Going Sideways

I was watching classic Dr. Who last night, and the Doctor (#3, John Pertwee) recommended to Jo the benefits of “lateral thinking.” Jo takes him literally, and since they can neither go forward because there is an abyss in front of them, or backward because there are monsters behind them, Jo decides to literally go sideways down a corridor. She exclaims that Dr. Who is a genius, just as he is about to tell her that wasn’t exactly what he meant by lateral thinking. He just stops short and says, “I am?” and then accepts her assessment with a smirk.

1 Samuel 28:3-20

7 Then Saul said to his servants, "Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, so that I may go to her and inquire of her." His servants said to him, "There is a medium at Endor."

So, lateral thinking: The story of the witch of Endor is eerie. My translation goes all PC and calls them “mediums,” but the phrase “the medium of Endor” just is not evocative in the least.

(Now we go sideways.) I just happened to read an article (while searching for a word for words that make you feel a little shiver) about all the nature words that are being removed from modern children’s dictionaries as irrelevant. “The deletions,” according to Robert Macfarlane in another article on Friday, “included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.” There was another article by Martin Robbins (in my opinion one that utterly misses the point) about how “attacking a dictionary for removing archaic words is like punching your thermometer when it’s too cold.” Robbins goes on to say, “But Oxford Dictionaries are absolutely correct in what they’re doing, and the people moaning at them have got the whole situation completely backwards. Firstly, the job of a dictionary is to document words and usage, not dictate them.” I think Robbins has it backwards. Yes, it’s the erosion of nature’s importance to modern society that is causing the heartache here, but if the hope is to remedy this sad state of affairs, then who better to appeal to as an arbiter of words? Dictionaries influence the use of language, surely? To say, “the job of a dictionary is to document words and usage, not dictate them,” is disingenuous, to say the least. I don’t think this is an attack on dictionaries, it is an appeal to them. “Please help us keep these words from disappearing!” Every single excised word on that list has more poetic resonance than any of their replacements.

May God help us defend our beautiful and stately words; our fine and ringing words; our redolent and suggestive words, with the help of the Word that became flesh; the Word that is with God; the Word that is God. Amen 

Acts 15:1-11

10 Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?

An unbearable yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear. Yowza! Doesn’t that totally sum it up? Nobody in all of history has ever been able to adhere to such rigid rules, and every time we’ve tried we’ve made ourselves into hypocrites. Loud, obnoxious, intransigent, narrow-minded, bigoted hypocrites. Jesus called such people a “brood of vipers.” The apostles refer to the spirit of the law which is summed up in texts such as, “You shall not put God to the test,” and “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, spirit and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  I don’t understand how anyone could hold on to their niggling, petty, hateful, stubborn, and self-righteous ideas in the face of such clarity. I mean, I see it every day, and this is the heart of my practice right now. I need to figure out how to love my enemies. I don’t have any personal enemies that I know of, but I just realized that I do have enemies of the spirit; enemies who visit their malicious and spiteful ideologies on anyone they feel justified in condemning. I believe that moral values are of no use unless they express themselves in action. James says it: “Faith without works is dead.” So how do I show compassion and affinity toward people who display animosity, hostility, aggression and belligerence toward me, or someone else? I don’t know. I do know that they upset me, and I feel dismayed and apprehensive in their presence. (Now we go sideways.) I just remembered something from the book by George McDonald, “At the Back of the North Wind.” The hero is a little boy named Diamond, “who was just as much one of God’s messengers as if he had been an angel with a flaming sword, going out to fight the devil. The devil he had to fight just then was Misery.” (The scene is one of domestic violence: a drunken cabman slouched in a chair, his wife sobbing on the bed, and their baby wailing in the cradle.) “Like a wise soldier, he attacked him at his weakest point – that was the baby; for Misery can never get such a hold of a baby as of a grown person. Diamond was knowing in babies, and he knew he could do something to make the baby happy...” and, “I have known people who would have begun to fight the devil in a very different and a very stupid way. They would have begun by scolding the idiotic cabman, and then they would make his wife angry by saying it must be her fault as well as his, and by leaving ill-bred though well-meant shabby little books for them to read, which they were sure to hate the sight of; while all the time they would not have put out a finger to touch the wailing baby. But Diamond had him out of the cradle in a moment, set him up on his knee, and told him to look at the light.” McDonald says something else: “the misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai it was thunder; in the cabman’s heart it was misery; in the soul of St. John it was perfect blessedness.”  McDonald first calls Misery a devil, and then calls it an echo of the voice of God. What? So I’ll be literal, like Jo, and ask, “How do echoes behave?” Aren’t they sometimes so distorted that you can’t understand if they make words or not, or if they even belong to a voice? Isn’t it the shape of the space that controls that? If there were so many stony pockets in the cabman’s heart; so many different heights to the ceiling and wrinkles in the walls; that the Voice that he longed to hear was too mangled to make out. Misery. Then Diamond starts singing to the baby, and gradually the songs put the cabman to sleep, “and the sleep was busy all the time it lasted, smoothing the wrinkles out of his temper.” I guess when it comes to dealing with those mean folks, first I’ll have to remember that what makes them that way is Misery and then next, I’ll have to look for the baby, and if I can find it, sing to it. Not so easy, but then what is practice for?

