Fire on the Lips

I write to my beloved wherever he may be and whomever.  Is He the mist around the moon?  Is He the bright red cardinal who feeds close to the ground on a dayfull of windy snow?  Is He the reflection of sky on snow—blue with rose patches?  He is faceless, and yet I feel him everywhere.  Isaiah had a vision.  One seraphim cried to another, “Holy,holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole world is full of his glory.”  Woe is me.  How can I feel lonely when He is all around?  As the wind, he kisses my cheek.  As the candle flame, he dances before me.  As the Word, he called me early this morning when I read, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come! 

For see the winter is past,

the rains are over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth,

the time of pruning the vines has come,

and the song of the dove is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.

Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,

and come!

All week my mind has been full of examples of women to whom God appeared.  The mental obsession began on Sunday when our priest, Father Dan, stressed in his sermon the importance of creating a real relationship with God as the only thing that can bring us joy.  To describe this joy for those of us who don’t have much experience with it, he reminded us of the Samaritan woman at the well in the heat of midday.  In scripture, you meet your spouse at the well; and Jesus comes to her there and, in exchange for a cup of water, promises to be her living water.  This woman’s life was a mess.  She was on her fifth husband and was an outcast in the eyes of the townspeople.  But after encountering Jesus, who seemed to know everything about her and still wanted to talk with and take refreshment from her, she ran and told everyone about him:  “could this be the Messiah?”  She knew it was.  She felt loved and, in return, could not withhold her joy.  As we near the end of Advent, we begin to hear the story of God’s coming in the flesh.  Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary, “Hail, full of grace!  The Lord is with you.”  Was Mary as lonely as I am?  I wonder.  Painters often depict her reading, and medieval texts describe her as something of a scholar.  She sits alone with her book … until the angel interrupts her meditation and tells her that she will bear a son and he will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father …”.  Mary is understandably incredulous, “How can this be since I have no relations with a man?”  “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” she is told, “And the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”  An angel appears, with at least one set of wings, and he speaks of the divine overshadowing the creature.  This scene would have overtones of Jacob’s wrestling with the God (who is often depicted in angelic form), if Mary struggled just a bit, argued just a bit.  But she doesn’t, she simply says “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”  Perfect humility.  Perfect trust.  Perfect.  No struggle.  That is why Mary has always been way out of reach for me, despite the fact that I am named for the holy family … my two names resting side by side as Mary went along with Joseph to Bethlehem to register for Caesar Augustus’ census, although women were not required register.  She didn’t have to go, but perhaps she wanted to be with Joseph.  And by going, she affected the way God is with us in this world.

Back to Isaiah.  Now Isaiah is someone I can identify with because he struggles.  Taking a break from grading midday, I opened Isaiah’s Book to the sixth chapter.  I silently experienced his vision of the seraphim (with three pairs of wings), and then I began to read aloud.  There was no one in the room but my black cat stretched luxuriously on the green blanketed bed, gazing through the window at birds.  “Woe is me:  for I am undone, because I am a man of polluted lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of polluted lips: for mine eyes have seen the King and Lord of hosts.”  Then, one of the Serarphim, carrying a hot coal from the altar—with tongs!—touches the lips of the prophet Isaiah and tells him that “thine iniquity shall be taken away, and thy sin shall be purged.”  As I read this, I began to cry.  The biblical moment touched my life:  I have always had difficulty speaking.  My diffidence doesn’t come from a lack of passion or a missing motive for eloquence.  Rather, it comes from an age old worry about how my words will be received compounded by guilt that I have so much to say when other people may not.  I grew up whispering words before I would say them, feeling the need to practice.  Too often, I swallowed my own sound before it was out.  When I told a priest this summer that I was afraid to pray because I was such a sinner, he simply said, “that doesn’t come from God.”  Neither do my feelings of inadequacy around speaking.  Language is God's special gift and a big part of our dignity as human beings.  Isaiah calls it "pollution" and I am calling it "human inadequacy"—the sense of being a sinner talking to sinners or an ordinary woman writing to other ordinaries, who could care less.  Whatever we call it, it must be overcome.  When the hot coal touches the prophet’s lips, he is kissed by God who is always in the Hebrew Bible on fire.  It is pure encouragement.  Pass it on.

When I made a connection to this ancient prophet, something softened.  I was less lonely.  My mouth became tender as if it actually had been burned.  My mind drifted to Christmas Eves of long ago … when my father was still alive.  There were a lot of us in a very small house, and everyone was excited.  Mom would feed us quickly after the Christmas Eve Mass.  What did we eat?  Something simple … grilled cheese and tomato soup.  We didn’t need a lot because there would be sweets of all kinds with our friends from the neighborhood after we walked up and down the street, ringing doorbells and singing songs.  We’d sing two carols at every house.  Everyone would disagree about which song would be next.  It was joyful.  Really joyful to stand before smiling faces and sing “We Three Kings,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Away in a Manger.”  Now no one hears these songs anymore except in church or in the muzak piped into Rite Aids beginning after Thanksgiving.  These songs are not shared face to face with neighbors.  And there was my father—one of only a few adults—singing his heart out.  His favorite carol, “The First Noel.”  Whenever I hear it now, I cry.  “The first Noel, the angel did say, was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay.  In fields where they, lay keeping their sheep, on a cold winter’s night that was so deep.”  This night and the two nights left of Advent, including Christmas Eve, are going to be deep.  I plan to wait with the doors of my heart wide open to let the warm love in.  

I went downstairs to get ready to take the dog out.  I sat down to unlace my heavy boots.  Boy, my hands have gotten rough.  Whose hands are these?  I recognized the thumbs as mine--shredded by nervous picking.  But for a split second, I saw my father’s hands—chapped, cracked, rough, picked.  My father’s name was Joseph.  He never missed Christmas Eve caroling.  And his coming with us—always—affected forever the way I experience God with me in the world.

The angel:
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.

I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,

Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

The Face of the Poor in Shakespeare

I was headed toward Miller Road to shop with my daughter.  It was the day after Black Friday, and something unsettling happened.  We were stopped at a light, and a man wearing a brown cardboard sign made eye contact and began gesturing in an aggressive way to his face or his head.  The sign said something about not wanting to get wet.  It had rained for two days straight.  “Don’t look, Mom.”  I caught Katya’s eye, and she was scared.  I wanted to look at the angry beggar’s face and the disapproving face of the black woman sitting on the bus-stop bench.  “Mom, go, the light is green.”  The faces were unsettling.

“Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel … Take and swallow it.  It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.”  John in Revelations eats the scroll, which is sweet in his mouth and sour in his stomach.  “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”  I heard this passage read at a Friday mass on November 18, and Father James emphasized that the holy is supposed to unsettle.  It is so much bigger than we are.  “Why does the God of the universe allow us to be with him in such an intimate way as communion offers?  We take him into our bodies.  I don’t know, but it should push us to go out and … blank … it’s a blank.”  I forgot what Father said we should do when we are unsettled by contact with the Holy.  At that same Mass, in the gospel, Jesus was angry at the merchants selling in the temple precinct.  He overturned their tables and drove them out.  Whatever we are supposed to do, I am certain that being nice, being silent, doing nothing is not what ought to be filled in that blank.  “Prophesy!”

I have been teaching Shakespeare’s second cycle of history plays this semester (called The Henriad).  I purposefully did this during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, because the four plays that chart the rise of the Lancastrian dynasty after the deposition of Richard II, the last king thought to reign by divine right, is a study in the emergence of the political as a sphere of activity that human beings control.  Does Shakespeare offer any hope for our politics?  That was the overarching question that I hoped would stir up comparisons between the history plays and our own election.  For myself, I think Shakespeare offers real hope although it’s a kind of longshot hope, dependent on the smarts and compassion of his original audiences and readers capable of original response.  The plays teach that society desperately needs good rulers.  What makes a leader good?  He must be something of a rogue or renegade, as Prince Hal is, who leaves the court behind to drink with tinkers, learn about their struggles and hopes, and learn from core values like fellowship.  Kings—and U.S. presidents—need prophets to keep them honest.  In the Bible—the books that detail the emergence of kings in Israel (I & 2 Samuel)—prophecy is born with monarchy.  Prophets (Samuel for Saul and Nathan for David) exist to remind kings that they are men and that they exists to serve the people … not, as David did, to take Bathsheba for adulterous sex and then send her husband to the front lines to be killed.  When he did that, Nathan came to court:  “There was a rich man and a poor man.  When a traveler came to the city, instead of culling an animal from his own herds, the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe, which was like a personal pet to him.  You are that man.” 

Shakespeare in The Henriad turns the fat knight Falstaff, a man addicted to a sweet wine called sack, into the prophet who attempts to educate Hal.  He teaches him how to be himself rather than a fake, how to think and speak freely, how to be humble, how to laugh at himself, and, above all, how to see more in the poor.  In his very first scene, he is essentially asking Hal:  who are we to you?  A bunch of thieves and good for nothings, men destined for the hangman?  “Let us not that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty.  Let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon under whose countenance we steal.”  Falstaff is admitting that they steal and often get away with it (incidentally, Diana was one of the mythological identitites Queen Elizabeth claimed), but he is also challenging Hal to see more and better … perhaps to see “feelingly” which is an adjective made up by a character who is blinded and has an epiphany.  But that is another play.  It’s questionable whether Prince Hal ever learns to drink deep of prophet Falstaff’s imaginative generosity.  Falstaff is fat.  The prince is thin.  Falstaff countenances the poor with undeserved praise while the Prince reduces them to something like their income bracket.  What is a man worth?  Trump and Clinton both referred to the poor in the most cynical ways during the campaign.  Trump said that he “loved the poorly educated,” who Clinton called “a basket of deplorables.”  We need Falstaff or someone like Falstaff (perhaps Pope Francis or Father James Mangan) to challenge us.

 Falstaff is really too big a subject for a brief blog entry.  Brilliant satirist, jovial clown, inspired prophet: he is an “in your face” kind of character.  But it is a different face I wanted to look into.  Bardolph is one of Falstaff’s sidekicks.  He has none of the cleverness, charisma, or credentials of his leader.  Moreover, his face is really messed up:  like one of those ugly faces that is so compelling you cannot help but look:  “His face is all bubuckles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’fire, and his lips blows at his nose, and it is like a coal of fire, sometimes blue and sometimes red.”  It is this face that trails through The Henriad like a comet, calling us to look and to say what we see in it.  Fluellen, the man who gives the above description, is a Welsh military commander who values men for their discipline, open valor, and knowledge of classical warfare.  His merciless and literal description of our test face, befits a man who has no compassion for the condemned.  Bardolph is “arrested” for stealing a pax from a church, and when his friend, Pistol, tries to speak to Fluellen on his behalf, the Welshman says, “Were he my brother, I would wish the sentence be done on him.”  And so another crucifixion happens without any kind of devotion. 

Bardolph is executed in Act 3 of Henry V, but his red face is the butt of many jokes in the earlier plays, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.  Interestingly, it is the man, himself—perhaps to combat shame—who first calls attention to his ugly face when alone with the Prince.  This is after Falstaff, along with Bardolph and a few others, have robbed some pilgrims.  The Prince had agreed to be part of the jest (stealing the rich to give to the poor), but he chickened out, let Falstaff do the dirty work, and, in disguise, robbed him.  This is the set-up to what is supposed to be a hilarious practical joke:  hearing the wild lies Falstaff will tell about how many men he fought off.  Long story short:  when Falstaff’s magnificent story, peppered with disgust at the Prince’s failure to back his friends, is confronted with Hal’s paltry truth, Falstaff says he knew the prince all along and ran away because he was a valiant lion who acted on instinct.  When Falstaff goes to answer a nobleman come from the court to find the prince, Hal tries to get the dirt on Falstaff from Bardolph, who says that he “blush’d to hear his monstrous devices [lies].”  The prince isn’t having it:  “O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen years ago, and were taken with the manner, and ever since thou hast blush’d extempore.”  The prince (in his usual mean-spirited way) is mocking not only Bardolph’s face (red from drinking) but his class position.  Bardolph, instead of deflecting the shame, addresses it.  We even get an unusual stage direction from Shakespeare:  “pointing to his face” he says, “My lord, do you see these meteors? Do you behold these exhalations?  What think you they portend?”  The language Bardolph employs to describe his own skin condition is astronomical:  meteors, exhalations, portend or presage.  His diction dignifies his face.  It means something.  To him, it portends “choler” or anger.  We might pause to wonder what Bardolph is choleric or angry about.  He seems so mild-mannered and quiet, compared to Falstaff.  But our thoughts are taken up short by the prince’s shocking inhumaneness.  He says what he thinks that Bardolph’s face bodes “Hot livers and cold purses” which translates into him saying that Bardolph looks like the poor alcoholic he is.  Wow!  And Prince Hal is just getting started. His closing remark is that Bardolph’s face predicts “Halter”:  translation:  he will be hanged, probably for stealing.  Spoiler alert:  he is.  Is this mean comment something like a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Shakespeare seems to be saying that once the powers that be have written off a human being or a whole class of human beings, there is no hope for men like Bardolph.  Don’t be fooled America:  Donald Trump will not countenance your ugly asses:  no cigarettes, botox, fake boobs, and expensive clothes are the rule … only pretty people will be allowed in his court.

