Job pt. 1

Begins with THE main human addiction: materialism. Job is RICH. He's got lots and lots of stuff. And we humans, we like STUFF. lots of it. Greed! We are constantly looking for little "boosts" that we feel in mood or happiness with a new purchase. I thought it is interesting to read this ancient text and see the story of Job start with a guy who has a lot of STUFF.

year of living Biblically

I read the intro to the book The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. I thought I would share some pieces of it. I really like this paragraph: "The influence of the Bible--and religion as a whole--remains a mighty force, perhaps even stronger than it was when I was a kid. So in the last few years, religion has become my fixation. Is half of the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on a part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And most important, I now have a young son--if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don't want to pass it on to him."

So A.J. Jacobs gets the idea to follow the Bible literally from his (ex) Uncle Gil. ("The Bible says to bind money to your hand [Deuteronomy 14:25], so Gil withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank and tied the bills to his palm with a thread. The Bible says to wear fringes on the corners of your garment [Numbers 15:38], so Gil bought yarn from a knitting shop, made a bunch of tassels, and attached them to his shirt collar and the ends of his sleeves...")

He confesses that his first motive for reading the Bible and trying to follow it literally was to write the book. His second though, is that: "If I had what they call a God-shaped hole in my heart, this quest would allow me to fill it" (6).

And his third reason? To explore biblical literalism. "A literal intrepretation of the Bible--both Jewish and Christian--shapes American policies on the Middle East, homosexuality, stem cell research, education, abortion--right on down to rules about buying beer on Sunday" (6).

As we talk about in class, he says, "But my suspicion was that almost everyone's literalism consisted of picking and choosing...Not me. I thought, with some naivete, I would peel away the layers of interpretation and find the true Bible underneath" (6-7).

Everyone is worried about how this adventure will affect him. He says, "It's impossible to immerse yourself in religion for twelve months and emerge unaffected. At least it was for me" (7).

He reads it: "four weeks, five hours a day" (8). As he reads, he types up every rule and bit of advice he can find, ending up with "a very long list" (8).

He says, "This is going to be a monster project. I need a plan of attack." Um yeah... He notes that some of the rules (no lying, no coveting, no stealing, love your neighbor etc.) will make him a better person, while others will make him strange. "And a good number of the rules aren't just baffling, but federally outlawed" (8).

I learned that there are an estimated three thousand versions of the Bible in English alone.

He says: "To follow the Bible literally--at face value, at its wort, according to its plain meaning--isn't just a daunting proposition. It's a dangerous one" (9).

He makes some decisions. First, "I will try to find the original intent of the biblical rule or teaching and follow that to the letter" (10). He decides to devote the majority of his year (8 months) to the Old Testament because that is where the bulk of rules are (and many of the rules in the New Testament are similar). He decides to talk to some people: "rabbis, ministers, and priests, some of them conservative, some of them one four-letter word away from excommunication" (11). He decides to visit groups of Biblical literalists (Orthodox Jews, Amish etc.). But ultimately, "they won't be the final word. The Bible will" (11). He wants to discover the Bible for himself.

Interesting: his Orthodox Jewish Aunt says "You can't just obey the written law. It doesn't make sense without the oral law" (12). Apparently you need rabbis to explain what "rest on the sabbath" means. I thought that was interesting, and it points out the glaring fact to me that I don't know much about religious customs.

Also interesting: "Some conservative Christians were also baffled by my undertaking. They said I couldn't truly understand the Bible without accepting the divinity of Christ. They said that many of these laws--like the ones about animal sacrifice--were nullified by Jesus's death" (12). I guess this helps me understand Biblical literalism somewhat--I have a real hard time understanding why people FIGHT against evolution being taught in schools and think that creation ( or the "scientific" theory of the irreducibly complex) should be taught instead; or at the very least along side it...

