I know that the title is grammatically unsound, but I figure after the last rather intense blog, it’s time for a lighter theme.  And what poet speaks to that better than Horace, who really knew how to write a party ode?  Indeed, when he penned the words nunc est bibendum, he had in mind a celebration.

Life is full of parties and celebrations.  There are some normal celebrations, like New Year’s Eve or one’s birthday—and I am pretty good at throwing a nice birthday party—and then there are those that are religious or at least quasi-religious, such as baptisms, confirmation days, weddings, and funerals.  And then there are the big celebrations—holidays, such as Christmas, Easter, and in the U.S. and Canada (though in different months), the quasi-religious Thanksgiving Day (the hint is in the name). 

Funerals? A celebration?  Well, yes, and I think I generally prefer funerals to weddings, especially if the person who has passed has lived to a ripe old age.  For it really is a celebration of life, a life, whose pages have turned like those in a book.  Of course, when I am at the funeral I don’t know the whole story. We get to hear only the greatest moments, the best chapters; rarely are the sour and sad pages talked about.  But the point is that that person lived, had a life, and their life had real significance.  Their life touched others and shared, with us all, in this fantastic, most amazing thing we call capital-L “Life.” 

Yet when I was watching a classic film the other evening, “Letter to Three Wives” starring Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern, Paul Douglas and a very dapper Kirk Douglas, among others, I saw that one of the couples, really two of them, had a less than ideal life.  The husband of that couple, played by Paul Douglas, is a wealthy businessman, only married his wife (Jeanne Crain) because it would be “a good deal.” Their relationship was essentially transactional, and that showed up very clearly in the film even though it was made in a time (1949) when saying as much might have been seen as somewhat subversive. 

But real love is not and should never be transactional, and at one point in the film Jeanne Crain’s character exclaims that very thing. If there is a give-to-get aspect to it—what the Romans called do ut des—it’s not real love, for real love is self-sacrificing. It cares about the whole person, both in the short term, when one person is enjoying the other, and chronologically, who the other person is on the inside, who they will be when they are old, ugly, and maybe even disabled.  The other kind might look like love at first blush, but it will prove in the end to have been a transaction. The film does a good job of pointing out how unromantic and unpalatable such a relationship is.

But back to parties. It seems like the parties and celebrations listed above are mostly “religious” affairs.  But religion is so dour, so prune-faced, isn’t it?  Yet, paradoxically, I suppose, for thousands of kids, maybe even millions of them, every year Christmas is the happiest of days.  And Easter and even Thanksgiving are celebrated by many folks with at least a modicum of joy; by some, who really grasp the meaning, with great joy.  And how many times have I seen people in church crying tears of joy at a wedding or expressing heartfelt sadness at a funeral, even for those who know they will see that person again on the far side of Jordan? 

You see, at least in its origins or somewhere along the way, Christianity in particular seems to have picked up on Jesus’ words that he came eating and drinking, and somewhere along that same way, someone noticed that his first miracle was the transformation of water into wine.  Some of my atheist and even agnostic friends won’t marry, don’t attend religious services of any kind, and avoid funerals because they offer, they say, a false hope of an “afterlife”, and they hate weddings.  They don’t celebrate Christmas—but of course not—nor Easter (even of-courser not), and they reluctantly sit down to Thanksgiving Dinner mostly because it has a “bad history.”  So they have deholidayized their lives.  But in doing so, it seems to me at least, they’ve also made their lives pretty boring.  Practically no parties, except those in a mad dash after pleasure, and virtually no real celebrations… bummer!

And what about mere Christianity? That’s where the party’s at.  And I didn’t make that up. Christianity is like a party, and you might be surprised to find that the homeless, the forgotten, the despised, and bullied will be the principal guests! To wit I offer my own translation of Luke 14:15ff.:

Jesus said to them: A certain man was preparing a large party and he invited many guests. When the time for the party arrived, he sent his servant to announce to those invited, “Come, because verything is prepared.”

But they all began at once to make excuses. One said, “I have recently bought a field, and I have to go to inspect it. Please excuse me.”

 Another said, “I just bought five oxen and I am about to test them. Please excuse me.”

Yet another said, “I just got married; I cannot come.”

