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There is no real reason to record it, however, unless you want to do so; because it will be running here on this site all summer in order that everybody who wishes to, can move to the summer site with just one click from the present one.

Summer, as God’s Politics and Mother Nature define it this year, commences next Friday, 20 June. It commences, in fact, at 7:59 p.m. edt, which, as most of us have probably already guessed, is the precise moment of the Summer Solstice. And Summer, 2008 will end, logically enough, on Monday, 22 September at 11:44 edt, which is, of course, the Autumnal Equinox. So the next time we are together should be next Sunday, 22 June, not next Monday, 23 June. Hope to meet all of you there….pt

* * * * *

The second unusual thing about this morning’s blog is related to the first: namely that before we go setting off to talk about the words of Jesus in a more general way and in company with a wider audience, I want to talk about The Words of Jesus – A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord in a contextual or historical way, though I certainly hope that intention will not prove to be a daunting one. I want to talk, not about The Words as we have been thinking of them this spring, but rather as what The Words of Jesus really is as a book, and about the category of Christian literature to which it belongs.

The truth of the thing is that as a book and in one way, The Words of Jesus is no more [and hopefully no less] than the most recent or current example of a form of Christian literature that has a history as old, almost, as Christianity itself. The Words of Jesus, by category or genre, is principally a Sayings Gospel; but it is also something else. It is a “harmony of the Gospels” or a “Gospel Harmony” and comes up out of that literary tradition just as surely as it does out of the Sayings one.

The first Gospel Harmony that we have extant is the Diatessaron. It was composed, some time between 150 and 160 c.e., by a Christian scholar/philosopher named Tatian. Translated, Diatessaron means, appropriately enough, “through four;” and the hedging on whether or not Tatian’s Diatessaron was the first Gospel Harmony rests on the fact that scholars think he probably had a prior Greek Harmony, now lost to us, from which he worked.

Whether that theory be true or not is a bit of a moot point, for the real point is that Tatian’s Diatessaron melded all four of our now-canonical Gospels into one narrative. While, unlike a Sayings Gospel, Tatian included both the Sayings and the context or narrative around them in his work, he blended or omitted duplications and organized the flow of the whole around a plot line that was essentially taken from the Gospel of Luke. But the real real point here is two-fold.

The Diatessaron was the authoritative Christian text for Syriac Christianity until the fifth century. The Syriac Church was composed originally of those churches who spoke a variant of Aramaic. Antioch was its politico-cultural capital, as well as the seat of the Church’s Patriarch. Edessa and Nisibis, both located in what today is Turkey, and Ctesiphon, in today’s Iraq, were likewise major centers for the Syriac Church, which borrowed heavily from Rabbinic Judaism and Mesopotamian culture for its foundation.

Among other things and probably in part because of these theological and cultural influences, Syriac Christians did not regard either the Pastoral [or Apostolic] Letters or the Revelation of St. John as canonical or authoritative. While Tatian was located for years in Rome and was originally a student and follower of Justin Martyr there, he was, none the less, a Syrian by birth and a polyglot who could write in Syriac or Latin or presumably Greek with equal ease. It is possible, then, that some of the impetus behind his compilation of a Gospel Harmony had its origin in part in his early life in Syrian culture and religious thought.

Whether that be true or not, the fact still is that sometime in the early fifth century, a bishop of the Syriac Church decided that, in conformity with the rest of Christian practice, each of the churches under his oversight should include not only Tatian’s Diatessaron, but also at least one copy of each of the four, now canonical, Gospels as they are when independent of one another. Following that, in 423 c.e., Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus on the Euphrates in Upper Syria, went a step farther. He collected all the copies of the Diatessaron he could locate in his diocese—200 of them, we are told– and “took them away,” whatever that euphemism may mean. Theodoret’s action was taken as much for political as theological reasons, for the pressures that would culminate in 451 c.e. at the Council of Calcidon were already in play. The effect of his action none the less was that, in time, the melded or harmonized Diatessaron ceased to be the text of choice or even of legitimate use for the Syriac Church. Its influence proved to be so lasting, however, that well over a century later, Muhammad would still speak of the Christian Gospel as being one text, rather than four.

But the other part of the point to be mentioned among us before we move for the summer is that while the Diatessaron was the formal text for Syriac-speaking Christians for centuries, it also existed in the other tongues of the Mediterranean world where it generated not only texts but also commentaries or study tools based upon it. Tatian’s work likewise spawned the literary tradition of the Gospel Harmony; and one of the hallmarks of that tradition is that, like the Diatessaron, the harmonies are usually written in the vernacular, an approach that renders their content very present and very immediate for readers. That tradition of the melded or harmonized Gospel written in the language of the people held until the time of the Reformation when new ways of seeing Christian scripture took pride of place in Christian thinking and when Scripture itself was re-positioned as the sole and un-arbitrated, unmediated authority for belief and action.

