Scriptural History

I am absolutely in love with this:

Victory to the People

The title doesn't at all convey what you're getting. It's the story of the Bible, not the Bible story. The history of the text.  With a tone that I can't get over. Any time anyone can say, "Eusebius of Nicomedia got all butthurt over this, and remained pissed off for the rest of his life," that's worth celebrating.

I spoke with Eusebius of Nicomedia briefly, and he said, "I'm still not over it."  So there you have it.  I won't quote; you should read the whole thing

Okay, I will guote:

(When Constantine heard this he said, “Can’t you guys just get along? Why not agree to disagree like every other friggin’ philosopher since Plato was a pup, and get on with your lives?” to which both sides answered “No!!!!eleventy!!!” and thus Nicea.

Come on. How can you not like that.

Some time after that, Constantine went to Eusebius of Caesarea and said, “Yo, Pamphili!” (Eusebius’ friends called him “Pamphili”), “You’ve got the biggest collection of fanzines in the world. How about you put together the teaching anthology?”

Yeah.  That's good stuff.  Go. Read it.

Metaphor

It's a classic defense to claim that you were employing a metaphor, just as it is a classic defense to claim that your listeners were employing one incorrectly. Metaphor is dangerous, because you never have to say what you mean, and people don't like that.

It's not like a simile, where you say, "Hey, racists are like pigs because they eat slop, their shit smells awful, and they're only good dead."  People expect an explanation to a simile. "Okay, so you're saying that this thing is like this other thing. How so?" they ask.  And the answer satisfies them that yes, while you can describe the first thing by evoking the second, the first thing is distinct and different and it's merely a way of describing and not a literal equivalence.

But metaphor doesn't work that way.  "Racists are pigs, stewing in their own offal, declining to contribute anything of benefit to society except their deaths."  Yes, you might see that I am indeed saying the same thing about racists as I did before: they eat, and smell like, shit, and we enjoy them more dead than alive.  But note: I am not explaining; I am elaborating on the metaphor, thickening it, but I'm not saying anything about racists, I'm saying it about pigs and then saying that a subclass of the pig is the racist.  Racists are pigs.

That's confusing.  I mean, do I really think racists are pigs?  Of course I don't; that's an insult to pigs, which are wonderful, loving, intelligent creatures which just happen to possess certain attributes which can be used to amplify how I feel about racists.  And it's convenient, so I start simply saying, "Racist pigs," when I mean to say, "Racists who embody these traits which can be metaphorically illustrated by a comparison to a pig."  And then I just say, "pigs," because the rest is implied. The metaphor has legs.

Surely not.  Surely it doesn't work that way.  Why would I remove the racist part?  That's the part that's important.  Because language is literal and never figurative, and what I say is exactly what I mean, and I won't die and have my words passed down and translated and misheard.  If I preserve the exact condition of my original statement of metaphor, people can tell that I mean it metaphorically.

But let's look closer: sure, people might know that I meant, "Racists are pigs," metaphorically, but what about "stewing in their own offal?" Do pigs literally (using the term which has come to mean the exact opposite of its literal meaning, which is irony of the highest order, another term that doesn't mean what it literally means) stew in shit?  They cook themselves in a pot filled with shit?  I think not.  Stewing is a metaphor so far removed that it has become simply figurative language.  And do I think that, describing racists as pigs, I am saying that they wallow around in their own fecal matter?  Dear God, there are layers here, and I'm terrified, so instead of following the trail and discovering that maybe there might be turtles all the way down... well, it's hard to be entirely literal because the sentence I'm currently finishing had at least two easily-identifiable turns of metaphorical phrase, and if you keep digging, pretty much everything we say and do that isn't a concrete noun or verb is a metaphor at the bottom.  Language is symbolism. Language isn't literal.

That's terrifying to people who want a straight answer.  Absolutely baffling and terrifying.  You know (or may be, in which case I'm sorry but you should get your head out of your ass, though not literally) one of these people: they were the kids in school who, when the teacher was reviewing what would be on the test, would always want to know what the answer should be, even to the essay questions; they're the folks who don't like long passages when a short summary could do; who don't like nuance; who don't read "hard" books or, if they do, think Moby Dick is about the whale and Dante's Inferno is a tour guide to Hell.  They're not bad people, but they can't deal with uncertainty.