The servant returned and told this to the master. Then the owner of the house was angered and enjoined his servant: “Quickly, go out into the streets and alleys of the town and summon the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”

“Sir,” the servant said, “I have done already what you ordered and there is still room.”

Then the master told his servant, “Go out to the lanes and country roads and compel those there to come, that my house may be full. Not one of those invited, I say to you, will enjoy my party.”

Those who actually come to the party that Jesus describes aren’t the smart set. These aren’t necessarily the physically attractive people either. They are the ones who have been used and abused, have felt inadequate and unloved.  Maybe they have spent their life feeling like outsiders. But when they heed the invitation, they are the ones who get to enjoy the real party.  Hope to see you there!

It is the first day of spring today, 20 March 2019, so it seems appropriate to speak about the dawn. It has been a long time now since the sun set on Aurora’s life.  She was a friend of mine from many years ago, a time before I believed there was a God at all or, what is more, that there could be the kind of God, who has compassion for and deeply loves his creation.  But in those days I saw only the surface.  I looked at the complicated cosmos as something clear, scientific, black and white.  I hadn’t any idea about the illusionistic nature of nature, something I discussed a few blogs back.  I saw suffering and concluded—in my former self’s defense, my reasoning wasn’t totally unfounded—that there cannot be a God who cares. If there were, he would be like the pagan gods, mercurial, taking some pleasure in or, at best, having no care whatsoever for human suffering. 

I have just finished a recently released book entitled, Circe, by Madeline Miller.  It is an excellent read on a number of fronts.  Miller takes the Greek myth and adapts it, telling the story of Eos’ niece, the nymph Circe, from Circe’s point of view. Donning the first-person narrative voice, Miller explains how that nymph wound up being stuck on Aeaea, what it was like living there, who visited and what happened, culminating with, as a second climax (the first was Circe’s encounter with Daedalus and her departure from Crete), the lengthy stay of Odysseus and his men’s metamorphosis into pigs. I won’t ruin the book for you by telling you the third climax, which seemed to me almost an afterthought, the only real weakness of the book which is in every other way compellingly written, with numerous turns of phrase worthy of a truly great writer.  Still, the end of the book takes a twist that is compelling if the alternative is merely the world of the pagan gods.  Within the milieu of such quixotic and random divine hatred, the conclusion makes perfect sense.

That said, however, one of the most impressive things about the book is its “theology”.  It really is pagan in the truest, purest sense of that word. One feels the arbitrariness of the gods affecting negatively the life of Circe, with whom the reader’s sympathies, naturally enough, lie.  Yet the gods are not Circe’s only enemy: she is her own enemy.  She allows many a sailor to take advantage of her sexually, not simply because she is bored—though that is certainly the case—but primarily because she suffers from/indulges in a stark lack of self-worth.  She really can’t love herself because she has suffered at the hands of men (her perverse uncles, her uncaring father, as well as her offensive brothers) and women (her overly critical mother, her nasty sisters).  Her appraisal of herself is that she is unworthy, and she only derives her self-value from lovers who don’t really love her, even though they might passionately say as much.  She knows it’s all a lie—but she lets them have their way with her anyway, not merely for pleasure but to create in her the fleeting illusion of self-worth.

For Circe, in the state she remains in the book, there is no real redemption.  Again, I won’t spoil the end by telling you her earthly solution. But in real life—though some might beg to differ with me on this—there is a far better solution.  It’s not earthly, it’s heavenly.  It involves not unbridled passions that lead to nothing—at one point Circe describes her allowing herself to be had by the numerous visitors to the island as being stabbed by a thousand blades—but the Passion of true Love that leads to heaven.  On Circe’s island, one is surrounded by held grudges, self-doubt and self-pity; the alternative I speak of, the alternative I presented to Aurora, is a life surrounded by forgiveness, new-found confidence and self-worth.

So what about Aurora, where this blog began? Aurora was, as I said, a friend from long ago.  When she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer she contacted me. She remembered that somewhere along the way I had changed from someone like the visitors to Circe’s isle to someone who prayed to a non-pagan God, and now she instinctively knew that she needed that kind of prayer.  I told her, of course, that I would pray hard for her, and I did, every day through her struggle.  Though she was baptized as a Catholic, she had not stepped foot in a church for years; if I recall correctly, her parents were more or less agnostics or atheists.  I asked her if she ever read the Scriptures. She said “no,” but she said that she would read the passages from the Psalms that I sent her from time to time; she found comfort in them. 