It should not, in other words, be lost on us that in this time of new re-formation, we find ourselves moved once again toward what our forefathers and foremothers in the faith found to be of such inestimable and precious worth to their hearts and souls. In approaching The Words of Jesus or any careful Gospel Harmony, we are simply reclaiming, as the children’s song says, “something that’s been lost and must be found.” And that, it seems to me, is a good thought with which to wrap up our first Spring together.

See you next Sunday.

Let us suppose then. Let us suppose that there is a huge, deadly wreck on busy Main Street, USA in the midst of mid-day traffic. There are, technically speaking, several hundred witnesses, albeit from very different perspectives. Some of the witnesses are immediate, so immediate in fact that two or three of them are wounded themselves by the flying glass and careening steel. Others are simply immediate enough to have been splattered by blood and dust and specks of oil. Not so immediate, but still close enough, are those who had to jump out of harm’s way and, in doing so, dropped possessions or skinned a knee or simply got an adrenalin rush of significant proportions.

Other of those who saw had a less dramatic experience, of course. Some of them really did see, in that they were standing at the curb waiting for the light to change and saw the whole thing as if in slow motion. Others were walking in the direction from which the wreck came and likewise saw the whole thing, also as if in slow motion, albeit from a safer distance. Some witnesses, of course, only “saw” the deadly accident in the loosest sense of saw. That is, the space between the sound of the crash in progress and their turning their heads to look was no more than a nano-second, or so it seemed. For some even, the screeching of tires laying down rubber was so dramatic that they turned and, in point of fact, really did “see” the wreck itself, although they hardly could be said to have “seen” the whole thing, since they witnessed only its final act of culmination.

And then, of course, there are all the window-gawkers…the office workers who leaned out from the windows of all the surrounding buildings that line Main Street. Or the store personnel who came running out of the street-level shops and commercial businesses. And there’s a couple of cops who were cruising in the opposite the direction away from the wreck and therefore did not really “see” it at all, except that their deep experience with wrecks let them respond almost instantaneously, just at it allowed them to re-construct what logically must have happened and include it in their report of the wreck itself.

Assume, then, that we have some several hundred good citizens-maybe even some not-so-good ones and a few out-right liars, thieves, and nair-do-wells on Main Street. Each of them, from the purest to the most nefarious, now has a wreck in his or her head. Each of them-it is one of the surest bets in this gossipy world-each of them is going to tell some other human being about this phenomenal wreck, at some point at some time over the coming hours, days, weeks, and years. Maybe even, he or she will tell several someones, And what they are all telling is true. A wreck happened at mid-day on Main Street, USA. Yet for every witness, that wreck is distinct, is different, is so nuanced that there are as many wrecks as there are witnesses. Oh, the tales will, in all probability, share a common thread; but they will also contain some inconsistencies and some contradictions amongst them.

Yet the truth in all of this–the one “fact” in it all-is that each witness, bearing home his or her story of disaster on Main Street, is reporting the actual wreck. All of them who seek to speak the truth of what they witnessed are indeed speaking the truth. The inconsistencies and contradictions amongst their various stories, were we to collect those tales into some kind of whole, would not be erroneous or deliberated distortions or violations of fact. They would be honest and true reports of what happened, because what happened did happen within the vitality and experience of each tale’s teller.

Now good and honest men and women are on the horns of a dilemma. We have the expertise of the police who have brought their training to bear on what will become the more or less official assessment of what happened. In addition, we have all the technology and brilliance of accident-reconstruction specialists who, by studying the lay-down of debris and tracks and the pressure required for such impact and the points of primary as opposed to secondary and terciary impact can be reasonably certain about what or who hit what or whom first. They can even re-construct enough to establish with some confidence which actions had to proceed which other actions in order to culminate in the impact in the first place.

All of this is absorbing. It can occupy the news media for weeks and conversation for a lifetime. It can cause consternation among those accused and angst among those deemed to have been not at fault. Reams and reams of paper, billions and billions of pixels, yards and yards of documentation, not to mention several hundred thousand dollars, will be spent in pursuit of the facts about this wreck on Main Street.

And when it is all over, when all is said and done by expert or ordinary citizen, the only absolutely certain thing…the only “fact” beyond conceivable question…is that there was a wreck one mid-day on Main Street, USA and that there was some take-away. We will never know the sum total of all the facts about the wreck nor will be ever know all of its specific details. What we have-and all we have-is the actuality of the wreck and the burgeoning largesse of lives changed in some greater or lesser way by their engagement with the wreck itself or with its story.

I tell you this dangerous tale on a sunny early-summer Monday morning for a reason. But you know that already. A parable always reveals itself early-on in its telling.

