psychiatric action figures

It seems unlikely that Jami's step dad would have psychiatric figurines: but here's a guy on a couch talking with a bearded guy writing. When I saw this I immediately thought of Freud burrowing into the substance of people's dreams. What if this was an early session where Freud and Jung analyzed each other. Perhaps this is right before Jung made Freud faint. But what is the guy on the couch holding? It seemed to be a musical text of some sort. I was also nonplussed by Freud writing with a quill pen.
Last year I bought an action figure of Van Gogh, which I left in its case. He came with five canvases and a french easel. A french easel is one of those things that fold up into a box and which can be set up outside. It's called a french easel because the english easel requires helpful badgers, an eagle and a donkey that is lost, away from home, on an epic journey of discovery and valor that will test their loyalty and prove their friendship. I think that's more the CS Lewis or Beatrix Potter easel.
Today in church I was scanning the hymnal and came across the hymn "there's a wideness in God's mercy" which I always read as "a wildness in God's mercy". It makes more sense to me that God's mercy is wild than that it be wide. Wideness goes without saying and the fact of it being wide is not interesting to me, not as interesting as that that mercy is wild. God's mercy is untamed, untrammeled, pristine in a natural state. God's mercy sneaks up on you, overflows its boundaries, floods, grows over, blows through. Who knows when God's mercy will bump into you. Wild!
More disturbing is the hymn misreading "while shepherds washed their flocks by night." I can see this as an action figure though: it's not surprising that ancient shepherds washed sheep at night, bonfires blazing, buckets filling troughs. All this time the cattle are lowing, sometimes hitting a C below the staff, and the deer baby sleeps - how does he sleep? Fawningly.
But the little lord Jesus, no crying he makes? Give me a break. Tell me he bawled like a baby. I'm tired of these docetic Christmas hymns. What isn't assumed isn't saved, as the ancient adage goes, and it's important for the incarnation and all that follows from it, that Jesus be typical in terms of feeling and needs.
A friend of mine is sermonizing on Acts 17 - the episode where Paul preaches in Athens. Metzger's textual commentary indicates a great textual variety in this section. The passage begins with Paul being left in Athens where he's disturbed by the profusion of idols. It seemed odd to me that he was disturbed about that: certainly idols are all over the place in that world. It may be the display and splendor of those idols that disturbed Paul. Acts is an interesting book. I think that it only vaguely reflects Paul's actual activity and personality: a memory, a trace, used for a history based on the epic form, like the Aneid and others of that time. Paul is presented as a type and acts according to the rules of honor and shame. Whereas in the letters, Paul is keenly aware of these rules and pictures himself as someone who has no ostensible honor. I'm sure that there are areas where my conjecture can be criticized: sections of letters where Paul is concerned with how his honor is perceived or passages in Acts where Paul acts without recourse to how he's perceived. I think that the preponderance of instances points to a Paul who in his letters works to subvert the honor/shame system of the ancient world, while the Paul of Acts doesn't exhibit that subversive program. The most interesting Paul of course is the one shacking up with Thecla in Spain - essentially the Paul of my imagination. The girl baptized a lion right after she baptized herself (in the only instance of baptizomai in the middle voice in koine literature) in front of friends and family at the Roman equivalent of NASCAR.
Paul and Thecla action figures would be great - accompanied by that lion. Their child, called in utero Pauline, with her full name, Pauline Theologie.