Jacobs says he is nervous about his quest. I would be as well. He says, "I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, and fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia" (13). Good point. Also points out how fantastically influential this single text is. Blows my mind to think of how much influence the Bible has today, let alone adding up its past as well. Amazing. How is it even possible that this one book has essentially controlled millions? For so long? Reminds me again, of complexity theory in science. Which basically would say that the Bible took hold, as opposed to any other text, by fluke. But once it gained momentum and power, its momentum and power kept growing. So the Bible take over has emergent properties: it took over because it took over...

Overall, I found the introduction to be an entertaining read. He is a descriptive writer, and he kept my attention (I hear that is difficult to do these days). Did I mention that he took a Biblical literature class in college?

Susanna part 2

Music is feeling. I think i may have said this before but music conveys this whole realm of human expression that cannot be conveyed descriptively through language. Music touches us deeply. We sing when we are sad, and emotions pour from the depth of our souls. We sing when we are happy and our hearts are lifted up. I, too, believe there is a silent music of the earth, of our existence. There is a music in the silence that we can feel if only we pay attention. Emotions are music and music is emotion. Dance to the vibration of the earth and you will learn to listen to your heart, for our hearts speak, not in words, but in music. Our hearts beat out a steady rhythm. So we each exist to our own music--the music of the physical body. Susanna is pure. She is in tune with her own music and rhythm as she feels the sensual touch of water, of leaves on her hands. She is connected with the earth and a part of it. And the elders are somehow separated from the earth. They deny the music of their bodies until it can no longer be suppressed and comes surging and beating out.

Wallace Stevens evokes in my head this image of this woman who is so pure of heart, she listens to her heart and to the sounds of the world and she is connected with nature and herself. She is experiencing the bliss of the moment. Then, suddenly:

A breath upon her hand

Muted the night.

She turned —

A cymbal crashed,

Amid roaring horns.

Her whole world crashes in on her and everything begins to move very quickly--the poem moves from beautiful, sweet to crashing, loud, chaos (almost) like one of Beethoven's symphonies.

Though her physical beauty may fade, the fact that she was beautiful remains--it is in the past, it is preserved. Though the event of Susanna and the elders is over, it yet lives because it happened and it happens. It is a story of human experience. People are mortal, but this universal experience and this universal music is immortal. As long as humans live there will be beauty, there will be deceit and lies and truth and honesty and purity and goodness and evil and peace and war and desire. The essence of the story is immortal. This is what I take from the end of the poem.

susanna part 1

I spent 7 hours yesterday dealing with my sick horse yesterday. So I plan to write more, but am trying to get initial thoughts down.

Susanna as a woman offers the promise of ecstasy to the elders. Because women hold the power of the physical enjoyment of her body. She is beautiful, and therefore she holds power in her beauty. I think the poem compares the power that her physical body holds to the power of music. It is something that cannot be described using words. Wallace Stevens uses poetry to conjure up the feeling of desire and longing in us, the readers. Susanna is pure in her beauty because she does not sin. Perhaps it is her rejection of the elders that demonstrates what great power beauty and sex have over them. They want her even more because she rejects them and this leads them to anger and desire for revenge.

But Susanna, the woman, is pure of heart. And justice comes to her because of that.

More to come later...

suffering

I had planned to spend the weekend catching up on my reading for this class. Then Saturday I felt physically ill, and combined with this pile of emotional burdens I carry, I could not. Then sunday slipped away. And today, I cannot stop crying.
I am sitting here looking at a picture I took of my dad the day he died. It was just after sunrise, and so the sun is brilliant. And he is smiling. He emits this glow from the photograph; the same glow that is evident in so many photographs, and in so many memories. My dad radiated happiness and gratitude.

Sometimes I think I would have given anything to had at least some warning. My whole system is still confused by what happened that day; I am still reeling. But steadily, this sludge of reality is sinking in. He's dead. Gone. I cannot call him. I cannot hug him. And with it, reality brings deep holes of grief. I feel so much pain in my life right now. Less than a month after my dad died, my mom and I had to have our dog put down. My mom has Parkinson's disease, making our already slightly strained relationship more complicated. My horse is sick, probably infected with EPM, a neurological parasite. He was treated for the disease 4 years ago, but it seems to come back. Most of my friends are working a lot now, with school. My boyfriend works heinous hours. So I am alone much of my time. I have always embraced aloneness, and I believe that loneliness is part of the essence of the grief process. Loneliness is a part of the definition of grief. No one can share the memories I have with my dad. They are mine alone. Yet this means that the pain that comes from those memories is mine alone as well. I think for me, the loneliness is compacted by the trauma of watching my dad die. I have never felt more alone than I did on that mountain, coming down without him.

