The Refectory Manager

The refectory . . . A place to nourish the soul. A place to share the savory comestibles, the sweet confections, the salty condiments of the things that matter. A place to ruminate the cud of politics. A place to rant on the railings of religion. A place to arrange the flowers of sanguine beauty. A place to pause in the repose of shelter. Welcome, my friend. The Refectory Manager

My Photo
Name:
Location: College Place, Washington, United States

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Are you a smoothies dude?

The Saunterer http://saunterersjournal.blogspot.com/ e-mailed me this morning.

Is Joshua a hawk or not!

Our journey of reading the Bible again, for the first time, has us now at the point of entering Canaan.

Hawkish or not!

My e-mail response to him . . .

Are you a smoothies dude? Or a fruit-salad dude?

OK! It's a trick question!! LOL

But to amalgamate the metaphor even more-so, are you a dude that can actually chew real food? Or must you revert back to the smoothies?

As usual, the QBC [Queer Bible Commentary] provides another epiphany for me.

In my reading this morning, pages 151 and 152 in the QBC, it really struck me for the first time, the explanation, and for me, a rational explanation, of the why-for, how-come of the multitude of 'gods' in this biblical record.

Going all the way back to Melchizedek.

I recall from my previous fundie days the enigma Melchizedek would cause in the literal reading of Genesis. Like there was something more there, that somehow God was not going to let mere humans know this complicated secret, that we simply had to be protected or something, from this mysterious connection that transcended our simplistic paradigm of theology.

And then enters Margaret Barker. OK, she may be an outlier, a non-orthodox, an out-of-box instigator, but what she says makes a lot of sense to me. Especially when I shift my viewpoint from a literal, canonical-reading of these books.

Going on Michael Carden's (author of the chapter on Joshua) assumption that these stories meet the 4th explanation for their existence, i.e. that they are fiction and a reconstruction of a history that was accomplished partially in King Josiah's day and completed in the post-exilic era, and that the indigenous peoples of Canaan are one and the same as the Israelites, and the concept of "god" was an evolving and involving amalgamation over centuries . . . this now comes as a very rational understanding for me.

El Elyon with the androgynous Asherah, as the Canaanite high god, dwelling in a mountain Edenic garden, promoting the movements in heaven as enactments on earth. The successive kings of these earthly nations were the earthly manifestations of their heavenly patrons, that the subordinate deities of the supreme El-Asherah . . . i.e. Yahweh-Anat, Baal-Anat, and Chemosh, were the patrons of these Canaanite cults, that angels and demons were the lesser deities, and in time, El-Asherah and Yahweh-Anat were fused into one monotheistic god that became more "fleshed out" in the New Testament era.

And so to the smoothies or fruit salad.

The QBC telling me, and Margaret Barker suggesting, that to read the "Old Testament as the writings of a monotheistic faith which had one God with several names", is to sanitize it "for the benefit of modern readers for whom mythology, ritual and mystery are too reminiscent of all that has been cast aside with the Reformation."

To "sanitize" it!

To "smoothie" it. To make it Paul's "milk" for the weak and uninitiated? One amalgamated god. Convenient. Congeal the individual components. Blend. Emulsify. Strain. Slurp it, suck it up. No teeth necessary.

But in reality, a fruit salad. Individual gods with individual characteristics. A dominant flavor but with individual characteristic textures. A series of nuances that provide an essence of complexity. The hints of pungency. A cohesive nectar. Fiber and pith. Acid. Sticky. Slimy. Chewy. Crunchy. Bouquet. Fragrance. Satisfaction. Fragments that literally need to be picked out of one's teeth. Paul's "meaty" organoleptic experience.

The understanding, by this, a 21st century gay man, of the truly wonderful gift this history is to me. The awakening to the why-for, how-come of this theological evolution. The testimony of an ancient sharing people, real people with a real sense of what it means to be human. With what consisted of "their" understanding of reality. A reality that I am now beginning to be aware of and to try to understand and to accept for what it is.

They believed what was rational to them . . . with the experience and understanding of the world as they could only know it. And I must respect and honor them for that.

To understand this ancient history is not unlike how one must deal with a loved-one with Alzheimer's. One must simply exist in "their" reality.

As a former fundie, I was taught to abhor fiction. We were not to read it as children or students. For it was a lie.

