Gathered to His People: Jacob's Request

A venerable old Church tradition for the burial of the dead holds that they should be buried in the churchyard.  This method of burial was an affirmation of hope in the resurrection of the dead.

In Genesis 49-50, Jacob makes Joseph swear to bury him near Abraham and Isaac, in the cave near Mamre in Canaan.  This request serves as the structural connection between the era of the patriarchs and the great deliverance in Exodus.

On one hand, the entire affair serves as a dramatic and ironic foreshadowing of the story to come.  Certain powerful continuities between the last chapters of Genesis and the early moments of Exodus are important; the Egyptians mourn for Jacob for 70 days (50:3), while in Exodus God makes the Egyptians favorably disposed towards Moses and Israel (Ex. 3:21).  Also, Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen (50:9 and Exod. 14:9) are present on both journeys.  These continuities create the ironies of Exodus and cast a dark shadow over the restorations between Joseph and his father and brothers.  The freedom with which Joseph and his brothers can simply journey to Canaan and bury Jacob increases the sense of tightness in the grip that refuses to let Jacob's children go.  And Genesis ends with a sense of deep foreboding, since it has already been promised (15:13) that there is a slavery yet to be endured.

On the other hand, however, Jacob's request shows that finally, after a lifetime of penitence, he has become a redeemed man.  The supposed death of Joseph had dislocated Jacob from the world to the extent that he could speak of his 130 years (!—47:9) to Pharaoh as days that were "few and evil" (מְעַ֣ט וְרָעִ֗ים).   Indeed, upon learning of Joseph's death, Jacob maintains that he will not be comforted until he joins Joseph "in the grave."  Having found Joseph, then, his request to be buried in Canaan is no small gesture.  Jacob has already shown his unwillingness to be parted from Rachel's children before, when the brothers try to take Benjamin to Joseph.  But his requirement that he be buried near Abraham and Isaac binds Jacob not to the purported and imagined life with Joseph but to the promise made to Abraham and Isaac, and hence, to the maker of that promise.  It binds Jacob to the promises of God, to the slavery and redemption, to the threads of the story that are yet dangling at the end of Genesis.  Jacob's request denies the facsimile of a home in the stability of Joseph's principality and casts his hope upon the faithful God of his fathers to turn the place of Abraham's wandering into a home for His people and His name.

And Jacob seems to expect some kind of bodily participation in that inheritance, even after his death.  Jacob may be saying more than he knows when he says "I am about to be gathered to my people."  And perhaps the best way to account for all of this is to say that "I am about to be gathered to my people" is the literal sense of a verse whose figural sense would translate as "expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi."  

Is this not what might be expected to follow from Jacob's intimacy with the God of the living?

Nye Eats Humble Pie

In a stunning vindication of the views of scientist Ken Ham, a set of footprints has been found and dated to the time....wait for it....that humans and dinosaurs walked together!

Kenneth "Bubs" O'Leary, a UCSB paleontologist on consultation with the Santa Barbara Police Department, was the first to unearth and examine a section of rock in which a human footprint seems to have been superimposed with that of a much larger, lizard-like creature.  Said Bubs early on Tuesday morning after digging all night, "the impressions were what really give it away.  Conceivably, the print could have been made by an of a whole host of creatures, but the impressions near the tip of the toes evince the presence of claws at the end of the feet, digging into the ground."

Those who are not taken in by the military industrio-scientific prison complex will recall the drubbing creationist mercenary debater Ken Ham gave Bill Nye on Ham's home turf.  Nye insisted that Americans who believe the world was created by God rather than evolved by the throw of cosmic dice should all be locked up in prison because for the future.  But as anyone who remembers his career before the ridiculous Bill Nye the Science Guy can attest, Nye is a scientist-for-hire, whose integrity is more than up for grabs.  Between televised segments, we have it on good authority that he could be found in the makeup room powdering his hair, counting his money, and screaming inarticulate obscenities into the dressing room mirrors.  One of my good friends who listened under the door was pretty sure he also heard Nye exclaim "master" after a serpentine voice told him to up his game or else.

Ham, whose stalwart faith was pilloried again and again on every lamestream media outlet imaginable, fought the good fight, pointing out that science is an incomplete and ever-changing guessing game, while the interpretation of the Bible is agreed upon by everyone and has never changed.

And here's the proof, etched like the 9th commandment into a tablet of 5,000 year old rock:  humans and dinosaurs lived together.  Bubs deferred comments of a religious nature to the proper authorized authorities, but he did mention the famous Footprints poster, which he remembered from the bedroom wall in his mother's Malibu home.