The world is an uncertain place. That's scary. But believing that something is literal, or can be literal, just because it's hard to understand any other way isn't helping. It's sticking your fingers in your ears and humming loudly while the doctor tells you that the cancer isn't responding to treatment, then going home and having a "Cancer Free!" party, then wondering why everyone is surprised when you get sicker.  It's... well, it's a metaphor, because that's the only thing I can do to continue to talk about it without just saying exactly what it is again, which is, "believing that something is literal, or can be literal, just because it's hard to understand."

A lot of time is spent on "literalist" readers of the Bible (to pick something totally at random) and how they don't get that even though they claim that there's only one literal meaning to the text, they're applying their own interpretation.  There are some very good pieces being written on the subject; I link to this one because, well, it's apropos.

But I think a deeper issue exists than people being unable to understand that there's no way to read something without interpreting it.  It's recognizing that, regardless of "interpretation" you might be missing the fact that the whole thing is a metaphor.  When it says, "Samson slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass," maybe we have to take that in context and realize that The Bible isn't sanctioning the slaughter of Palestinians with a very small bone in that verse, but more than that, maybe we have to consider that, "slaying the Philistines," and, "jawbone of an ass," might very well not mean anything like what they "literally" mean to anyone, even if we were able to divine exactly what literal meaning they should have somehow.

I'm not a Biblical scholar. I don't pretend to be. So my example is necessarily wrongheaded and stupid because I don't know what the metaphors were and thus I'm as at sea as anyone trying to read the Bible as a literal text with literal intentions.  But suppose we take "Philistines" for a moment.  In our wonderfully figurative language, "Philistine" has become "philistine" and is used to refer to those who... well, let's let Miriam Webster take a crack at it.

a :  a person who is guided by materialism and is usually disdainful of intellectual or artistic values

b :  one uninformed in a special area of knowledge

Because at some point, someone said, "Boy, that materialistic person who has no knowledge and is disdainful of intellectual or artistic values sure is a Philistine, an enemy of God's Word (that's what it means, so let that be a lesson to anyone)."  Metaphor. Give it long enough, it takes off and everyone forgets everything but the object being metaphorically used for comparison.

So there's a legend about slaying enemies of God's Word that didn't make it into the Bible, probably because it wasn't actually about slaying enemies of God's Word and in fact may have predated the whole idea of God's Word(shocking, I know).  And in it, the hero slays his enemies, who happened to be people who could be described as Philistines at the time the Bible was written down, but who may have been Canaanites or Syrians or whoever was the enemy of this particular Semite hero. Now, the audience (never forget that it wasn't written down at first) for the Samson story would have known this other legend, and they would have known that the anonymous Semite hero of that legend was vain and had slain these enemies because he was showing off for a woman, and the audience would have said, "Aha, so Samson is John Q. Semite as he slays his foes, so what does that tell us about Samson?  It's an object lesson in humility, even in the service of one's cause. We must not be proud before Jhvh, nor should we be proud in His service, for He is the one to be exalted and we are merely his instruments."

Eventually, it became, "Oh, so Samson is a slayer of enemies, so we must be humble before God."  Then, when it was written down, the Israelites weren't fond of the Philistines, so "enemies" became "Philistines," and "we must be humble before God," became implied.  And then other people took the story but didn't look at the book of commentary where it explains, "So, you see here that Samson was killing the Philistines because he was proud of his strength, plus he's going to have girl troubles later on, so maybe, you know, make with the less showing off, nu?"  And those other people didn't have a clue what the metaphors were, and Samson himself became a metaphor, and pretty soon you've got folks from the South saying that literally the Bible wants us to kill everyone in Palestine and give it to Israel.

None of the above is true.  I have no idea whether "slaying the Philistines" was a metaphor for something.  And that's the point; I don't know, and neither do most of you, including pretty much every joker who claims to be reading the Bible "literally."  The "jawbone of an ass" might be a reference to a popular folk song of the time where Avram makes a marital aide out of a donkey's jawbone so he can please his wife since he can't get it up any more, and this is all a smutty joke about how Samson was gay, since he was "slaying Philistines with 'the jawbone of an ass' if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge."  As far as I know, that's not true either, but you don't know.

