SONNETS FOR MARY: CRUCIFIXION (John 19:26-27)
SONNETS FOR MARY: THE WAY OF THE CROSS (Mark 15:21)
SONNETS FOR MARY: TO JERUSALEM (Mark 10:32-34)
INFERNAL GOVERNMENT DENIES INVOLVEMENT IN REPUBLICAN PRIMARIES
Note to the reader:
Odd things do turn up on the web. Their source is typically impossible to validate. The following essay, however, makes sense only if we read it as a chance escapee from some underground website—very far underground. Perhaps it comes from the op/ed page of a newspaper read by aficionados of foreign policy or from a political newsletter addressed to those convinced that government officials, in Hell as on the “Surface” (to use our author’s term), seldom tell the truth. I would guess that it must have been written shortly after the US “super Tuesday” primaries on March 1st of this year.
Malvolia Kakodaimon, Secretary of Terrestrial Affairs, responded to journalists’ questions yesterday about the US Republican primary elections by reaffirming the government’s stance against interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. “We continue,” she said, “our age-old policy of working with individuals and non-governmental organizations such as churches, stock markets, and infant football leagues. I have nothing to add to this statement.”
Nonetheless, rumors persist that officers of Subterranean Intelligence have been assigned as advisers to the principal candidates. There may even be some involvement in so-called “dirty” operations. The astonishing ascendancy of Donald Trump, who seems remarkably devoid of qualifications other than egotism and a complete lack of shame, has perplexed many both on the Surface and in the Hadean sphere. And some claim to have glimpsed SIA operatives “behind the curtain,” casting spells of fascination over audiences or introducing aerosolized chemicals thought to cripple the critical faculties.
Dubbius Phoné, spokesdevil for the SIA, dismissed such claims as “the daydreams of old demons who want to bring back the era of the Inquisition when we ruled the Surface more directly than we do now. That era is over. Get used to it!” Some old Inquisition hands, however, are said to be involved with the Cruz campaign as policy consultants.
One analyst at the Imperial Subversion College (who spoke with us on condition of anonymity on account of being “off message”) noted that he sees at least some interest in the capacity of Evangelical voters to reinstate something like the medieval alliance between the Infernum and the church. “This could be the best prospect of reinstating direct methods since the McCarthy Era,” he said, “though there is concern that the Evangelicals may be peaking prematurely.”
Invidia Weesil, Professor of Temptation Theory at the Hadean Institute of Technology, on the other hand, doubts that the government is actively tampering with the election. “If there were an overall strategy,” she said, “we wouldn’t expect to see energy divided among so many dubious candidates. This looks more like the free-lance efforts of junior tempters, competing with each other for the limelight.”
If that is indeed all that is going on, Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Cruz’s personal demons have a right to feel very proud of their work. Both candidates have done an outstanding job of arousing free-floating anxiety and turning it to their advantage. Without question, that produces a climate favorable to Infernal interests. Mr. Rubio’s companion, by comparison, could be doing a better job—or perhaps just needs better material to work with.
In any case, rumors of official involvement persist, and this columnist will continue to dig more deeply into them. For some, at least, the present moment seems a good opportunity to move toward more intensive Infernal engagement with the United States. Such schemes have been working well in Iran and North Korea, and they are showing promise in places like Syria, Libya, Somalia, and northern Nigeria. There is no reason to think that a place like the United State could not benefit from more attention. The promotion of distrust, anger, arrogance, greed, and general bloody-mindedness is, after all, the bread and butter of our economy and can only do us good.
SONNETS FOR MARY: HE CURED MANY WHO WERE SICK (Mark 1:34)
Picture scanned from Grabar, Die Kunst des frühen Christentums, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8080658
SONNETS FOR MARY: WHO IS MY MOTHER? (Mark 3:31-35)
Image from
islandlife-inamonasstery.blogspot.com
Permission to reproduce has been requested.
