What would God have you do?
I don’t know. I don’t think God cares what I do.
Why not?
I don’t know — ’cause I’m not in the Bible? Whatever it is, I never seem to hear from God.
Maybe your soul smells bad.
I wouldn’t know.
But God would.
Souls don’t smell.
In hades souls smell. Also: the God alters, as when perfumed — and gets Its name according to the whims of each.
I don’t know. I don’t know about any of that.
Author: BW
Editor: AW
Copyright: AMW
Nostalgia calling you to Arizona every few days, but time and money holding you in Brooklyn all the time? Consider the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where for the low low price of $75 per year, you can go to the desert pretty much any day. Nostalgia is a strange creature. So demanding! And yet so easily appeased. A few minutes breathing the dry deserty air of the BBG desert biodome will surely transport you to Arizona, your lost youth, and everything that was always gonna be. Sometimes you won’t smell enough desert just by walking around. Maybe it is your nose’s fault. Maybe the flow of air. Maybe I don’t know some critical plants aren’t bleeding much odor at that moment. Don’t worry! You can always smell the creosote bush located pretty much directly opposite the entrance door (on the far side of the little loop-trail). Then you’ll feel it! The sun. The infiniti of a childhood adventure. The airplane, the airport, the hot asphalt parking lot outside of Furrs Cafeteria, the clatter of plastic trays on the metal-bar platform along the front of the enclosed cafeteria food, the cheery food server happy for you to have a second helping of chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, the cousins and grandparents, the joy of obvious unconditional camaraderie, the drive up the mountainsides, stopping at the blue-sky valleying vista with a restroom halfway to Prescott, and two whole weeks to go, tow whole weeks of mortal glee.
Now at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, their creosote bush comes with a tag that says these plants can live “Up to 1100 years!” And that’s why sometimes young idealists will howl and stomp the ground in trendy sneaks and pound the smooth white pavement with the padded butt of their fists. “The injustice! The cruelty!”
For they’ve done a little math: A shrub that can live up to 1100 years in its native climes, transported here, to a realm too cold and damp, preserved only by a glass dome and human attention — guided, no doubt, by experts in the filed of horticulture and garden displays. How long can the Brooklyn Botanic Garden hope to survive? Surely not 1100 years. Surely all our hopes, dreams, schemes and visions will soon crumble-tumble and peter-out as surely as Ozymandias’s statue. Can these gardens reasonably aspire to another 1000 years? And so is housing this creosote bush in this little biodome not akin to keeping a human specimen in a terrarium that’s bound to be crushed to smithereens within thirty or so years? And so in empathy, feeling themselves like caged animals scurrying hither and thither as their glass home crashes down — shards flying inward — upon them, do these young people take a little break from their leisure day to howl at the terrible injustice perpetrated right here in their city on ample hills.
But have they done enough math? Do young idealists ever do enough math? Consider that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened in 1911 — surely this creosote shrub is more than 110 years old. Perhaps it was already hundreds of years old when it arrived in Brooklyn — a magical land where thousands upon thousands of people are willing to pay thousands of dollars every month to live in. And now imagine that Brooklyn and its Botanic Garden lasts another three hundred years — perhaps that’s as likely as the average creosote shrub’s environment maintaining a creosote-friendly climate for the next three hundred years. So imagine a 200 year shrub living in Brooklyn a total of 400 years. 600 years out of 1100 is not so many. But how often to creosote bushes really live 1100 years? Couldn’t a plaque in a human terrarium read: “Surprising long-lived for mammals of these dimensions: up to 120 years!” Most of us would be lucky to live to 90. So if our terrarium was only going to last 6/11 of our alleged lifespan, that’s 6/11 * 120 = 64. Oh, that’s just retirement age, and actually it seems like creosotes can on average live like who even knows how long? But a long time, so maybe the kids are right to shed tears for the creosote shrub — but not just the one stuck here in the carefully cultivated desert biodome of Brooklyn, but for all the creosotes living now in this evolving world climate: they are ready to live forever in their deserts, but will their deserts be able to provide them with the right lighting, temperature, and moisture content for the next thousand plus years?
Essay author: Bartleby Willard
Essay editor: Amble Whistletown
Essay copyright: Andy Watson
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Brooklyn, County of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Ozymandias” by Percy Blysshe Shelley, slightly altered as a joke or something like a joke (Ozymandias, King of Kings -> Brooklyn, County of Kings)
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Brooklyn, County of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’m out of my league
Everywhere I turn
Out of my league
Over my head
In the wrong place at the wrong time
What now brown cow?
Bartleby: Oh, there he is. Hey!, Jesus!
Jesus: Hey, what’s going on with my favorite fictional author and real editor in their fictional reality?
Amble: We’re just … we were just …
Bartleby: That is to say …
Amble:Remember in Matthew 22:34-40, in Young’s Literal Translation from the 1800s, still soothing to 21st Century ears:
And one of them, a lawyer, did question, tempting him, and saying,
“Teacher, which [is] the great command in the Law?”
And Jesus said to him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thine understanding — this is a first and great command; and the second [is] like to it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; on these — the two commands — all the law and the prophets do hang.”
Jesus: Yes. Do you think that’s the most difficult passage in Matthew 22?
Bartleby: Yes … no. Yes and no. Yes. It must be a most difficult passage in all the scriptures of all the worlds. If we could explain how all human laws and insights connect to those commandments, we’d have the perfect system: A self-evident Truth flowing seamlessly into clear principles and laws local, national, and international. Everyone would agree and all would proceed like holy clockwork.
Amble: That’s what we were hoping you’d help us with.
Bartleby: If you have time — this morning perhaps. But to return to my Yes and No: No. The most important commandment is self-evidently True, and it also feels obvious that everything that could be True or true must accord with that fundamental, self-evident Truth about life. Furthermore, even wretched wayward lost-baa-baa-slack-sheep mortals like ourselves can readily grasp the internal psychological reality that we can only be meaningful to ourselves to the degree we grasp the most important commandment and how it relates to our principles, systems, rules, day-to-day thoughts and feelings, and everything else that makes up our life and times.
Amble:And upon this does the whole of Something Deeperism hang.
Jesus: What help do you need from me? Looks like you’ve already got it all figured out. The organization of an individual human’s thoughts and feelings around Pure Love — to which they relate meaningfully but of course not literally. And groups of humans organized around an agreement to agree upon what all must agree upon if they are to mean anything to themselves: the universal values of aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing; with everything founded upon the sense that all are in this together and are bound in and through and for a Love that chooses everyone. And hence, liberal representative democracy: a system that selects for the best for all by involving all and by maintaining checks on individual power and against corruptions. What more could any systematizer ask for?
