Peter

Cartography

April 12, 2012 By Peter 3 Comments

From The English Patient (again):

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.

No commentary to make me feel better about quoting it. I’m not up to it.

I just finished Crime and Punishment (second read). I’m really enjoying All The King’s Men (first read) and, yeah, John’s gospel. And, very slowly — sometimes backwards – The English Patient.

Filed Under: Critical, Journal

Easter tweets retrospective

April 10, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

Sam Heard, the author of one of my favorite Twitter feeds, very kindly put my Easter tweets into one blog post. You can read it here on his blog, praxymetry.

I published the original tweets over an eighty-hour stretch — one tweet an hour on the hour. Read in paragraphs now, the tweets show little deference to one another, each tweet too forceful to simply refine a previous sentence’s thought or to simply set up the next sentence’s idea. Some repeat a word or phrase as a means of refocusing the reader even though the word or phrase is now the subject of the previous sentence.

In other words, the tweets are not used to not competing in a marketplace of hundreds of such tweets, and they’re not ready to let their guard down.

But that’s the fun of reading the tweets in paragraph form, I think. How does reading tweets differ from reading paragraphs, all things (such as content) being equal?

I have been trying, though not online, to work my emerging political philosophy into some accessible whole, and this past weekend I tried Twitter. I’m not satisfied with how it turned out, but I enjoyed the process.

Filed Under: Civil

box elder

April 9, 2012 By Peter

Just as Tom was about to go out and check the post today, we have external mailboxes here, of course, though ours is only a step from the house, and our regular posties tend to wait for us to come out and hand the mail over, there was an enormous thump on the window which made us nearly jump out of our skins. It was not one but two squabbling cock chaffinches, so absorbed in their quarrel they forgot to look where they were going. One of them landed, punch drunk, on the fence post outside the window. At first, he was very wonky, his sides heaving, so knowing that having time to recover from shocks like this can make the difference between life and death for small birds, we waited for him to fly off at his leisure, before going out for the post.

From box elder

Filed Under: Passages

Soulfool

April 7, 2012 By Peter

A woman once stopped me in the street and, holding her eyelids apart, asked me to remove the log in her eye. Wary of religious folklore –and of the sharp, crystal edges of the talc that clung to her clothes- I shook my head.

“No, no,” the woman said. “Look harder.”

I saw a piece of eyelash nestled on the orange inside of her eyelid.

From Soulfool.

Filed Under: Passages

Billy

April 7, 2012 By Peter 7 Comments

Billy, my stepfather-in-law, died last month after a nine-month battle with cancer. During our subsequent four-day visit to Nashville and Columbia, Tennessee, Betty asked me to preach at the funeral, something I haven’t done before. Here’s what I said.

Who can sum up a man’s life? The finest eulogies diminish the dead. I can’t say what Billy meant to you, either. I can talk a little bit about what he meant to me, and maybe it’ll add to your own reflections about Billy.

And even though we can’t sum up one another, we can all draw lessons from one another. We’re that close to one another.

At a funeral it’s customary to hear what someone accomplished. And Billy accomplished things. He and his first wife raised Joe and Tina. Those are amazing accomplishments! And marrying Betty would have made anyone proud. Billy had great taste in women – he married the mother, I married the daughter – and he was an accomplished mechanic, too.

But his accomplishments, many as they were, weren’t the main message of Billy’s life, to me. They’re not what I learned from him.

When I thought about what to say today, I thought I ought to run it in my mind by Billy. That didn’t take long. I could hear Billy say, “I don’t care; whatever you think is all right with me!”

Billy was low maintenance. He didn’t ask things from life that life wasn’t about to give him. In an age when we’re all trying to reduce our footprint – our carbon footprint, our demands on our planet’s resources – Billy was ahead of us. Billy has always had a small footprint in this life. He worked, he came home. When he was retired, he walked in the house, and he walked outside. He had his truck, his transistor radio, and his poker machine.

But most of all, he had Betty. Betty dressed him, and he looked sharp. Betty fed him, and he was happy.

Billy was loved.

One of my favorite Bible characters is Benjamin, the youngest son of Israel. What did Benjamin accomplish? I’ve searched the scriptures: as important as he was, Benjamin accomplished nothing, or at least nothing important enough for the Bible to mention. But he was always on the minds of his father Jacob and his brother Joseph. Before Jacob learned that his son Joseph ruled Egypt, Jacob and Joseph got into a tug of war, and Benjamin was the rope. Joseph gave Benjamin more than he gave his other brothers, and Jacob, keeping him in Canaan despite the famine, protected him more than his own life.

Benjamin was loved. That’s all. And how much history he made by just being loved!