LIVING IN FAITH
[A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley on the Second Sunday in Lent, February 21, 2016. Readings (Year C): Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35]
And [Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
We’re going to talk about faith today. Abram, after all, is one of the great examples of faith in the scriptures. But I want to start out by acknowledging that the topic of faith makes a lot of people, including church people, uneasy. That’s partly because we live in an era that’s pretty much divided between people who aren’t too sure what they believe and people who know too much about it. A lot of people, if pressed on the topic, would probably say something like “Well, I think there’s something important here, but don’t try to pin me down.” And, on the other hand, you have fundamentalists or some evangelicals or conservative Roman Catholics who know exactly what they believe, right down to the punctuation marks. You could easily get the impression that those are the only two options.
So what exactly did Abram believe that got him such good marks in our reading this morning? Well, first a word about the English language. You know, every language carries the scars of the history that it’s passed through. That’s definitely true of the English language of faith: there’s the verb “believe” and the nouns “belief” and “faith.” Because our language got shaped in a period of intense religious struggle—the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the battle between Puritans and Anglicans in the 1600s—”faith” and “belief” have come to refer largely to the business of doctrine. The question is What creed are you willing to recite—or, at times, even die for?
In the process, belief or faith came to be about asserting a particular list of doctrines as true, whether it was the Nicene Creed, or the Westminster Confession, or any number of other formularies. If somebody asks you, here and now, in the English language, “What do you believe?” it’s a good bet that they want specifics. And I suppose the most common response from an Episcopalian begins with something like, “Well, I’m not altogether sure, but . . .”
Well, don’t feel bad about that. It actually puts you right in the company of Abram, who didn’t have any of fancy definitions of faith to fall back on. No, in the case of Abram, words like “believe” and “faith” have to mean something else. And our story is actually pretty clear about what that is. It tells us that Abram has had a long history with God. It’s included taking some big risks—moving lock, stock, and barrel from the place where he grew up to this new country that God directed him to. But all these years have passed, and he’s getting old, and he still has no son to hand everything over to. In that day and age, that world of petty kingdoms and no real rule of law, this was a disaster for which there was no real remedy.
So what does it mean when scripture says that Abram believed God? It doesn’t mean that Abram had a creed to recite. It means that Abram decided to go on trusting God—trusting God because of the sense of companionship, even of friendship, that had grown up between them over the years.
Listen to the text again with that one word changed: “And Abram trusted the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” It’s quite a different text, isn’t it?
Now let me say that the change I just made wasn’t arbitrary. The Biblical Hebrew word in question covers a whole range of English words: “trust” as much as “believe” or “have faith.” We use a form of that word in our prayers when we say “Amen,” meaning “It’s so, it’s worth trusting, yeah, way sure.”
The same is true of the corresponding Greek terms in the New Testament. Neither of these ancient languages had separate words for “believe” or “have faith” in our modern sense of “subscribe to a set of doctrines.” The next generation of translators should probably go back and purge them most places and replace them with “trust.” We need to hear scripture as talking about trust—not theological arguments.
Abram, after all, didn’t have any creeds. What he had was a friendship with God that had seen him through thick and thin for, we’re told, a hundred years or so. It hadn’t been an easy life, but it had been a good one. And Abram had a conviction that, however complicated and difficult and unpredictable life might yet be, God’s friendship was still the thing he could rely on. God might not fulfill all Abram’ss needs and wants in quite the way he wished; but God was still the deep source of strength and hope for his life. It may have been a bit vague theologically, but it was powerful.
It’s the same kind of trust that Jesus demonstrated when he dismissed the threats of Herod. He was ready to go on proclaiming the good news and take the associated risks, even though he knew where they were leading
And it’s the kind of trust that Paul called us to in our reading from Philippians. Other people, he says, trust in earthly things. Well, yes, celebrity, money, power do indeed offer short-term rewards, but if that’s what you trust in, they will end up destroying you as a human being. They are fickle at best and cannibalistic at worst. But “our citizenship,” says Paul, “is in heaven”—another way of saying that our deep trust is in our friendship with God. You have to be, to borrow a Yiddish term, a real mensch—a true human being—to live up to that kind of trust.