It was and still is the way of modernism to believe that there is some means by which to re-construct and define, with detail and specificity, the facts and truths about the wreck on Main Street. It is the way of post-modernity not just to doubt the possibility of that absolute position, but more importantly to ask why one would assume it in the first place, save for legal or fiscal reasons of guilt and/or innocence, although those are very valid, worthy, and sometimes energizing additions to the conversation. But what we really have here despite all our analyses and probing, the post-modernist might well argue, is access to only one truth: There was once an actual wreck and its actuality now lives in the actuality of hundreds and hundreds of people, being as distinct and different as are the hundreds and hundreds of individual universes in which the actuality now lives.

The post-modernist would argue, in other words, that as surely as it takes an observer for an action to occur, just so surely is the observed action the actual one. He or she would probably have us remember here as well that we should be leery of assuming that contradictions and inconsistencies are anything other than the evidence that things really are as they are when observed….that potentially light is a wave and light is a particle. It just depends on who is watching.

Let us go forth, then, and be Christian this lovely summer morning, but may the wreck and its story bother every one of us this whole day through. When all is said and done, every single one of us, alive in 2008 and claiming Christianity as our belief system, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks about the wreck. In other words, every single one of us, if we live another decade or so, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks not only about the crash, two thousand years ago, of Messiah into space/time but also about how we understand and engage the records of that event that have come to us over the centuries.

Phyllis Tickle

“All right,” he said. “What is your question?”

“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Was there, or was there not, a snake in the Garden of Eden?”

Without batting an eye, Barth replied, “Madam, whether or not there was a snake in the Garden of Eden is not what matters. What matters is what the snake said.”

— — — — —

I had never heard that delicious story until I read it in Pete Rollins’ ground-breaking, new book, The Fidelity of Betrayal about which there will undoubtedly be a great deal more commentary later both on this blog and many others. It is a gripping and stellar piece of emergent theology that deserves the serious attention of every Western Christian. But what interests me today is not so much the sum total of Rollins’s argument, but rather the Barth story itself. The Barth story is the best example of Biblical actualism I have ever heard of as having come out of the 20th century.

What Barth is saying to the woman and to us is exactly what Jesus said. “…the Scripture can not be denied;” [I,49] or “Is not this the reason that you are wrong, because you do not know either the scriptures or the power of God?” [I,65] The Word of God is not reducible, either literally or metaphorically, to the words that convey it. The Word of God is God among us.

I began this day’s blog with a story, and I shall end it with another. Once was the time when every Christian child was supposed to have a “favorite” Bible verse. Most of us in my generation, once we had passed our eighth or ninth birthday, just rolled our eyes in mock disgust and rattled off something without a great deal of thought. By the time most of us were adolescents, we unswervingly stuck with “Jesus wept” as the answer of choice, even as we resented the perceived humiliation of being asked such a childish question. But the habit stuck, and we grew up to become adults who still ponder from time to time about just what exactly is our favorite verse of Scripture. [Such sustained and life-long pondering was, of course, the whole point in the first place, though none of us grasped that at the time.]

My “favorite” has changed over the years. I lost “Jesus wept” by my sophomore year of college, although interestingly enough, it came back to serve another turn or two as I matured and discovered what real weeping means and where it comes from. But the verse selections also changed from time to time in accord with my own understanding of what “favorite” means when applied to a fragment of Scripture.

In adolescence, obviously “favorite” spoke to attitude and self-assertion, just as in adulthood it has spoken to consolation or insightfulness. Sometimes, I have carried a verse for long periods of time in the prime spot because of its sheer beauty and poignancy…”Have I been so long a time with you, Philip, and still you do not know me?” [IV,47] Sometimes, I have valued most the mysteriousness of it all. “In the beginning was the Word….and it dwelt among us.”

But now, as the poet said, I am old, and my excitement grows almost daily and exponentially. As a result, were you to ask me, I would say, as quickly as Barth answered his questioner, that my favorite is the 36^th of the Sayings of Public Instruction:

“Before Abraham was, I am.”

To touch that one is to touch the glory, which is to say that to touch that one is in truth to touch the actual.

Phyllis Tickle

The “Sales Conference,” psychologically speaking, falls somewhere in that range of emotion that stretches between a child’s pent-up joy on Christmas Eve and his or her mother’s exhaustion on the same eve. The problem is that while Christmas has two or more characters feeling distinct sets of emotions, the Sales Conference has all the whole range of possibilities roaming around in each individual involved.

The things are exhausting. There is no question in anybody’s mind about that. All the reps who will take the house’s new line out and try to sell it to wholesale buyers, to distributors’ buyers, to chain store buyers, to retailers and even, in some cases, to book clubs are brought in from their various territories around the country and assembled for two intense days. And it is no exaggeration to say that, to a large extent, whether or not a book will make it in the marketplace is determined in those two exhilarating, draining days. The whole next six months, in fact, pivots here, and everybody present knows it.