Little did I know at that time, that my old King James Bible consisted of, among many genres of literature, fiction.

Nenad, in this quest of reading, again, for the first time, I have come to realize how valuable this old Bible with its collection of genres really is.

What I had jettisoned with the paradigm-shifting-jolt of Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason," I am now reclaiming in a totally new, and enlightening way.

I never knew this aspect of the old story could ever exist.

The story now, is beginning to make sense. What Thomas Paine found as his "rationality," I am now finding what is mine. And I am learning that the key is to accept it as "their" reality.

And as you so wonderfully allude, like a little boy with a stack of well-worn adventure books, these are the stories of heroes and heroism. Of dreams and ambitions. Of conquests of unimaginable wars and conflicts and conquests and dramas. And some victories. And some defeats. Of the fighting with and for the deities. Of seeding one's own self awareness and identity with a sense of bravado. These truly are the things of sheer inspiration.

This morning, I read again, the story of Rahab.

These writers were so very human. They knew the plots that make people of any and all ages real, believable, people.

They knew how to write a story to make a point. To catch the attention of the reader.

They knew how the risqué piqued the imagination.

And if it took a prostitute to make a point, and including her to make, with the innocence of a straight face, a double entendra to the King's surrogates looking for the two spies: "But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, 'True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from." Joshua 2:4. From the footnotes in the HarperCollins Study Bible for this text, "'Come to you' and 'came to me' have a double meaning. Understood as 'come into you/me, the phrase can imply sexual intercourse as well as arrival at Rahab's house" . . . well, it adds a jewel to the subsequent plot line of what happens centuries later.

These stories truly are precious gems.

The jewels that brighten and enrich one's life.

But why , I am forced to ask, are these jewels so pulverized like industrial diamonds that then scour, abrade, cut, mar and deface?

That become in and of themselves, the weapons of war against the gay and lesbian. Against those of us in today's culture, that are perceived as the "other."

And what can be an inevitable consequence . . . throwing out both the smoothie and the fruit salad of these Biblical stories. Their total rejection.

And I still can't help ask, yet I know the answer. Whether it be smoothie or fruit salad . . . why must these ancient stories be adulterated so as to poison the very spirituality of the 'other' people.

For me, this is what a spiritual journey is all about.

And so my friend . . . as we enter "Canaan" with Joshua. Whether he is a war-mongering hawk or not. With his "rules of Sacral War" securely rolled up with his armaments . With his valor and heroism and sense of purpose-driven mission. Whether the populace had his confidence or not. It was and is the adventure series of "Be strong and Courageous."

And like little boys reading adventure books for the first time, we can at least "pretend" like we don't know the end of the story.

But of course we do.

So that means the plot line becomes even more intriguing . . . and embellished.

And in our imaginations . . . we play the various roles. Over and over and over.

Hugs

The Refectory Manager

P.S. I'll pass on the smoothie. But a big helping of fruit salad will hit the spot.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Be strong and courageous. He is neither.

"Be strong and courageous."

"Only be strong and very courageous."

"Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed."

"Only may the LORD your God be with you, as he was with Moses! Whoever rebels against your orders and disobeys your words, whatever you command, shall be put to death. Only be strong and courageous."

Four times in Joshua 1. Be strong and courageous.

This to a new young leader. A man with the heritage of Moses strapped to his back. A man with a seemingly impossible task. To be the human Chief Executive of a theocracy government.

The story of Joshua is the implementation of the Dueteronomic constitution.

The implementation of ancient Israel's constitutional law.

Joshua's story ends in failure. By the time that Dueteronomic History ends at the end of 2 Kings, Israel has ultimately failed in its covenantal/constitutional relationship with the theocratic head of state. The curses were invoked.

And yesterday, April 16, 2009, a symbolic Joshua, the Chief Executive of a modern-day, man-made republic, with a mantle of a proud "Dueteronomy-esque constitution," with a sworn obligation to uphold and defend that Constitution of the United States of America, with the cultic support of millions and millions around the world to "only be strong and courageous" . . .

Wasn't.

As Joshua's story ends in failure . . . so the story of Obama will end.

Moral failure.

For the Constitution of the United States requires the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators of war crimes involving torture.