"The temporal delay between the human foot and the sharp-clawed creature doesn't look like a long one; I'd guess the human didn't make it that far.  Maybe that's the reason that suddenly there's only one set of footprints in the sand."

Poetic Understatement: Case Study #1

A previous post mentioned the way Tolkien, because of the mythos his poetry is able to access in LoTR, is able to write in a beautifully understated idiom.  It allows him casual mention of things that do not have to be elaborated.  Words like "tree" have a symbolic resonance in the mythworld that allows a poet merely to mention them and move on, carrying their wider mythological significance in the structure of the poem.  A similar kind of beautiful understatement can be found, I think, in the Gaelic tune "Lament of the Three Marys."

The second and fourth line of each of these stanzas contains a lament that is difficult to translate, but means something like "Wail-a-way."  It seems, to the best of my knowledge, that the phrase actually capitalizes on the vowel sounds to create wailing words, barely articulate cries.  And these cries punctuate a narrative that moves by easy, even playful (if "playful" can apply to something so grief-stricken) steps.

"O Peter, His apostle, have you seen my true love?
[...]
I saw that [his] enemy was here."

The naming of Peter the Apostle conveys the mythos we are summoned into.  The second half of the first line combines the spheres of maternal and matrimonial love, weaving these two emotional registers together, so that we feel the suffering of Jesus' mother with a slightly overloaded ardor that would be amazingly strange except for the object of this affection.  He is her Son, the child of her womb; he is also the Lord for whom she as ecclesiae Mater has the love of Bride for Husband (Eph. 5).  The propriety of the sentiment in theological terms notwithstanding, it is still a little bit of an overloaded phrase when compared with the kinds of things we usually say with words.  It is a surprise of charged emotion, followed by a wail whose sound says more in its untranslated state than could be communicated by translation.  The third line, then, presents just a devastatingly understated sentiment:  "I saw that [his] enemy was here."  What a strange line to follow such a wail.  But it is just here that the mythos works its magic, for what an audience gets out of this line is the tension between the quotidian phrase and the horror we know it refers to.

To my mind, this beats the etherized patient six ways from Sunday.

Click to listen (Coaineadh Na dTri Muire)

A Pheadair, a aspail, an bhfaca tú mo ghrá geal?  
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
Chonaic mé ar ball é i láthair a namhad  
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
   
Gabhaigi i leith, a dha Mhuire, go gcaoine sibh mo ghrá geal  
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
Ceard atá le caoineadh ágainn mura gcaoinimid a chriámha?  
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
   
An é sin an maicin a hoileadh in ucht Mháire?
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
Éist, a mháithrin, is na bí cráite
Ochóne is ochóne ó
   
A Leinbh, is mór é tualach is léig cuid de ar do Mháthair
Ochóne is ochóne ó  
Iompruíodh gach éinne a chrosa, a Mháithrin  
Ochóne is ochóne ó

Tolkien the Modernist?

"That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming… Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging." 

"I don’t know… It came to me then, as if I was making it up, but I may have heard it long ago."

Tolkien's poetry of Middle Earth, or at least so argues Tom Shippey (Tolkien: Author of the Century, H/T Matthew Bardowell and his namesake), achieves its splendor by an act of remembrance that had become foreign to modern England.  "True tradition" shows itself in the interplay between an author's originality and the way that originality is constrained, with or without the author's awareness.  Frodo reprises the "Old Walking song," without any awareness that he is reprising ("as if I was making it up").  Readers of LoTR know, of course, that he is not creating it.  The road that Frodo pursues with "weary feet" is the same road that Bilbo had pursues with "eager feet" when he leaves for Rivendell near the story's beginning.  But, Shippey admonishes, we should not be so quick to assume Bilbo's rhyming is really his, for Bilbo later reproduces the rhyme in a totally different way while retaining Frodo's "weary feet."  In this way, Tolkien signals the existence of a poetic tradition that is deep enough to be unconscious to those who "rhyme" within it.  It inheres in the basic symbols of both the Shire and Middle Earth more widely.  So when Frodo composes, it is rightly called "imitation," but it is no less so in Bilbo's "rhyming."  It is not really his either.