The house’s publicity department has to present elaborate and convincing evidence that a forthcoming title is going to absolutely and positively be written up in The New York Times and featured on Oprah…or barring that unlikely pipedream, at least featured in something impressive. And, of course, endorsed by a bevy of well-known experts or fellow-authors. Marketing has to present its almost-surgical pitch about what is the size of the press-run and why, who the primary anticipated audience is, what has been the track record of similar titles and to whom in what part of the culture, etc., etc. The reps, sitting there, computers open, frantically make notes and, as a rule, ask disconcertingly direct questions. They even have been known to make side-remarks like ,”You’ve gotta be kidding,” which is commonly regarded as not a good omen. But then, the rep is not only making a comment, he or she is also already building a defense against possible failure on s book that doesn’t look all that saleable in his or her territory. Everybody has something on the line in Sales Conference, in other words.

Except that nobody in that room-including the author, believe it or not-nobody has as much on the line as a book’s editor. An editor, depending on the size of the publishing house, has either acquired a forthcoming title in the first place or, in larger houses, has been assigned the care and feeding of it from first draft on. A book, by the time it makes it to Sales Conference, is very much like a child whom one has either conceived and borne or adopted in earliest infancy. It is like the child of one’s heart whom the editor has taken as raw material and shaped and dressed and nurtured and consoled and educated and then-dreadful moment-sent forth into the world to make its own way, but carrying all the angst and hope and ego of its parent with it. For editors, Sales Conference is, in essence, the last time-the very last time-the book will be his or hers. After Sales Conference, it will belong to the world. This is the last parental opportunity, the last chance to shape in any way the presentation of the beloved child. For that reason, I always listen to editors closely in the two or three weeks before their spring Sales Conference.

They call or e-mail, sometimes to chat in general, sometimes simply for a little collegial empathizing with an old hand who’s no longer directly in the production part of the industry, and sometimes to ask a specific question. The specific questions usually begin with, “Am I crazy, or is such and such actually true?” I love those conversations, because I always learn more than I ever add to them; and I got an especially delicious such call a couple of weeks ago.

Sandra DeGroot is a project developer/editor at Eerdmans Publishing, one of the oldest and most respected houses in the field of religion publishing. This season, Eerdmans is publishing a book-one which, by the way, I think is magnificent-entitled The Eighth Day of Creation. Written by Clifton Black, it is a lover’s guide to the contents of the Bible. Not a précis, but a presentation of them arranged in the same way that a really fine guide to the works of Shakespeare arranges his works. The effect is somewhere between so beautiful one wants to cry and so monumental one wants to walk away for a while in order to breathe.

I had seen the book in galley some several weeks before, but I had no idea that Sandra was its developer, much less that Bill Eerdmans himself had discovered and acquired it. When Sandra called, then, I was unprepared for her question. “Am I crazy,” she said, “or is what Clif Black has done part and parcel of the same kind of thing that The Words of Jesus is doing? That is, can I say in Sales Conference next week that they represent a kind of mini-trend toward greater intimacy with scripture?”

Sandra DeGroot was never crazy in her life, I suspect. And she is certainly not crazy on this one. “Of course,” I said. “Both are a push toward not only intimacy, but also toward the immediacy that precedes intimacy.”

“I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it before I did. Going out on a limb is not my style.”

“OK,” I said “I’ll go you one better. About three weeks before The Words of Jesus was released, the International Bible Society released The Books of the Bible, and it will knock your socks off. They have removed all the verse and chapter and volume markers, so to read it, you just have to read it. Talk about dramatic intimacy and immediacy, it’s really there when you see scripture this way.”

There was a silence at her end, and then she said the thing that every old hand (and every young hand) in publishing knows. She said, “Three in one spring.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh,” she said; because what the old and young hands both know is that when three different house, unbeknownst to each other and in one short time-frame, publish within more or less the same new window, there is an uncanny validity to the concept or approach they are pursuing. Whether by intuition or serious analysis of the culture or something in between, three new, but similar, works from different houses is confirmation…not that a particular book will itself succeed, but that the idea behind that book is a vibrant and worthy one.

“Immediacy and intimacy,” she said again.

“Yes,” I said, “because in all three instances the content moves from the perspective of proscenium to that of participant, or at least I know that is true with using the Sayings format for the words of Jesus. Reading the gospels, one is watching a story in the same way that one sits in front and watches a play. Reading the Sayings, though, moves one from a row in front of the stage up onto the stage itself.”

“That’s it!” she said. “That’s exactly what happens. Proscenium. That’s all I need,” and she was gone. But after she had hung up, I sat in my office and was stunned by the fact that together we had just arrived at analyses that I had been half-aware of, but had not previously given full articulation to….which, of course, is at least half the reason for having Sales Conferences in the first place.