At first, I wanted to scream to everyone: "my dad just died of a massive heart attack on a mountain in front of me! He was so healthy! My dad!" and at the same time that I want to scream this out I want to deny it. This urge has quieted a bit, as the day to day activities slowly begin to feel something close to normal again.

I do not want to sound like such a "downer", but that's what my life is right now. I lay this foundation because I want to talk about my experiences with suffering, and to share some of what has come from it. I am experiencing grief, just as everyone who is alive now will at some point in their life times. Death is as much a part of life as birth, and therefore, grief too is very much a part the human experience. We all must grieve; we all must suffer. Pain is hard to deal with. We want to run from it, stuff it down, kill it with medication, avoid, ignore...anything but feel it. But to feel pain is to allow it to pass on.

I told my friend Anna the other day that sometimes I want to go back to the days just after my dad's death. Those days are a blur, I was so numb. I have never lived more in the present moment than I did then. I had to. I had to extract every possible joy from each moment; I had to revel in the feeling of breath in my lungs, marvel at the sound of my heart beat, gasp at how terribly fragile life is. But it is the fragile-ness of life that make it so precious.

I found a quote in a grief meditations book that someone gave me that I read often. It really spoke to me, and spoke to my experience. Ironically, it is one of the few quotes in this book that is somewhat religious.

"She thought that she had never before had a chance to realize the might, grimness and tenderness of God. She thought that now for the first time she began to know herself, and she gained extraordinary hope in this beginning of knowledge."

-James Agee

The author of the meditations book, Martha Witmore Hickman adds: "If we have ever wondered about the limits of our strength and our ability to endure, our experience of loss will tell us much. Our life is shaken to the foundation. But we survive. And our of this terrible, rarefied self-knowledge comes, if we are fortunate, a kind of empathy with all creation--a sense of wonder at the suffering and the beauty, of the world. "

When I realized my dad was having a heart attack on the mountain, I felt this rising, almost uncontrollable urge to panic. But I told myself "You cannot." And I did not. From this experience, I was able to access a level of deep calm that I did not know I was capable of. I learned that I am capable of handling a situation that is worse than a nightmare, and I am stong enough to slowly step out of that situation and continue living. There have been moments when I am profoundly aware of this moving forward. The first huge step was starting down the mountain alone. I remember looking back and seeing my dad's body, just lying there. The body. Only moments before, he had been a man. He had been my dad. When I first realized that I would have to hike down without him, I took off and immediately tripped and fell. I stood up, took some deep breathes and told myself: "Natalie, you have to get off this mountain safely." I carefully took another step, and walked down the mountain and into my new reality. I did not notice until I was at the bottom of the mountain, in the Ranger's office, that my knee was bleeding.

Because my dad died in Boulder county, he was at the coroner's office there for a few days. He died so suddenly, and his medical records were so clean that they had to do a complete autopsy to rule out foul play. My mom flew up to Denver the day dad died. I called her from the mountain, a short ways down from where he died. By the time I got to the trail head, she was on her way up. We had a few days in Denver to digest. I was glad for that time, for by the time we got back to Durango, CO, there had been enough in the paper that many had figured out what happened and were waiting to hug me and comfort me and do....something! (All of this, as anyone knows who has gone through a painful experience is a bit overwhelming). Anyway, my next big step was leaving Denver for Durango. I felt it was another step out of my cloud toward reality. The last big step was leaving Durango to return to Bozeman. I remember walking into my apartment the night I got back and seeing the passage of time everywhere: dust, rotting food in the fridge...it was bizarre to see my apartment the way I had left it and to think of how different my life was when I had left compared to my return. And yes, since I've been back in Bozeman, I do feel like reality is sinking in, and along with it the grief. Today, three months ago, my dad met me in Estes Park, and we had a lovely diner. He was happy and healthy and content and so, so alive.

