folds

Deleuze emphasizes folds as a metaphor for how concepts open up, how life opens up. Merleau Ponty uses folds to say that "unfold time behind us" or that time folds up behind us. There is this sense that as with a crease, we both sense and nonsense reality. Things are folded away from us. Things fold out. We have a sense of expansion and contraction, as with an accordion, that things can seem temporaly near but spatially distant, or vice versa. Like a gag trick folds indicate that more is nested in a problem than we supposed, or that more can be pulled out, as with the magician and the handkercheif, one after another. Or sentences in Tristram Shandy, containing subordination within suborination, parenthetically paranthetical and apositive alongside apositive.

Artistically folds give us clues to the contour and mass of an object. A flat surface tells us nothing. As the surface becomes scarred, creased, differentially rubbed, more is disclosed. So a fold discloses even as it hides.

Deleuze uses the french Pli and its prefixes and suffixes: complicate, explicate - to describe how folds fit into our concepts of description.

a visit to the museum

I spent Saturday in the Art Institute of Chicago and most of it in the new wing where they've moved contemporary and 20th century art. I couldn't photograph the Twombly exhibit (which is gorgeous - and I've not been warm to Cy in my life - but here: here are large panels of greens and reds and yellows, where the paint is allowed to course down the surface). Instead I was drawn to the Richard Gober - whose work I'd never seen as a total installation before. The Nasher here in Durham just displayed the litter bag - why show that at all if the rest of the installation is left out? The Guston - I fill more Guston as I grow older. I understand what he's doing. And the comparison with late Morandi - so apt: the hesitancy, the letting things be (a quality I discerned in the Twombly) and the confidence to just let them be. I found this in the Charles Ray who recapitulates Smithson's installation of a tree filling a gallery - although he carved the thing and hollowed it out. So you could say Ray did one more step in the repetition. And the Picasso head of 1927 - perhaps the most Klee like image Picasso did. I went back to this again and again. I couldn't leave it alone.

For me, the art institute is a spiritual experience - as are most great museums: the MFA in Boston, the Metropolitan and MoMA, LA's museum, and Atlanta's - though my home museum is a poor relation. The sad thing is is that the three here in the Raleigh Durham area don't amount to one gallery of either of the first three museums. And don't get me going on what London has to offer: the Courtauld, the National, both Tates.

I go to church for something. Oh yeah.

creation of eve and stuff

[an addition from the codex beaze, a palimpsest in a margin, underneath the text, aside a rubric and a cartoon of a donkey riding a rickshaw]
"And not just wars and rumors of wars but peace and rumors of peace
and price hikes as well as discounts
and there'll be adjustments for inflation
and people will lose money
and people will make money
people will be getting together for lunch and dinner and eating too much and laughing too much
and many people will not have enough to eat but will still find ways to laugh
and enjoy human relationships.
Basically things will be predicatable
Even moreso, to the point of cliche
and veneration of kitsch and the wrailings against them in all high-minded quarters.
And there'll be plenty of stupidity to go around: two blind men will fall in a ditch, for example, and one will be taken to an infirmary and the other will be left behind
because he was unseen and unheard by the blind rescuers -
oddly enough, he'll be the one to survive. So there'll be lots of irony
And some will get it and others won't,
and some will confuse irony with coincidence
and others will take it or leave it.
As it was in the days of Noah
When the whole earth was flooded and all life destroyed, except for the sea creatures and microorganisms, especially those things that have been living in arctic glaciers all this time,
So it will be in those days.
And pray that your flight isn't delayed
and you have to make a connection at DFW
cause then you're SOL.
The thing is, I said, "no one knows the day or the hour," so quit trying to pin down a day or describe a scenario that means it's just got to happen.
Remember the ending of the book of Jonah: God changed his mind and Jonah was left hanging.
Let that be a sign to you: God talks about fire and cataclysm and armageddon, but She lilkes reconciliation, rebirth and slavation a whole lot more --
a lot more than you probably do.
In fact if you're in this because you want a front-row seat to witness the wholesale destruction of what you hate - you'll be disappointed."

