition of not gleaning the field, which was so important in the story of Ruth. But I think this is reflected in the social criticism of the OWS movement: the sin of Wall Street isn't that they're rich, it's that they take everything, when the law obligates them to leave enough for the poor and the alien.

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. (Leviticus 19:13 NRSV)

Here, we have the scriptural warrant for the tradition that a laborer should be paid before sundown, which figured in the Matthew 22 reading from a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of the preceding post.

I thought the following passage was especially relevant to our present, troubled times:

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor (Leviticus 19:15 NRSV)

I believe this can be read as a criticism of central tendencies of the Democratic and Republican Parties respectively. Is there perhaps wisdom enough in this passage to pull us through? I wonder.

Finally, I'd like to note a strong parallel between the reading as it appeared in the lectionary, and Jesus's words from the Gospel. First, Leviticus:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:1–2, 15-18 NRSV)

Next, Matthew:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40 NRSV)

Note how Jesus's epitome of the law parallels the beginning, and even more explicitly, the end of Leviticus reading. This lead me to ask the question: was it an idiom of oriental thought to refer to an entirety obliquely by mentioning it's beginning and the end? It took a couple of hours for the answer to occur to me, in the writings of John of Patmos:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. (Revelation 1:8 NRSV)

And so, I invite a more diligent, more prayerful contemplation of Leviticus 19:1-18, for upon them hang all the law and the prophets.

Peace

The Role of the Rich

Matthew, in material unique to him, tells a parable known as “the Workers in the Vineyard,” but it's actually about the owner of the vineyard:

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:1–16 NRSV)

Why does the owner of the vineyard go out to the market at noon, at three, and again, finally, at five? Does he expect that their work will provide as much value to him as that of the men he hired early in the morning? Of course not. For he is not hiring men, early or late, for the value they can provide to him. He is hiring men out of his abundance for the value he can provide to them, a wage sufficient for the day in return for honorable service. He understands the responsibility of the rich in society: it is neither to hoard wealth, nor to dissipate it, but instead to use it purposefully to advance the health of society.

Let us consider our society today, a society beset with sustained high unemployment. We hear from the voices privilege that the problems our our society are due to to the poor. It is the poor who don't contribute enough. Yet the poor still seek work, and if they don't find it, it's not because God has not provided. It is because those he's entrusted with wealth have nurtured the delusion that their wealth is a reward for their own merit, and its sole purpose is their self-indulgence. The problem we have today isn't that the poor aren't working, it's that the rich aren't hiring. It's that the rich that aren't doing their job.

Let us pray:

Dear Lord, Heal our society. Call the rich to their duty, or give us new rich who will do it in their stead. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen.

Peace

A New Dark Ages

These thoughts were inspired by a conversation over at John Hanson's blog, De Gustibus, we all need something, and I'd like to acknowledge my double debt to Brother John, not only for initiating and hosting that conversation, but also for a gentle and generous comment here that agitated me to write again.

Robert Maynard Hutchins coined the notion of “The Great Conversation,” which is defined as, “a characterization of references and allusions made by authors in the Western canon to the works of their predecessors.” This notion became, in due course, the seminal idea upon which Hutchins and others ultimate built “The Great Books.” The question as it came up on De Gustibus considered the status of religion in the Great Conversation, and the sense that religion is being relegated to a marginal and mostly honorary role in that Conversation. I think this is an important question, but it is not today's question. Today's question regards the health of the Great Conversation itself.

I'll begin by illustrating and expanding a bit on Hutchins' idea. Melville's novel, “Moby Dick,” is built upon references to the Old Testament, from the first sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” to the last, “It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Here we see a pattern of references he could assume would be meaningful to his readers. References which would enable him to say less, but mean more. His novel does not stand alone, but it builds on that which came before, and indeed, I suspect that more people today associate the name “Ahab” with the Great White Whale than with Jezebel or Elijah. Melville entered the conversation.