Shakespeare is subtle.  He never hits you over the head with anything but is deeply respectful of his auditors’ intelligence.  He plants the seeds, drops the hints, comments on faces, but finally leaves the auditor to water the seeds and bring in the harvest.  To me, he is pointedly contrasting Hal’s reduction of Bardolph to Falstaff’s countenancing of his friend.  The bar where they all hang out is quiet after the long night of post-robbery partying.  A noblemen from the court sent word that Hal was to return to talk to his father, the king, in the morning.  The Percies (a northern power family) were gathering an army to challenge Henry, and the Prince needs to man-up.  Falstaff had him practice how he would answer his father, an intention that led to the uproarious playacting of the king by Falstaff, who is deposed by a nasty Hal who predicts he will banish his tutor, judging him to be a “white bearded Satan” and a “villainous misleader of youth.”  The early morning tavern scene is anything but upbeat.  Probably hungover, they are all full of regrets and are bickering amongst themselves.  Falstaff is trying to make them laugh (I think), talking about how out of shape he is physically and morally, and telling them that he intends to repent because he hasn’t yet forgotten what the inside of a church looks like.  Bardolph flat out calls him fat, and Falstaff is back at him with a face joke.  “Why my face does you no harm, Sir John,” and Falstaff launches into all the uses (literal and spiritual) there are for Bardolph’s face.  I will print the whole face poem.  Yes, I think of it as a poem because of the stunning parade of light imagery.  To me this poem makes Bardolph some kind of angel of light—almost a muse.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that liv’d in purple; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning.  If thou wert any way given to virtue, I would swear by thy face; my oath should be “By this fire, that’s God’s angel.”  But thou art altogether given over, and wert indeed, but for the light in thy face, the son of utter darkness.  When thou ran’st up Gadshill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire, there’s no purchase in money.  O, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire light!  Thou hast sav’d me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern; but the sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandlers in  Europe.  I have maintain’d that salamander of your with fire any time this two and thirty years, God reward me for it!

Who wouldn’t want to possess the fire of inspiration or be called an everlasting bonfire light?  There is a parable in Bardolph’s face.  Jesus told the disciples about the rich man, Dives, who refused a beggar, Lazarus, table scraps.  Although he suffered in this earthly world, after he died, Lazarus went to the bosom of Abraham, and from that comfortable vantage point, he watches Dives burning in hell.  Dives begs God to send Lazarus with a drop of water to refresh him, and God refuses, citing the great gap that separates the saved from the damned, as wide a gulf as the one that separates rich from poor in Shakespeare’s time and in ours.  Bardolph reminds Falstaff of the promise God made to the poor.  I am not sure Bardolph takes this love poem for the great compliment it clearly is:  “S’blood, I would my face were in your belly.”  He keeps up the bickering banter as is the way with friends.  But I believe he is touched.  After “the king … kill[s] his heart” by banishing him, Falstaff dies offstage in Henry V, and it is Bardolph who is ready to follow, “Would I were with him whereso’er he is, either in heaven or in hell.”  His comment provokes the tavern hostess’ lovely eulogy that begins, “he’s not in hell, he’s in Arthur’s bosom if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.”  Some editors suggest that she means to say Abraham’s bosom (perhaps hanging out with Lazarus), but I think we hear and imagine Falstaff comforted by both holy men—Abraham and the mythical Arthur, King of the Round Table.

Falstaff countenanced Bardolph.  Shakespeare plays with this verb punningly in a number of plays.  In Taming of the Shrew, one servant tells another that he must “countenance” the new mistress.  Why, asks the other?  She has a face of her own, doesn’t she?  But what if our faces are not our own?  What if it is more true to say that my face is a boundary, a threshold, the place where I appear as the monarch appears on the balcony of the palace?  Perhaps I never come out if the world is too cruel or too judgmental.  In its verb form, countenance means “to look upon with sanction or favor; to favor, patronize, sanction, encourage, back up, bear out.”  Perhaps we never see the Other unless we coax the subject to appear, unless we call it out from behind bars.  The young page, whom Prince Hal gives Falstaff to harass him, when joking about Bardolph’s face to prove his wit, lands upon a similar idea:  “’A calls me e’en now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could discern no part of his face from the window.  At least I spied his eyes, and methought he had made two holes in the ale-wive’s petticoat and so peep’d through.”  Poor Bardolph trapped within a face that everyone mocks and only Falstaff holds the key to opening the door.  Maybe Bardolph stole the pax of little price because he needed a reminder that his suffering was worth something more; and, ironically, it was the objectified tableau of the crucifixion (of little price but great value to Bardolph) that finally did put a halter (not a halo) around that face..

Shakespeare teaches us that no man is a self-sufficient island.  Our faces are group projects.  When it comes to other people, we have two choices:  countenance or deface.  It is clear that Falstaff’s way is the way of ethics and the Prince’s way is the way of power.  The Prince breaks his bonds with his friends, and, like King David, he must find a way to redeem himself by repenting these broken covenant bonds.  Shakespeare leaves it up to the audience to determine whether Hal, when he becomes Henry V, repents sufficiently.  But, he plants a double of the king in a very minor servant character in the subplot of Henry IV Part 2.  The servant’s name is “Davy,” and the name is used excessively 21 times in a short scene:  Davy, Davy, Davy.  Shakespeare doesn’t want us to miss the biblical echo of David who served King Saul, fought a giant, played his harp, sang to the lord, prophesied, and later repented.  Shakespeare’s Davy is the dutiful servant of Justice Shallow, whose farm Falstaff visits on the way to the wars.  He knows the ins and outs of the house and farm business, and is a very busy character but not too busy to “beseech” Shallow to “countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkins a’ th’ Hill.”  But there are many complaints against William Visor, protests the Justice.

