Tag Archives: bible

Simeon’s Story – Part II

Posted on by under Original writing

(Part II of my reimagining of this story from the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 2. Part I can be found here.)

The couple came in with a baby, obviously preparing to offer a sacrifice for the child in accordance with the Law’s requirements. I stared at them as they passed. (I did so with many who entered the Temple, sometimes to their extreme discomfort.) The girl looked over and our eyes locked. There was something behind those eyes that I’d never seen before. It drew me to her with a call so faint I almost missed it. With more strength than I thought I possessed, I raised my weary bones to my feet and rushed to get closer to them. In my haste, I crashed into one of the money changers who made a mockery of the temple. If I’d knocked him to the ground, I wouldn’t have spent a moment regretting it. He didn’t belong there.

The woman, who was not much more than a child herself, didn’t move. She waited as if expecting my approach. To his credit, her companion stepped between us. His caution was understandable. A strange, wild-eyed old man who looked as if he was about to accost his wife justified his concern. In response, I paused. But the woman stepped around the man and stood before me with her little one. That’s when I got a good look at the baby.

It was the child.

I’d always expected the Anointed One to stride into view in royal attire, borne by a mighty stallion or a chariot, unmistakable, ready to assert His privilege and power. I pictured myself bowing before Him, worshiping Him in His glory. But it was a baby. A helpless infant. Surely I’d mistaken my hope for truth.

Nothing set this newborn apart from the many others I’d encountered over my long vigil. Little wisps of hair, ruddy wrinkled skin, eyes unfocused, cooing and fussing in his mother’s arms. No, it wasn’t just my hope. It was the Spirit once more, divulging a deep truth about the little one. It was him. Never had I been so sure of anything.

But what could I do? More than I could express, I wanted to touch him, make his parents understand who it was they held. Maybe I should have been satisfied merely to let my eyes rest on his tiny form and go home to die, content. Doubtless prompted by the same Spirit that drew me to her, the woman held the child out to me. I became aware of the fact that I was trembling. Nonetheless, I took him from her, in awe of what was happening.

Before I knew it, I was speaking. Or rather the Spirit was speaking through me. Having the Spirit speak to me, while precious, wasn’t new, but this? The words came tumbling out unbidden. I spoke to Jehovah. I spoke to the couple. The statements felt profound, prophetic, but I had no idea what they meant. If the couple looked confused and amazed, I was even more so. There would be time to mull over the meaning of the message later. For the moment, I held it in my heart. I could see his mother doing the same.

Then came the words I wish I could have swallowed rather than spoken. Better the bitterness in my mouth than wounding that poor woman. Even as I saw the message cut her, I felt the sword in my own heart. A heart attack? Was God so soon demanding my part of the prophecy? Was this already the end I’d long expected? No, it was our pain, the mother’s and mine, shared. But hers was yet to come.

It was finished. Carefully, tenderly, I handed the baby back to his mother. I tasted the tears on my lips before I realized I was crying. Was it joy? Perhaps. Was it the fact that I knew now that my days on earth would soon draw to a close? No. It was peace. I almost didn’t recognize it because it was a peace like nothing I’d ever known. It defied explanation and expectation. It was a sense of completion, of hope fulfilled, of a promise kept.

Out of respect, I dipped my head to the couple before they disappeared into the crowd, still looking unsure of what they’d seen and heard. I’d seen Him. I’d touched Him. And He had touched me.

To think I almost didn’t get out of bed.

Simeon’s Story – Part I

Posted on by under Original writing

(Believe what you want about the Bible—my personal belief is that it is the essentially true story of God’s dealing with humanity—but it is a treasure trove of great literature and stories. It’s often sparse on detail (and admittedly often excessive with esoteric minutia) but that’s part of the fun. One of my favorite writing exercises is to fill in those gaping holes by combining my limited cultural knowledge with my overactive imagination to create possible (if not likely) scenarios and profiles.

I’ve done this a few times before in this and my earlier blog. See here and here and here, for example. This time, I’m telling the story of a little known character from the Christmas story, a gentleman named Simeon. You can—and IMHO should—read the original story here.)

I almost didn’t get out of bed that morning. It hurt too much to move, never mind stand up and walk. Every joint in my body screamed for more rest. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering what I had to get up for. At my age, there was no one left to see and nothing I had to do, even if I still had the strength to do it.