So if we are asked about our faith, we can honestly reply that we are learning to trust. It’s not a one-time thing. Abram had to keep learning it over and over. His greatness lay in his willingness to keep renewing his trust and his friendship with God. And this is the kind of faith or trust we hope to grow into, ourselves. It was good enough for Abram and it’s good enough for me.
And, happily, we also had in our readings today the perfect prayer of trust, one that we can keep returning to again and again as we learn to live in faith: Psalm 27. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” says the Psalmist; “whom then shall I fear?”
And then the Psalmist goes right on to make it clear that life has been no picnic, that we still experience danger and fear. But against all that we set the intimacy and joy of a life that “beholds the fair beauty of the Lord and seeks him in his temple.”
“What if I had not believed that I should see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!” cries the Psalmist. What if I had lost my bearings altogether? Who would I be then? Instead, he reminds us, “tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong and he shall comfort your heart; wait patiently for the Lord.”
That is what scripture means when it tells us that Abram trusted God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.
SONNETS FOR MARY: THE MARRIAGE AT CANA (JOHN 2:1-11)
I like this painting because Jesus and Mary are tiny figures far in the back. You would never notice them if it weren’t that they have auras around their heads. The scene is all bustle and confusion. But, as with virtually all portrayals of the story, the water jars are far too small.
Tintoretto: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15542127
LENTEN ROSES
Lenten Roses
by Bill Countryman
Our life is lent us by a mystery.
Lent points us now to our mortality.
And Lenten roses in funereal tones
embroider winter’s pall as it declines
toward spring.
AKENFIELD
Back in the late ’60s, I read a review of Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village that made me want to read the book. Even though I never got round to picking it up, the title stuck all this time. Now, forty odd years later, I’ve finally read it—and I’m grateful to my memory for hanging on to it!
To be sure, I had reminders, since Ronald Blythe, now in his 90s, writes a weekly column in The Church Times composed of observations and ruminations crisscrossing a broad array of literary, gardening, historical, artistic, and religious concerns. The column is called “Word from Wormingford,” the town where Blythe now lives in an Elizabethan house called Bottengoms Farm.
To the American ear, this may all sound just too quaintly English. Believe me, it is anything but. Akenfield is based on interviews with people in the region of Suffolk where Blythe grew up and brings to life a whole range of characters caught in the rapid transition of the English countryside after World War II—transition from horse-powered to machine-powered agriculture, from farms that raised a wide array of products to factory farms, from an agriculture that required many laborers, preferably not too well educated, to one that required fewer hands and more specialized skills.
It is a process, of course, that the United States (and, for that matter, the world at large) is still going through in various ways. There are times when the fictitious “Akenfield” seems not so very different from, say, the American Rust Belt or the small towns of the Plains states.
What is particularly beautiful and intriguing about the book is the way people were willing to open up with Blythe as he asked them to talk about their experience of the times and their response to change. One has no way to know just how precisely he reproduced the interviews on which he based the work. They were certainly disguised to protect his interlocutors. Yet, each has the individuality and unpredictability that tell us these figures were not “made up” out of his own imagination.
The book is distinct from most enquiries of an ethnographic sort in that the whole project seems to have been motivated originally by pure curiosity about Suffolk and country people like those he had seen, as a child, plowing with horses. He was exploring his own world and had the gift to do it without sentimentality. Yes, he was fascinated by the past, but has no illusions about its having been a kind of rural paradise. Yes, he is part of the changing present, but sees both its advantages and its costs.
The book has two great gifts to offer the reader, even in a world that has continued changing at a great pace. One is its breadth of human sympathy. Whether you are teacher, priest, pastor, physician, judge, or just plain old citizen, you will be likely to find your human sympathies and your social awareness broadened and deepened by it
And, if you once start reading, you will receive its second gift: a series of narrative as compulsively readable as a good collection of short stories.
Happily, it is readily available in a recent reprinting by New York Review of Books, with an introduction by Matt Weiland. Take and read.