            I grant your worship that he is a knave, sir, but yet God forbid, sir, but a knave should have some countenance at his friend’s request.  An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not.  I have serv’d your worship truly, sir, this eight years; and I cannot once or twice in a quarter bear out a knave against an honest man, I have little credit with your worship.  The knave is mine honest friend, sir, therefore I beseech you to let him be countenanc’d.

We must speak for the fools and the knaves—for those who cannot speak for themselves because they are guilty of dust and sin or because they are ugly and mocked.  Shakespeare, through characters like Falstaff and Davy, speaks for the essential value of a life against a culture that was coming to invent all kinds of new ways of measuring the value of men:  labor power, looks, wealth, education.  There are two scenes in the Henry plays that involve muster rolls.  Muster rolls are quintessential Elizabethan texts:  they began to proliferate in the 1580s and 1590s as the Privy Council increasingly sent orders to local officials to assemble men and determine their fitness for war.  Falstaff’s language of extravagance stands opposed to an emergent discourse of husbandry and sensible expenditure of men.  Give me life is his motto when he runs around the battlefield trying to keep the shot out of his bowels, but he sees and values it in others and, more importantly, calls it out of them.  This, then, is his special form of prophecy.  Life—sacred life—imprisoned in a body that is dead to the eyes of the authorities but, for the master, is something too sacred and too scary not to unsettle and not to inspire.  “You must prophesy again!”  

My Symposium

            “Has anyone pointed out that this work is misogynistic?  It reads like a bunch of rich white guys at a spa justifying their attraction to young boys and their illicit sexual encounters.”  We were on our second day discussing Plato’s Symposium—a dialogue on the nature of love; and the best, most challenging speeches lay all before us.  Doug had missed the discussion on Monday and was crashing the party with his provocative remarks rather like the drunken Alcibiades does when he comes in at the end of Socrates’ speech to call him a liar.  Doug is a very smart, sixty-something gay man—teacher, lawyer, social worker, who has lived in New Zealand for much of his life.  He is auditing my class.  I respect him and even though I disagree with his sweeping dismissal of a work I love, a work that must be opened carefully to reveal its beauties, his comment touched my own secret trouble.

            Monday had been a struggle.  I couldn’t manufacture my usual enthusiasm for the work, and I plodded through the early speeches dragging the class with me, like a reluctant puppy.  Back in the safety of my office, I said to myself out loud, “oh, I miss S----.”  I had the strongest urge to call his number, to be Ruth again.  I yearned for the kinds of conversations that had felt so real.  I had unsettled dreams of him all that night, and the following day, on and off, I sucked on an unlit cigarette.  Yearning.  The sunny day rained yellow leaves.  The car thermometer read 72.  I walked in my favorite park, thinking obsessively about The Symposium.  I have to figure it out.  I have to take it back.  In my mind, the dialogue was inextricably related to my relationship with S-----, idealized by us both in Platonic and Miltonic terms as a “meet and happy conversation.”  Were those talks true or had I put aside my yearning for truth and the beautiful to function, not as an equal partner, but as his eromenos?  The eromenos is the beloved of Greek homosexual custom—a beautiful creature without needs of his own who exists to service the male lover.  Was I that flaccid-dicked being (a sex slave) or was I Socrates, who, in trying to teach, succumbed to seduction?  I understood that teaching this work was going to traumatize me all over again.  But obviously, I had questions that still needed answers.

            S----- introduced me to the work when he compared me to Socrates—ugly on the outside but when opened up … full of golden images.  He told me that the most beautiful young man in all of Athens was smitten with Socrates and even slept by his side all night, wrapping him up in his coat.  He told me these things, and I knew at once that he fancied himself the beautiful youth, who, for some reason, loved me—a nothing!—and I couldn’t help wanting him to wrap me up in his jacket.  Little did I know if would be a straightjacket!  Even before I had read the dialogue, I was at his mercy.  Driving fast on I-69 from his office, I stopped at Barnes and Noble, bought a copy of the dialogue and read it over the next few days.  S----- had hinted that it contained the secret of his feelings for me, so I read it initially to discover the key.  But there was so much more:  the music of Socrates’ arguments worked like a Siren song and I was reduced, like all the shipwrecked sailors, to white bones on a beach.  Can these bones live?  

            For those of you who do not know the story, I’ll set it up for you.  An elite group of men (dramatists, politicians, philosophers) meet and instead of drinking (because they are all hung over from the night before), they propose to take turns giving speeches in praise of the god, Eros.  There are three main speeches.  Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, tells a myth about early humans—spherical creatures—split in half by the gods, who are driven to search for their other half.  It’s the romantic idea of finding a soulmate, summed up in the pithy formulation that “love is the pursuit of wholeness.”  Socrates’ speech is an account of a series of conversations he had with a priestess who initiated him into the mysteries of love as creative practice:  begetting literal and metaphorical “children,” birthed through the back and forth synergy that occurs between participants in a dialogue.  Finally, Alcibiades (the up and coming general and politician)  arrives plastered, wearing crowns of violets.  He praises Socrates in a sequence of revelatory images and his drunken ramblings are construed as a love poem by big name philosophers like Martha Nussbaum.

            From the beginning, I loved Socrates for his submission to a female teacher, a priestess Diotima.  One of my students suggested that Diotima is his anima, a figure for an internal alterity with whom he converses.  She may be that, but she is also a figure for each and everyone of Socrates’ interlocutors.  Once having seen the Beautiful, we know how to look out for it everywhere.  What I especially loved and still love about his account of their tutoring sessions is the yearning for understanding (that’s why I keep coming to you, Diotima, because I want to understand), its reaching for a connection, its stress on being in an in-between state—between man and the gods, between ignorance and understanding, between self and Other who knows other things and knows them differently than I do.  Despite S-----’s objections to this speech on love, derived (as all of his opinions were) from other philosophers, I could not read it as an escape from the physical particulars, even though Diotima plainly says that we begin with physical beauty but that real love learns to see and value so much more.  Nor did Diotima’s speech seem overly schematic, despite its clear delineation of a process of loving likened to climbing a ladder rung by rung.  I read her explanations as highly metaphoric—a poem about the creative process:  we are all pregnant, we all long to be delivered, and epiphanies, like psychic orgasms, spread waves of joy that enable us to see our lives and the people in them for the beautiful beings that they are.  We see them because we have been seen by an Other with whom we have conceived and born an idea.  “Yes, but your golden hair.  Your beautiful letters.  Your musical soul.  Ruth, you are not like anyone else.”