We had a seven-hour visitation yesterday, and we about needed it all, too. Billy was loved. His wonderful brothers and sisters – J.C., Charlie, Ruby, Ada, Bob, and Barbara — loved him, and he loved them.

And there’s a part of me, the older brother – part of all of us, I guess – that needs to be like Benjamin, too. That’s what I learned most from Billy.

Just before Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin, she named him Benoni, “Son of my sorrow.” But his father renamed him Benjamin, “Son of my right hand.” Benjamin was born with a second chance! And Billy knew how to appreciate a second chance, too.

Billy appreciated everything.

I met Billy about the time he bought his truck. The truck is now nineteen years old, and I hear you have to know a few secrets to start it. But the truck didn’t have to move for Billy to enjoy it. The sun still came in warm through the windows. You could still see through the windshield.

The Bible says we see through a glass, darkly. What Billy taught me was, that’s okay. Or, as Billy would say, “I’m fine with that.” You don’t have to have it all figured out to enjoy it. You don’t have to earn love. You just have to take care of your own business, work the program, and let God come to you. Sometimes, it’s not about coming to God. Sometimes, it’s about God coming to you.

One day, Billy found himself living next door to Betty. The girl next door when you’re forty-four – they ought to write a country-western song about that.

And Betty, I’m sure God is singing over you this morning.

We see through a glass darkly. But Billy now sees him face to face. And if Billy were to speak himself this morning, I bet he’d say, “That’s okay, too.” And he’d smile that winning smile, and chuckle a little.

Be comforted when comfort’s offered. God bless you all in your grief.

Filed Under: People

John field notes 5a: The rules of evidence

April 3, 2012 By Peter Leave a Comment

In the latter part of John 5, John’s earlier undercurrent of legal language (testimony, evidence, witness) flows to the surface. John 5:30 – 47 is a virtual hornbook on John’s law of evidence. Here are some of its rules:

Rule 1: Jesus’ testimony about himself would be invalid if unaccompanied by other evidence (John 5:31).

His language suggests, however, that his testimony about himself is invalid, period: “If I testify on my own behalf, that testimony is not valid” (Id., REB). Later, the Pharisees use this strict reading of Jesus’ rule against him:

The Pharisees said to him, ‘You are witness in your own cause; your testimony is not valid.’ (John 8:13, REB)

Jesus seems to reverse himself but argues in the alternative that Deuteronomy 19:15 applies:

In your own law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. (John 8:17, REB)

The second witness, of course, is God the Father.

Rule 2: Human testimony is not essential but is provided as a concession.

Jesus reminds his listeners of John the Baptist’s testimony, and he points out that they sent messengers to John and “rejoiced in his light” for a little while (John 5:33 – 35). Jesus suggests, then, that the Jews implicitly recognized John’s authority as a witness.

Jesus seems to have an ambivalent attitude towards John’s testimony. He validates it for a reason similar to the one he says Moses permitted divorce: “because of the hardness of your hearts” (Matthew 19:7-9, KJV).

Rule 3: God the Father testifies about Jesus through the work he has Jesus do (John 5:36).

This “work,” we learn elsewhere in John, includes the signs (miracles) Jesus performs as well as his crucifixion.

Rule 4: God the Father’s other means of witness are unavailable to his listeners because of the nature of God (invisible form, inaudible voice) and the state of his listeners’ hearts (unwilling to accept the scripture’s testimony about Jesus) (John 5:36-40).

Rule 5: A juror will remain unpersuaded of any evidence if he wants honor from others instead of from God (John 5:41-544).

Rule 6: Belief in what Moses said about Jesus is a precondition to belief in what Jesus says about himself (John 5:45-47).

There are two more aspects to John’s gospel’s courtroom underpinnings I’ll explore in later notes. One is the separate, later trial Jesus frequently alludes to. Jesus accepts that he’s being judged by his listeners; in fact, most of the legal language in John involves that trial. But he suggests that the tables will be turned one day, and that the subsequent trial will turn on how his listeners judge him during the first trial.

The second aspect I’d like to explore is how John’s gospel ranks the different forms of evidence it addresses. And why it does: sometimes (as one would expect) as a guide to the strength of various forms of evidence, but more often to suggest the relative receptivity of different people to different forms of evidence and, through it, the relative merit they deserve.

[I'm reading John's gospel. My reactions here vacillate between notes -- a list of impressions -- and something less sketchy. A note on nomenclature: the note number in my post's title indicates the chapter of John's material I'm reacting to. A title's letter, though, differentiates the post from earlier posts about that chapter. "John field note 2c," then, is my third post concerning John's second chapter. N.B.: 12a may precede 3d: I skip around.]

Filed Under: John field notes, Journal