People think to live a long life is a blessing. They’re mistaken. It’s a curse. The body weakens until it’s all but useless. Everyone you’ve ever known leaves you, rendering you more and more isolated until finally… you’re completely alone. The last friend I had died last year. I lost my beloved Joanna as she gave birth to Samuel, who, like his older siblings moved far away long ago. Samuel went north to Galilee, to Cana if memory serves, although it doesn’t serve me well these days. Asa, always captivated by the sea without ever having seen it, went to Joppa. He was determined to make his fortune sailing and trading around the Empire. I wonder if he ever achieved that goal. The rest of my surviving offspring migrated to God knows where. They used to visit when they came to Jerusalem for Passover or other other holy days. Over the years, they came less and less, rarely observing those festivals. It pains me to not see them but it hurts more that they’ve drifted away from Jehovah. He’s the only reason I’m still here—still in Jerusalem, yes, but also the reason I continue to live and breath.

In the end, with concerted effort and much groaning, I rose. It wasn’t my will but the Spirit that moved me. Years ago, back when I was a foolish youth with little promise, few prospects, and no hair on my chin, the Ancient of Days revealed to me (of all people!) that, before my time had run out, I would see His Messiah, the Christ, the consolation of all Israel. From that day on, I looked for any sign of His arrival. At first, it was mere curiosity. As I grew older, it became an obsession. Now that my body tells me daily that it has nearly run its course, I wonder if my youthful fantasy was just that. Was it the wishful thinking of a daydreaming boy or a true message from the Lord of Hosts? My faith began to waver but my will never did.

That morning I was inspired like never before to go to the temple. That’s where Jehovah meets us and that’s where I was certain I’d find the fulfillment of the prophecy He’d given me. I sat as always, enduring the whispers, snickers, and slights made at the expense of the poor old fool who thinks God speaks to him as if he were Moses. Does one have to be Moses to have a word from the Lord? I thought not. I hoped not. In spite of my hopes and expectations, the morning passed no differently than any other.

Until they walked by.

…to be continued

The Eighth Deadly Sin

Posted on by under Generic Rant

Most people can rattle off a few of the classic “seven deadly sins”, although few can name them all. According to Wikipedia, that Font of All Imperfect Knowledge (or FAIK), they were codified by Pope Gregory I in 590 AD. They are:

  • Pride
  • Greed (or my preferred rendering: Avarice)
  • Wrath
  • Envy
  • Lust
  • Gluttony
  • Sloth

It’s been said that envy is the only one in the list that has no upside. The others can be kind of fun to wallow in, for a little while anyway. That’s one problem with the list. The other, more troubling one, is that it no longer resembles a list of faults or transgressions. Rather, it reads like a job description for POTUS. (Seriously, look at that list and make the comparison yourself. It’s one thing to perpetrate those transgressions. It’s a whole ‘nother to brag about them.)

For a very long time, I’ve believed the list to be incomplete. There’s one I fall victim to as do most people I know, to our and society’s detriment.

Fear

Yup, I think fear might be the deadliest sin. For those who, like me, take their standards from the Christian Bible, you’ll find the pages there replete with exhortations to overcome fear or avoid it altogether. Here are a few:

  • “Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Jehovah, as recorded in Joshua 1:9
  • “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Jesus, in John 14:27
  • “…for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” St. Paul, in 2 Timothy 1:7
  • “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” St. John, the Beloved Disciple, in 1 John 4:18

And the grandaddy of them all, Psalm 23:

  • “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”

In fact, I once did an audit of the entire Bible in order to determine what the most common command in Scripture is. I can’t remember the exact order, but “fear not”, or some variation thereof, was first or second.*

Here are a few more excellent quotes that affirm the truth of the above:

  • “Everything you’ve ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.” – George Addair
  • “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” – Marianne Williamson (not Nelson Mandela, as some claim)
  • “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” – this one is Nelson Mandela
  • “There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life.” – John Lennon (I wonder if he knew he was merely paraphrasing St. John.)
  • “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” – Plato

Avoid this deadly sin, probably your elected leader’s greatest one, and the rest of the list becomes a whole lot easier. And less frightening.

Fear not…

* For the curious among you, the other charge was some form of “Go.” Combine those and you have something to think about. And do.

Poor Thomas

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a poor guy named Thomas. I don’t know his last name; he probably didn’t have one. But we all know his “first name”, which also turns out to be his claim to infamy:

Doubting

Yes, I’m talking about the Thomas in the Bible, chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, to be more precise. (Verses 24 through 29, to be even more precise. This is worth reading. Seriously.) As a result of the fact that he didn’t (at first) believe that Jesus had risen from the dead (would you?) he has been labeled “Doubting Thomas” for all of CE human history.