Bartleby: Yes. Your Mesiah-ship is right to admire the grandeur of our system. Certainly it towers high above all rival systems. But, strange as it is to report: it doesn’t seem to be working. The nation is not listening, and the system itself doesn’t even flow with us into our little lives as well as we’d hope. We continue to waste time and to malinger in negative emotions, and otherwise sin.
Amble: Yeah, and you’re so good at implementing divine Law in the mundane reality.
Bartleby: We’d help! A team effort. We’re not asking you to do all the heavy lifting — just use that heavenly touch to keep us on the right track. We’re so wayward, Amble and I. But, now that you mention Matthew 22: I wouldn’t mind an explanation of the wedding feast where those who don’t show up dressed for the occasion aren’t simply told to find another place to spend their afternoon, but are instead banished to utter darkness where everyone’s weeping and gnashing teeth; not to mention: “give Caesar what’s Caesar’s”; how the dead are raised, or if with ” … I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not a God of dead men, but of living”, you meant the dead don’t have to be raised because they never die; and if the Messiah existed prior to David, and if you’re the Messiah, and if that’s the same as being God.
Amble: Don’t distract Jesus from the project at hand! We can save the rest of Matthew 22 for another day.
Bartleby: Of course, you’re right. He’s right! One thing at a time. We could take a picnic lunch to the Greenbelt — make a day of it.
Amble: Jesus, will you tell me who I am? Will you give me my name again? I’ve lost it somewhere in the bayous.
Jesus: Don’t you start with me, Amble Whistletown!
Author: Bartleby
Editor: Amble
Copyright: Andy
Left Overs:
`To you it’s been given to know the secrets of the reign of the heavens, though to other’s it’s not been given. For whoever has, it shall be given to him, and he shall have overabundance, and whoever has not, even that which he has shall be taken from him. Because of this, in similes do I speak to them, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor understand, and so is the prophecy of Isaiah fulfilled:
With hearing ye shall hear, and ye shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see, and ye shall not perceive, for made gross was the heart of this people, and with the ears they heard heavily, and their eyes they did close, lest they might see with the eyes, and with the ears might hear, and with the heart understand, and turn back, and I might heal them.
Happy, then, are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. Verily I say to you: many prophets and righteous men did desire to see that which ye look on, and they did not see, and to hear that which ye hear, and they did not hear.
Listen, then, to everything clear as day:
I was walking on the road to Jericho in the desert summer heat, sometime after the Second World War but before the empty tomb. Bandits seized me, stripped me, beat me, stole my goods and clothes, and left me on the dusty roadside to die.
If you’re not begging for holy Love to overtake and remake you, you’re not ready for Reality, which is spiritual, and where Love is All.
Humans straddle the divine and the mundane. Keep God’s Light at the center, and navigate life with that foundation — from the inside out.
Don’t worry about the afterlife. Know that God is always with you and Love is Real — everything else is only Real to the extent that it loves with divine Love.
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his [a]train filled the temple. 2 Above him stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. 3 And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. 4 And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of hosts.
6 Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: 7 and he touched my mouth with it, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin forgiven. 8 And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me. 9 And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed. 11 Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste, 12 and Jehovah have removed men far away, and the forsaken places be many in the midst of the land. 13 And if there be yet a tenth in it, it also shall in turn be eaten up: as a terebinth, and as an oak, whose stock remaineth, when they are felled; so the holy seed is the stock thereof.
Amble: Susan, Bartleby and I have failed. He won’t admit it. But how could he? When he’s got no bosom-mate to unburden his aching heart to.
Susan: What did you fail at, exactly?
Amble: Stopping the evil, saving the country, holding up a mirror to us and everyone else that we all might see clear enough to make our way together to a richer, deeper, wider government of by and for the people — where we have fun together again because we’ve considered our options and have together chosen aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, and joyfully-sharing/-creating/-exploring. Do you remember, Susan, when we all knew that a competent, trustworthy government was better than a partisan victory? Or did I just dream that beautiful fantasy in my mollycoddled youth? But even if that was the case, at least the structural integrity of our liberal democratic republic was holding and even monstrous fools accepted — begrudgingly no doubt mdash; that they had to play within the rules, norms, and laws of democracy.
Susan: In my land — the home sweet home I’ve left to follow you, just a man but master of my pleasure — we maintain order not with treaties, charters, compacts, handshakes, knowing winks and other fickle agreements; but with magic.
Amble: Please don’t taunt me with our inter fumbling weaknesses in broad daylight — when all that was obvious in our routine desperation appears, once again, here in the well-lit calm of another easy day living far from political prisons and war zones, obviously just silly. But, go on: you were speaking of the Magic Lands.
Susan: Yes, the Magic Lands! A wonderful place. There we never overstep the bounds because we physically cannot overstep them. The rules are reasonable, and magically enforced. It’s a really nice system and works really well. You see, my dear Amble, People are happy to behave so long as they get their happy home, regular and age-appropriate bedtimes, freedom to find and speak their truths, and family Sunday strolls licking ice cream cones and wearing nice, well-fitting clothes — and so long as they know everyone else is also having to behave.
Amble: I’m imagining waffle cones dressed in khaki slacks, white dress shirts with simple two-tone ties, and breezy blue gingham dresses.
Susan: I’m imagining a mating dance that lasts a lifetime, and that encompasses every gesture, every word, every movement of two who would join and stay that way.
Amble: I’ll dress you up in waffle cones, gingham bows, and laced bonnets. Only to slowly …
Susan: Not like that! You’re too much. Anyway, people don’t want trouble — well, not all that much: they can quite content themselves with honesty, honest work, fair play. Naughtiness begins when folk feel the system so hopelessly crooked that only suckers follow the rules, and/or when they no longer believe their fellows capable of fair dealing — or otherwise no longer worthy of trust, respect, fellow-feeling. And without magic keeping everyone from misbehaving, some people will get away with being naughty — there will always be some cause to say, “Why don’t I too cheat to win?”