And the scariest metaphors I haven't even covered yet.  Those are the kind where you don't even make a comparison.  Where you say, "Boy howdy, pigs sure do like to wallow in shit.  I wonder if we should buy them some white hoods."  Whoa, too fast for me buddy, slow down.  You're alluding to your subject without mentioning it because you're assuming that the audience has the context to be able to pick up what you're putting down.  And you can be satirical on top of that; my racist pigs don't really support an example because they're too simplistic, but suppose we take Gulliver's Travels and say that not only is Swift using metaphor without telling you what the subject is, but he's deliberately exaggerating the metaphor's characteristics so as to satirize the original, unstated subject.  No, Gulliver's Travels is not a fantasy about visiting different strange lands filled with different strange people.  A literal reading might let you interpret, which is why movies made from the same book aren't the same, but unless you get that it's all a metaphor (in several layers, with satire) you don't get it and you don't even know you don't.

It's like the Bible is a satire that nails its subject too well, and so people don't think it's satire.  It's a metaphor so convincing and complex that people are fooled into believing that it's literal.  Except that's not true; people aren't fooled, they're duped, or they willfully believe against proof, or they know and are lying.

This was all an excuse to link to the post to which I linked in the text, plus this:

Destroying the ballet in the name of artistic freedom

Unless you know the context, it looks like the Federal Theatre Project is about to make a resurgence, and that, while it might seem like a good thing, would not be.  Keep government hands off of artistic expression, I say. Unless you know the context.

A Fine Sermon

I really couldn't say it better, so just read it for yourself.

You Cannot Be Replaced

Depression and sin – not one and the same, but in this alike – tell us that we are replaceable. That those who love us do not really know us, that our failings and our brokenness are the only memorable things about us. That they are all we will be remembered for.

But those are lies. Depression, sin, self-loathing: they lie to us. For we are all, each of us, beloved by God. The Lord God remembers, not the mistakes and fears on which we ruminate and base our self-loathing, but the steadfast love from which we are created and which is ever extended toward us.

I Shall Not Be Moved

I have a dim recollection from my childhood of going to a church service at a church unfamiliar to me, one of a denomination different from that of my family. The town in which I grew up was, and still is, small, and many people we knew were there, all of them coming to this place of meeting, all with a purpose.  I should say also that my home town was (and still is, I hope) fairly liberal and activist, so we weren't getting together to protest Obamacare or demand that the rich take our money (that's what they want, right?).

We were gathering to protest something.  I believe it was Nicaragua, or if not that, some other injustice in Central or South America, land where there have been so many injustices that it's hard to determine which one was happening when.  But we were there to protest, mostly middle-class white people gathered in a church in the middle of a small, liberal town, to say that such things were unacceptable, that atrocity and injustice are never acceptable.  And that's the first time I remember hearing, and singing, "We Shall Overcome."

I sang pretty well as a child, and I didn't then have the baggage that I have now, the fears and neuroses which make me unwilling to simply give up my voice in song whenever asked. So I sang, not really understanding, but knowing that this whole thing was about something important, and that I was singing on the right side, because why else would my parents and all the people I knew be here?  I'm sure I'd heard the song before; one of my favorite childhood artists was Pete Seeger, whom I had the opportunity to see live, but I don't remember that. I do remember singing in the church.

"We Shall Overcome" isn't really a song that the privileged should sing. Yes, if you're on the right side of a cause, you might be justified in joining with others and singing, but even then, you're not really the one who is overcoming.  If a middle-class white man joined in the Civil Rights struggle, he should be viewed as being on the right side, and maybe he could have sung "We Shall Overcome" with his brothers and sisters, lending his voice to theirs as he lent his support to their cause. But he wasn't the one who was going to overcome someday. He wasn't oppressed.

So we were singing a song, all of us lucky not to be in Nicaragua and being killed by death squads or raped or burned or mutilated, and we were doing it in private, essentially, not out where someone who might have been able to help might have seen us and been persuaded to do so.  We weren't going to overcome shit. As Dave Barry puts it:

[W]e held hands, black and white together, and sang "We Shall Overcome," and we were absolutely positive that we would. I got into a friendly argument with a bystander, a black man not much older than I, who laughed and assured me that nobody was going to overcome anything.

 It was that, minus the black people and anyone arguing that we wouldn't overcome anything.

You know the end of the story: we didn't. I'm pretty sure Nicaraguans continued to be killed, raped, mutilated, and generally treated like shit for a while after, prayer and song notwithstanding. I'm not trying to be flip about that either; I wish that it weren't so.  But, like most prayers, our Nicaraguan-oriented, non-denominational ones didn't produce instant gratification.