In Luke's gospel for instance, when the disciples think it would be a good idea to rain down fire from heaven to consume unrepentant villages, Jesus thinks otherwise. God doesn't get caught up in projections and countertransference like we do. Whether stuck in rush hour traffic with nothing on the radio and late for an appointment or putting back a cold one at the local pub, God's pretty much the same even-kelned, unflappable Guy/Gal, trinitarian perichoresic being, simple and one and three and complex. Of course that's just one of the ways we're different.

Self portrait with mackeral

Cartoonishness is the most difficult critique of my work that I grapple with. Sometimes the lines are too facile. But is it not also a strength. A strength when pushed in the right direction - when pushed into or along with my imagination.
I can only go in the direction I am. In the past I've gotten into cul de sacs: places where I fall in love with a principle. For instance, there was a time 31-28 years ago that my work consisted of dots with really faint lines linking them. I am now uncertain what I thought I was doing. The positive thing was: I continued to make images. That's what I can say: every day or so I make a drawing or two or three or four or five or ten.
So Here is a fine drawing of me holding a mackeral.

ruminations

The bottom drawing needs to be rotated counterclockwise. Sometimes things come out sideways and I don't catch it in the tiny thumbnails.

I love the top two watercolors, perhaps the simplest things I've done.

Blanchot, in Waiting Oblivion, repeats the phrase, which I misremembered later: the phrase - act so I may speak to you. I remembered: Speak so I can hear you.

I like both. I felt that what I misremembered was helpful for CPE.

So much of our speaking is framed such that we are unheard.

Do people really believe that they'll be heard for their rants. The the person being ranted at and the people being ranted among, are actually attuned, listening?

It feels good to the ranter. And certainly I've ranted plenty. And my ranting has done me no good.

The rhetorical tradition doesn't have a category for ranting. Nor bloviation - a wonderful word that depicts what it sounds like: imagine a fat jowled speaker, hand on chest, red faced, other hand gesturing wildly, the heat and light.

It's what I imagine CS Lewis was implying somewhere where he indicated that people become their sins, and in one instance describing someone has having become simply a complaint. I think it might be in the Great Divorce.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Blanchot is like that. A writer engaged by a variety of French philosophers: Jean Luc Nancy, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. I'm almost certain that I'm going to pick up some new volume and someone else will be refering to him.

Blanchot and Celan speak to the issue of our relationality and silence and waiting.

I'm just beginning to read him myself.

Meanwwhile I'm picking up Rauschenberg and Smithson again, after years, both artists exemplifying association and entropy. Ah, to rediscover entropy after all these years: the principle that the work we create is deteriorating the moment we sign it.

How our world tries to live as if entropy did not dog our every move.

Yet even we wear out.

It is hard to grapple with, that one day I won't be here. Just like my mom isn't here, or my grand fathers or my mom's mom, and one day my dad's mom, my dad. My wife. Beautiful and smart.

Quick eyes under earth's lid - Pound writes about soldiers, but about any human being it would suffice to say.

Of course I just appeared in history as well.

A history where certain things had already happened: Babylon, Rome, Charlemagne, Lee and Grant, Washington and Cornwallis, the Devil and Daniel Webster.

I just happened, came to consciousness in the body of a boy growing up in north Georgia in the 1960s, speaking English, seeing with one eye, going to school and being miserable. Trying to piece together reality from fragments: why my dad was aloof, why we read these books and not others, why are we moving, why am I alone.

What a wonder it is to be alive. To breathe air and to feel the sand under my hands at the beach. To touch a branch and shake the leaves, listening to their rustling sound. What a wonder to see light touching a table in a dark room early in the morning, while even the cats are asleep.

How can it be that any of us may have this and then it is gone?

Ecclesiastes, Job, Lamenations, all testify to the early Hebrew belief that this life is all there is. The Psalmist writes, "the dead will not praise you" in more than one place. Only with Daniel in 165 BCE do we get an inkling of resurrection. Isaiah 26 as well - but what is that? 400 BCE may be, 3rd Isaiah. Resurrection and heaven: not Greek Ideas but Persian.

Christ turns the Psalmist's words aside with his assertion that "all live to God. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Christ's words here have a hint of Berkeley to them: esse est percipi: the tree in the forest makes a sound because God hears it. God actualizes all our existenses by virtue of her creative omnipresence, infusing time and space in infinite and sinuous ways, we do not fail to Be and are held in Beingness by a God who is Being and Becoming along with us, behind us and before us.

Barth, Jungel, the reformed tradition, are great in emphasizing that the sole purpose of Believing in Jesus is that the most important thing about life after death is being with Jesus in the inter Trinitarian relations, the divine perichorises.

That Jesus is not a means to an end, a ticket to continued existence, where you get to meet great people and converse with them, play basketball with rejuvenated hall of famers, eat fried chicken with the family again on the old porch under the shade trees on the old farm while Rex cavorts in the yard and it's perpetually July 10th.

Jesus promises that we'll be with him. And he and the early church thought that that was a good enough reason for people to leave all, take up their cross and follow him.

This being the case - and it's the strongest case that can be made from scripture and from Jesus' words, it is astonishing the elaborate end of world scenarios and heaven as the apotheosis of free market capitalism memes running afoot.

Again, even in Revelation, the purpose of eternal life seems more to do with worship of God and nothing, not a shadow of a trace of a palimpsest, about self actualization, self realization. We'll be with Jesus.

What does that mean? Some 1st century wandering apocalyptic prophet, resembling a cynic, throwing out cryptic lines like "love your enemy" "the first will be the last and the last first". Victor Furnish points out that Jesus seemed to command love - he didn't inspire it - a phrase that grates on our need for the seamless hero, the docetic Jesus.

So this guy? Paul writes that we knew him in the flesh but now no more; now we know him by faith in the spirit.

Paul is not speaking of Christ in the vague way we might speak of someone being with us in spirit. Paul believed that Christ was physcially present and real, as real as he was or anyone could be. More so.

To me, this is where faith becomes difficult, but the most rewarding. Take away the projections, the wish fulfillment fantasies, and ponder a question without answer: a question that requires rephrasing at every step.

Yet I am drawn ever in. Great is the mystery of Faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Live in such a way that I may speak to you.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Listen in such a way that emptiness is filled over flowing.

two drawings

The top drawing is myself, painting, in a mode implying a puzzle.

The bottom drawing is not an image of Eve (though it's all right if people think so, or nearly all right if they think it - however, it's not right that they assert it). It is an image that is polysemous, sure, but in an hellenistic way: either Europe and Zeus (the bull) or queen Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon (the sire of the Minotaur). Other clues are incorporated: a tortoise and hare, a fluted Greek column in the background. What about the snake (and this seems to tip people off in the garden of eden direction: nude woman and snake - gotta be Eve and the serpent [note serpent, not Satan - who is not in the garden episode; yet people seem to insert him into the garden episode frequently])? The snake refers to the Greek god of healing, starts with an A, sounds like Aesclypius but I'm not sure, as well as to the Cauducus that's part of the Doctor symbol you see on various medical buildings and stationaries. All ancient peoples loved snakes and naked women. For instance: well known minoan figurine is of a topless woman weilding snakes in her hands like thunderbolts. Snakes and naked women - not just confined to the Hebrews - who probably got the idea from the Persians anyway. If this was the garden of Eden, I'd have put a ziggurat, not the greek column, in the background, and included Adam, or a canvas of Adam being painted by St. Paul, who invented the way we see Adam now out of whole cloth supplied by the book of Maccabees.

Anyway, I really like this drawing. I did it on CPE day as some speaker rhapsodied on about Evon Agazarian and system centered group processes. Benzene molecules and various chemical diagrams are in this drawing. And it has a nice overall tonality - I've saturated just about every 1/8th square inch of it with my quick tiny darting pen strokes. Rapture.

A whole segment of christiandom awaits rapture - conspicuously that segment that seems most divorced from knowing what rapture is or being capable of it.

What if some sect decided to make a central doctrine out of the word orgasm. The climax of God's kingdom here on earth. Jesus shall come ...

I'm sure that's been done before. It's cheap. Cheap and beneath me.

Still I like both these drawings. The top one hasn't had quite the career in generating misconceptions yet.

Misconception - there's an interesting word.

I would hate to misconceive the immaculate conception.

That would be like misconstruing flowers at a wedding.

Garcipara's wife - that's a misnomer. An eggregious pun dependent on people knowing Redsox shortstops.

I like both drawings. They exhibit intricacy and inventiveness.

And the stars around the head of the nude woman refer to the stars around the virgin in the immaculate conception, and the virgin's prior identity with Aphrodite, the stella maris, the star of the ocean, as she was called, which ties the greek and hebraic symbols together. Another image that ties early christian with ancient symbols together is the image of Isis holding Horus [I think it's Horus, it's Isis' kid anyway]: looks just like a madonna and child. Much christian iconography makes use of precursors, Roman, Greek, Persian. These associations are mostly lost in the kitschified world we live in today.

Sigh.

free associations

Freud reports that in the process of free association, the most important thing is not what is voiced, but what remains unsaid, where the resistance is. In a way, an idea from negative theology: the most important and true things about God are the things we don't say, that remain unvoicable. And in our society where we expect solutions and things being ready at hand, the notion that the important thing is eternally out of reach cuts against the flow of our desire.

And what we desire fails us again and again. The push through to satiation, to climax, finds us back again, in the land of want. What would the attainment of desire be? Immolation?

Perhaps this underscores the rational the ancients, including St. Paul, developed against desire; instead they counseled contentment. "Godliness with contentment is great gain." That sums up the attitude of the early church. To be content is to live in the present - whereas desire inflames and calls us to some other place, beckons us to the future before we get there - a future that takes us out of the present. Whereas contentment is a present that carries us into the future. Perhaps I simplify too much.

Outside my window the backyard is soaked. A cricket chirps, and there are more greens than usual. I see one and wonder why I haven't gotten it into a painting yet. Lately I'm seeing more greens and grays than I ever suspected. I could be the influence of Morandi. Morandi whose simple still lifes and landscapes haunt me. And I think I know what the connection between him and late Guston is: the awkwardness of presentation. Both exhibit an awkwardness front and center: presentation and line, color and composition, awkwardly there ThereTHERE. And what intrigues is that this is what most other artists strive to hide. Even De Kooning and Pollock present chaos and violence, but with a polish, an authority. There is nothing awkward in their work. But Morandi and Guston: how awkward and uncomfortable.

I'm listening to Boulez's Pli Selon Pli. My favorite piece of classical music. It folds upon folds, covers and discloses.

Otherwise I listen to Eric Dolphy's Far Cry. How I wish when I was buying CDs back in 1999 that I'd bought more Booker Little. Booker Little and Freddie Hubbard - my favorite trumpet players - more so than Dave Douglas now or Clifford Brown then - who I was more immediately attracted to. More than Miles Davis (except for Bitches Brew - an exemplary jazz album and I increasingly think, Davis' best). I also like Dolphy's Out to Lunch.

David Markson is onto something in his recent work. Work that resembles a literature major's notes. But something solid but hidden lies at the center. The great unnameable in his work.

Jung, Freud, Lacan, Klein, Bion: all agree. Not to cure, to fix, to make go away - but to integrate, to contain, to hold opposites in balance - that is the aim. The goal, the conclusion, is something else, a logical end point.

Desire whirls around a void, the drives, according to Lacan, for whom all drives are death drives seeking to break through the pleasure principle, regardless the cost. Deleuze would say that the drives are not voids but plenums, bursting with abundance. Neither concept invites touching - it would be like putting your arm in a turbine. Why would you do that? Isn't the point that you're getting energy and that it's the energy you should be using.

But this is what we get for thinking that our human predicament is something that needs fixing. We spend too much time trying to fix, to put into place, to fit in, all the conflicts and incongruities of our life. The question is What gives us energy? What takes away energy? What empowers? What deflates?

When Jesus says love your enemies, what if the scribe had asked, as in another place, And who are my enemies? And Jesus had responded with the parable of the good samaritan. Or would Jesus have held up a mirror?

Listening to Jesus, you'd think that his family, his disciples, all were enemies - except the Romans. He never says anything bad about them. Or the samaritans either.

We often take God's speech that she held out her hand to an ungrateful people as a complaint, but what if we hear that as discription. This is what God does: He holds out his hand to ungrateful people.

God doesn't seem to have enemies.

The very people Jesus is harshest with are the ones who insist that they're on his side. "lord lord didn't we do all so many good things in your name." These people, these early volunteers, he tells to scram.

Perhaps God would rather hear, "fuck off."

Perhaps he goes not to those who are well but to those who are sick because these people seem to have a clue.

The people who think they've got it licked, figured out the system: these are the ones who're off. He tells them, "since you say 'we see!' your sin remains."

I'm now listening to Andrea Parkin do weird things with the accordion: fold upon fold.

taking or leaving

I love this pararble and its hyperparabolic possibilities: Matthew 24:41 (n + 1).

In the same way there will be two guys crossing the country in an old car, perhaps a loaner from one of their dad's or a friend's. At some point they'll discover the gas guage is broken and they'll be stranded in Palestine, TX. At some point a Samaritan will stop and offer them some help. So one will be taken up the road to an open gas station, and the other will be left behind to watch the car and wait.

In the same way two pigs will be feeding at the trough. One day the farmer will come and take one and the other will be left behind. Then the farmer will come back and get that one too.

In the same way there'll be two of anything, cats, zebras, jockeys, lesbians, policemen, unemployed middle managers, incarcerated businessmen, exiled cabinet officials, apocolyptic prophets; invariably differences and divergences will emerge among them that can be summed up as the taking or leaving what they have in common, a place. So it is that two of anykind, unable to exist together will find themselves displaced in relation to the initial reality they'd formed.

So what do we do with this displacement. Is it a displacement that invites replacing? Or is the parable's force in pointing out how slippery it is to label: women grinding, men in the field. One of each can be taken and one of each can be left? What does it matter in view of the culmination of the world. The coming of the son of man.

Here is prime exegetical territory: liberating the text from what it has to mean, whether that meaning is the accretion of orthodox defenses or heterodox insurrections. What is ortho and what is hetero change with the wind - more as expressions of power than of truth.

So two boys are building a tree house in the sand with rocks.

Two dowagers go to see Waiting for Godot and one is taken aback and the other is left speechless.

Two Roman legions are wandering in the forest searching for Arminius.

I think it's best to bombard the text with alternative settings, extrapolating and pushing meaning to the nth - searching for an eternal return.

The son of man is an eternal return. This time coming as a thief. The first time coming in tragedy and the cross - but this time, a thief and in farce? He comes like a flood and in the clouds and gathers his elect. Earlier he came like a mother hen gathering her chicks; now like a fox raiding the hen house.

Two hens will be brooding secure in their hen house; one will be taken and the other will be left behind. Pity the watchdog, Rex, with egg on his face.

good grief

I've slackened my pace of writing on this blog. I write in many other places. Sometimes I write on facebook, which is not satisfying. At times I've been dissatisfied writing on the blog here: no responses; responses that miss the point; responses that are spam - though there have been responses of understanding, appreciation, and encouragement.

I do a lot of writing on small scraps of paper. Paper scraps that I arrange in a collage of seminarrational resemblance. I don't want to write a narrative so much as the feeling of a narrative.

I think now that no one is reading what I'm writing here, except perhaps Jami or an occasional friend, or someone who types a google search looking for something else. I think that it's a good thing to write in order not to be read. There are many things written for an audience - think : what is your audience. And so minnisters for years are encouraged to write for a group of 8th graders.

I don't know what it says for us that the intellectual development hoped for in our country is 8th grade. Or that the emotional develoopment might be even younger. In clinical pastoral education (CPE) I've learned that emotional deveelopment is muich more important for behaviour and wisdeom than intellectual development.

It's amazing what we can think. Yet the complexity of what we're capable of thinking is belied by the simplicity of our emotional reactions. Most people in our society are reactive. If our politics is a reflection of us, then we see, we feel, in a polarized manner.

So the question is not knowing more: it's knowing what we feel and why we feel it.

What can be done? How can we move beyond reactivity to, as W Bion might say, containing our good/bad feelings together when thinking about others: that a persoon can be good or bad, a mixture, and that our reactivity toward them, our desire to act out, to pull the passive/aggressive thing, is not in ours or their interests: that such reactivity forestalls communication and growth and relationality.

I recommend a mass reading of Alice Miller's Drama of the gifted child.

Our child rearing methods invariably induce trauma prior to cognitive devevlopment. When parental love is not provided in a nurturing manner, the child faces the crisis of the mother being bad. How to get the good mother back, he thinks. He discovers that when he pleases her, the good mother comes back. What happens here, though, is that many times, what is discovered is the mechanism of pleasing: where admiration, compliments, take the place of love. The child still craves love, but gets compliments instead. When the child wants love, he does behavior to get the compliments (this is where he gets the good mother). Over time a split develops, many splits really, where good and bad never reside in the same object at the same time. The child may grow up and his manner of compensating may lead to high levels of accomplishment. If not, it may lead to high levels of grandiosity. The child cannot face the fact that he is ordinary, neither good nor bad in absolute ways. Still the child has a chasm of unlovedness - a chasm that gets deeper and more secret as he becomes an adult.

Miller, Klein and others discuss this development of narcissism much more thoroughly, and I recommend them. But this is my basic understanding of what takes place.

Certainly I see this grandiostiy working in me, a grandiostiy that masks shame and that needs further accomplishment to substitute for love not received as a child. It's not that parents intentionally don't love their children: but I believe that often they don't know how. The baby gets quuiet when they threaten it - mission accomplished; the child behaves when he is spanked - mission accomplished. The child wins a prize, gets all A's, a scholarship, hits for the cycle - all is perfect. Except when the chld strikese out, gets all B's and C's (or that first F), flunks out - then the need is still there, to cover up that empty hole (where the shame of being the bad infant or the guilt of being the hurtful infant) that's still there, and now there's not a compliment, a plug of praise, to substitute for the love the child doesn't know how to ask for, has only sporadically received, and doesn't know how to give or receive (except that it binds with an object of enough emotional umph! to replace the original object that failed).

So what to do for this child. This is where the process of grieving comes in. I think a book like Kathleen O'Connor's commentary on Lamentations "Tear of the World" is helpful in this regard. Though I've found it helplful to read lamentations straight through in one sitting or the book of Job. These books deal with grief in complex and let it all hang out kinds of ways.

solitude

While at Oak Island this year I experienced solitude in a very personal way. I was not lonely; I was not merely alone; I was not escaping companionship. I was sole, dwelling in myself and resting in myself. I found a place to do this: a spit of sand extended into the sound at low tide. I would walk out at low tide, through shallow water, and sit on this extension of the beach that was made available through the dredging efforts of the Corps of Engineers and the pulling back of the Atlantic. I brought my books, pen and paper, binoculars and camera. I read Blanchot's Waiting Oblivion. I drew in the sand. I observed the distant birds and boats. I looked back at our beach house. I felt equipoise. And when we left the beach I discovered that I retained it in me, independent of location.

Point taken

 There's not enough time, every moment of time is too precious to spend being reactive, nurturing resentments, ranting ad nauseum. Every day in the hospital I see people in distress, nearing their limit, grieving - and it seems, ...that there is no time to waste in any endeavor but love, in any position but in hearing and speaking to our mutual wounds.

I posted this recently, and I think it's an important reflection of mine, born of almost 2 years in different hospitals - I should say, 2 stints in hospitals: it's only a little less than a year now.

What I hoped to get from CPE was a sense of how I am and how people are in limit situations. As Kathleen O'Conner says in her Lamentations commentary, "to extend a gentle reception to the pain of others, we need familiar knowledge of our own pain, grief and doubt. [92]." She also talks about how denial (where we deny our grief through consumerism, escapism, addictions, or violence) blocks our creativity and ability to flourish.

Blanchot reflects this sense of nurturing solitude in order to be with others. In his Awaiting Oblivion, which I read at the beach, I found that lines like "narrow the presence, vast the place" and "he feels liberated by waiting for waiting" and what would happen if my speech were suddenly to make itself heard by me?" - this is all good stuff, and the effect on me was to craft an interior space where I could be with the other.

a wonderful fall

The story of the Fall

is that we can go out

into the world and fail:

ourselves, each other and God.

god doesn't desert us

nor do we

even the snake has no

hard feelings

There'll be blame and

attempts at covering up

and scapegoating.

But it's not the end of

the world.

The Fall is like the fall, in that it seems like the end, but is actually a beginning. We don't begin until we fall, and the year begins, in some calendars, in the fall. So I could mean both.
 Failure characterizes creation; until failure occurs, the creation subsists in a merged identification. With the initial failure resistance is set in motion
 The figure distinguishes itself from the ground. In the Fall we know we are not gods; and in the Falling leaves, we see that god's view of perfection is not uninterrupted stasis. That is: failure is the perfection of creation. The text enjoins us, invites us, to tread with confidence into the world of fall. Perhaps a folly age [foliage] imposes on me.

On the notion of being left behind

I began a reflection on those verses in Matthew 24 that talk about one of a couple being left and another being taken. A common enough worry among us - that the one we love will die before we do or that we'll die before them. How will we handle such an event. It is too big for us to imagine. Somehow, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like this: that we don't know what will become of us or our loved ones. The question of being left behind is addressed by Jesus at the end of John's gospel, where Peter askes of the "beloved disciple" What about this guy? Jesus says basically, "whether he comes before or after you, what does that matter to you and me. You're following me - not him."
Knowing the popular mythology that has accreted onto this parable and especially how it induces emotional wrecks to respond to altar calls, I thought, let's take this in another direction.
I began with a joke.
Matthew 24:41x "Likewise there will be two virgins attending a feast/ one will be taken and the other .../ the other will be taken as well."
Which is a bit juvenile, as Jami points out to me. But I gamely continued.
Matthew 24:41y "In the same manner there will be two men sitting in a bar, after work, and they'll be eating hot wings with blue cheese drerssing, watching a sports call-in show - they'll drink several beers, some with high gravity, and laugh at increasingly odd jokes, and one will take home an extra order of wings and the other will leave behind a tip."
41y "In the same manner two hillbillies will go down a river with class 3 and 4 rapids, in a rubber raft, with a gallon of moonshine, their favorite coon hound, and a box of cherry bombs, on a night with a full mooon under a cloudless sky. And they will be thought to have taken leave of their senses by all they've left behind."
41 [symbol for pi] "In the same manner there will be an indeterminate number of people, men and women, engaged in a variety of activities, entertaining each other, teaching and learning, sharing the joys and struggles of life, in solitude and in crowds, family groups, freinds and strangers, all attempting to live good lives or to discover what the good life is, at once happy and dissatisfied, carried away in the moment or settled in contentment. And one or more will be taken in by artifacts left behind. And one or more others will leave behind artifiacts taken up for reasons no longer remembered. One or more of either group may be taken behind and left. One or more of either group might be behind, and though for a bit left, eventually taken up again. Of those in all groups and in the group of those conditionally excluded there might be behind those left or taken while some are taken from behind that others had left, through no fault of their own.
The key thing is this: it is difficult to say whether being taken or left is good or bad. It's like sometimes when there are mass layoffs, one guy is taken from the widget line and is retrained and gets a better job, while the guy left behind continues to make a steady salary - both are happy. Sometimes a kid, for instance in school, is left behind and blossoms - sometimes not. Results can be mixed. In both being taken and being left behind there are opportunities. The difficulty in being taken is a kind of resting on your laurels where you cease to learn and try and you just mail it in. Likewise the difficulty in being left behind is that you get depressed, you dwell too much on how others are passing you by, and you begin sabotaging the process.
I underscore this ambiguity here with this observation from my days as a wood worker. We would go among the trees and I remember my dad pointing to various ones: we would take a certain tree for a chair - even though it might be small, but the wood had the right spring to it. Others we'd leave behind, because they were more suited to a table or a plow that we knew we would be building later."