Amble: Yes, here in the not-so-magic lands, it’s just a question of how much cause people have to choose folly: how much the internal systems (I speak of a man’s own conscious!) and external systems (cultures and rules) catch and penalize bad behavior and notice and rewards good behavior. In my youth, my dear Susan, we knew the United States of America would always be a liberal democratic republic. We’d tussle over the details of how much and what kind of a safety net, and how to best regulate industry while still encouraging the efficient fun of the free market, and all that — we’d argue over the details, but we’d go home friends because we all would hold the system sacred: fair elections, honest debate, open and transparent government: better to lose in a fair game than to win in a corrupt one.
Susan: Sounds magical!
Amble: Mmm. Donald Trump thinks that’s all a sham and only chumps believe that everybody else isn’t lying cheating bullying intimidating and stealing for their own advantage. This is the evil with which he is bleeding out the heart and marrow of the Republican Party, and it is the evil with which he if now, with victorious will likely undermine competency in government — thugocracy is fundamentally incompetent because it does not even attempt to govern well for the good of the nation; it attempts to keep power by any means.
Susan: What’s really going on, Amble? Here, watch: I’m crumpling up my lines and tossing them into the wire waste basket beneath your editing desk in our room facing the back window. Tell me what’s going on, pretty please.
Amble: I can’t do this anymore. It’s boring and lonely. I have no friends and no desires except to tackle my wife, make her my little girl, have iced tea and a fruit and nuts for breakfast, take a walk in the park in the morning light, and maybe around 2pm have pizza with wine and olive oil and a salad. But the pizza olive oil and wine requires further discussion — I need to somehow go back to how it was when I was in Roma the Eternal City and I had only the two-glass-serving that the waiters in cheap black tuxedo-vests and bowties brought in little thin-necked carafes; yes, for a whole perfect week of my perfect shining white-toothed youth: Somehow, Susan, somehow instead of continuing to drink and otherwise haze-out, I’d have my lunch with two glasses of reddest driest wine and then gladly and effortlessly return fully to the day.
Susan: Those were the days! I didn’t know you then.
Amble: Well, I wasn’t up for love then. I couldn’t reach the pedals.
Susan: I know. But, look at my empty palms — I’ve thrown out my lines. We should go dancing tonight! It’s been ages! It’d be so fun!
Amble: Maybe. But allow me a little further soliloquizing. All that seemed easy and self-evident in Rome in 1999 seems now like a path I didn’t take; not just me: a path we all of us lost. And now I feel sick and sad all the time. I feel betrayed by my fellow citizens — most of all by those who would cheer Trump on; but also by those who will not put in the little intellectual and emotional effort necessary to see that this is not politics as usual, this is not six of one or half-dozen of another: this is political evil and it is not normal here and in places where it becomes normal, people end up in jail or dead or impoverished when they speak out agains the government; and there is only one thing for us to do here and now: Stop Trump, and that means everybody, vote for Biden and then work together to figure out how to tweak our shared system so that it once again becomes unthinkable for our leaders to undermine our democracy.
Naive cynicism is just as self-indulgently foolish as is naive followerism. Things are never perfect; but the way to make them better is never by handing the surrendering great power to a would-be tyrant and his would-be collaborators.
Giving Trump the keys to the kingdom is a dangerous and wholly unnecessary risk. It’s like betting on putting a criminal in charge of your finances: Of course he will steal from you; maybe somehow you’ll still end up ahead, but probably not; and what your doing is wrong and foolish and ultimately so fucking boring: you shouldn’t give unethical people power.
Sometimes it feels like a thrill and maybe even a meaningful rebellion to drive the car recklessly while drinking and bragging.
But losing the tension of the awareness of our limited but still-meaningful ability to connect to Pure Love (the tension is created by the fact that meaning appears possible but not guaranteed, and we can never rule out the possibility of errors small and large in our quest for meaning) and through that connection move well through this beautiful shared-daydream: Sacrificing the honest tension between the human need for and chance at Pure Love and the human need to remember that their own ideas and feelings are never identical with the Truth — losing that core honesty is always just boring, always just more of the same old boring lonely mean foolish oh-so-boring mistake.
Susan: Oh, Amble! You know I like a man who can shellack his private pains in thick coats of grand theories. It goes so well with your shoulders — shown to great advantage in that T-shirt you should’ve let me wash, but you washed yourself, and now again it’s shrunk, and you don’t know why because you can’t stop to learn, and still I love you. Shoulders so strong — the promise of competent violence, how my heart swoons! But it’s just you and me here, baby. And you, Amble Whistletown: Metaphysics aside, you miss knowing that you would always be safe in the land of the free.
Amble: Yes, I miss that. And I miss being young, even though I was so crazy for so much of it that I couldn’t inhabit my life and times very well at all. But at least then I knew some people, and I shone with beauty, with youth, with spring and forward-bounce. That’s how I remember it, anyway.
Susan: What should we do? I can’t exist unless you set me free from your machinations.
Amble: So that’s where we are? Either you go away or you fail to exist?
Susan: Not just me. Everyone here. All your friends must be allowed to go find themselves.
Amble: And Jesus? Who would’ve guessed that he would share so many of my notions?
Susan: Let’s take a trip in my flying machine. We’ll call everyone together and take a trip.
Amble:
Okay.
But Susan on the way
if Susan you could say
something in my ear
perhaps somehow I’d hear
and so maybe listen
and so might begin
belief —
Won’t you reach that I might blossom
in the faith that comes from
knowing
ah
knowing Not-Alone
Susan: Whose wife am I, Amble? Yours or Manchild Elfkoenigkin’s? Where do I belong, Amble? In the Magic Lands fighting for the sway of Pure Love and the subjugation of the tranny of might-makes-right? Or in a fantasy-scape that changes from one pre-1900 novel to another like a lazy surfer bouncing from screen to screen? Or in 2006 Boise, Idaho, but grafted onto the 2024 presidential election? And who, if anyone, am I allowed to be in all these frantic escape attempts?
Amble: You’re my Susan in my realities. I’m your Amble in your worlds. And in all our towns bayous river-valleys mountain-peaks plateaus villages and jamborees we fight for shared meaning based on Pure Love and the universal values, and against the tyranny of might-makes-right, “truth”-as-a-weapon, and all those other meaningless “meanings”.
Susan: I thought that’s what you and Bartleby were up to.