Anyway, I said above that I wanted to address the question of why we suffer. And I want to do so by sharing with you my experience.

Life is about extracting every possible inch or crumble of joy we can from every moment. Because a lot of life sucks. Everyone has bad moments. Sometimes you think a day is a bad day. But I think there are no truly bad days, only a bad perspective. The bad day I shared in class, for example. Yes in the moment it sucked, but now I can look back and think that that day brought my mom and I closer. It gave us the ability to connect in a way that we otherwise might not have. I am glad I could be there to support her through the day that should have been my parent's 30th wedding anniversary. And I was glad she was there to support me through that day, missing him, and through my horse's sudden illness. Therefore, even though the day was difficult, there was something beautiful that emerged. Nicholas Kristof said that when he travels to the darkest, most corrupt, violent places in the world, he also finds alongside the awfulness, examples of absolute goodness that humanity is capable of. I think this is why we suffer. Because to truly appreciate what we are grateful for in life, we must experience loss. Because grief adds a whole new highness to the feeling of joy.

Author Paulo Coehlo uses wine as a metaphor: "You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one" (Brida).

Because beauty comes from pain; pain is never alone; for me it is accompanied by good things that come from it's experience. When I was little and I was sick or had teeth pulled, no matter how miserable I was, I could always be grateful that my loving parents were there to take care of me. Now, I can be grateful for what my friends can give me for support during this time. I am grateful for all of the love I currently experience in my life, and for all of the love that I have experienced.

With the pain of my dad's death comes a strange gratitude. I am grateful for the pain, for the depth of the loss and the suffering. My hole is so deep because the man who left it was so great. My dad and I had a special connection that I will never experience with another human. He loved me intensely and unconditionally. And I will never stop loving him. I can say that I have no large regrets. My dad and I had a wonderful relationship, and there was no unfinished business or hardness between us. How many people can say that about their fathers? I have more good memories with my dad in 22 years than many people have in 50. I can be oh so grateful for those happy memories, for all the photographs.

Something inside me smiles when people tell me that my experience led them to reevaluate a relationship in their life. My best friend, Page, told me that she is really treasuring every moment with her mother. That she feels a sort of urgency to ask her mother all the questions she has been wanting to ask and to enjoy her mother as much as she can. The park ranger who helped me to the bottom of the mountain told me as I was leaving that she was going to call her dad: "yeah...we don't get along that well. But I think I need to call him. I need to call him." And many other people have told me that they have reevaluated relationships with parents, their health, perhaps the priorities in their lives. So from my dad's death comes inspiration. I had several people tell me that his obituary and his funeral were just that: inspiring. I feel proud to be the daughter of my father. He truly lived his life by his ideals and values. He was passionate about his work, he was passionate about being a volunteer firefighter, passionate for the mountains, wilderness and wildness in general really, and most of all passionate about his family. He made huge sacrifices to always be there to support me in any event that I did, and he would always take my calls, no matter how busy or stresses he might have been. He made us, his family, such a priority in his life. And for this I am so, so grateful. I have to question myself, would I be this grateful for these memories if my dad had not died so suddenly and tragically?

I have found myself scrutinizing every aspect of my dad that is within me. I have always known that I am a lot like my dad. We even look a lot alike. But through the experience of looking through so many photographs and all of his files, all of his personal belongings--what cards he kept, what articles he saved--I have learned so much about my father. And the more I learn about him, the more closely I examine him, the more of him I find in myself.