Shippey further illuminates Tolkien's poetics by analyzing his relationship to three other "shire poets":  the author of Pearl, William Shakespeare, and (to a much lesser degree) John Milton.  Shakespeare's poetry is ridden with effects whose presence the poet himself may have known little about.  His alliterative contrast in Antony and Cleopatra between day and dark recalls a pairing that is as old as the Saxons (dœg, deorc)).  And at the conclusion of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, one finds a stanza that Tolkien would later rewrite in Bilbo's own poetry.  Shakespeare's lines seethe with folk charm:

"When icicles hang by the wall
       And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
       And milk comes frozen home in pail..."

Similarly, Milton's Comus preserves an ancient contrast between the unchanging sphere of stars and the change-ridden tangle of life beneath the trees.

Although all three of these poets were capable of writing shire poetry, Tolkien parts company from them because their poetry fails to reproduce the brilliant network of symbols that make the playfulness of shire poetry cohere into a deep and earth seriousness.  Tolkien's "O Light to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees" reprises a theme seen in Comus, but Tolkien still has a sense for the ultimacy with which these signs communicate:  "We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees / The starlight on the Western Seas."  There is loss, pathos, and memory here, because Tolkien knows something of what trees and light meant to those who first named something a "tree" in the first place.  The coherence of the mythic web Tolkien is accessing here allows a poetry of astonishing understatement that allows his three lines to do what modern poets would have to go to great lengths to accomplish.  These three lines resound with power even Eliot would be unable to achieve despite at his most brutal moments ("like a patient etherized...").

The comparison with Eliot, however, points out what seems to me to be a missed opportunity in Shippey's argument, the avoidance of a question that could have been pressed far more acutely than he does it.  Eliot and Tolkien represent two different ways of responding to the banality of Victorian England.  Eliot mocks it ceaselessly.  But although Tolkien's picture of modern England is similarly comic (Shippey points out that Bilbo represents the amnesiac sensibility of modern England, "and that means comfort"), there is simultaneously an aptitude in the hobbits to become fuller parts of Middle Earth.  They come from the Shire, and this means that they know more than they can say.  Frodo and Bilbo inherit a poetic tradition each may think they made up even though it is more likely neither of them did.  They do not know where it comes from, but they do know it.  Similarly, modern English people are shire-people, even if they have forgotten this.  They know, deep down, about trees and starlight, about dœg and doerc, and they can summon up courage if they have to.  Tolkien's poetry is filled with pathos and sadness, but it is also a reminder of who they are to the English.  And in this way, it is poetry repurposed.

The great fear of LoTR is the loss of lore.  The tragedy of Tolkien's art is that he has to do with precision, uncertainty, and utter detestable self-consciousness what Bilbo, Frodo, and the Gawain-poet were able to do without knowing it was even an ability they had.  He had to be a lore-finder because lore-masters had vanished from the earth.  For all his archaism, the self-consciousness with which Tolkien did this marks him out as inescapably modern.  He belongs to our time, and lucky us, since it is as a modern person that he instructs modern people.  The modern period knows its own peculiar agonies, and our poetry sucks as bad as it does because there is no mythos for it to connect to.  There is no coherence that allows us to understate; our poetry says too much and crushes the beautiful things by overexertion.

This is not a cry for a golden age; it is a summons for us to be intelligent mythmakers again.  The decay and banality characteristic of our time is the result of our adherence to myths not worthy of the name, myths that have no time, no soil, no sense of how things we know arise from where and when and with whom we are.  Untrue myths.  It will not do to attempt to be Tolkien; it may be enough to be like him.  To look hard at the earth and ask it who we are, to respond to our time with courage, and excavate a beauty that will allow the creation of true myths, in which our silence may express nearly as much as our words do.

Credo ut Videam: A meditation on John 9

"Where is he, Lord, that I may trust (pisteusō) in him?" (Jn. 9:36).  The man, recently healed of blindness, has a knowledge of something that those who have never known his ailment do not:  namely, the primacy of trust over doubt for any properly human rationality.

The Pharisees insist that the man was born in sin and is therefore unfit to lecture them.  The problem of course is that since he was born blind, the man has lived closer to the noetic consequences of sin than they have.  They have deluded themselves into thinking that doubt is the appropriate response to ignorance:  "as for this man, we do not know where he comes from."

Polanyi has well-developed why this posture of doubt is so disturbing not only to life in general but to the acquisition of knowledge.  Imagine the scientist that abandons a hypothesis at the first sign of contrary data.  The scientific method depends not on doubt but on faith.  Once doubt is embraced as axiomatic, there is nothing in human capacity to prevent its complete takeover.  We simply cannot know very much without doubt, since anything we think we know is interpreted through a web of perceived meanings none of which is certain.