At first glance . . . Obama, a trained constitutional lawyer at that, is blinding his administration and by implication, we the people of these United States, from these atrocities requested, justified, and ordered by previous administration officials . . . starting with the President of the United States himself, the Vice President, Secretaries of the Departments of Defense and State, the Attorney General and Department of Justice officials, and the actual implementers in the Department of Defense and The Central Intelligence Agency. There are also others.

He has apparently decided that not seeking justice for atrocities in the past will somehow prevent them from ever, ever again, in the name of the United States of America, from happening.

How wrong can he possible be!

Why a nearly exterminated tribe of neurotic, xenophobic sheep and goat-herders, with a steadfast belief in a mono-theistic paradigm of life itself, would chronicle its history by exposing its fraught disasters of war and conflict and injustice, and yet still identify its ideal for its very identity and survival with stories like "Joshua," is truly a gift for modern-day mankind.

Unlike so many modern-day exemplars in the last century, the lessons of atrocities ignored were the implementation of even greater atrocities . . . (1) An ignored WW-I Germany that rises to WW-II Germany, (2) the antecedents of McCarthyism, the fallout of the Church Commission, (3) the junior operatives of the Nixon cabal, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfled, whose only lesson learned was to "let it never happen again!" . . . letting past injustices be ignored because they might be too painful to excise, those wandering herdsmen exposed for us what happens when there is moral failure.

For those old stories of Joshua, and Judges, and Chronicles and Kings, tell us that yes, there is failure.

And there is a reason why.

Only be strong and courageous.

Live up to your morals.

Be strong and courageous.

Obama. In what you did yesterday.

You are neither.

The Refectory Manager

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Risen

It struck me today, on this Saturday before Easter Sunday, that I have not had a hot cross bun in years and years and years.

As a kid growing up in Canada, we always had them on Easter Sunday morning, and frequently for Christmas as well.

Other than my kiddish perception of them being sort of "adult-like," i.e. they were not necessarily sweet and sticky like a good old fashioned cinnamon roll or something, and I wasn't too enamored with them when they had bits of candied citron in them, but I did like that mystical flavor of the mix of cloves and cinnamon.

So I dug out my mother's old "Purity Cook Book," (first copyright in 1932, revised in 1942) and found a recipe for Hot Cross Buns.

But before the culinary part, Wikipedia tells all about hot cross buns . . . to include some interesting folklore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_cross_buns

I like this especially! " Sharing a hot cross bun with another is supposed to ensure friendship throughout the coming year, particularly if "Half for you and half for me, Between us two shall goodwill be" is said at the time. Because of the cross on the buns, some say they should be kissed before being eaten."

What is unclear is just what or who is to be kissed! The bun? The friend? The bun's friend? The friend's buns!! LOL

And I have a wonderful baroquish rendition of that children's nursery rhyme about the how the baker's hawk their hot cross buns . . . if there are no daughters, give them to your sons. And if no sons or daughters, then eat them all yourselves.

And so I have started a batch of hot cross buns. The "overnight method." (see below).

Hot Cross Buns
(Quick Method)
1 cake compressed yeast (didn't have dried yeast in Canada in 1942, but one envelop of active yeast is equivalent)
1/4 cups lukewarm water
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
About 3 1/2 cups sifted "Purity Flour" (all-purpose flour)
1/4 cup butter
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup currants
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 egg white
sugar/water
Plain, uncooked white icing.

Soften yeast in lukewarm water. Scald milk, add 1 tablespoon of sugar and cool to lukewarm. Add yeast and half of the flour. Beat until very smooth, cover and leave in a warm place (80 - 90 deg F) to rise until very light (about 1 1/4 hours). Cream butter, add remainder of the sugar and add to sponge. Add well beaten egg, salt, currants, spices and sufficient flour to make a soft dough. Mix thoroughly, turn out on to a lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic. Place dough in greased bowl, cover and leave in a warm place until double in bulk (about 1 hour). Divide and shape into round buns and arrange on a greased baking sheet 2 inches apart. Cover lightly and leave to rise until double in bulk. Glaze with a mixture of egg white and water. Press a cross on each bun. Bake in hot oven (425 deg F) for 15 - 20 minutes. just before removing from oven, brush the buns with sugar moistened with water. While hot fill each cross with plain, uncooked white icing.