            I tried to escape by going to the other side of the world.  Semey in northeast Kazakhstan.  Minus 30 every frosty winter’s day.  I taught all my classes around a space-heater.  In the tiny classroom where we met there was a set of English books—Everyman classics that included a volume of Plato.  No—I will not allow myself to read Plato here.  I am in Kazakhstan, and I must learn to look at this world.  I was rigid in my self-discipline, but still he followed me on all my morning walks along the frozen Irtysh with my fists balled up inside my gloves thrust deep into my pockets.  As the sun of March began to warm things ever so slightly, I promised myself that I would document the process of doing Romeo and Juliet with the students here.  I would not think about S.  But then a letter arrived that contained a Plato reference (to Aristophanes’ speech):    I read the letter over and over sitting in the courtyard of the Star Café.  I melted. 

            Yet for me it was always about the dialogue.  I hated going to S’s office, but I loved talking on the phone.  I felt like I was pregnant all the time and was begetting in the beautiful:  discourses about Plato, exegetical missives about Biblical subjects, a book manuscript about Shakespeare’s use of allusions to the Hebrew Bible.  I was blooming, producing abundant fruit.  How could the tree be a bad tree?  I kept trying to tell S that love had to move (Plato says the soul is in constant motion), it had to go somewhere.  Sometimes, he would throw me a bone to let me know he was listening:  “we are on a path,” but I knew it was a dead end because he would never leave his office.  But while I was striving to be a living proof that Socrates and Diotima were right about love—that eros is a begetting in the beautiful—I failed to notice that my beautiful interlocutor was the creation of my own overactive imagination.  In truth, S was ugly in the Homeric and Platonic sense.  I was the one who was thinking, talking, working, writing, loving, he was undressing me, pulling me apart, sticking his protrusions into every opening, and trying to convince me that this was wholeness.  I thought I was okay because I continued to produce, but I should have remembered what Socrates said while Alcibiades was putting the moves on him:  if you think you can trade bronze for the gold of true beauty, you are mistaken, Sir.

            In preparation to teach it, I worked on the dialogue alone.  I was very lonely, but I lived through the loneliness.  I understood that I had always been right about the beauty and value of Socrates’ talks with Diotima.  It occurred to me that what Plato does is appropriate the bonds of host-guest amity that were vital to Homeric culture.  Socrates needs Diotima just as Odysseus needs Athena.  Telemachus struck me as a case in point.  He was an infant when Odysseus went to war and is about twenty years old when the poem opens.  With no memory of his father and a house full of rapacious suitors constantly roasting meet, drinking wine, threatening his mother, Telemachus is depressed and stuck.  That is, until Athena appears to him in the guise of father-figures (Mentes and Mentor); and after only one conversation, he feels his soul begin to move, to sprout wings, and he is suddenly in between childhood and manhood.  As he faces men in their violence, at their ugliest, he defines maturity:  “now I am grown big and by listening and speaking to others can gain wisdom.”  In the face of a good and kind divinity, Telemachus gives birth to a new version of himself.  It had been impossible for him to beget that mature self in ugliness.  Appetite is ugly.  Eating up others’ resources and giving nothing in return is ugly.  S----- is now, in my eyes, the epitome of ugliness and I wonder what god was present that enabled me to produce all that fruit.   

            In addition to affirming my initial reading, I made progress coming to terms with Alcibiades.  I had been deluded by Nussbaum’s reading of Alicibades as a true lover of Socrates and a poet who gropes for images and associations to communicate the inside feel of the love experience.  S----- preached the necessity of being vulnerable and dependent on others; and he, following Nussbaum, dismissed Socratic independence as a detachment from the what makes life beautiful—the ways we can be wrecked and ruined by one another.  When I looked closely at Alicibiades again, I discovered that he is, indeed, in love.  His tears flow at Socrates’ words.  His soul is disturbed, “struck and bitten by arguments in philosophy that hold more fiercely than a serpent.”  He is ashamed before his beloved, but this shame comes from a very specific cause:  he doesn’t want to change, he doesn’t want to move or grow.  “He compels me to agree that though I am myself much in need, I neglect myself and attend to the affairs of Athens.”  Doesn’t love demand that we change?  Doesn’t it call out to our best selves to dedicated work and a journey into a far country?  Of course, it does.  But Aliciabiades doesn’t want to commit, and neither did S.  Both ran away.  Both attempted to use seduction to appropriate beauty in the most dishonest ways possible.  The Symposium (and Alcibiades) tells the truth about seduction:  it is about power, and it is an evasion of true beauty which can only emerge when a space is made and sustained between two cherubim who watch and wait, talk for hours, wrestle and struggle, and wait still longer for the visit of the divinity who will surely come.  It is ugly to play God.

            In the end, it was the class that helped me reclaim The Symposium for myself.  Doug’s comment, working like a lightning bolt that lights up heaven and earth, made me see in a flash the clear line between the philosophers and my abusive therapist.  I was jolted back to S’s room with leather chairs, the footstool piled high with books and papers, the couch where he played with me, the statue of a philosopher and the framed poster of Shakespeare—two posters, actually.  I felt myself drifting far away from my classroom.  Focus.  Quick.  I looked intently at faces—other faces speaking truths that I recognized.  Yes!  They think like I do!  Lauren offered her speech:  “I am more in love than I was when I married Mike seventeen years ago.  He even had his face ripped off in a motorcycle accident, and the love grew deeper.”  Ren offered her story to support the view of love that Diotima teaches Socrates—two students or two teachers or student and teacher.  Who can say which is which?  The roles are impossible to decipher, and that, too, is real.  “Alicibiades is not in love with Socrates,” Cody said definitively.  Cody is a philosophy major, a writer, and an artist.  His contributions are always on point.  “I agree that it is all about power.  There is no meaningful exchange.”  Cody also offered a beautiful reading of Socrates’ alleged detachment—going without proper clothing in icy weather, drinking excessively and not falling asleep, maintaining composure in battle, and drifting into private contemplation in the most surprising places.  “It isn’t detachment, it is freedom.  He knows what is important and he pursues it.  And what is important to him is very real.”  Plato thinks the particulars that Nussbaum and S value so highly are just shadows on the wall of the cave; what is real is more difficult but not impossible to see and feel in the synergy of the dialogue.  I touched something real in that class and felt, as a result, saved, blessed, affirmed, a recipient of amazing grace.  Sammie wanted to add something, “Socrates stands alone all night to think when he is with the army on a campaign probably because he couldn’t find a fit partner with whom to converse.  So … he had to work out his problem alone under the sky.”