“But what about the New Testament?” I asked her by telephone at one point. “Would you read some of that if I sent it to you?’  “No,” she said, it wasn’t her world. She couldn’t fathom really getting that close to God, and at any rate, it was too late for her, she said.  She had lived a life a bit like Circe. The gods she had known, if they were really there at all, were the pagan gods, who afflicted people, like her, randomly. There was no purpose or plan behind most of their machinations.  In fact, she seemed to believe that the “gods” were just extensions of our emotions. The notion of a God like that of the Psalms was comforting, in a way, but in a way, kind of disconcerting or off-putting.  Where had He been all this time? For Aurora was in her early fifties when she was afflicted with cancer. 

I couldn’t answer all her questions, but I asked her again, if I sent her bits of the Gospel of John, for example, whether she might read them one at a time.  No, she said again, for she thought that she wouldn’t understand them. So I tried one last time—what if I were to translate them directly from the Greek for her personally, the “H.R. Jakes translation,” written in a way I guaranteed her to understand.  This gave her pause, and then she changed her “no” to a “yes.”

So, week by week, I got up very early on Sunday mornings to render the weekly installment of the translation for her and then before I went off to church I would send one chapter to her.  I prayed that these old words in my less than polished translation would encourage her in her dire straits , that she might find not only the faith and hope about which 1 Corinthian 13 speaks, but also, and especially, the love which it showcases, for I knew by chapter 11 of John’s gospel that same love was plainly manifest.  I didn’t know how short the time was: Aurora died shortly after I sent her the eleventh chapter of John.  When I learned of her passing I was, of course, broken hearted.  The sun had set on her life, and I felt myself as if shivering, standing on a wintery beach looking at a vast sea just after sunset, with the afterglow of the sun sinking fast into the waves.

A few days later, though, my hope surged like Lazarus leaving the tomb at Christ’s command, for I learned from a friend that Aurora had done something quite unexpected before she died. She had demanded that a priest be summoned to give her last rites, and indeed the priest went to her home and performed the ritual.  Do I believe there was any hocus pocus in that ritual? Etymologically speaking, yes, I think I do. In any case, I believe it affirmed that she had read and understood—had much more than understood; had believed—the Truth inscribed in the texts that I had sent her. She knew that in the midst of the storm there was God who truly loved her.  Aurora’s seemingly stuck inner Circe—you’ll recall that Homer’s character was Eos’ niece and Sun’s daughter—was rescued from her isle by the Son of a greater mythos, one bearing the authority to repair broken souls and defeat death.  For those conversant in Greco-Roman mythology, it will sound almost tautological to say that Aurora has risen, but I believe those last rites were really first rites to the dawn of a new life.

A couple blogs back we were talking about time—about chronological time vs. living in the moment, and then considering how that momentary time (in Greek, kairos) was redefined roughly 2000 years ago.  In that blog I said how people are like elephants, and we tend to remember a lot of things.  I have vivid memories not only of my adulthood but even of my childhood.  My wife says that’s because I’m a writer; but I say, I’m a writer because I tend to remember.

But this blog is not about remembering but about forgetting.  That may seem to be more than a paradox: it may seem to be hypocritical to say, on the one hand, we tend to remember but then on the other hand, to turn right around, and say that we need to forget.  Now let me say that what you’re about to read won’t be hypocritical.  Nothing bothers me more than hypocrisy, for if there is any way to define sin—and my non-Christian friends like to try to get me to do that because they love to find exceptions to the rule; it’s a kind of game, I imagine—hypocrisy is that way to define it.  Run your eyes over the Ten Commandments, for example, or do it from memory, if you happen to know them.  At any point if you violate any one of them, think about it, you’ll pretend, in certain circumstances, that you did not.  You might confess to a close friend that you stole that thing or lied about something to someone’s detriment (which is what bearing false witness is about), or coveted a friend’s lifestyle or car or garden, but if asked publicly about that, chances are you’d deny it.  Same with murder, which hopefully, you haven’t done, same with adultery, etc. So hypocrisy is definitely not what I’m getting at here. 

Nor am I writing in this blog about the healthy practice of intentionally forgetting other people’s sins against you. That’s an excellent practice and one that takes time to develop; it’s not easy.  It’s something like mastering a skillful billiards shot or a timely quip at a dinner party. No, that’s not what I’m getting at either.

