taxi | CURIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A friend of mine (a cousin, actually, who is also my friend) has been traveling in New England. One of the lodgings he stayed in recently was a lovely old Maine countryside B&B attached to a pub. It was lovely to look at at least, he said, as it did not serve him a lovely New England breakfast. Amidst its otherwise quaint furnishings, it featured a rather uncomfortable bed. He described resting on that piece of furniture as being like sleeping on the floor of a taxi cab, an analogy that, however unlikely it may seem, certainly embodies well the level of discomfiture.

And that is the theme of today’s blog, not the floor of a taxi cab—which in my day was always stickier than it was hard, though with Uber that has all thankfully changed—but rather one’s bed. For one knows the dictum well enough to be able to finish it from the partial quotation in the title above: “Well, you’ve made your bed, and now you’ll have to sleep in it!” The meaning is, of course, not quite that of “karma,” which, I explained in a blog of a few weeks ago, is a Weltanschauung to which I am glad that I personally don’t share, as were it true, I imagine that I would myself constantly be on the receiving end of retribution of some kind. Rather, the maxim to which this title alludes is a doctrine of just consequences. It means, “Well, you’ve made a bad decision, and now you’ll just have to live with the result(s) of that decision.”

Now that’s as good as far as it goes, I suppose, as there’s some truth to it. If you get a tattoo on your hind quarters that says, “Mary and Bob,” inside of a heart with an arrow through it, but you wind up breaking up with Mary or you want to change your name to Robert (or Roberta, which nowadays has become increasingly more common), either you will wind up always keeping your pants on or you will have to have the tattoo removed, though even then it may still be somewhat visible to the naked eye. And that would be, in any case, a pain in the … .

But I leave the tattoo aside to get back to the expression about the bed, which, I think, the example of the tattoo amply demonstrates, can be true. I say “can be true” and not “is true,” because it is Good Friday today, and on the third day, Easter. And what do these two holidays (in the true etymological sense of that word) mean? They mean, “You’ve made your bed, now come sleep in this much more comfortable one where you can find real rest.” That’s a very strange variant on the dictum, isn’t it?

What do I mean by such a variation? I mean that these two holidays are a bit different than either of them is billed as (Good Friday is not “billed” at all, and Easter is billed as chocolate and bunnies and eggs, an incongruous enough combination, confusing even to children). They are in fact kind of opposites of each other. On Good Friday one man dies for all. On Easter Day, that same man rises. We love the optimism of the second part of the formula. We might even be tempted to say that’s what the formula is all about—optimism, symbolized in a story that isn’t physically or historically true but is psychologically true. But even if you were to accept such a superficial and facile explanation of Easter, which I do not, that still leaves Good Friday dangling.

Good Friday is all about the aforementioned bed. Unlike the tattoo that is hard to eradicate and usually but imperfectly and painfully removed, the bed in which you are supposed to sleep for your past mistake(s) can be removed—indeed was, a long time ago. It was removed in or about 33 A.D. when one man died for all, for he died as a ransom. He eradicated utterly and completely the blotches that were far more than merely blotches—they were deeply clinging cancerous tumors in our souls. He didn’t just shrink them by divine radiation or by setting an example of how to live in a better way. Rather, he took them all into his own body, and they killed him, as cancerous tumors are known to do. And when he died with them, they died with him.

So back to the bed that you’ve made. No, you don’t have to sleep in it. You might choose to, even though you know it’s quite uncomfortable and you won’t rest well in it—in fact you’ll quite possibly wake up more tired than when you went to bed in the first place. But you don’t have to sleep in it. With a dash of wisdom and a little courage, you can muster the strength to choose to sleep in quite a more comfortable bed in which you will find true rest, for it has been bought for you and given to you for free. For that is what grace and Good Friday, and Easter, too, are all about. Good Friday has paid for your new, comfortable bed. Easter gives you the courage to choose to sleep in it.

Happy Easter! Or, as the Greeks say, ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Oddly, I was in Italy again this week. I say oddly because, as chance would have it, I tagged along, once again, with my friend who attends those philological congresses. As a novelist and blogger, I am there just to listen and learn. I won’t bore you with the pedantic-sounding details of this particular congress, rich as it was in variant readings and passages in manuscripts that have been interpreted, reinterpreted, and often misinterpreted from antiquity to the present. “Does this Latin word end in –es or that word in –is or the same word in –os?” These are, quite literally, the kinds of things that are debated at such congresses, and add to this that there is much consternation over the new interpretation.