            Alicibiades attempted rape.  Socrates, the true teacher, tried to redirect his advances.  Then the privileged young man went round the city in a fit of madness, breaking the noses and phalluses off all the statues of the messenger god Hermes—an erotic figure if ever there was one.  S had a shoe fetish, and was always impeccably dressed.  But Eros is ever poor and homeless and unshod since his mother is poverty.  The contrast is so plain.  How in the world did I miss it?  Socrates, a true student and follower of Eros, is famously unkempt and shoeless, but that’s of secondary importance.  What matters is that Socrates saw the Beautiful once, and, having seen it, wants to see it again and again as if life were a ferris wheel ride and the view from the top always, always delightful.  That is why he pursues his researches and conversations with such tireless dedication.  His path is also mine.  A class convenes.  Every time a student speaks, the possibility exists that the veil will part, the silenus open, and a divine vision will be revealed even for a moment.   

Postscript.  After a difficult week of wrestling with The Symposium and with my lingering love of S-----, I learned from my lawyer that he is closing his office.  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said into the phone, wishing still (as sick as it may seem) to talk to S-----.  I bundled up my load of guilt (big as a small child) and took it down to the river.  I expected to hike with it along the blue water under the crabapple trees and was pleasantly surprised when it just floated away.  I was also surprised at how easily I let it go.  A patch of color blew into my eye.  Orange.  Must have been a falling leaf, but I turned my head quickly and saw the wing of a monarch butterfly.  In love, the psyche grows wings.  I AM.  “Free at last!” I said to myself and wondered how I ever let him convince me that he was the Beautiful. 

"What are gods?"

            “What are gods?”  The question came in an email from a student in my mythology class who was frustrated by discussions in which the word gets tossed around without a clear sense of what it signifies.  Cody’s message was quite long and full of wonderings, “Are gods just a placeholder for the unexplainable processes of a given phenomenon, like thunder, growth of wheat, etc.?”  At the center of such swirling suggestions was a question couched as a request for the teacher to address:  “I want to know more about what it’s like, in our (my) understanding, to “speak” with the gods, if they are the humanization of processes.”  I got the message late Wednesday afternoon.  I’d been teaching all day and was preparing to take my daughter and puppy to puppy training class, but Katya wanted spaghetti.  I printed off Cody’s email, and as we waited for our plates of spaghetti, while she played with her phone, I jotted ideas on the back of Cody’s message.  Duty bound, I went back to the text of Gilgamesh, as if I could find the answer by surveying the array of supernatural beings (gods of sky, earth, water, wisdom, cattle, serpent, sun).  I have no doubt that my anxious and hurriedly written email was confusing at best and incomprehensible at worst.  He said he didn’t need an exhaustive definition, but I could read his need between the lines.  When I surveyed the text, typed a reply, and pushed send, I was just being the good teacher.  But what I really felt awe—that this student trusted me enough to ask such a question.  I was really in awe of the question because it was honest and because it was also mine.  Every time I opened my email that weekend and saw that Cody had not responded, I knew that I had not given him what he needed.  What if he didn’t want a definition?  As we move from the mythologies of Mesopotamia to Greece and on to the stories of the Hebrew Bible, God becomes increasingly subjective and impossible to pin down—“I am what I am.”  Cody gave me a gift with that question.  Whether he knew it or not, he invited me to search my own experience for an answer.  “You always find reasons not to think of your own life.”  Maybe it is time to put down the books, return some of the stacks around my bed and desk to the library, and come out of the cramped room in which I spend the majority of my time.  Maybe we find the answer to such tremendous questions only when we dare to live.  

            Over that weekend, I got swept up in life—thanks to Katya.  Paul had gone away for the afternoon, and she and I took our new puppy out for a walk.  She was quieter than usual, and when I asked what was wrong, she said that she felt like Trevor (her “boyfriend”) was going to break up with her, and she wanted to do it “to just get it over with.”  When I began to probe, she explained that he had been “acting weird,” and had said “that his feelings were beginning to fade.”  Ever since the photo of her wearing a cheap engagement ring (which I purchased at Plato’s Closet for $3.00) hit SnapChat and circulated among the Valley School parents—Trevor’s crazy Mom saw it—she forbid him to see her.  That night as it was getting dark, I could see her legs—back and forth—she must be on her swing, but she was yelling at someone on the phone.  A few minutes later the back door slammed, and she pounded through the kitchen—“leave me alone”—and up the stairs slamming her bedroom door behind her.  A few minutes later, I went into her room.  I said something meaningless like “how are you?” or “how’d it go?”  She seemed to feel proud that she had done it, but she was still upset.  Then she came out with it:  “Mom, I kind of want to tell you something, but I’m afraid you won’t like me.”  I told her that whatever she could say would not change my love for her.  Then, she told me that in June, just after graduation, she asked me to drop her at the Mall so she could hang out with girlfriends.  That was the plan, and I believed her.  Trevor picked her up, took her back to his house, where they had sex.  Suddenly, I felt very small, very naïve, very ineffective—a failure.  Much stronger than my own feelings of failure was my sadness for her.  She was carrying that around all summer.  She accused me of thinking her a slut.  She had even expressed interest in going with me to confession.  Oh.  And how much harder the break-up must be given that she had been so intimate with him.  Oh.  My poor daughter.  I felt my virginity lost, taken, violently, felt it all over again.  I think I hugged her, but I do not really remember.  It hurt.  I was hurting with her.  Maybe that is all she needed. 