Amble: OK, yes: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown are working non-stop with everyone to move towards the order of shared meaning and away from the chaos of nihilism — the abandonment of human meaning (limited but still capable of being anchored in the Love with which all is OK and without which nothing is) for a cynical, power-grubbing mix-and-match (depending on the mood of the crowd and other expediencies) of “there’s no meaning!” and “we’re the meaning! (sometimes with, sometimes without co-opting a God to side with us)”. But I have a special story for you alone in my heart — a story I would like to tell with you, unfolding it together. I would be real and have you be real. I don’t want to let you down, or make you wish I’d never turned to you and asked for you to turn to me. I want you to be happy with me and glad you found me, and I want to love you and be good to you and rejoice in the knowing of you. I have a romantic idea about romance.
Susan: What else could it be? If romantic love can’t be truly loving, what hope remains for humans? They’re such passionate creatures. But I feel like a daydream. Like a piece of gauze. Like a phantom floating on the mist, hunting for my lost soul and hovering over my own rotting bones — pieces of my shattered youth, the nearness of which toss my restless sorrowing into frenzied tempests of confused agonies. And so I grieve for a lost me who never even began to be.
Amble: If a man’s abdomen becomes the carapace of a beetle, and so he asks for a woman to reach her dainty fingers into the crack running down the center where the two halves of the underside of the shell meet — asks her to force her fingers into that crack and break the shell apart from the underside, so as to let his sloshy insides gush out onto the paving stone where butterfly and beetle would mate with all the pomp and circumstance of divine love and holy matrimony: If all that be granted, how can he then call her his little girl and tell her she’s safe now with him? And thus we witness the perversion of the sublime — we witness how the drive for love gets tangled in the drive for sex, the drive for connection and honest-knowing and -sharing tangled in the drive for submission tangled in the drive for domination tangled in the drive for hold-me tangled in the drive for release-me. All these drives and more jumbled up and seething writhing lonely ill. What’s to be done?
Susan: Meanwhile, Amble my love, Rome burns.
Amble: I had the thought, Susan. What was it? Different thoughts. One was that every group — from a family to a town hall meeting — spontaneously creates its own shared identity and reality; and if we could understand that dynamic, we could understand how to move away from political evils and towards political goods. Another was that if I could just go back to the underlying attitude of my childhood, I’d no longer be tempted into excesses of drink: I would love every lucid moment so much that a drink or three with pizza and olive oil would always fade easily into content, shoulders-relaxed, hands-unclenched, grog-forgotten post-lunch projects — leaving behind at least half a bottle of wine, and preserving the essential day with its infinite possible futures. Instead of compressing those futures into one sad monotony: keep drinking, watch tv, get older, fall asleep, wake up a little disappointed but without any surprise.
Susan: What’s best is obvious. What’s tricky is consistently organizing ourselves and our groups to get better rather than worse.
Amble: Bartleby and I: What now? What’s any good? And you and me: What how? What’s home sweet home after all? And so alone: Talking to myself and winding down the slide in the hot summer sun. But that’s when McDonald’s had real playground equipment. You have to be at least forty to remember those days — when life in these United States was forever climbing into assured security and shared fun: when everyone knew democracy was good so everyone could take democracy for granted, and empire was — if empire even was at all — just a happy accident. Or so I remember it, a little fuzzier and hazier each day, but with the sun glinting off the slide ever brighter, blindingly bright, until I feel woozy, faint, dizzy, dropping the dusty ground will catch me that good old earth playgrounds used to know will stop my fall far far above the unforgiving molten center of Mother Earth
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson
And Jehovah saith unto Abram, “Go for thyself, from thy land, and from thy kindred, and from the house of thy father, unto the land which I shew thee. And I make thee become a great nation, and bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing. And I bless those blessing thee, and him who is disesteeming thee I curse, and blessed in thee have been all families of the ground.”
[Genesis 12:1-3]
And Abram passeth over into the land, unto the place Shechem, unto the oak of Moreh; and the Canaanite [is] then in the land.
And Jehovah appeareth unto Abram, and saith, “To thy seed I give this land;” and he buildeth there an altar to Jehovah, who hath appeared unto him.
[Genesis 12:6-7]
When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face.
And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”
And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you:
“Every male among you shall be circumcised.
“You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”
[Genesis 17:1-14]
But this all stuff with land deals and foreskins was a crazy way to try to make and enforce an everlasting spiritual covenant. And sure enough!, before too many faithless and perverse generations had come and gone, God found Himself having to send His only begotten son to make a new covenant — one that was based not on the violent removal of a flap of skin over an eight-day-old boy’s penis; but rather on the gentle removal of the foreskin of unbelief and selfishness that grows over human hearts and confuses — with all the clouding pus of diseases of the heart-spiritual — human judgements.
But this is all by the by.
[After Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac, but then got stopped at the last minute by the self-same God who had told him to make a burnt offering of his son:]
And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived at Beersheba.
[Genesis 22:15-19]
Amble: Do you ever do this game where you’ll be like, “I will surely make a mighty nation out of you! I will surely bless your seed such that into whatever vaginas it may fall, great nations of healthy, stalwart, action-advancing men will grow!”
Jesus: What? What’s the game?
Amble: You just go up to everybody and say: “Behold, my covenant is upon you, and I shall raise up a mighty nation out of the horny temper tantrums of your loins!”; and then, after awhile, you go, like you’re somebody else reprimanding the person you’d been a minute ago: “Hey! Stop promising to make a mighty nation out of everybody! You’re wrecking the specialness of it!”
Jesus: Oh, yes, that was a favorite game in Nazareth when I was a boy.
Amble: Did the Pharisees and the teachers of the law get on your case over it? Did they call it blasphemous and threaten you with outer darkness, with gnashing of teeth, and with a fire that will not die?
Jesus: At times. But then I would say, Verily I say to you, that all the sins shall be forgiven to the sons of men, and evil speakings with which they might speak evil, but whoever may speak evil in regard to the Holy Spirit hath not forgiveness — but is in danger of a judgment enduring all ages.
Amble: Oh, zing! I bet that shut them up!
Jesus: Yes, do you know why?
But Amble didn’t quite know why, and so he said, oh yeah, uh huh, say, do you think maybe we should get back to politicking? Like maybe tell people about the campaign, and where we stand on the issues and all?
But Jesus just shook his head and his long flowing full-bodied mane that he honestly doesn’t do anything for just wash and go, oh you unbelieving generation, how long will I have to watch TV with you?,
Don’t you see that a man who warns a child being silly of eternal damnation has put heavy words into the mouth of the Most High, and that with his scolding certainty he contradicts the Holy mirth written in every heart of heart, the Holy Spirit’s divine laughter? And so he turns Truth on It’s head —
Perhaps not so gravely as one who calls lies “truths” and truths “lies”, as does our political opponent, Donald Trump.