Phyllis Tickle

The third oddity is that where we live is no more a farm than a duck is a turkey, though they do bear some similarities and presumably share a common ancestor somewhere back along the way. The Farm In Lucy is down in size now to about ten acres. It still has a barn, albeit a moldering one, and a whole panoply of outhouses and sheds that are in a similar state of incipient decay. There is a garden still, out of which we eat rather heartily, in fact, but the animals who share life with us and our two dogs are feral cats, innumerable mice, the omnivorous deer, an unpleasant number of raccoons, and the occasional fox. Not a cow or a chicken or a guinea or a horse on the whole place. Not, in other words, a farm any longer by any definition or in any place.

It was not always so, of course. Once the chickens squawked and flustered all day long, raucously and incessantly. Once the guineas drove us crazy with their guard-dog alarms and the ducks did likewise with their honking. Once the bee hives gave us our honey and the blackberry breaks gave us our spring delights and summer cobblers. Once the cows-the loves of my life-grazed and bred and mooed and sauntered to the pasture fence with news of how thing were for them and with the naked desire of the totally innocent to be petted and stroked and embraced. Those things are memories now; but occasionally something happens to yank the memory forward from past time into present time. Always I am grateful.

Last Thursday, Sam and I were driving home from a day in Memphis. We had turned off of the state highway onto Lucy Road and gone about a mile or so when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her. The terrain in Lucy is rolling and, for west Tennessee, fairly high. Accordingly, we have in places some steep gullies, a few ravines, and an occasional really evil ditch. One such ditch-narrow and perhaps three to four feet deep-runs beside Lucy Road off and on for three or four miles. And she was teetering on the edge of one.

I am sure it was habit that made me see her, for I certainly was not looking in her direction. “A cow!,” I said to Sam. “There’s a cow out at the top of the ditch.”

He drove to the nearest driveway cut, turned around without saying a word, and drove back. And there she still was. “She’s beautiful,” he said as matter-of-factly as if he were telling me the sun was shining. And she was. A year old, probably, and her whole body glowing in the spring sunlight with the blonde sheen of young red heifers in the clean light of early spring. There was a break in the fence behind her that she had obviously grazed her way through. Now she was caught with one front and back leg still clinging to the edge of the pasture and the other front and back legs precariously planted six inches below on the edge of the ditch.

“Damn!” Sam said, which was about as appropriate as anything I could imagine either of us saying. She couldn’t hang there much longer. Her shoulder and hip girdles would both give out soon, and she would have to move. If she lost her footing and went into the ditch, she would either flip onto her back in her tumble or land in too narrow a space for her to be able to get her legs under her and up. Either way, she was in trouble.

We drove up the road to the house where her owner and our neighbor lives. There was a car and a pick-up truck both at home, but not a soul in sight. I went calling and knocking and halloing, while Sam honked and drove farther up into the property. No luck. What we needed, barring people, was a rope, at the very least. And even if we had gone on to The Farm In Lucy, there were no longer any ropes.

Afraid to waste more time, we turned around and went back to her, expecting in both our minds to see that beautiful creature broken-legged and trapped….but she was gone! When we got there, she was gone. Somehow…who knows how, whether our honking and shouting had called her or whether by sheer grace…somehow she had managed to do the impossible and side-step her way up to enough level space to get back through the break in the fence. We saw her, regal in the pasture. She turned and looked at us, as cows are wont to do, with exquisite patience and almost a kind of fondness for our having stopped and cared.

“Beautiful,” Sam said again, and we went on home.

There is a large part of me that resists with disgust and scorn speakers-most especially preachers-and writers-most especially those in religion-who tell a good story and then demean it by making it an object lesson, after the fact, for some kind of inanity or moral tedium. I hope that’s not what I am doing here this morning. Whether it is or not, however, the story of the young heifer is the story that wants to be told; and when a story really wants to be told, there’s no denying it its release. Until it is told, nothing else of any moment will come out. Thus, this morning, my red heifer. But having said that, I must say as well that I don’t think it was the heifer herself, for all her beauty, that has absorbed me these last few days. It is I who have absorbed me.

It is my amazement at how quickly Sam and I turned back into farmers on the pivot of a moment, yes. But more than that, it is how we both fell into her beauty like hungry children falling into a hearty supper. And what has arrested my attention most is how I saw that beautiful animal for the first time only when I saw her out of context.

We pass that herd at least twice every single day of our lives. They graze all the way to the fence line that parallels Lucy Road; and often when we pass there, they are resting beside the fence, watching the trucks so by. They are there and have been for who knows how long or how many times; but I never saw her or her sheen until the surround in which I am accustomed to see her disappeared. That realization, mundane as it may seem, is what wanted out, because it is the same, and ever-growing, realization I have every time I pick up Jesus’ words in the Sayings format.

Lifted out of the habitat in which I have known them for years, they suddenly take on a drama and a beauty I had grown too jaded or habituated or simply too familiar to see. What I want is to know that they will never turn, like my beautiful red yearling, and slip back into an obscuring context. Pray God, no.