            The next morning, I woke her up to go to Church with me.  She went without an argument, and we made it to our old pew, unoccupied all summer while we both were going through our own different crises.  Barbara quietly slid in behind us, and at some point, complimented Katya on her hair (as she always does).  At the sign of peace, I hugged Katya and she began to sob.  I held her for a long time, and I felt a surge of maternal power and love.  She shook hands with all the usual people.  Stan, the man who has sat behind us for years, asked me if she was alright, and I indicated that it was boy trouble.  “Men are dogs,” he joked.  “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us, Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.  Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”  During this prayer she stood with her head on my shoulder.  We knelt.  We processed to the altar, all unworthy but loved anyway, to receive the bread and body that mark our participation in Christ’s body—broken and whole—today, tomorrow, forever.  There is fullness.  There is love.  There is forgiveness.  Forgiveness is so often out of reach and even unimaginable for human beings, living within the limits of our judgmental natures.

            The next day was Monday, and in Greek mythology class, I opened discussion with Cody’s question.  Certain students were more sure-footed with their answers, giving lengthy anthropological explanations or stating matter-of-factly that gods were human projections.  I told the story of the weekend (omitting sensitive details) of heartbreak healed at Sunday Mass, when my daughter leaned on me.  I told about the powerful feelings of forgiveness and love.  I said that I didn’t think we could have gotten to that place of deep connection had we been standing in her room.  In church, our sins, our sadness, our forgiveness—green shoots in the wilderness—didn’t die in an otherwise parched landscape of closed doors, constant work, and YouTube videos.  Our small efforts were encased in a loving kindness that wrapped us up together in an embrace.  That is what it feels like to be in the presence of God.  It was an inkling of transcendence.  Seek the Lord while he may be found—when a daughter needs her mother to lean on and the mother (me!), for once, felt like she was there for both girls.  News flash:  we objectify or idolize God when we imagine him up or out there somewhere.  God happens where we love people, our neighbors. 

How a Christian can be a Wrestler

            I like to think things out by walking.  S---- called me peripatetic … like Socrates.  Whenever he would say things like that, I would try hard to shake off the flattery—water off a duck’s back.  “I am nothing.  I prefer to be nothing … like the characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear who embrace nothingness to be made new.  Today, I have just enough time for a short walk.  I pull in the driveway of ForMar, past turkeys grazing.  ForMar is an arboretum on the edge of Flint that was once a farm and is named for the married farmers who left their home to people far from home, people seeking peace.  I head straight for the highest point today—a hill at the back of the acreage—walk up into the sky and sit at the summit watching the clouds roll over me, enjoying the protection offered by high grass and weeds, facing the old oak below that is the axis of my mundi.  It is my sacred spot.  Usually I pray here—a strange mixture of Muslim prayer (prostration), pagan prayer (arms outstretched), and Christian prayer (kneeling and whispering Hail Marys).  Today I am Abraham on Mt. Moriah and Moses on Sinai:  “Here I am!”  Loins girded, pen in hand, I am ready to try the strength of my own religious tradition whose Son-God suffered, died, turned the other cheek.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about emblems:  the Reformer John Calvin chose an extended hand holding a burning heart with the motto, “promptly and sincerely in the service of God.”    

My emblem, if I could choose, would be a woman wrestling with angel or God.  In an essay I wrote on Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, the competition between Jew and Christians for chosen status gets figured by their competition over the biblical character of Jacob.  Christians identify with Jacob the trickster-thief who robbed elder brother, Esau, of his birthright, while Shylock, the Jew, identifies with Jacob who wrestles his way to atonement (with God and with brother).  I am a Christian who identifies with Jacob, who wonders if there is room for a feisty fighter, a woman who takes a stand, a woman who wants revolution and revelation in her life?  Pen in hand, I have come to this hilltop—waiting to take dictation from the God of my heroes.  Writing like Moses wrote and rolling like Moses rolled toward my own promised land.

            On Sundays since my one world ended leaving me dogpaddling in the welter and waste of original chaos, I sit in church, secluded in the side chapel.  I watch the congregation through glass.  I see my place vacant and imagine I’ve died.  In the beginning, I sat apart so no one would see me cry and so I could be close to Christ in the golden tabernacle.  The chapel is dark, and the space feels more intimate.  Sometimes I sit there and have the sensation I am laying my head on Jesus’ breast.  At other times, I feel like I’m in the belly of my own great fish, waiting to be spit out … but not before my own prayer emerges from my own depths.  The fish is patient.  Last Sunday, waiting for Mass to begin, I was praying when I felt the proximity of great gentleness.  It was Barbara—the old woman, dear woman—who has sat behind me (and sometimes me and my daughter) for years.  I felt the fingers on my shoulder, turned and saw her face, and instinctively hugged her.  “What happened?”  she asked, and I told her.  And what she said melted me.  What she said made me believe that I am redeemable.  “You are so soft.  It breaks my heart to think of that happening to you.”  Barbara said something so simple but true about me—I am a creature without a hard shell, a soft porous responsive being.  “I want to learn compassion for my husband.”  “I miss my Papa.”  “I love my students.”  I revealed such things to S----- straight up.  And I know that you, like him or anyone who spends any time with me can tell that I spend most of my days in the space of questions, in the passionate state of unknowing or never being certain about anything.  I read and walk, and let myself absorb my surroundings—a thinking sponge—which is why, since moving to Flint, I go to ForMar most days to call the flowers by name, to make the deer stand still—one day two deer approached me, to dance in the wind, and feel myself in the world.  I let myself think S---- was Boaz to my Ruth, Adam to my Eve, but he confessed that he only saw the world through my eyes.  “I never really paid much attention to flowers.”  How could he love me if he could not love the world?  And S----- had nothing but disdain for my essential softness:  “Christianity is a religion for weaklings,” said the confident Zionist, who I learned by the way is a gun-toting believer in the Republican party—“the party of Lincoln” and, much to his elitist chagrin, of Donald Trump.  He adored my softness only as long as it made me malleable and susceptible to his manipulations.  When I showed the least bit of chutzpa, he told me I was “hard as nails.”