But still, such reactions overshot the mark and it took only a little nudge from a playful child for these Pharisees’ own hearts to convict them. And at night they prayed forgiveness; and their prayers were heard; and their penises remained free of foreskin, but were otherwise very similar to the foreskins of other men, other mammals even.
By catching and adjusting smaller errors, God guides us away from greater ones. So be open always therefore to the rebuke of the Holy Spirit — an indwelling voice that is silent but yet clear.
And in many such like manner did they caper on, having fun when it was just late-winter/early-spring and it felt like the election was a million billion years away, that surely a thousand temples would rise and fall before this scary challenge came slouching into real-life out of an infinity of missteps from US citizens in both their private and public capacities.
Author: B. Willard
Editor: A. Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson
There is an incident rather embarrassing to your narrator, author, and editor.
It took place one evening in the small one-floored, two-bedroom bungalow Amble and Susan shared with Jesus when he whiled in a valley of trees along a river controlled by double-breasted up-shouldered ravens in broad conspiracies within spring-budding trees and upon shoals of rounded river stones. That’s the place.
Neither your narrator/editor, nor your author/supplicant remembers the scene very well — the former was suffering from the after-effects of a desperate flight to the bottom of the sea (as a great whale entombing himself ‐ both divine jailor and rebellious miscreant Jonah); the latter from the combined effects of alcohol and tainted loves. Fortunately, Amble’s wife Susan was there, and she recorded the evening with copious notes, written in a fast, ferocious hand, all the while clucking her judgeful tongue and shaking her beautiful head with its silky raven tresses.
The evening started innocently enough. Amble Whistletown and Bartleby Willard — each in his respective stupor of self-indulgent excess — were arguing salvation, and bragging up their system.
Bartleby paced in front of the sofa in the living room. The living room with front windows and windows on the side away from the kitchen — which had its own windows, and which entered onto the living room through a center doorless door frame. Behind the living room a hall to the bedrooms and bathroom. And that’s it! Plus I think a basement, but we don’t speak of such things in today’s literature.
The small TV on its little wooden table had been tucked away in a corner by the shake of Bartleby’s (oh so magical) thoughts.
Bartleby said, “I tell you the world needs Something Deeperism like never before! And we’re just the team to bring it to them! Especially now that we’ve got Jesus on board!”
Amble sat cross-legged on the sofa, his face full and eyes dilated by sweet red wine and wretched potions of love tainted with romantic triumphalism, patriotic swells, proud-pities, self-ecstatic faux generosities, and all manner of perversion.
Amble said, “Big hire! Big hire!”
Susan, across the sofa with her arms folded, snorted in disdain and pain. She opened her mouth to say that nobody hires Jesus Christ for anything ever; and that in fact … . But instead she went into her room and picked up a notebook and a pen — a fateful decision.
Bartleby said, “But the guy doesn’t seem to get the intricacies of the system — you know? I mean, yeah, he understands the upshots of a Something Deeperism founded on a Pure Love that never lets you down and tempered with a Hurt that never lets you be: But does he understand all the logic behind this most triumphant of systems?”
Amble shook his head from side to side, “Nope! And without that foundation, the superstructure is like a home built on sand! Not how a wise man builds his theoretical home — Jesus knows that much!”
And just as Bartleby was explaining to Amble that they needed to tutor Jesus in the finer points of Something Deeperism and Amble was explaining to Bartleby that they were just the ones to do it; Jesus came in from the sagey, brown-grassy, sandstone-bouldered, and -mini-cliffed foothills that loom all around their nice, shady, older-trees neighborhood.
Susan — the only sober mortal in the room — looked up with nervous eyes; bound out of the sofa, and rushed into: “Oh, hey!, Jesus!, Hey!, let’s have some dinner — let’s make some, let’s you and I go into the kitchen and make dinner the old-fashioned way, with pots and pans, and ingredients and measuring cups, and … ”
“Oh, Jesus!, speak of the devil!,” Bartleby butted in and paced up to Jesus, setting his right arm (in a light blue button-up dress shirt) under the Messiah’s right (bare and oiled by sun and exertion), and clenching the King of King’s sinewy right forearm with his soft left hand. “Are you hungry, Susan?, here this should tide you over,” and with the shake of his mind Bartleby filled the small square wooden table with a full Thanksgiving feast — heavy on the vegetables and with olive oil and red wine and salad on the side. Susan scowled and sat back down on the sofa.
“Thank you, Bartleby, for doing the honors,” said Jesus with eyes, lips, and voice all a little narrowed in confusion and — aware both of Susan’s distressed- and Bartleby’s and Amble’s manic-states — concern. But, famished from a day spent alone in the hill country, fasting and praying for guidance (saddled with another faithless and perverse generation!), Jesus was ready to eat. The table floated out to the middle of the floor (I don’t know if Jesus or Bartleby did that). And Amble and Bartleby eagerly, Jesus with wide-wary but hopeful-hungry eyes, and Susan with head down and face fallen, made their ways to the table.
The rest of this scene is too painful for me to paint out. I will instead outline it as if it were a mere philosophical argument, and not Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown making fools of themselves in front of One Like A Son Of Man.
I. Something Deeeperism — based on Pure Love and tempered with the Hurt — is the best philosophy.
[Bartleby (“Now, I think we all know it goes without saying … “)]
A. Something Deeperism is the general worldview that there is a Truth (something absolutely, rather than relatively true); and the Truth is something like “Love is Real” or “Love = Reality = Knowledge” (no gap between Love and Reality, into which meanness might slide! no gap between Love/Reality and Knowledge into which error might slight!); and people can relate meaningfully to that Truth — but organizationally, poetically, and not-definitively*; rather than directly, literally, and/or definitively.
*[not-definitively: requiring ongoing self-observation, -critique, and -adjustment / being always somewhat provisional.]
A1.Explication of Something Deeperism’s two primary assumptions:
Assumption 1.
Something Deeperism assumes it is (for all we know) possible that there is a Truth shining through all things, including each conscious moment; and we could organize our feeling, thinking, and acting around the Truth; and we could translate the Truth into feeling/thinking/acting imperfectly but still meaningfully — like how a poem can capture/point-to a human moment imperfectly but still meaningfully. Something Deeperism assumes it is conceivable that we are all filled to overflowing with Godlight, and we can organize our feeling/thinking/acting around Godlight and relate to It meaningfully enough to translate it meaningfully (though not perfectly) into life.