What, then?  I am talking about imagining forgetting.  If I’m right, and we humans tend to remember a lot of things, from the hurts we’ve experienced, to joys to random moments in our lives, then what I am about to suggest is something we must imagine doing, for I want to lay out a scenario where we intentionally imagine forgetting.  Imagine if you could forget all the things people have told you about people.  We are told that we are creatures of our habits; we are told that the world is a certain way—fluid—and we need to adjust to that fluidity, go with the flow, not resist it, for it is unnatural to do that.  We are told this or that political system is best, that guns should carried by practically everyone; that they should be banned. That there should be a southern border wall; that there shouldn’t be one.  That kneeling for the national anthem is an act of patriotism; that it is not.  That bathrooms should not be binary; that they should. That there is no such thing as right and wrong; that the opposite is true, there is such a thing as right and wrong, even if sometimes it is not easy to see. 

And all that endless din of opinion wears us down.  It wears me down, at any rate.  But what if we could forget all that?  What if we could just tune out all the constant droning of the world’s background noise and just go away and think.  What if we could forget the professor in college who said there is no God and equally forget the evangelist who once knocked on our door with some “reading material” to tell us all about his particular version of God—sometimes trying to judge us to make himself feel more righteous, I imagine, rather than trying actually to invite us to church or the like.

But what if we could forget not our lives, per se, but “it”—all the things the world tells us to think, to eat, to wear to become self-fulfilled—and instead, what if we could go, in our mind, somewhere safe to reflect.  What would we find there?  How would we honestly evaluate not who we are but who we have become? 

I think for each person, there will be a different answer.  Let’s take one example: a long time ago, someone named Elijah did this very thing, and he did so when he was in a moment of great distress.  He went to a place called Beersheba and went into the wilderness and sat under a juniper tree and felt that he had had enough of this world—he was, in a sense, at his wits’ end.  He examined his life and felt that he, like everyone else, had lived a life that wasn’t as fulfilled as he might have wished, that was cluttered with the same sins as everyone else.  And he was probably right.  And when he was there, in that uncluttered and quiet moment, something amazing happened. He went into a cave and temporarily forgot all the problems he was having and received spiritual nourishment that would help him through a difficult time, when he needed it—which was over a month long, according to the story.  And he poured out his heart there to God—his deepest concerns, his deepest disappointments, his deepest fears.  And then came a big blast of wind; but no, God wasn’t in the wind; then the earth shook, but no, God wasn’t in that, either; and a fire, too, but no, not there either.  And then came a small, still voice.  And he poured out his fears again when he heard the voice.  And that’s where he found peace, or maybe Peace found him.[1]

Elijah left that cave with purpose, maybe for him for the first time in a long time.  He found a way to put off his burdens, to offload his cares, his sadness, his fears, his shortcomings.  In the modern age in which we live, perhaps it is hard to imagine forgetting long enough to hear that voice.  After all, who has time to go into a cave for several days?  Yet maybe we don’t need a cave.  Maybe we just need to take the time to be alone, to think, to review our lives with God, to imagine forgetting.  Imagine that: if we can only imagine forgetting we might be able to see clearly again or, perhaps, for the first time, the first real kairos.

[1] My summary here is based on 1 Kings 19.

Namque ignes inter, quorum in me lucet imago …

Dante, Paradiso 20.30

In the very first year of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud published an important treatise entitled in English, On the Interpretation of Dreams.[1] In it, Freud seeks to explain how dreams work, attempting to use psychology and analysis of emotions and memories to expound upon something that in other cultures and other times had been and still was, at the time of his writing that treatise, sometimes explained in religious terms. 

Now let me say straight off that I don’t think just any dream is a mandate from on high or any such thing. If someone suffering from diabetes dreams that he or she can live without insulin, that doesn’t mean that he or she should wake up in the morning and throw out that medicine.  That is one kind of dream, and it may be a wishful hope or even something that should under no circumstances be acted upon.  Not all dreams reflect a good outcome.