Phyllis Tickle

But spring is another matter. If the South is tough in the summer, it is embarrassingly self-indulgent and opulent in the spring when everything turns lush and the sun is only pleasingly warm and the rains are by and large predictable and transient. Spring is our out-doors season in Memphis, Tennessee. Our urban life, in the spring, is one festival right after another from early April through mid-June. Truth told, there are sometimes even as many as a half dozen big festivals or parades or street fairs going on more or less simultaneously during those months. But it is the art shows that have absorbed my interest this spring. That is undoubtedly due to the fact that Sam and I have been to three or four really stellar ones in the last few days.

Art shows in the spring may, for all of the reasons above, be a Memphis custom, but ours are also as various in format and ambiance as anyone could possibly imagine. Two of this season’s have particularly lingered in my thoughts. Both artists are life-long West Tennesseans, so they share a common regional history and culture. Both are painters, so they share a medium as well. Likewise, both are fairly established, commanding a supportive audience for their work. After that, they are remarkably different. But it is not so much the nature of their differences that has continued for several days now to absorb me. Rather it is the implications of them.

One of the shows was in a commercial gallery and the other was an outdoors showing in a park-like space with canvases on easels rather than walls. One was elegantly lighted…actually lighted to perfection. The other was what it was…paintings bathed in sun and tempered by the shadow of a passing cloud or tossing tree branch. Both contained representational work… a great deal in the open-air show with fewer such in the gallery showing…but the bulk of the canvases in both shows was deeply interpretive studies in color and outline.

The gallery pieces employed subtle shadings of grays and yellows to open depth into the center of largely non-representational experience. Their surfaces were various with sometimes the tracings of a brush and other times the solid lay-down of a pallet knife or the almost-not-there swiping of a rag just ever so lightly over an area of canvas. They were as peaceful as a city loft, high above the roar of urban noise and wrapped in the steely beauty of simple, calming architecture.

The open-air pieces were greens and reds and delineating browns. Their content–fields, trees, and earth-was more mythic than tranquil; and the canvases were vibrant with an immediacy and a constancy that pulled the heart out from itself and into the strange impermanence of our humanness upon an immortal earth.

The collected or aggregate work of an artist always gives us, ultimately, the world-view, the interior realities, the “truth,” so to speak, of the artist himself or herself. In the same way, of course, the collected work of an author, in the final analysis, really gives us the author-his or her interior realities, his or her “world,” his or her truth. None of us looking, as did our two Memphis artists, at the same physical objects, sees the same essence. Nor does any one of us choose from physical reality the same list of essences to bring in into ourselves as subjective furniture.

That is why every one of us is, of course, a distinct creation or cosmos, unique unto itself and skin-bound unless purposefully and energetically shared….which-obvious as it may seem and naïve as it may sound-I now understand to be at the very root of why the words of Jesus rendered into Sayings format has been so haunting for me all these many, many months: Read them, and there, spread out before you, is His “world” or interior or world-view or truth or whatever other word we may choose to employ. Read them, and you are in.

Shocking.

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.