Overnight Method.
To make Hot Cross Buns by the overnight method, follow above procedure but use 1/2 a dry yeast cake instead of compressed yeast and ferment sponge overnight at 75 - 80 deg F. Make up the dough, etc, as in the "Quick Method."


And on this Saturday night, the night before Easter morning, I have this bowl of sponge. It would appear to be quite dormant. Inert. Resting. Dead. Certainly to the casual observer.

My faith is such that by morning, when I peer into this bowl, it will be risen.

The Refectory Manager

Sunday, April 05, 2009

"Harper." "HarperCollins." "Collins."

When one reads the Bible again, for the first time, the discovery of a "new" Bible can be a truly serendipitous experience.

I have little understanding of the etymology of these words in the context of my Bibles. But whatever Collins has done to Harper, it was a very good thing.

My well-worn, leather-bound, thoroughly marked up study Bible is/was a Revised Standard Edition (1952 revision) published as the "Harper Study Bible" by Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Zondervan publishes a lot of material for the evangelical community.

The "foreword" in that Bible was written by Harold Lindsell and dated, July, 1964.

I bought that Bible in Walla Walla, WA at a stop-over on our move from Ft. Knox, KY to Ft, Wainwright, Alaska. That was in June of 1976.

That RSV "Harper Study Bible" has been a part of me for a long time. And it was a significant "upgrade" for me from my very well worn King James Version used in my college days.

And then, my introduction to and acquisition of The "NRSV HarperCollins Study Bible" in December of 2008. It uses the New Revised Standard Version text that was copyrighted in 1989. And published by a division of HarperCollins Publishers. A publisher that is known for its wide collection of Biblical research books.

This NRSV "HarperCollins Study Bible" itself has a copyright date of 2006.

It was my Serbian friend who alerted me to the HarperCollins, and it was I that bought two of them, one for each of us.

This NRSV Bible is new to me . . . not a part of me yet. But that is quickly changing.

Even though I have been reading the actual text, with their comprehensive footnote references, it was yesterday that I read the preface material in the NSRV Study Bible. For the first time. There are five significant essays of expository, background, and introductory material.

The first is "Strategies for Reading Scripture" by John Barton. I have been aware for a long time that "higher criticism" of the Bible was somewhat of an anathema to heresy. It was to take God out of the Bible, to denude it, to strip it of its inspiration and inerrancy. To leave the reader with a sense of nothing.

This essay provides a succinct compare-and-contrast of both of these ways to read the Bible . . . and suggests at the end, that both camps , the canonical-reading camp and the critical-reading camp, can and will find things of comfort in this particular edition of a study Bible.

As Barton explains the essence of "Canonical Reading" . . . . It is to read the Bible with the expectation that what is found is:
1. "True." Literal, historical, factual truth.
2. "Relevant." If it is there in the Bible, it is relevant to our instruction. No matter what.
3. "Important" and "Profound." No triviality, nothing is superficial or insignificant. Begats and abominations included.
4. "Self-Consistent." No matter what it says [within/between books], there is only one consistent voice and message that comes forth.
5. And this for the Catholics especially, the Bible is to be read so as to conform to the teachings of the church.

That canonical-reading of the Bible is the main paradigm of conservative and evangelical Christianity.

And then his explanation of the essence of "Critical Reading."

1. Bible reading/study is approached from a "literary" rather than a religious perspective. What "kind of" text each book of the Bible is. To read prophecy is different from reading the law, as it is different from reading historical narrative. The Gospels and Paul's letters are different. To understand the "when," the "why," the "who" with respect to the book's history . . . is to help understand the context. And to understand the context is begin to understand the message.

2. Critical reading brackets the question of the "truth of a text" until it has established what the text means. Instead of approaching the text with the correct predispositions and presuppositions, critical reading is to read the text "cold", without a prior commitment to its truth or ready-made truth (a church's teaching) within which it is read.

And so the critical readers have found inconsistencies between and within the various books of the Bible. And in some cases, come to radical conclusions . . . what was once thought "gospel" is now clearly recognized as "fiction." Examples include the books of Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Job. Purposeful fiction though! And that again, is a part of the critical-reading method, just how and what does that sacred fiction contribute to the message.

When I was first exposed to the authors and works of higher criticism in the mid 90's, I was aghast. I was staunchly in the canonical camp.