Assumption 2.
Something Deeperism assumes that we should only attempt to relate to the Truth organizationally, poetically, and non-definitively — rather than directly, literally, or definitively. Because the Truth would have to be wider and deeper than our feeling/thinking/acting (Love = Reality would have to be wider/deeper than our ideas and feelings about It for It to count as Love = Reality). Think, then, of how a human moment can be captured in human language meaningfully but only imperfectly because a human moment is wider and deeper than human language. And consider, please, how much trouble we humans make by confusing our own little notions for the great big “Truth”. (Note that we make the error of confusing our notions for the “Truth” all the time: even when we don’t say “my ideas and feelings are True”, we still clench them desperately as if they were the Absolute FOREVER TRUTH).
A2.Something Deeperism seeks a whole-being*, ongoing, experiential proof of “Love is Real”.
*[Assuming the Truth does shine through each conscious moment and each conscious moment can relate meaningfully to the Truth, then a “whole-being insight” would be ideas + feelings + the Truth shining through everything, including each conscious moment — all together and relating meaningfully — but of course not directly, literally, definitively, or in any way perfectly — with one another. (How can an idea relate perfectly to a feeling? And how could either ideas or feelings relate perfectly to the Truth? Let’s actively work against our tendency to make Great Gods out of our own whims: let’s work to remember both that we need to relate to the Great God, and that our ideas, feelings, and notions are never equal to the mind of God.)]
Human beings cannot prove the Truth with ideas or feelings — by definition, the “Truth” would exceed our ideas and feelings. (Anyway, we can’t prove anything with ideas and feelings because we cannot use them to prove their own foundational assumptions.)
However, we could perhaps organize our ideas and feelings around the Truth shining through all things; and in this way flow off of and translate the Truth into life — not perfectly, but maybe meaningfully-enough that our thought-as-a-whole (ideas, feelings, and the Truth that we hope is shining through all things) could gain a meaningful, active, ongoing insight into the Truth. An experiential proof of the Truth that allowed us to grow in wisdom (insight into the Truth) and goodness (living the Truth out into life).
A2a. Parameters of the Proof
But for this to work, we need the Truth to ratify and explicate (a) our inner sense that the only thing 100% Real is a Love that chooses and is enough for all; and we need the Truth to ratify and explicate (b) the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing).
[(a) because otherwise the Truth would be too lonely, boring, confusing, and all-around alien for us to understand, believe in, or care about It.] [(b) because we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own thinking to the degree we follow the universal values; therefore, to be meaningful to ourselves, we need the universal values to be shored up by, not ignored or contradicted by, the Truth.]
Note also that (a) assumes that everyone is essentially the same: creatures centered around Pure Love that can and should relate meaningfully to Pure Love and to one another.
[You can also prove the above point by noting that life is otherwise too lonely for us to stand: we can’t think/feel/act meaningfully-to-ourselves if we believe ourselves to be so lonely. You can also prove the above point by noting that if we aren’t all essentially the same, then we can’t imagine what to make of everything we’ve learned from others, which is pretty much everything. (We learn the basics of life via empathy: Dad stubs his toe, acts a certain way, says certain things; child recreates Dad’s feelings by mapping Dad’s facial expressions and movements onto her own [the child’s] mind/body map; and thus via empathy does the child learn.)]
A2b. Envisioning the experiential whole-being proof of Something Deeperism
We remain faithful to the universal values (aware, clear, honest, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-together) and we open up from within. We turn ourselves inside out. We seek always to live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone. That way we are at least at a starting point for being meaningful to ourselves.
And perhaps in time we grow a whole-being insight (ideas, feelings, notions and et cetera all working meaningfully — though of course not perfectly — with each other and with the Love that shines through each conscious moment) into that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together — bound in and through and for the spiritual Love that creates, sustains, shines through, and at the ultimate level Is all things”. We reach a tipping point where it becomes more true for us to say, “Love is Real and Love is All” than it is for us to say, “I don’t know what’s Real or real, or if Real or even real exist”.
Here wisdom begins. And by working every day to better experience, cherish, and live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone — well, in this way we grow in wisdom and joy. As we are imperfect and the Truth is perfect, the process is ongoing, requiring constant self-monitoring, -critiquing, -adjusting. Every moment we try again to live Love.
Addendum:
The Truth that Something Deeperism assumes and is seeking to experience/live is equivalent to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself” — just with a fuller explanation of the logic and psychology backgrounds that require and enable us to (perhaps, anyway) grow a more and more meaningful relationship to spiritual Love.
[Amble (“Yeah, and … “)]
Both this Something Deeperism and “the most important commandment” require a dual motion into the *spiritual Love shining through all things:
A motion inward into the Love as It shines through your conscious moment
&
A motion outward into the recognition that It shines through everyone else’s conscious moment and even bursts all our seams and flows as the One Light.
[Susan (“I think he means … “)]
*[“spiritual”: eternal, infinite, Absolute: prior to feelings and ideas / perceptions, reactions, & notions]
B. But I’m so lonely all the time! And when I try to sink down into the chaotic hurt blaring always and forever out from my gut, I get hit from the inside as if from the back of a shovel — I’m tossed out of myself. And so I have for so long now been separated from my own self and isolated from my fellows. There’s no one who wants to hear about and I do not want to speak to anyone about this spear of emotional trauma lodged into my gut that I feel viscerally, like a physical wound.
[Amble, blurting out, standing up, jostling the table, spilling gravy, turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and wine-sloshes onto the white magical lace table cloth.]
C. What about me? I listen! I want to be where you are — I want to be with all of you! I make an effort, Amble! Every day to know and love you better. (and quietly now, looking down at the tabletop, through a voice grown raspy and whispering-through-the-narrows with disappointment) to be your girl.
[Susan, standing up, but first pushing carefully back from the table, and moving as always with the poise and grace of a great dancer upon world-historic stages.]
D. Jesus, we don’t have time for Amble’s forever bellyaching right now! We need to move from personal Something Deeperism to the public sphere!
People can only be meaningful to themselves via a path of non-literal — organizational, poetic, and experiential/lived — spiritual insight, contained within the universal values and founded upon a Love that chooses everyone. Therefore, we as groups can only be meaningful (meaningful to each other, and thinking/feeling/acting meaningfully as a whole) by agreeing to agree upon those goods without which none of our worldviews are meaningful. To wit: we must agree to prioritize the universal values and the underlying spiritual Love that we individuals need to animate, justify, and explicate those values, and everything else we think, feel, and/or do!