One thing I know:  I was blind and now I see.  The man had no pretense about his ability to make himself see what he clearly had just begun to see.  The utter gratuity of his seeing made him humble about what there was to know and how it could be known.  How many things did he come to know in the first five minutes after his healing that he had known of only by testimony before that?  How quickly he must have come to see how peculiar the relationship between faith and sight is:  the seen expressed truly and accurately in the testimony about it but revealed to be only a barely serviceable faculty in the greater light that sight is.  The one thing that man knew is that he had been blind.  And in the first moment of seeing, he knew his blindness better than ever.  There were so many true things he had nevertheless not known.  The gift of human reason is the knowledge that there are things we do not know.  We exercise that reason in discerning trust, beginning with affirmation as the necessary precondition to discerning, qualifying, and negating:  doubt is a movement of faith or else it is neither rational nor honest.

The only other option is a self-defeating epistemic position that leaves little at all to be known in the end.  It is by their proclamation that they can see that the Pharisees remain in their sin (Jn. 3:18).  Jesus does not say to him "do you believe in me since I healed you?"  Rather, he asks, "do you believe in the Son of man?"  There is no indication that the man knows it was Jesus that healed him.  Rather, having spent a lifetime being conducted by the testimony of others, this man is eager to believe in that which he does not know.  He knows, as so many of us do not, that we demonstrate rationality primarily in our trusting.

In to Go Out: Hebrews and Deliberative Rhetoric

For a book that so strongly emphasizes pilgrimage, moving on, and going to Jesus "outside the camp" (13:13), the places where paraenesis is most explicit in Hebrews seem to have a lot to say about gathering in.  "Do not forsake the gathering of yourselves together" (10:25), "Keep on loving one another as brothers" (13:1), "Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you" (13:7), and "Submit to leaders" (13:17), not to mention the praise of the table from which the church ("we") have the right to eat.

If, according to common practice in deliberative rhetoric, the intended action is hinted at early in the letter but becomes clearer as the letter goes on, then all of this "together" rhetoric cannot be insignificant.  Indeed, if deliberative rhetorical techniques are operative here, then it is arguable that the more cryptic imperatives ought to be interpreted in light of the clearer versions of them later on.  Is "drifting away" (2:1) a drift away from the gathering church?  Is the "turning away from the living God" (3:12) a way of speaking about turning away from the brothers?  Is the "falling short of God's rest" a typological reading of an on-the-ground reality of pulling away from a united church?

The "tabernacle" motif has a deep history in Protestant typology.  When the insitution becomes corrupt, the thing to do,(so the reasoning goes) is to go to Jesus outside the camp, to come out from among them and be separate.  But what if we have to go in to go out?  It might be in fact that the best way to deal with weakened brethren is to cling to them with all the might of the cross.  Could it be that Hebrews actually tells us that the biggest danger facing the church wasn't apostasy but schism?

Soldiers, not Heroes

O'Donovan, in his (much maligned in my circles) The Desire of the Nations distinguishes two kinds of warrior tradition in ancient Israel:  the heroic, found in the story cycles of Jonathan and the young David, and the sacral, found in the prophetic corpus, much of Torah, and Joshua's story of divine punishment in Jos. 6.  These traditions are difficult for modern people to accommodate, and often that are shrugged off in a kind of embarrassment.  But if we are not to give over the entire public square to the powers that be, then we must, simply must, insist on YHWH's right to command the armies of the earth.  YHWH's cease fire in Jesus does not in fact make sense unless he holds the helm of the sword.  Horrifying as these texts can be, we must insist on their being absolutely expressive of YHWH's right to liberate. The public square is determined, at the basest level, by the right to dictate who dies, how, and why.  And the ascription of this right to YHWH cannot be done without the frightening entailment that sometimes the cease-fire may need paradoxical preservation by judicious force.  We cannot give YHWH command and at the same time know in advance that we will never be violent.  If God alone can offer peace, it is God's terms that must guide that peace.  And those terms may require, as I suspect they have, the willingness of some to be soldiers.  The brokenness of the world may be such, that is, that God's interaction with it requires people to do that for which they will later be rightly sorry.  And I suspect that if we are to be realistic in our endeavor to live faithful lives in this world, it is the sorry soldier at confession, and not always the crowned martyr, who can dislodge from us our cult of military heroism.