* * * * *Every once in a while, there comes a letter like this that is nothing short of a gift not only from the writer who expended the time and energy required to send it, but also from Heaven itself. The minute I read her letter the first time [I must have read it a half dozen times since, at least.] I knew she had put her finger on a problem. In fact, I wrote back:“….and you also have a penchant, I suspect, for being able to put your finger right on the soft spot or sore point, or whatever metaphor is most apt here. “You also are very good at stating your case clearly. That is, I think I have a pretty good sense of what you are saying here about a congregation that is of at least two dispositions. It’s a problem as old as Christianity, I suspect. Some of us thrive on thinking about the substance of our faith, while others of us wither under the inevitable anxiety that attends any kind of studied approach to faith. Inevitably, if a believer looks too hard, some, one, small, piece of something is going to have to be removed or re-inserted somewhere else or re-worded or reconsidered; and the result is going to be that half the pieces surrounding the now errant one will all fall out too, making a mess on the spirit’s floor and requiring hours and days of re-building. But you already know that, and know as well that it is especially true in doing the WofJ. “Whatever else I am, though, I am not an iconoclast and neither, I am guessing, are you. The last thing in the world I want to be caught doing is deliberately tearing up somebody else’s interior theological and/or devotional architecture just for the sake of making a scramble of things or even for the sake of cleaning out debris and useless junk pointlessly. Paul has to have been right on this one that some of us want meat, but others of us can handle only milk. So be it. God in His mercy provides food for both sorts and conditions; and we’d be smart to not try to improve on His generosity. “On the other hand,….ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it?….On the other hand, the Messiah, we are taught, was Word Incarnate. That, actually, is the substantive definition we are given for Him. So it must be that the words of the Word Incarnate are the nearest or most accessible bits of Him we have, save for prayer and ecstatic experience itself. This, I am assuming, is why your pastor has approached you about taking on this load. So given both the necessity of engaging Jesus and your pastor’s sense of concern that you try to lead at least some of your fellow members in this way of engagement, then the question really becomes a bit different, I think. Given all of this, it becomes a question of whether or not there are ways of winnowing out some of the hard parts. Are there ways to set aside the more difficult and discomforting Sayings for later study…or for further study with those who have survived the first, more predictable and comforting sessions and still wish to go farther? “For example, would it be feasible with a group like the one you describe…a mix of those who are toddlers, at best, with more matured believers…to commence not with His words of Instruction, but with the Healing Dialogs. In terms of popular perception, the majority of people probably think of Jesus first as a miracle worker. Only after that do we think of Him as God and working savior. And only after that do we really begin to think of Him as God teaching God’s Godness. All of which is to say that I wonder now, three months after the fact, whether or not I should have suggested in quite so blanket a way in the “Reflections” that folks should commence their reading with the words of Private Instruction. Rather, I suspect now that I should have said more about who should begin where…what kinds of folks will find which Book of Sayings to be the best entry point. “And as for whether or not one should go forward, you’re not going to like my answer, I fear, but yes, you have to, I think, to the extent that strength and the Spirit empower you in such a decision. These are His words as He provided them to us. They are what we are when we worship. If we do not provide to ourselves and those committed to our care the means of direct contact and direct engagement, we either stifle the spirit or else put so many layers of stuff between it and the Beloved that we anesthetize it. “What do I hope? I hope you’ll begin slow and assume toddlers. The mature believers will profit as well, but they will also push on for more, I’ll wager. The toddlers will be the better nourished for what they have received in the Healing Dialog Words; but being timid or restive, I’ll also wager they’ll drop out after the Healing Words rather than take on more than they can digest….or I pray that is true, anyway.

“And one last thing, please know that I am grateful…very grateful…for the opportunity you have given me to think this through….and I pray for your decision, whatever it is, to be the better one.” Phyllis Tickle

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The whole purpose of this web site and blog is, of course, to circulate questions and answers, problems and solutions, just like this one. Please feel free…no, please feel obligated…to post here any pertinent comments or suggestions you may have that would be of interest to the rest of us. If you prefer to address me directly, as this writer did, then please do that; and I will post edited and protected precises for the use of all…pt

This Low Sunday at Holy Trinity in Memphis, Tennessee, we began our Sabbath together by singing—quite lustily, in fact—one of those spirituals that are springtime favorites in my part of the world: “I Went Down To the River To Pray, Studyin’About that Good Ole Way, and Who Shall Wear A Golden Crown. O Good Lord, Show Me the Way. After that, we did what Christian churches often do. We baptized new Christians, we confirmed some of those who wished to renew their vows, we accepted two confirmands into full membership within the Church, and we received into congregational membership those baptized Christians who had come to us from other places and now wished to join as co-congregants in that part of God’s church which we call Holy Trinity.  It was a glorious morning, despite it moniker as “low.”

One of the baptized had no family living nearby and so had asked if I would stand with him for the sacrament. I don’t think that has happened to me more than twice or three times in my whole life; and it would have been memorable in and of itself. As things stood, however, it was more than memorable this time. Standing at the font, watching Tim, our priest, consecrate the water in the font and then holding the service book as he read the eternal words of baptism, I felt the emotion not only of the moment, but also of what was ahead of us before the day was done We were receiving one new fellow-Christian into the body of Christ on earth; but in less than two hours, we would be releasing a brother whom we had loved—releasing him from this part of space/time and into life at a remove from space/time.

Tim had spoken to us earlier about baptism itself, and our visiting clergy had spoken of the waters of baptism, of how we are conceived in water and kept safe in water and then born in a mighty rush of water…of how we solemnize those truths by using water once again to mark the re-birth of the Christian into the kingdom of God. Now, even as he was pouring the holy waters, I saw Tim’s face gather itself against grief. We, and half  of those watching, knew that there was another form or act of baptism still to come and that we would shortly be participating in it.

On Low Sunday, the mighty Mississippi was at flood tide and near its cresting in this spring of floods and cresting.  He was a good man, was Rick Kersey, in every part of his life; and he had desired cremation and to be returned to the flow of water. So we took him, or that part of him which had survived the crematorium, and we gathered at the river, at the swollen rush of muddy water that had jumped its banks at least two weeks before Easter. And standing on what was left of a verge between the road and the swirling waters, Tim read the words of dispersal. “We return to you, O Father, one of Your own whom we have loved and who, with us, has loved you.”