My dad was always trying to teach me to follow my dreams, and to learn to love myself. He often told me that when I couldn't sleep at night, I should repeat the mantra: "I like myself." But I have this funny habit of judging and putting down many aspects of myself. This experience of grief has changed that for me. I have found so much strength within myself that I did not know I had; and I have found so much of him in me. I love him so much, how can I hate something that I love? I have begun to embrace those parts of myself that I think come from him, and I have found so much of myself that I can be proud of and grateful for. My whole perception of myself has shifted. I also feel like my entire perspective on life has changed. I now know how precious every moment is, and how quickly life can be over. Just because I am young does not make me immune to death, and I think it is healthy to have some awareness of our mortality, so that we may enjoy every moment more in knowing that this life is not forever. Through the suddenness of my dad's death, I have learned to focus on today, and today is the day to do what i want to do. Or it is the day to work towards what I truly want to be doing.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I had had some warning. I am almost jealous of friends whose parents died from cancer. I think "at least they knew death was approaching." But, first of all, I do not think there is any benefit that can be gained from comparing our experiences of pain or grief, every experience is different, and second of all, I look at the photographs of me and him on the day, oblivious to looming death, happy to be together in the mountains. And I think that my dad died exactly as he would have wanted to die. He was in the mountains, in a beautiful and spiritual place, he was doing something he loved. He was healthy up until those last moments. And he was with me, the daughter he has always adored. He said he wanted to "flame out". I think he got his final wish.

Sometimes I wish with all of my heart that I did not have to carry the experience of watching my father die with me. And yet, I am so grateful to have been there. I have no questions about his death; I know we did absolutely everything possible, and there simply was no way to save him. And especially because my dad and I did not have the opportunity to see each other frequently recently, I am so, so thankful that I was able to spend that final day with him. And I am thankful that I could be there with him; I like to think i was a source of some comfort during those final painful moments. In a way, this experience pushes my relationship and my closeness with my dad onto another level. I feel so close to him now.

how to read scripture

Has anyone looked at the section titled "Strategies for Reading Scripture"? I just opened my Bible to that page and something on it caught my attention, especially after all the Frye I've emersed myself with lately. John Barton writes: "First, we should read the Bible in the expectation that what we find there will be true." He goes on to talk about some groups of Christians where the "truth that is looked for is literal and historical truth, so that whatever the biblical text affirms is taken to be factually accurate." But, Barton notes, many do not subscribe to this theory and therefore the "truth it contains may sometimes be poetic or symbolic truth rather than factual truth, but it is not an option to suggest that anything in the Bible is an expression of error." That last bit is the part that caught my attention. Who is he to say "it is not an option"? What about free will and intellectual freedom etc. are we not free to interpret for ourselves this text?

More on Frye.

Pg 30. "...myth is the linguistic vehicle of kerygma, and...to 'demythologize' any part of the Bible would be the same thing as to obliterate it."

pg 32-33. "Certain stories seem to have a peculiar significance: they are the stories that tell a society what is important for it to know, whether about its gods, its history, its laws, or its class structure."

This reminds me of the complexity theory in theoretical physics. Complexity is that which exists just prior to chaos theory. I remember reading somewhere about how things took hold in society, eventually to impact/influence massively almost at random. The influence of the particular stories that happen to make up the Bible seem like a good example of this. Almost by chance, these words came together to perforate and impact society in every facet of our western cultural life (including many ways that we are probably yet unaware of). I would doubt that the authors of this text had this intention.

pg 40. "The general principle involved here is that if anything historically true is in the Bible, it is there not because it is historically true but for different reasons. The reasons have presumably something to do with spiritual profundity or significance. And historical truth has no correlation with spiritual profundity, unless the relation is inverse." So why do we have this ongoing CONSTANT battle between fundamentalist Christians and evolution? I have never been able to understand why anyone would attempt to take the Bible literally. I guess this relates to the discussion in class about the easiest way to halt learning is by giving an answer. The issue gets rather complicated, because the traditionalist view of the Bible is based on faith; but does this necessarily mean that faith includes faith in the "truth" (in a very modern, concrete and scientific, if you will, sense) of the events that occur in the Bible?

pg 44. "...one should doubtless keep an open mind about them, though an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake." I really like this comment. Why is it that we are so stubborn in our beliefs? I guess it is the same with anything; somewhere deep down we are afraid of change in every facet (despite that the whole human experience is change--nothing is static).