And so to read, today, a compare-and-contrast of the "Canonical Reading" and "Critical Reading" methodologies was not exactly new, but certainly clarifies these perspectives to me.

My old RSV "Harper Study Bible," in its preface material, denigrates the critical-reading approach.

Hence my, probably totally inappropriate, sense that "Harper" was a distinct fundamentalist. I suppose, using the critical-reading techniques, the Zondervan Publishing should have been a clue.

And even though my Harper RSV is a "Study Bible," there are not that many expository references in the preface material. However, there are extensive footnotes throughout the text. In reading the preface material for the Book of Genesis in each of these editions, it is truly a compare and contrast between canonical reading and critical reading. Harper is truly a canonical kind of guy.

A second essay in the preface material to the NSRV HarperCollins, "Israelite Religion" by Ronald Hendel, is to read a treatise of what a canonical-reader would call heresy. At least the "Harper" of my RSV Harper Study Bible would say so. Although Hendel doesn't go quite the distance of the Queer Bible Commentary in its critical-reading approach, it certainly points one in that direction, and for certain, to that possibility.

And then the preface material essay "The Bible and Archaeology" by Eric M. Meyers.

Back in the early 90's when I first read a book that a Jewish friend of my son gave to my son, and then he in turn gave it to me, about the Shroud of Turin [the thesis was that yes, the shroud was "genuine," but the person it enclosed was not dead!"], I was introduced to the Essenes and started my intensive quest on the true history of what happened in those 100 years before and after the period of Jesus. In that quest, I got hooked on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And read all kinds of stuff about them. To include subscribing to "Biblical Archaeological Review." I read off and on from it, (I still get it actually), but I was sort of dist by the eternal squabbling over the politics of who had the "rights" to do that work, who was legitimate, who was for supporting the Biblical record and who wasn't, and on and on and on. And then the explosion of the fake-articles-of-antiques industry that just confounds the historical narrative. And this essay, in the NRSV Study Bible, makes a succinct summation of this historical squabbling over the arrangement of carts and horses. Which came first. Archaeology to support a Biblical narrative, or a Biblical narrative to support archaeology. The money quote from this essay is on page lxi, the end of the second paragraph. "What in fact can be said of the situation at the beginning of the twentieth-first century is this: there is no longer a consensus on the history of ancient Israel either from biblical scholarship or from archaeology. A new synthesis is in the making, one that will be significantly different from the one that dominated in American circles for most of the twentieth century."

The essays "The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament" by David E. Aune and "Archaeology and the New Testament" by Jurgen Zangenberg continue with helping the reader understand the context . . . a necessary component of critical-reading.

I am so struck with the differences between these two of my "study Bibles."

And speaking only for myself, to read the Bible, again, "for the first time," with a textual translation that is 50 plus years "newer," with an epic change in how archeology has contributed to understanding in the last half-century, within a paradigm of critical-reading that not only asks the difficult foundational questions, but seeks to fully support whatever the message might be . . . whether it meets a preconceived notion of what it is "supposed" to be or not, is a fulfilling experience.

For a gay individual brought up in a paradigm that religion abhors my very being, the critical-reading method is both enlightening and reassuring.

As my fellow Saunterer on this Bible-study journey has pointed out to me, with the help of the Queer Bible Commentary . . . gays and lesbians are NOT the "other" that has been so demonized by the literal canonical-readers of scripture. Rather, the historical narrative, the prophets and the law are truly inclusive. There is a diversity there for the seeking. And there is a context to those seemingly horrid stories of violence and sex and misogyny . And a message can and is being found. And with the tools and perspective of critical-reading of things sacred and scriptural, there is that Balm in Gilead for the disenfranchised gay or lesbian. There is not only hope, there is comfort.

And so Collins . . . whoever/whatever you are . . . you have transformed my old "Harper" Study Bible, with its old restrictive canonical ways, into an enlightening new "HarperCollins" Study Bible with a wonderfully open and inviting perspective.

And in more ways than one, this reading of the Bible is truly a "first time" experience for me. And praise be.

The Refectory Manager

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Such are the joys of a shared spiritual journey.

A spiritual journey, whether one knows they have one or not, is a characteristic that defines humanity. And to share in that journey with another, is to share a sacred bond of intimacy and love.

As such, Nenad and I relish in this experience. Our backgrounds are so different . . . and that is part of what makes this so fulfilling for each of us.

He being reared in an Eastern European Communist society. Not experiencing, or being shackled with the paradigm of fundamental, literal, scriptural doctrine or dogma as a life-controlling religious force. The Sacraments, the ritual, the high-holy mystique of the form of the Roman Catholic liturgy made up his formative religious experience. The Bible . . . simply a collection of the experiences of an ancient peoples. His formal training as a historian of the ancient world. . . it frames his perspective.

From my earliest recollections, the Bible was taught to me as a literal, inerrant narrative with a purpose-driven message. A literal, short-history paradigm of the world. My very being the result of a special creation by and for a personal God. That I must be redeemed by blood sacrifice to fulfill this world's destiny, to be made new and whole again. That I am but a bit-player in a conflict-of-the-ages scenario between a god and a satan. That my salvation depends on my choice of allegiance. That my belief and acceptance in the literal words of the "Bible" is the first prerequisite for my salvation. But being gay, it is all a moot point, for I am in a sinful condition that not even a god can forgive.

In a sense, we are both becoming liberated from our respective pasts.

Our discussions over the past year or so have lead us to this, a shared experience. For each of us, to read the Bible again (for we each have read it before, several times), but this time, "for the first time," with a new perspective. By accident, we found "The Queer Bible Commentary." We each have read from contemporary scholars, expositors, pontificators . . . how Christianity must change or die. What rigorous scholarship into the history, anthropology, archeology, geology, and theology of things ancient and modern with Mesopotamian cultures and religions tells us. What the centuries of Jewish Midrash help us to understand. What the sorry history of mankind becomes when things are done in the name of religion. We have discovered that the QBC is providing to us, a framework that puts the "w" questions into a context that makes such rational sense to each of us. The who, what, when, where, and why.

From Nenad's post to me last night, a comment on the perceived differences between religious "conservatism" and "liberalism."

Then there is another problem with liberalism: it keeps seeing itself in reference to conservatism. Conservatism is the standard, with everything else gaining its identity only in relation to it. Everything gets labeled according to its gold standard. So even when one feels firmly rooted in liberalism, it's usually with the awareness of what we have been liberated from. There's more of that fear of 'otherness' that you wrote about. But it all sounds quite co-dependent to me. The need to compare or debate, to look over your shoulder, to seek validation from 'the other side'. Which is why I love the QBC so much. These authors couldn't care less what the other side may think about their theology. They are not in it for the debate or some sort of intellectual competition with their conservative colleagues. They are not interested in wrestling with the religious right, as that would only resuscitate it and give it more power and significance. And that is the best revenge of all. Just let the old ways of thinking fall into oblivion. At the same time, that is not the Old Testament way of doing things. Writers of the Hebrew Bible could leave their former Canaanite ways, but they clearly couldn't leave them alone. It's all about the engagement and wrestling with the past, with much gusto and bravado. It really is two completely opposite attitudes toward life.

And so we each have found ourselves on this shared journey.

We find ourselves in a great museum. Filled with exhibits. Dioramas. Placards. Living history. Things to touch, to feel, to see, to smell, to taste. A docent that we dote. With all of its warts and scars and deformities and incongruities and vulgarities and violence and poetry and literature and wisdom and redeeming themes. Yes, we find ourselves in the NSRV version of the HarperCollins Study Bible.

We find ourselves in the hushed reading room of a library. The ambience of scholarship, of stateliness, of old polished wood, of the smell of antiquity. We catch the leaping letters of the learned from their pliable pages of a-platitudinous perception. We find writers wrestling with the constraints of the past, with the liberations of the future. We find diversity. We find newness. We find hope. We find liberation.

We find ourselves in a great national park. We saunter, together, far from the beaten path. We found a precipice. Fearfully, yet with an adrenalin rush of risk and adventure, we crawl on our hands and knees to peer over the edge. And the vista is exhilarating. An awesome new horizon.

But we are not very far into this journey.

We have only gotten to a point where an ancient people have failed miserably in claiming a land they believed was promised to them. [The end of the Book of Judges.] And there are hints as to the who, the where, the when, and most importantly, the why.

What epiphanies the QBC has yet for us, what new precipices we will find on our journey, we don't yet know.

But a theme of sorts has emerged to this point.