We were probably a motley looking crew, standing there. Some of us had changed into jeans after church, because of the mud of the cresting river and the continuing rains that had fallen for five days unremittingly. Some of us were wrapped in slickers and all of us had umbrellas under which we hid from the rain and also from the nakedness of our grief. And so, the words over, Tim and Ann, the love of Rick’s life and his wife, stepped cautiously down to the very last foothold on the bank, and there they released his ashes down into the flow of the river. Rick Kersey had returned to that from which he came by the same means as his original coming.  He had flowed through water into life and then into redeemed life and now, at last, into life fulfilled.

When we had first begun to gather at the river’s edge, there had been no one else out in the weather except for us and one stranger who, given the look of his equipment and the positions he was taking on the slippery bank, had to be a professional photographer recording the river’s cresting. In the course of his watching the river, though, he had begun to watch us, as if he were being drawn into our circle by some familiarity more powerful than acquaintance. I had even realized a time or two that he was very unobtrusively taking pictures of us, of Ann, of Tim, or the dispersal itself.

Then the whole thing was over. Some of us left, but most of us went back to Ann’s house for drinks and rememberings before facing the somber drive home.  But two days later Ann received a packet from the unknown photographer. He had made contact with a woman in our group whom he did know and had gotten Ann’s name and address; and in the packet was a disk of the pictures he had taken as we released Rick to the river on Low Sunday.

“I did not know who he was,” the photographer wrote in his accompanying note, “but he must have been a good man to be so obviously loved and revered by everyone in attendance, as it was very evident.”

“….as it was very evident.”

 I shall not hear those words ever again in quite the same way. Instead, always hereafter they will remind me of the ineluctable truth that even in death, we testify. I know that, of course, we all do. It is, none the less, a good and worthy thing to make mention of from time to time here in this place where the Words of Jesus are the reason for our coming

Eternity – A Letter to the People of St. Stephen’s Church

The noted author and lecturer on religion, Phyllis Tickle, has written a fascinating new book entitled, The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord.  Most of the book is a compilation of Jesus’ sayings, all that he said, without the surrounding narrative of the four gospels.  The effect of reading the words of Jesus like this is stark and powerful.  One realizes that the narrative of the gospels serves more than one purpose.  Not only does the narrative situate us in a particular landscape and move the story along, it also serves to cushion the sharply defined and at times severe words of our Lord.  Without the narrative of the gospels, Jesus’ sayings can seem probing, penetrating and potent.

In her reflections that accompany her compilation of Jesus’ sayings, Phyllis Tickle notes that biblical scholars have long pointed out the predominance of Jesus’ teachings about the end times.  When she was working on this Gospel of the Sayings of Jesus, Phyllis said that this emphasis in Jesus’ teachings came into stark relief for her.  Like many of us, Phyllis admitted that she had, over time, managed to lapse into a kind of theological laissez-faire about the end times and doctrines like eternal damnation.  In fact, she comments, many people like her have commonly assumed that focusing too much on things like this was only for “fundamentalists and weirdoes.”

But when you are faced with the intensity and frequency of Jesus’ teachings about these things, you tend to sit up and take notice.  In Phyllis’ case, it sent her deeper into prayer.  “And what I came out with,” she writes, “may be as ordinary and obvious to every other Christian as it has been barrier-breaking for me.  What the Sayings share and rest on is the very simple principle that human life cannot end.” (pp. 29-30)

Poets and philosophers through the ages have intuited and reasoned about the immortality of the soul, but in Jesus we find something different, something more intense, urgent and consuming.  It is as if a dim or flickering light has become extraordinarily brilliant and radiant in Jesus.  Phyllis Tickle describes her experience of God in Jesus as a “Yearning” for us, a burning to help us grasp the implications of our endless lives. 

In other words, it matters very much how we live our lives.  And although the concept of Hell has an inescapable concreteness in the Sayings of Jesus, our consolation is in realizing that God burns with desire for us and with the need to make God’s way of Life known to us.  It is not that we need to understand and profess all of the right doctrines.  Jesus was not yearning with a desire to have us all say the same creed.  Instead, he yearned with the desire to show us the Way of Life, so that we would devote our immortal souls to life, not death.

What does this mean for you?  This is something you have to discover for yourself, and the process of spiritual discovery requires something significant of us.  Listen intently with the ear of your heart to the words of Jesus.  Bring yourself to Communion with a deepening sense of reverence for the mystery of God’s presence with you and within you.  Recognize that there is a way of knowing that is deeper than intellectual knowing.  Listen with your heart, and take Jesus’ words with you in prayer.  Make your times of prayer frequent and regular – Christianity is not a drive-thru religion.  Do not expect sudden “aha” experiences; just be still in God’s presence, and rest in a posture of openness with our Lord’s sayings. 

Another way of saying this is, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)  Just remember: it’s not about having all the answers or believing the right doctrines; it’s about discovering the path of life, the pearl of great price, the joy for which we were created.

                                                                          Gary Jones +