Mark 5:1-20

15 They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. 16 Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. 17 Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood. 18 As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19 But Jesus refused….

“But Jesus refused….” Now why would Jesus refuse to let someone follow him?

(Let’s go sideways right from the start.) This guy was the reason Jesus had to get out of town. “Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood.” Jesus was being practical. This guy was probably really, really needy. So that’s a great recommendation on behalf of ‘tough love.’ Some of the commentators see this as Jesus assigning this guy to be an apostle to the Gentiles before Paul ever was. I think that’s a stretch, personally. Now, this poor man had caused an enormous local economic impact in the loss of a whole bunch of livestock. This was Gentile territory, so a big herd of pigs wasn’t too odd, but in the course of researching ‘pigs in first century Palestine,’ I ran across something else interesting: the legion that supposedly occupied the area at the time was the Tenth Legion, (X Fretensis) and one of its symbols was a boar. I don’t know how reliable that information is, but it sure put a whole different slant on the story. Maybe the pigs were Roman pigs. Maybe the whole story is a wistful foreshadowing meant to bolster all those Messianic hopes; maybe it’s a complex allegory in which the demon ridden guy is Israel, the demons represent the Tenth Legion, and the mass nosedive of the pigs off of the cliff is the much-longed-for expulsion of the Romans from the Holy Land. Jesus refused to let the guy follow him, and instead sends him to his Gentile family and friends to tell them what “God has done for him.” So the message to the Gentiles (including the Romans) sounds like it might be: “God has the power to throw out those pigs of Romans. Don’t follow me, go home and tell those bastards to leave Israel alone.” That interpretation actually makes a lot of sense to me. The Romans continued to occupy Judea for hundreds of years after Jesus died. Mark’s gospel was written right around the time of the destruction of the temple, and the ruin of Jerusalem which was horrible beyond imagining. Some of the stories about that time say that the blood was splashed up to the tops of the doors in the city. Josephus says a million people died in the sack of Jerusalem, and although that number is an exaggeration, it shows how horrific the slaughter was. During the siege, the Tenth Legion camped on the Mount of Olives.  The Mount of Olives is where David wept as he fled from Absalom, and where Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Gethsemane is at the foot of the Mount of Olives. Jesus also camped there, I think, since the Bible often says he ‘retired there to rest.’ It’s haunting to think of the Mount of Olives as the place from which Israel’s salvation and its destruction both come. If the author of the gospel wasn’t actually writing at the very time of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, then the memory was still terribly fresh; there were still rebels hiding out in the hills; the Roman occupiers were still bitterly resented, and the dark and humorous aspect of this story would have had great appeal. Think of it, Jesus sent those Roman demons running and squealing over the cliff and they kicked and thrashed as they drowned, with no ship to rescue them. Go Jesus! (Oh, another side note: the main symbol of the Tenth Legion (X Fretensis) was a ship. Those drowning pigs don’t get no ship!)

Lateral thinking is nifty like Zen, in that it never begs the question or insists on a moralizing conclusion. You want one of those, ask those pigs.