At this point, I'd like leverage this example into three related digressions:

1. If “Moby Dick” is a part of the Great Conversation by dint of its references to the Bible, doesn't this mean that the Bible is also a part of the Great Conversation? Yes. Isn't this obvious? It certainly was to the authors of “the Great Books,” who in their introduction made the point that they didn't include the Bible in their collection simply because they expected any of its readers to already have multiple copies. Indeed, if we remember that the Bible is not a book, but a collection of books, we can already see the Great Conversation at work within the Bible, as one book quotes another.
2. Hey, isn't the Great Conversation supposed to be about the Western canon? The Bible is a lot of things, but it is mostly written from the very different perspective of oriental culture. The first thing you have to understand about Western culture is its acquisitive nature. We claim the Bible. You don't like it? We don't care.
3. What about other cultures? Don't they have conversations too? Isn't it both arrogant and limiting to focus on the Western canon? Alright then. The second thing you have to understand about Western culture is that it is arrogant. But yes, it is limiting, which is both good and bad. What gets sometimes gets lost in the “Dead White Male Lit” vs. “World Lit” debate is a willingness to acknowledge what both sides have right. There is a distinctive Western conversation (nods to the right), but it is itself in conversation with other culture's conversations (nods to the left). The Bible, one of the foundational documents of the Western canon, is very much a case-in-point, but hardly a unique one. I'll cite Hesse's “Siddartha”, Achebe's “Things Fall Apart,” and the cinematic conversation between Kurosawa and Leone.

But now we get to the question. What is the health of the Great Conversation today? How might we assess it?

This is a critical time for the Great Conversation. Even in the early 50's, Hutchins wrote about how then-recent events had challenged (but in his estimation, unsuccessfully) foundational values of Western culture. And perhaps it was revulsion to Hitler's racial interpretation of Nietzsche's elitist notion of Übermensch that lead Mortimer Adler to push the egalitarian notion that the best education for the best is the best education for all. And the Great Books grew out of this, as an explicit attempt to make the Great Conversation accessible to all. These challenges, while they have not yet overwhelmed us, remain unabated. And all the while, technology has been producing profound changes in the nature of publishing, driving down costs and increasing bandwidth, to the point where anyone with access to a public library, a Google account, and an axe to grind, can set up shop and hope to reach billions. The absence of a public library notwithstanding, this blog itself is a case-in-point.

My thesis is that the Great Conversation has all but collapsed. As more and more people have entered in, and as time-to-publication has fallen from years to milli-seconds, the Great Conversation has pivoted. We no longer consider so much the great minds of the past, nor do we hope to engage the great minds of the future. We write for today's comments, which after a week's time will live forever unread on Google: cache without value.

My thesis is that these are the New Dark Ages: that we've walled ourselves off from the past and future of the Great Conversation, in favor of more vigorous but ultimately ephemeral chatter. We know more facts, but possess less understanding, less wisdom. We are trapped in the ignorance of now.

But I see hope. Whether through nature, or through God, our excesses are inevitably corrected. Difficult times, which is simply another way of saying times that involve changes we don't understand, are times when we're compelled to look beyond us. And we face difficult times, perhaps difficult enough to tear us away from our inward gaze. If not now, soon.

Peace

Is Death a Social Construct?

Over on Kirby's blog, G. M. Palmer posted a link to Easter, a remarkable poem by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Kirby felt the poem was “very secular.” This seemed to deeply miss the point of Essbaum's poetry, which struck me as a poignant reflection on a central paradox of Easter.

As Christians, we celebrate Easter as Christ's victory over death. We declare death vanquished. Yet we know, God's victory over death is ultimate, not present. Death surrounds us, and our own mortality presses in. We proclaim victory in defeat; we celebrate in despair. The ones we love pass on, and the threads that tie us to this life grow weaker, while the threads that pull us to, and we believe through, death grow stronger.

Why? JH has lamented the lack of the surreal over on Lutheran Surrealism. Let's have some here.

Is death a social construct? I'm thinking, yes.

Peace