            My task on this road of trials is to discover the strength of Christianity—not just its paradoxical strength in weakness but its unadulterated strength.  It must exist.  How else could seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionaries, like my hero John Milton, rise up to challenge King Charles and to justify (as a tenet of his faith) the peoples’ right to put him on trial and behead the pretender on a cold day in January for breaking his covenant with them?  “It sounds just like S-----,” said my husband when we were talking about the English revolution and how it fed the minds of the American revolutionaries.  I was explaining how the musical Hamilton had resurrected the American heroes in the same way Shakespeare’s wildly popular plays about English history resurrected important—because useful to the present—people and moments from the past.  The challenge to Charles was enabled by remembering the way the peers challenged Richard II in 1399.  The stories of history matter.  They are seeds of time that if nurtured turn into new ideas and avenues of action.  Stories matter.  Bible stories.  Historical stories.  Myths.  They help us to see moments of struggle and conflict in our own lives as the stuff of hero journeys, trials of character, ways that our life evokes our character, calling the best out of us.  Here and now—Here I am!—still wrestling with S----- and wrestling with my Christianity-induced guilt about standing up to him, permitting the reduction of my covenant to a legalistic contract, suing him for negligible therapy … not for the money, but because stories matter, ideas matter, and covenant has become a tenet of my faith.  I still remember a particularly painful exchange in an argument I had with him back in May.  “What about our covenant.  You said it would be immoral to break it.”  I had learned by then that the difference between covenant and contract is that covenants protect relationships while contracts protect interests, and covenants (at least those between God and human beings) are irrevocable.  “So you think you are little Miss Covenant,” he sneered.  Yes, as a matter of fact I do.  I embrace that identity and will show him just how seriously I take covenant.  S-----, if you are there, I want to tell you that I am not beheading you or ruining your life.  I really don’t want your money.  I have taken this step because the story matters.

            Over the summer, I decided it was high time I read the New Testament for myself.  Steeped in stories from the Hebrew Bible, it seemed fitting to begin with the Gospel of Matthew, which, as I understood, was written specifically for a Jewish audience.  The Jesus I encountered was anything but weak.  I was especially taken with Chapter 14 of Matthew’s narrative.  It begins with Jesus going into a desert place, presumably to mourn.  He has just heard of the beheading of John the Baptist.  So often in this gospel, Jesus is going into the desert or up a mountain to meditate, pray, to be with his Father.  On my own desert journey through the months of summer, I identified and was reminded of the Israelites in Numbers, struggling to trust even though they hungered for the fleshpots of Egypt.  Moses was the means by which God wrought food and water miracles for the people he loved:  so many quail that the meat stuck in their throats followed by the more delicate manna that they would collect—just enough for the day—every morning before the dew dissipated; and water flowed, miraculously, from the hot rocks.  Jesus, like Moses, seemed always to be feeding people in the desert and feeding his followers, who worried, understandably, when they found themselves deep in the wilderness without food. 

            When Jesus was mourning for John, the people followed him.  Their presence drew him out of meditation.  My Tyndale translation says that Jesus went forth and saw much people, “and his heart did melt upon them, and he healed of them those that were sick.”  When night falls in the desert, the disciples, in voices on the edge of panic, insist that Jesus send the people away so they may go into the towns and “buy victuals.”  But Jesus wanted them near.  Perhaps he needed them.  “They have no need to go away.”  Feed them.  He gave the command, but the anxious men had only five loaves and two fishes, and the crowd was thousands large.  Jesus took the food and “looked up to heaven” (I imagine him talking to God), and then he blessed and broke the bread and gave it to the disciples to distribute.  All the people ate, and there were baskets of leftovers.  The narrative does not begin to explain the miracle.  Nothing is impossible with God, and Jesus trusted God, asked God, talked to God, and, as I believe, remembered Moses.  During the Exodus, to satisfy the peoples’ thirst, God had told Moses to strike a rock to bring forth water.  But much later, at Meribah, in the Book of Numbers, the people were pressing Moses for water.  This time, God told Moses to talk to the rock, but Moses after speaking angrily to the “rebels,” struck the rock, perhaps venting his aggression, perhaps valuing force a bit too much, perhaps remembering his own past action, but not listening, not trusting God.  Water poured forth but so did the voice of God, telling Moses that because he did not trust him (broken trust equals broken covenant), he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land. 

            Jesus knew his Torah.  His actions in this desert place lead me to believe that he remembered the old stories, thought about them, and breathed new life into them by acting them out in his own ministry.  His strength lay in his absolute belief in what he told Satan when the trickster tempted him in the desert, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  To feed, to succeed, to obtain the grace we need every moment of every day, we cannot fall back on old habits or take God for granted, thinking that we know what to do or know Him.  Jesus didn’t imitate Moses, he learned from Moses’ mistake to go directly to God.  But that wasn’t the end of the teaching.  He went a step further, creating a situation in which he could effectively dramatize to his followers this message that the new covenant required absolute trust.  After the meal and after the crowd scatters, Jesus, in need of time alone, sends his disciples ahead of him across the lake in a boat.  He goes up to the mountain to pray.  Meanwhile, a storm has kicked up on the water and the disciples’ boat is floundering.  Jesus, ever the shepherd, walks on water to safeguard his flock.  Master, says Peter, if you are you and not a spirit, bid me to come to you.  “Come,” said Jesus, and Peter stepped out of the boat and onto the waves, but he was frightened badly by a wind, and his own fear caused him to falter, but Jesus reached out a hand to catch him, saying, “O, thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”  Although Peter falters, I think he is so beautiful for trying, really trying.

                Part of the reason why I wanted to read a gospel is that Jesus always seemed so distant—even scary—to me.  Son of man, son of Mary and Joseph, our brother, our shepherd—I had heard these things about Jesus all my life, but he seemed so out of reach. Here I am!  I have needed to reach out for the hem of his garment, reach out for his hand for so many years … all my life really.  He was there all along, but I didn’t take time to know him.  I am trying now, really trying, like Peter.  I know he is God, and therefore it is fitting that he is beyond me, but in order to love him, I had to make some kind of connection, and I found that bond in a shared skill—wrestling with stories and with coming up with ways to teach the heart and gut truths that stories contain.  Finally, this is what my complaint is about:  I am trying to be true to the covenant and even to S----- by continuing to wrestle with and revise the story we started.  Moses repeated the past when he struck the rock; Jesus learned from Moses’ mistake how to do something new by trusting and talking and believing that the answer would come even though it would not always satisfy his immediate desire.  On this hilltop in Genesee County Michigan, I offer up my heartbreak and my half of a broken covenant, and I will wait, Father, to accept the sustenance only You can provide.  Sitting on that green mound in ForMar, the clouds parted, and I knew at once that Jesus wants me to be and that He spent no time feeling guilty when he turned the tables on the moneychangers tables and chased them out of His Father’s house.