But is it possible that some dreams could suggest something?  One has to be very careful here, I know, for the soil upon which we walk in interpreting dreams is prone to shift rapidly.  Yet, even so, it could be, and has in the history of humanity been from time to time, the case that a dream can offer a premonition or even an admonition.  Take, for example, the account of the three wise men in the Bible. They were ordered by Herod to report back to him about the Christ child but, “warned in a dream” (Matthew 2:12) they stealthily departed for their own country.  In that same chapter, Joseph is warned in a dream by an angel to depart with Mary and the baby Jesus for Egypt.  And there are many other examples.  Daniel was given the ability to understand visions and dreams (Daniel 1:17), and the New Testament author, Luke, notes that such dreams are not to end in antiquity: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit” and “…your old men will dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).

That said, I would like to share with you a dream I had the other evening and leave the interpretation to you.  Maybe it was “nothing.” After all, as Freud once famously said about a cigar sometimes just being a cigar, so a dream may just be a dream.  The context is this: I have been sharing with a close friend a bit about what a life with God can look like—the joy, the blessing, the sense of forgiveness and restoration, and even the unfathomable emotional closeness of thelove of Christ—but I did not share everything.  I did not explain that when you go into a lion’s den—and metaphorically speaking you will from time to time, if you’re living the Christian life correctly—people will think you’re crazy, or when you say that everything good in you isn’t really from you but from God, they’ll think you’re nice but a bit crazy, or when you try to tell someone that God actually does answer prayer, you guessed it, they’ll think your nuts.  Why?  It has to do with going in a direction contrary to that of the world. 

Whether or not my particular dream has any meaning, then–well, you can decide.  I and the person about whom I spoke in the previous paragraph were in an airport.  She was waiting in line to board a plane and everyone was in that line, all walking slowly in the direction of the plane.  Suddenly and weirdly (of course weirdly, it’s a dream after all) I was standing next to her in line. Somehow, I knew that something bad, very bad, was about to happen.  (I admit freely that, with all the airplane issues lately, maybe what I had read in the newspaper about Boeing 737 Max 8 planes informed this part of the dream.)  I had been sent to warn her not to go with all the other people—not that the plane was going to crash, or anything like that, but rather not to do what everyone else told her to do. I was sent to call her back from the direction she was headed, the direction that all the world nowadays goes in. That’s the direction of self-fulfillment,  self-realization, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement, self-self-self.  It’s about me, my desires, my wants, my needs.  All those people were heading in that directing, waiting in that line in what seemed to be an airport. And there I stood, warning her that this is really a bad line.  I didn’t say a plane would crash or anything like that but I said, this is not the line you want to be in.  She thought about it for a while, and then suddenly we fled, running the opposite direction, right along the side of the line of people. 

Now here’s the weird part, and the part that surprised me when I woke up, because up to this point there’s nothing all that shocking in the dream.  The people in the line started jeering at her.  Many said despicable things about her—that she was stupid to give up her place in line, that she was an idiot. Some yelled out that she had done bad things, some yelled out that she would never get her place back in that line again. But, though she was by now in tears, she seemed to trust me about this not being the right line, it being a bad line indeed, and we ran outside into a field. When we looked back, it seemed that the building (for by now it was a building and not an airport any longer) was on fire.  And now she was sitting in the field and a giant Lion came from nowhere—at this point I was out of the picture, but I could see her clearly—and that noble beast passed right in front of her as she sat there crying.  She reached out both of her hands to the lion, who passed right in front of her, and touched him as he was passing. And when she touched him she was immediately transformed: she stopped crying and had peace. 

I don’t know how much one can read into a dream like this.  But I can say that the people in the line were not very nice to her when my friend decided to go in a totally different direction based on what seemed a chance encounter in the line.  And the Lion?  I don’t know, but He had a markedly noble quality, worthy of a character in a book of C.S. Lewis. Was it a good dream? Well, you can decide for yourself.  I couldn’t have made up such a dream, for it happened, at least to the extent that dreams happen. But I can say that my favorite biblical character is someone named Joseph, whose life story has in many ways been replicated in my own many times over. So maybe, just maybe, this dream of going in a direction completely opposite to what is expected, what the world tells you is “healthy” (but really is not) will prove to be a good one in the end and for my friend, like the dream of Joseph, will turn out to be true.  Time will tell. In the meantime, a mere caveat lector will suffice: be careful if you reach out to touch a Lion, for He might just leave you changed.

[1] Available on-line in toto at: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf