image

What if I told you this image was taken from a moving train as I was translating the Easter passage from 1 Corinthians, where Christ our lamb is sacrificed for us and we're enjoined to attend the festival - actually the Corinthians of ca 50 AD are enjoined: we're on the outside looking in, a condition of reading any ancient text, but especially scripture. How do we enter the text? What must this group have been like? Certainly not participants in a worldwide movement. More likely a communal gathering tangentially connected to other communities by the comings and goings of the apostles. There was no central authority - no curia or general assembly or council determining what All believed.
When I look at the accumulation of theology and confessions and catechisms over the ages, I am overwhelmed by how many blanks have been discovered and filled in - blanks that these early people could not have guessed at. But then I look at ordinary believers, who are variantly involved in the faith and they are perhaps better informed than the early believers, but they also have blanks that need to be filled in. The blanks to be filled in today are different blanks. The church today is more fragmented, less communal, individualistic, more consumerist and the product of a particular culture of violence and libido (what Barth describes, in his Commentary on Romans, as the result of erasure of the Creator/creature distinction) - especially here in the US.
For early believers in Corinth: they were called to celebrate a feast of reconciliation, a feast of sharing abundance.

the passage of time

These two photographs are taken in approximately the same spot: Salem Rd in Newton County. When I was two we moved to this house and lived there until I was 12. The top photo was taken in 1964, note the old frame house across the road. We lived in a ranch house that I will post a photograph of later - but it looked like a typical red brick ranch house. That ranch house is still there, though painted white now, and the office of a used car lot for the last 20 years. The yard is paved, except for this oak tree I'm standing under as I take the bottom photo. 39 years ago I planted this oak tree from an acorn that I gathered from underneath an oak that grew in my grandparent's yard.
Just last year the cow pasture that had been across the road was sold and developed, all with astonishing speed. Now there's a Kroger. Three months ago I noticed a stop light, right where we used to live. And this time a road has been graded and paved.
This Thanksgiving Jami and I, on the way to see dad and granny Wise, stopped at the neighboring Shell station and I walked over into this yard, this parking lot, and stood in a spot that I hadn't stood in since I was 12, since this oak tree was a slender sapling verging into a mere ability to provide shade. I stood there and took a photograph approximate to the slide my dad took 40 some years ago. That yard was small. How did we fit here? How did it take so long to mow this lawn? How did I get lost in woods as small as a strip mall and a gas station?
More of my youth is erased. My great grandfather's farm, a quarter of a mile down the road, is now under a subdivision and day care center. This whole road, once an obscure country road with two stop signs along 8 miles south of I-20, where very few cars drove on any given day, is now crowded with traffic even at night, houses abound and stores - a McDonald's even across from my great grandfather's old home, and another McDonald's at the interstate.
Now I am resigned to change. When I was a young child my mother read me a story about a house in the country: in image after image a village and then a town and then a city grew around the house, until the house was surrounded by tall buildings. I was fascinated by this progression. I listened to this story over and over. I devised maps as I grew older where I imagined the growth of settlements into cities. I poured over diagrams of progress. Birth growth and deterioration and rebirth fascinated me. The little house in the story is eventually moved out into the country.
What did I feel while I stood on this piece of ground? Not a revelation. Not a recapitulation. A repetition? Maybe the sense that whatever was there for me is no longer there. I can never go back to some simpler time or some time before, some time where a deep mystery might be discerned in its inception. I'm a 47 year old man standing under an oak tree in a small patch of asphalt surrounded by used cars taking a photo of an intersection. Before I was here, even as a 12 year old, there was a dirt road, a dirt road that curved and twisted in different ways, that wasn't straight, and oddly fewer trees punctuating cotton fields. And even further back was there a road or even a path? Indians. Buffalo - Buffalo roamed throughout the eastern seaboard. Perhaps I can find the small road again - but not here.
Once Jami and I went to a small church way out in the country. It was spring and the scene was bucolic. The church was on a hill, overlooking granite escarpments scattered among pasture land. Picturesque. We thought, " how can we get here?" But even there, development was not far away - just over the hill and down the road.
Is it possible, like the small house in the story my mom read to me, to be returned to our beginnings, back into a place of nature's abundance and purity. Isn't this the human desire to return to the garden? If only we can find the way back to Eden, past the fiery sword brandishing angel, through the over grown gates, into a forgotten paradise? Revelation itself ends the human story not back in the garden but in a city. But any garden we might end in is not the original garden. That garden has been traced and erased many times. Like our memories the facts change and are transformed: we discover that the north facing window really faced east; the well house was wooden and not brick; the tree was pine and not ceder. Places we remember so clearly turn out to have never existed; things we don't remember, we did.
When I stand here, what am I remembering - even more so, what am I forgetting? My dad remembers that when I was 12 or younger, that I pestered him no end to go to a stunt car show at the Lakewood fairgrounds. I have no memory of this. Even having my memory jostled, I can not conjure a vague trace of a memory. I have absolutely forgotten something I desired with all my pre-adolescent heart.
The Bible is an artifact of things we've forgotten. We have here narratives recorded - but also narratives lost. The history of the Church is a history of remembering and forgetting - but remembering and forgetting imperfectly.
In the Scottish nudist camp, people are off kilter. I'm sure that pun's been made before. I thought about that this afternoon, as I sat in CPE, and I wrote it down, so I wouldn't forget it. I've thought of better puns, puns that I have failed to record, and now these gems of wordplay are lost to history.
The world is full of things forgotten. Great paintings are now lost. Vermeer painted more than 42 paintings. A van Eyck nude with mirrors, the pendant to the Arnolfini Marriage, was lost at sea. Rembrandt's only sea scape has been lost in a robbery in Boston. We have no way of knowing what the music of the Romans sounded like. Ancient writings are lost to us. What is Beowulf but the popular literature of its day - and what is lost to us from then: more stories of Grendel? different monsters, different heroes.
Under such an oak on such a bit of asphalt did once a child weld a plastic sword in a last ditch confederate stand against the Saxon invaders, saving Guinevere from the dragon, so that Lincoln might drink from the Grail and king Arthur might walk on the Moon. My parents stood in wonder at their sleep walking son under the moonlight. Why did we buy him that sword?

