MONDAY MORNING BLOG - May 5, 2008
Though I have always been a devotee of T. S. Eliot and though I have always appreciated the poetic truth or message in his saying of April that it is the cruelest month, I have never taken his lines literally. Or I had not until last Wednesday when, on April’s last day, she rose up and did indeed deliver a cruel blow.
The Words of Jesus had been in circulation for ninety days, or actually for a little over that by last Wednesday. Ninety days is a good, stable hunk of time. Ninety days, we say, is more than sufficient for everything from paying outstanding bills to warranting against defect. But, alas, not always.
Doing anything as complex as merging the words of Our Lord into a Sayings format and then cross-referencing those Sayings back to their canonical sources is a logistical feat of serious proportions. Only a few days engaged in that kind of work will convince anybody that more heads than one are required to check and back-check and then check again. Even so, sometimes the effect is one, quite literally, of dizziness and a kind of overarching, sick confusion. Thus it was that almost from the first day of the work, there were always at least two of us working on the project together, checking and re-checking. By the time that Words was finally released to go to page proofs, there had been at least six or eight sets of hands and heads involved in the referencing and cross-referencing process.
When at last we all signed off, I remember saying, “You know as well as I do that there’s going to be an error somewhere in here. Given this much detail, there’s just got to be at least one error.” But ninety days came and went, and no error reared its ugly head. Not, that is, til April’s last day.
How mystical one is varies more by personality than anything else, I suspect. That is, the ability and/or ready willingness to perceive the naturally inexplicable as being attributable to the agency of that which is outside the bounds of natural occurrence varies from person to person. For that reason, I can not be sure before the fact of just how what follows here will be received. To not report it, however, would be more deleterious than to tell it in all of its bald-faced truth.
There was a man named Hal Helms, Sr. who died some ten or twelve years ago, but who was a mystic. He was also a Baptist pastor and served on the clergy staff of the Community of Jesus in Massachusetts, which was the role in which I came to know of him. Pastor Helms “heard” messages from God. He had sometimes daily periods of experiencing something I can only describe as a kind of “intimate listening.” Some parts of what he received or heard, he wrote down after the fact; and some of those writings have in turn been published posthumously in the format of daily devotionals.
I had not thought of Hal Helms in several years; and I certainly had not read any of his words in even longer than that. As one who regulates the day by observing the divine hours, I simply do not have much occasion to use a daily devotions reader per se. Yet Wednesday morning, when I awoke just before six to observe the office of prime or of the dawn, I was compelled to get up and go find a Hal Helms book. I did. After the office, I was compelled …like the word or not, compelled is what it was…to open and flip through the little book, though for reasons that were totally lost on me at the time.
I flipped until my hands were driven-literally-to the entry for “November Seventh” on page 220 of Echoes of Eternity, Volume 2. There, blaring out at me like a carnival machine with flashing lights and raucous music, was a brief paragraph the pastor had written about the words he had heard in relation to the seventh verse of John 15. That verse quotes Jesus as having said:
If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you.
I knew before I even got the little book shut what had happened. I had just been given my error. It took me over two hours to chase the thing down and be sure…or as sure as I can be until someone out there proves me wrong again.
When we were merging the texts, somehow that verse of John 15:7 was originally placed in Saying 47, Book IV. As soon as some one of us caught the error, it was removed. Removing it is one thing; failure to re-insert it elsewhere is quite another, and that’s what happened. The verse belongs in Saying 50, Book II, where I hope all of you will insert it by hand until such time as we can correct the error in a future printing, and correcting as well the “Index” citations, of course.
There may be other errors slipping around, playing hide-and-seek with us, but I doubt it. And while errors are the bane of the writing life, especially where Holy Writ is concerned, I shall always honor this one…maybe even hold it as dear…because of the way its presence was made known to me. That is to say, I hate the error, but I treasure the strange way of its coming within my ken.