Now that’s just not fair.

Imagine if you were named based on the worst thing you ever did. Think about it. We’d be surrounded by…

  • Drunk Driving John
  • Sleazy Mary
  • Tax Cheat Phil
  • Swindler Suzy

Never mind if you rehabilitate yourself as Thomas did. You’re stuck with that miserable moniker as long as you live and, if Tom is any model, forever.

What would your nickname be???

Thank you for reading,
Lying Rick

Book burning is alive and… well…

Posted on by under Books, Generic Rant

Every year, libraries around the country commemorate (“celebrate” hardly seems like the appropriate word) banned books weeks and months. Everybody knows book banning and burning is the exclusive province of the far right fascistic wackazoids, right? Not exactly. As Ray Bradbury observed in his Coda to “Fahrenheit 451”, possibly the magnum opus on the topic:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-Day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.

Mr. Bradbury knows whereof he speaks as does his fictional Fire-Captain Beatty. After all, that’s his job, burning books. He has allies of all stripes everywhere.

Case in point: Imagine my surprise when I sat down to read a book about a quaint bookstore near Lucca, Italy, home of my forebears, only to discover the liberal feminist author, while decrying the practice of burning books in general, has no problem with it in specific cases. The specific case she not only accepts but endorses is regarding books she has a problem with. Oh, that’s original.

The book in question in her case is the Bible, arguably the most loved and hated literary work in all history. She has taken it upon herself to decide that the book should be removed from the face of the earth, one copy at a time.

How wonderful it would be to steal the books that can muddle people’s values and throw them into the fireplace!

Evidently her opinion that the Bible “muddles people’s values” justifies eliminating a book that has not only created most people’s values, but has been a comfort to billions. But this author says that’s not good enough for her. She says burn’em, so they’re thrown into the fire, a la every autocrat who has ever trod too heavily on this planet.

She had at least one ally/inspiration who actually did it. He stole copies of the Bible wherever he found them, including from friends’ libraries, brought them home and put them to the torch. Why? Because the God he didn’t believe in in the first place refused to answer his prayers. There’s so much inconsistency in that, it’s hard to know where to begin. So I won’t.

I’ll be the first to admit that people have misused the Bible for their own destructive non-Biblical purposes throughout history. The same can be said of a lot of literature. Burn’em all, right? As a liberal, maybe you oughtta start with Ayn Rand. She’s responsible for much of what’s wrong with (at least) the US, IMHO. I’ll bet you’ll find plenty more kindling where she came from.

Hey, if you’re going to broil the Bible, why not also cook the books it inspired? There goes “Brothers Karamazov”, “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “Ben-Hur”, and countless others. Feel free to combust a couple of my favorite writers while you’re at it, Anne Lamott and Frederick Buechner. You have the blaze going anyway, so you might as well toss in some Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Start down that road and you’ll have enough fuel to heat your home for a good long time.

This character, a self-proclaimed poet, goes on to say:

We shouldn’t burn books, I know. I’d still like to claim it as a symbolic act of reparation though, an irreverent prank a la Pippi Longstocking.

Pippi Longstocking? A prank? Seriously? Perhaps we were only punked by Third Reich, too! I guess that makes it okay. How many librarians would sign off on that philosophy come Banned Books Week?

I shouldn’t be surprised at this author’s hubris. This is another line from the book:

Autumn is also when my daughter, Laura, was born: my very own contribution to the fairy tale, something else I created from nothing–no mean feat.

The author created her daughter. Alone. From nothing. Ex nihilo. So neither the father nor nature/God/evolution (whichever you subscribe to) had any part in her “creation”. Well, with that much God-like power, she should be allowed to do anything she wants, just like a certain former president. I’m sure she’d blanch at the thought of being compared to such a moron/tyrant, but if the orange skin fits…

One more similarity between her and the former Oompa-Loompa-in-Chief who once sullied the White House carpets: Her dubious command of the language. She uses the illogical form, “each one is better than the next” when she means precisely the opposite. Some poet. Yes, English is not the language of her birth, but that’s no excuse for this bit of nonsense; it’s logic, not language. I’m no proficient wordsmith but even I know enough not to write the opposite of what I mean because I’m ignorant of the structure of a sentence. I railed against this very expression and a few other egregious transgressions against the language eleven years ago in this post on my other blog.

There’s actually a lot more of questionable value in this memoir—time prevents me from going into any further detail—but I stopped reading before she made any more brain-dead mistakes or outrageous claims to power over the universe and what I can and can’t read. Bradbury was right. Every point on the political spectrum has a match and is ready to wield it.

Look, lady, you aren’t the first frustrated wannabe authoritarian who’s burnt the Bible and you won’t be the last. Before you ignite the conflagration, I suggest you work on whatever it is that makes you so comfortable with being a hypocrite.

Man of the tombs (rerun)

Posted on by under Original writing

Two years ago almost to the day, I wrote a little story about a man who had a confrontation with Jesus. We don’t know his real name. He is known by what possessed him. I post it again here for a few reasons. First, life is hectic and I need the break. Second, it’s a bit of original writing that, although it first appeared in my other blog, Limping in the Light, finds its more proper place here. Third, with Black Friday approaching, one message I found behind the story takes on greater urgency. I’ll explain in the “afterword” below.

 

manofthetombsI was free until he came into my life.

I could come and go as I pleased and no one could prevent me.  Believe me, they tried.  Crowds of men would come and try to hold me down, as many as ten men at once.  They seized my arms and legs, leaped on my chest, locked their arms around my neck, thinking they could choke the life out of me.  I threw them aside as effortlessly as a fisherman tosses his nets out over the nearby Sea of Galilee.  Back then, I had the strength of thirty, forty, fifty men.

Sometimes, just to taunt my assailants, I would let them bind me.  I feigned struggle as they wound the chains around my chest, legs, and arms then clamped my ankles in irons.  When they were done and stood back, finally satisfied that they had subdued me, I stared at them with all the spite that was in my soul and shook off the shackles as if they were made of parchment.  My would-be captors ran off in panic.

They were afraid of me.  My strength frightened them.  My freedom threatened them.  They wanted nothing to do with me and that was the way I wanted it, too.  Their fear simply fueled my hatred for them and their common, contemptible lives.

I didn’t want to be anywhere near the people of the Decapolis – my home! – so I raced up and down the hills with abandon, howling my independence by day and night.  But most of the time I ran free among the tombs.  The dead didn’t bother me; they didn’t try to deny me my freedom.

One day, I found myself trembling.

Rumors of a fresh power sailed across the water before the boats driven by the winds over Galilee.  When they reached me, I was conflicted within.  Gazing over the waters from the top of a distant hill, I saw a man standing in a boat.  He stepped out and stood in the lapping water as if he was waiting for something.

He was waiting for me.

Like never before, I was driven to him.  Nothing and no one had ever compelled me like this man who was still merely a distant image.  Yet there was an opposing force inside me that was tearing at me to hold back.

What was this feeling?  The freedom that defined me now eluded me, replaced by an unnamed conflict within.  I could do nothing; I had no will.  Before I was aware of my own actions, I was at the feet of the stranger.  He spoke something in my direction, but it could not have been meant for me.  I didn’t understand his words.

Someone shouted a response in an acrid voice, or rather a chorus of voices that sounded like a mob all screeching at once.  “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  In God’s name don’t torture me!”

The sound came from my mouth.  I felt as if I was standing aside, watching the freakish scene play out before me.  The man the voices called Jesus asked, “What is your name?”  Before I could respond, the voices answered him.  I shuddered as I heard the wretched multitude of tongues growl “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

The voices terrified me, but they were the voices I knew.  It was my voice that spoke next the words that were a betrayal of myself, though I no longer knew who I was.  “Don’t send them away, Jesus.”  Maybe I was trying to convince myself because I repeated it over and over.

There was pity in Jesus’ eyes as he watched me writhing on the ground.  The Legion I feared and needed spoke from my depths, begging Jesus to send them into a herd of pigs that had been my only neighbors when I wandered these hills.  Jesus bade them go and they destroyed those pigs just as they had laid waste to my life all those years.

The citizens who wanted nothing to do with this wild man who ran naked among the tombs made it clear that they wanted less to do with my savior.  When they came out to drive Jesus away from their homes, they found me seated at the feet of Jesus, where I’d belonged all my life.  No matter where I would go, I would forever be his.

I was free indeed.

There is a literal meaning to this story, a tale of one man’s spiritual bondage and redemption. But, as with so much of scripture, there is a lesson for all of us, too. You can read my explanation of that lesson here in the post that followed this one in LITL. I commend it to your attention.