Pg. 44. "The first thing that occurred to me was that the Bible itself could not care less whether anyone ever finds an ark on Mount Ararat or not: such 'proofs' belong to a mentality quite different from any that could conceivably have produced the Book of Genesis." So simple, yet so profound and difficult to grasp. Once again, we are limited in our comprehension of the Bible because we are trapped in this time period; with our own pre-concieved notions of the way the world is viewed by humanity. It is difficult to understand such a different world-view and way of thinking. We have no way of experiencing it.

Pg 50. "All human societies are insulated to some degree by a culture that surrounds them and separates them from nature." And yet we continue to try to "return to nature" (at least in modern times, it seems to be a re-occurring trend, probably more pronounced in areas like Bozeman...). I do not really have anything "profound" to say about this quote, but it grabbed my attention.

Looking back through Frye (trying to grasp meaning from his WORDS--I find it much too easy to drift off in thought while reading Frye, although when I force myself to pay attention and extract meaning he is fascinating).

Pg. 17. God is a verb: I've heard this before. Dr. Mike Miles says that by even applying the name "God" (or any other name for this essence, Yahweh) we lose something of that which we are trying to describe; the best way to understand "God" according to Dr. Miles, is to stop trying to understand (it, Him?). When he was talking about this, I also remember him quoting the phrase "I am that I am". God is a verb. Author Paulo Coelho agrees with this definition of God. He also thinks we have spent too much time and energy trying to define and describe God.

Living in the demotic phase of language, the age of SCIENCE and FACT and TRUTH etc, it makes sense that humans will also try to apply this same view of the world to their religion. The main problem with this of course is that through logic, religion no longer becomes necessary for it is replaced by science and laws and government. So why do we continue to do this? Why the constant culture clash between religious fanatics and evolutionary biologists? Why the constant clash between religions, for that matter (which all seem to have arisen from one common ancestor of religion...)

Pg. 18 "'In the beginning was the Word' as 'in principio erat sermo'. This is a purely metonymic translation: in the beginning, Erasmus assumes, was the infinite mind, with its interlocking thoughts and ideas out of which the creative words emerged." This passage really grabbed my attention. I think it illustrates the power in words during the metonymic phase.

Frye talks about objective observation and how it is essentially obsolete because any observation is affected by the observer, from which we cannot remove ourselves. Using this line of thinking, how can we possibly understand the Bible as it is meant to be understood when we are stuck in the demotic age of language and the Bible was written during the two previous phases of language? Which raises the question: is it necessary to understand the Bible as it was "meant" to be understood? (it seems to me that this is the basis for many arguments among religious folk; everyone seems to think they know better how to best interpret the Bible...)

Frye says that the modern function of literature is to continue re-creating the earlier phases of language (metaphorical phase especially) (23). I have trouble wrapping my head around the functions of earlier literature; also have trouble with the idea that it was "not until the coming of a different conception of language that a tension arises between figurative and what is called "literal" meaning, and poetry begins to become a conscious and deliberate use of figures" (23). Probably because I am stuck in this scientific, factual, descriptive, demotic age. Yet how somehow Utopian and beautiful it seems to me, this idea of speaking primarily in metaphor. I feel like so much more could have been conveyed by provoking a much deeper sense of meaning, rather than a logical thought that is our current way of understanding and comprehending the world. Pg 28 on poetry: "persuading the emotions to follow their intellectual guidance.") Which ties nicely into Frye's point that language uses us, not vice versa. I have noticed this in the scientific world: the power of words and meaning is apparent there. There are words that are not acceptable in the scientific community. For example, scientists do not "believe" something to be true, rather they "propose".

Aha! a quote from Frye that goes with one of my earlier statements pg 26 (he is talking about Kant's writings): "God's existence disappears from the context of "pure reason", where rational proofs are needed, but reappears in the context of "practical reason," where reality in experience is what is appropriate."