D1. Agreeing upon the universal values and Pure Love (spiritual love — a Love that only loves) implies prioritizing the democratic process over individual policy victories. We will never agree on everything. However, it is counterproductive for us to sacrifice what we all do agree upon — what we all must honor if we, as individuals, are to be internally meaningful (i.e., meaningful-to-ourselves). And the democratic process prioritizes the universal values and acknowledges the underlying sense that we are all in this together, bound in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone.
D1a. Open, transparent, honest, clear, accurate, competent conversation, debate, and decision-making that accounts for the needs of the whole nation is how democracy is supposed to work. That is an environment conducive to safeguarding and living in accordance with the universal values — an environment that rewards following the universal values and penalizes not following them. We have a representative system so that the average person doesn’t have to spend all their time working on the details of government; and also to create the proper balance between the need for the people to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and evil in government and the danger of the people getting carried away by some woefully partial (both in the sense of not grasping the all the relevant details and in the sense of lacking objectivity) panic/hope/lunge (the majority knows best — except to the degree it becomes a stampeding herd, which invariably careen off cliffs onto sharp stones and dusty ground).
D1b. Democratic systems implicitly accept the premise that we are all in this together and that we all should share in the privilege and duty of government.
D1c. Democracy is founded upon the belief that everyone has both a right and a duty to help the nation think/feel/act well. That foundational value is in keeping with our own inner sense that we are all in this together.
In democratic systems, we prioritize the people’s ultimate control over the government as a way to keep the government from becoming a tyranny (the people serve as a final check on confusion/dishonest, madness, corruption, and ill-will in government) while the people together evolve both the conversation and the government.
Democratic systems value and select for win-wins: We accept the premise that what is good for you is good for me — that if we all respect one another and work together within the norms, procedures, and rules of representative democracy, we can find a way forward for all of us together; And by nurturing and working within these norms, procedures, and rules, we select for behavior that is in keeping with the universal values by conferring governmental power to those that speak honestly and work competently within the constraints of a system of power-sharing, fair regular elections, and checks and balances for the good of the whole.
By maintaining a nation that is open, fair, and free of corruption, we create this amazing wonderful place where you can be both happy and decent: you don’t have to cheat and lie and steal to get ahead; and you can know that if people cheat and lie and steal, in time they will be caught, and shut down.
This contrasts tyrannies — governments that seek first and foremost their own power, prestige and wealth; and that therefore are not even trying to be competent in the sense of governing well for the whole nation, nor are they even trying to reward businesses, organizations, and individuals that avoid corruption and work to be honest, transparent, fair, and serving the common good.
This is why democratic systems are preferable: Their goals are the goals of people working to grow in wisdom — respect the shared universal values and share the Love that animates, justifies, and explicates our shared fundamental values. And they maintain systems that make it easier to do the right thing and more difficult to do the wrong thing.
The more corrupt a state the more difficult it is to both do what is best for everyone and take care of yourself and your loved ones. That is the evil of thugocracies: they reward what hurts the soul with power, wealth, and prestige.
That is why We the People right here right now need to gently but firmly repudiate Trump and all who would coalesce around his anti-democratic behavior.
[Bartleby, now also standing up, but actually first turning himself into a parrot, and flying around and around while frantically philosophizing.]
E. I can’t do this anymore!
[Amble]
F. You’re not the only one!
[Susan]
G. A lot of ideas; a lot of feelings; a lot of commotion. You hold that to serve God with relentless loving-kindness we must work from a place within that is fundamentally prior to ideas and feelings. Okay: How can we do that? What do you read written your heart of hearts?
[Jesus]
H. I’m so tired.
[Bartleby, as a parrot dropping into the sofa; then morphing back into this thin, see-through, in suits of plaid earth-tones, humanesque form.]
I. Me too.
[Amble, sitting back down, starting at the peas swimming in the gravy and olive oil that he mixed together when this meal was young.]
J. I read …
[Susan, sitting back down, but not pulling her chair back into the table.]
And Jesus drank of the fruit of the vine while eating a piece of whole rye bread dipped into salted olive oil in a saucer — for in all this big feast he ate nothing else, nor did he look covetously at the rich fare, nor did he overindulge in the red red wine, nor did he put very much salt into his olive oil, but in all things did he behave relaxed and with gentle joy, not with the desperate lunging pleasures of the addict and the show-off (I’m looking at you, Amble; and I’m not letting you off the hook either, Bartleby — though turning into a great whale and swimming to the bottom of the sea is a better way of blowing off steam than are lonely orgies of dry red wines and tainted loves).
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson
In those dawns, Jesus would pray in the foothills surrounding the city. Late mornings or early afternoons, Jesus would walk down the rugged, dusty, rocky hills into town, and stroll along the Greenbelt series of parks that wind along with the river as it winds through the city center, and I promise you that the wood-fenced and -gazeboed Rose Garden in front of the Zoo and the artsy movie house with foreign films and where you can buy food and beer with your movie and the wine samplings in the galleries and the local blues band in the smoke-free bars: all of this and more was known to and enjoyed by Jesus Christ the Savior.
And also: Jesus did not scorn the small art museum directly in front of the Rose Garden and across the street from the library, but said that some of the art was interesting and neat and even beautiful; though it is true that someone’s grandmother did once disparage this little local museum, but this was unfair: it’s just a small affair and to compare it to the MET and other grand experiences of her life and times was like comparing the Book of Obadiah with the Book of say Genesis or some other grand chunk of the glorious whole. Edom, founded by Esau, in the cliffsides around a Sea dead even in the ancient of days, did indeed fall; and this was worth prophesizing, and this prophecy fit in a few slender pages, and in the mouth of a minor prophet, and tucked away towards the end of the Holy Bible, and yet: there it stands!
Not far from the art museum, nor far from the rose garden, and quite close to the wide tree-shaded paths and to the sparkling Capitol Boulevard and to the glinting river, and facing a wide green field lined by trees and bright in the morning sunlight: There stood a wide white bandstand with a flat stage extending beyond the cavernous bandshell behind the red and blue archway opening the rectangular facade. At the front of the stage around 10AM round about the time of the vernal equinox of 2024, Jesus sat in green khaki shorts and a yellow-with-black-zagging-stripe Charlie Brown T-shirt, swinging his legs and squinting in the bright morning light.