To make an example of what I just wrote: imagine that sentence was fragmentary and all that was left in a manuscript was something that vaguely looked like, “… over the new interpretation.” Now imagine that it was (of course) handwritten, and imagine, too, that I have, as I do, very illegible handwriting and, two thousand years from now, or even less, say a year from now, two people stumbled upon this fragmentary, seemingly hastily scribbled, sentence. One interpreter of it might say, well, “I think that it says, ‘aver the new interpretation.’ That sounds like something H.R. Jakes would write” (assuming it was even agreed upon that I had written it). Then that person might add, “He likes archaic-sounding language, and his use of ‘aver’ on this occasion fits the bill.”

Someone else might say, “No, no, this is obviously but a fragment of a much longer sentence. He probably wrote something like ‘there is much debate over the new interpretation.’”

Yet the first person might retort, “But he is a decisive writer, and I think he wrote, ‘I aver the new interpretation.’ That means he agrees with this interpretation.” And so the debate would rage, perhaps you are thinking “Yes, and quite pedantically,” yet someone else, a philologist perhaps, might find such deliberation stirring.

Yes, it was this very type of congress that I attended, and then I needed, of course, a ride to the airport, for flying out of southern Italy, particularly its mountainous regions, is not easy. The airports are near the sea, and thus if one is at all inland, as we were, one must get a ride to the coast—in my case, to the lovely zone (and airport) known as Lamzia Terme.

I had enjoyed dinner the night before with my friend and his primary contact at the university, a lovely and wise professoressa who enjoys the fortunate circumstance of studying poetry and rhetoric for a living. My friend had known of her for some time, as he had many years before reviewed one of her books and then connected with her at a conference, in France I think; I’m not sure, as he attends many of these international congresses. And so it went over dinner and drinks—a lovely conversation about the environment, philosophy, literature and, finally, even the quite serious topic of immigration and human displacement that is so sadly not just affecting the world in general but, especially, disquieting the lives of those displaced, disheartened, and often quite desperate individuals who have lost all—more often than not fleeing at the peril of their very lives. Each of us agreed as to the severity of the situation, the sadness of the lives of those involved, and the need for a fair and equitable solution.

The conversation turned from these serious, quite human but comparatively mundane topics to those of the spiritual realm. How strange, I thought, for among intellectuals the concept of a spiritual realm, let alone God, is but rarely discussed. If it is, it remains just that, a concept and an “it.” But this was an interesting conversation because the name Jesus Christ was mentioned more than in passing and not merely, as it usually is, as an expletive. Rather, the passage from the Bible that was discussed was that of Mary and Martha, and Jesus’ elicitation of Martha to be calm and listen, “To ‘be still and know that I am God,’” my philologist friend said, obviously quoting a Psalm.[1] The conversation then shifted to grace, a concept stressed, I think I might have pointed out, 500 years ago by Martin Luther, who reaffirmed the words of St. Paul, “For by grace are ye saved, through faith; and not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast.”[2] And thus went the conversation until I, undoubtedly clumsily and characteristically off-cue, brought up the comparatively entirely mundane subject of getting to the airport the next morning.

“Oh, don’t worry, there is a taxi,” said the professoressa. “It is all arranged. You can both ride together.” (Indeed, we were on the same flight at least as far as Rome.)

“Do we pay cash to the driver—I think I’m running low on Euros?” inquireth I, in an equally tactless manner.

“No, no, no …” she said. “It is all paid for already. Just get in and enjoy the ride.”

“Coincidentally,” my friend said, “That is precisely how grace works. No need to pay the bill—that’s already been paid at Calvary. One needs simply to,” and then he paused, as I could tell he was going to quote something, and I thought he was going to say, “be still and know that I am God,” for that would have made perfect sense at this climactic moment. But instead he said, “… glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

Of course I recognized the quote, as it is from the shorter Presbyterian catechism, a beautifully concise piece of sublime theology. We all had a good laugh, thinking of how a taxi ride could be a metaphor for grace. And, by the way, I did enjoy the ride to the airport, for Calabria is stunningly beautiful, and I am enjoying that other, more sublime ride, as not only in Italy, but perhaps here somehow more poignantly than anywhere else, la vita e’ bella. Enjoy the ride; it’s paid for.