Figures

I went and saw my great uncle, Frank, at the Home. He's in the same place that my grandmother spent her last six months at, but he still has his senses. Sure, each time he sees me he calls me by my dad's name, Jerry. He says, Jerry, glad to see you. And I go along with it. His twins brother's name was Fred. Fred died in a mill accident, his arm was ripped off by a machine and he bled to death, four years before I was born. I'm named after him. So if I say that I'm Fred too early in our conversation uncle Frank will say, "you look well. I haven't seen you in years. " I'm afraid at those moments he might think I'm a ghost. So at the beginning of our time together I accept the fact that I'm Jerry. Even though I'm not.
Over the course of our conversation uncle Frank will piece it together and blurt out, "you're not Jerry you're Fred."
Instead I listen to my uncle talk about his life. He'll repeat the phrase, "life's a teacher" several times, and I can't help wondering what he's learned over 98 years. I consider that in 47 years I've learned that things work out. I can anxiously buy the best seller now or I can check it out at the library in a few weeks or buy it in the remainder bin for a dollar in a month. That all I was anxious about at 20 or 22 or 26 or 30 has had a way of working out and that if I'd been less impulsive I'd have saved myself some grief as well as some money.
Frank talks about being in the Masons. He talks about teaching Sunday school for 30 years. He talks about his wife and his brother and his mother (the Victoria I'd posted on previously here). He wants to know that I'm right with the Lord - though he's less prone to preach now. His faith seems more declarative now than imperative. More about what he believes than what I should believe.
I used to pester him for information about his father and grandfather. But I've not these last two times. Still he tells me that I remember things better than he does. As much as I want to turn over some long fallow piece of family lore, some secret that will unravel the mystery like a massive knot, I realize that such a thing is not worth it here. I have started to simply enjoy being in uncle Frank's presence. Here is a man who is 98 this November. He has lived a life. Now he is tucked under his blanket in his room on a day after Independence day and it's 93 degrees outside. Just a few years ago he would have been sitting on the front porch at this place: now he's in his room. He lives outside of time.
When I leave I don't play the radio in my car. I want to retain the feel of being with him and hearing him as far down the road as I can.

Two Views of CTS home

Above is a photo of how the seminary home in Lexington looked last Spring, and below is how it looked in the publication Colored Light, a book about the seminary's history published in the 1930s. Though the photo on the bottom is blurry, a product of my bad digital camera, you can make out architectural features and changes. The rear rooms are gone, as is the porch. And the chimney is different. It is the chimney, the fact that it is a central chimney that cinched this building and not some other as the building in the photo. Also there is a big placard on the building claiming that it is the seminary's home - but the building is in such delapidation that I found the placard beyond belief. It amazes me just how much a structure can endure before it collapses in a shambles. The soil underneath this building is 200 years old, as far as it being undisturbed soil. When this soil was covered over by flooring the Creek still dominated the area, or had only recently been removed. This is soil that last saw sunlight when Georgia was the frontier. If this building lasts another ten years in its current state I will be surprised.