I'm not encouraging cynicism, far from it.  If all you can do is stand and sing in solidarity, even if it does nothing and you're thousands of miles from those who really need to overcome, even if you do it alone, even if it costs you nothing, standing is a start. It's not sufficient, but it's better than not standing and singing.

We also, I dimly recall, sang "The People United Will Never Be Defeated," (which I went on to hear as a piano work performed by the composer, Frederic Rzewski, in another church, which is another story entirely, but it's an amazing work).  Good song.  Perhaps too Marxist for most people, but still stirring, and since I believe at least one, possibly both, sides of the conflict in Nicaragua were Marxists and Spanish, an apropos choice.

But we didn't sing my favorite protest song. You can probably guess from the title which one I'm talking about.  I prefer it as "We Shall Not Be Moved" because there is strength in numbers, but a great many versions have been done in the singular, and one could make the case that by singing, "I shall not be moved," one is affirming a group promise not to be moved, since the only person one can promise shall not move is oneself.

It's a simple song; most good protest songs are.

I shall not, I shall not be moved
I shall not, I shall not be moved
Just like a tree that's planted by the water.
I shall not be moved.

You can vary the lyrics, but those are the ones with which you can sing along.

Why is it my favorite? Why did I tell you this long, rambling story about an ineffective protest? I'll admit, "We Shall Overcome" makes me cry like a baby in the right circumstances, and it lends itself to Gospel much more. And I'll admit that, unless you're on the line, as it were, singing it is a bit strange because who's trying to move you, really?

But it is the most resolute song. We shall overcome some day, but I shall not be moved ever.  You can sing it on the picket line, when forming a barricade against the onrushing aggressor, when standing up and being counted and saying, "No, I won't go away.  I shall not be moved."

It makes no promises of dominion, because there are none that can be made. Maybe all the singing in the world isn't going to stop them. Maybe they'll never stop, and the world will end in injustice and terror, the soul of man forever crushed beneath the heel of a boot. Not a pleasant thought if you're looking to win, but being right doesn't mean winning.

The Christian tradition from which the song comes has a prime example of this: Jesus was about as right as you can get, and yet he lost. Badly. But he didn't see it coming and turn around, run in the opposite direction, decide that hey, maybe the Pharisees were right all along, even though I for one could completely understand it if he had. Crucifixion is ugly, slow, painful, and just generally terrible in all senses of the word.

So the boot may go on stamping the face forever, and it might be that no amount of singing (or indeed, any other, more "practical" action) will change that. We can say we'll win eventually, or we can say we can never be finally defeated, but what point is there? There's no hope. Everything goes down to dust and all the the efforts of good cannot change that.

But Jesus didn't run. He let the heel squash him flat because he knew that standing was more important than winning. He knew that the only thing that he could guarantee was that he would not waver, that he would stand firm, that he would not move. And in doing so, in dying without giving up, he did win after all.

I shall not be moved. That doesn't say, "I will fight back." That doesn't say, "I will win," or, "I will be where you are some day and then you'll see." It just says, "I am right, and I shall be moved. My roots are deep. Go tell your boss, all the way up to the top, that I shall not be moved."  It's the sit-in rather than the riot. It's the passive resistance of peace rather than the active resistance of war. It's a stand, a line back from which one will not be pushed.

It's faith. "I shall not be moved," is a faith that winning isn't everything. It's a faith that, despite there being nothing else to do but stand and sing, some day that will change. It's a faith that boots may crush, that hope may die, that all may come down to dust, but I still believe and I am still standing and singing, wherever I am.

So why do I remember the useless protest of my childhood fondly, and why do I wish that we'd sung "I Shall Not Be Moved?" Because useless though it may have been, it mattered. Any time someone stands up and sings in solidarity, it matters, even if it doesn't make a difference.

And if we stop standing up and singing, vowing to stay standing and singing, then we aren't going to do anything else. It's the song that gives you courage to go and do more than singing. It's the song that you hear from all corners telling you that you aren't alone after all. Could we be heard in Nicaragua? Of course not. But we could hear ourselves. And though not going backward is a start, the song doesn't say, "I shall not move." Once you stand and sing, then go and do right with a song in your heart. You shall not be moved, you shall not be turned, you shall not be halted.

After the service, I'm sure my family went home. The details swim in my mind; was the fire and brimstone preacher there to whom I enjoyed listening because he was entertaining? Which church in my town was it? Who else was there?  I just remember the songs. They're still with me, long after memory has faded..