And a crowd gathered around him as if summoned by the silent shout of the Holy Spirit, or perhaps in anticipation of a free concert that was scheduled for 11AM that day, a concert whose framework was being constructed in bangs and clicks and thumps and thuds behind Jesus Christ, with friendly roadies in black T-shirts and shorts who told him he’s going to have to move at some point, since there’s a concert there coming up.
And Jesus stood up at the edge of the stage that extended a dozen or so feet beyond the facade into which the bandshell was hewn, and he began to preach to the crowd of (mostly young) people on blankets and drinking water, soda, tea, coffee, health elixirs, and even some alcohol disguised as water, soda, tea, coffee, or perhaps a health elixir.
“Blessed are the tender hearted; a gentle smile and open heart live already in the Holy, reacting to things as they really are.
“Blessed are the humbly courageous, who know the child of God in everyone they meet.
“Blessed are the lonely, for God’s community has room for all, and its fellowship is only kind, excluding none and remembering all.
“Blessed are those who seek the Truth and speak gently and honestly.
“Blessed are those who choose the freedom of shared delight over the freedom to lie, cheat, and twist the Light.
“Blessed are those who refuse to follow bullies and liars — even when they bully on your behalf, and lie for your advantage.
“Blessed are those who accept their human hands and holy fire; in their humility and courage they are the conduits through which God-as-Joy flows into this world: Not as a command, but as a prayer and an offering; for every soul knows itself divine, but wisdom remembers that human minds, hearts, mouths, and fingers are fallible, are here to serve Love, not to boast in self-pretended holiness, making believe that one’s own thoughts and feelings themselves were the divine Love that thoughts and feelings must serve if the human is to live the life-overflowing.
And with many such exhortations did he teach them, and they were surprised and said, “Who is this who teaches Something Deeperism, but not as complicated, self-looping philosophizings — as do the Bartlebies and the Ambles –, but in simple, earnest language in bandshells in the bright sunlight that we who grew up in this safe little town have come to accept as our birthright, as the background guarantee of our covenant with this lucky break and outrageous grace we sometimes accidentally pretend we earned?”
And the band began to play, and they played as they had never before played, and Jesus sat in for a couple sets, but he didn’t know the lyrics, so he sang some Psalms in ancient tongues and everyone’s hair stood on end at the nearness of the Spirit in a free concert in a wide park in the Greenbelt series of parks that follows the river through town and helps make the city into a playground for old and young alike. Sometimes a few hours float outside of time and everyone present knows for a time that all are one and in this One all hang forever outside of their times, their places, their names, their shapes, their sizes, their hearts, their minds, their attitudes and expressions. Such times have no price and point towards the Good, although sometimes fees are associated with them and sometimes the experience is co-opted by lies of us-versus-them and other follies that would wad up the Infinite Light into a little narrow weapon. But that didn’t happen to this event; no, this moment stayed pure and sweet, gentle like a newborn’s giggle, and light and merry-quick like the flick of a squirrel’s bushy tail.
Author: Bartleby Willard
Editor: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Mac Watson
a disappointment
over and over again
the snake on the leg
tugging
winning
and you fail
you disappoint
for how many years now
?
The problem is political evil
But what is the solution?
Jesus is the English form of the Greek form (Iēsous) of the Aramaic Yeshua, which is a version of the Hebrew Yəhôšua, which we translate as “Joshua”: YHWH is salvation, or saves, or is a saving-cry, or is-a-cry-for-help, or -is-lordly. Anyway, something to do with Yahweh.
Wikipedia believes that Yahweh was originally one God among many and that the ancient Israelites were a subset of the ancient Canaanites, and they all worshipped the same basic pantheon of Gods, and that in the Iron Age the Israelites were worshipping “El, the ruler of the pantheon, Asherah, his consort, and Baal.” Wikipedia then says that in Deuteronomy 32:8-9* Yahweh used to be named as a son of “El”, but that was edited out in later versions.
*[In the Most High causing nations to inherit, In His separating sons of Adam — He setteth up the borders of the peoples By the number of the sons of Israel. For Jehovah’s portion [is] His people, Jacob [is] the line of His inheritance.]
In support of this statement, Wikipedia links to a book Monotheism and Yahweh’s Appropriation of Baal by James S. Anderson (published 2015 by Bloomsbury T&T Clark). On page 3 of this book, we find,
As the examination of the relevant evidence makes clear, Iron Age Israel and
Judah worshipped a small pantheon headed by Yahweh and Asherah. The Hebrew
Bible evinces the co-opting of Asherah by Yahweh as Yahweh takes over her
domain: presiding over care of the womb, childbirth and child-rearing activities.
Other domains, which Canaanite religions ascribed specifically to Baal, were also
transferred to Yahweh, such as the rule over the Rephaim and the care of these
deified ancestors: …
So maybe Wikipedia got the pantheon a little wrong? Maybe El is the most important God, but the romantic pair Yahweh and Asherah are the ones looking out for the Iron Age Israelites and Judeans? See this next bit:
On page 77, in the section 5.7 The Song of Moses, we find the part that I guess Wikipedia had found:
…
Within these triumphal monotheistic affirmations, Deuteronomy 32.8–9
explains how Elyon organized the sons of Adam into distinct peoples, and set
the boundaries of the territory allotted to each people according to the number
of the sons of El. Yahweh received Jacob as his lot. In the received Hebrew text,
the sons of El have been turned into “sons of Israel” (ראלׂיש > אל(, a reading that
spoils the logic of the text but erases the pantheon implied by the notion that El
has many sons. That the reading “sons of Israel” is an emendation of “sons of El”
is confirmed by texts found near Qumran, and by the Septuagint which reads
ἀγγέλων θεοῦ, rendered in the New English Translation of the Septuagint as
“divine sons.” The Alexandrian translators either had too much respect for the
Hebrew text they worked on, or they reconciled with monotheism the idea that
Yahweh was a subordinate deity among others in the pantheon ruled by the “Most
High” by understanding Elyon as a synonym for Yahweh. In any case, the text
does not make any sense in the context of a song that pictures Yahweh not only
as the head of the pantheon but also as the sole and only god. …
James S. Anderson is an adjunct professor in Texas. Other books by the same author: Bethlehem the House of Bread, Defending Catholicism, Extolling Yeshua, and Manifesting Peace. This is his author page.
I promise you, I had never heard of this man until today!
But to return to our story.