The Hebrew Bible is the self-written justification of a people with a purpose-driven history.

The separation between them, and "the other."

It started with their understanding of beginning. A story of separation. Light from darkness. Form from void. It eventually continued with a rigorous codification of holiness and cleanliness precepts to enforce the separation of the holy from the unholy, of the clean from the unclean. Of the "non-other" from "the other." The "other " being a the culmination of a driving sense of both xenophobia and disgust of those at the bottom of the "penetration-based" culture.

A story fused in the Mesopotamian agrarian economy of fertility.

To plant seed in one's property. Be it field or womb. And the hierarchy of ownership and penetration.

Where the penetrator is dominate over the penetrated.

And the stories of sex and vulgarities and power and control. And those few stories when women spoke, took command, and shattered the penetrator's paradigm of dominance.

The incidents of humiliating an "other" male with penetration. Nothing gay about it. Sheer domination of power and control over something, someone, considered as "the other."

And these stories, especially in the Hebrew Books of Genesis, Numbers, Joshua and Judges are horrific in violence, abusive and in-humane sex, vulgarity. The stories of genocide, mass-murder, extinction of whole tribes of peoples, involving tens of thousands of victims, they go on and on. Exhibit after exhibit in that museum that Nenad and I are immersed within.

And we wonder. Why!

Why these stories?

What is their "redeeming" value about them?

It was Nenad who suggested to me, as an acute observer of American culture, the why.

Just look at our American culture.

Our relishing of the Wild West Tales. The shoot-em' up cowboy-Indian adventures. The settlers versus "the other." The intrigue of massacre, killing, sex, violence. The excitement. The glorification. The embellishment. The conquest. The settlement. The domination.

Look at the American history of immigration. The new-comer "other" versus the all-ready here. The violence, distrust, hatred, discrimination.

Our fascination with Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. War of the Worlds.

Our addiction to CSI, The Sopranos, Dallas, and uncounted movies of the exploits of illicit sex, drama and action.

The telling and retelling of myth and legend and folklore until reality, revisionist history, and sheer fantasy are blurred beyond recognition and/or redemption.

Our perceptions, on our journey with the QBC so far, is that ancient Israel was no different from us. As the post-exile (the return of exiled Jews from their seventy-year captivity in Babylon) Jews determined to never, ever, let that breach of "other" from their "non-other" identity be the cause for them to be corporately punished again, they collected, edited, redacted, literally "stitched the scrolls together," in telling these embellished myths, legends, folk-tales and stories. Stories to emphatically differentiate their separation from "the other." To explain a purpose-driven identity and history.

We have and do the same with our "history."

As these stories were told and re-told by ancient Jews, there was, as Nenad calls it, "a sense of gusto and bravado."

Ergo . . . my depiction of a goat-herder and his participation within his contemporary society in re-telling, with gusto and bravado, his glorification of his cultural past. A visceral reaction, on my part, to a sense of culture, both for the ancient Israel peoples, and my own today, that I want to be liberated from.

Such are the joys of a shared spiritual journey.

A journey that has opened a vast and new horizon to each of us.

As Nenad suggested to me a while back, one of the lessons to be learned, is what we do with these stories. As a culture. As individuals.

Whereas fundamental Christianity has taken these myths and legends and stories, sometimes told with gusto and bravado, and codified them into a literal religious dogma that must be worshiped as an idol in and of itself, we do not need to do that. We must not do that. Anymore than we do not worship the stories of the Wild West, anymore than we do not make Lord of the Rings our scripture, anymore than we do not believe and rely on Star Wars for our authentic anthropological history. Anymore than we do not use CSI as our moral compass. Anymore than we do not look to the old series of Dallas as an exemplifier of righteous living.

Anymore than we should not look to a woman, pounding a tent-peg through a man's temple. Anymore than looking at men who rape a foreign man's wife to humiliate the husband. Anymore than we look at the maniacs at Sodom and Gomorrah who wanted to humiliate the strangers within their gate simply because it was their "right" to do so. Anymore than spies using the services of a prostitute and violating the separation of "other" from their "non-other." Anymore than cajoling a village of men into getting circumcised so they can marry their daughters, and then, in their incapacitation, murder all of them. Anymore than cheering on an Army in the massacring of tens of thousands of innocent women and children because they are "other."

To take these "vulgar, redemption-less" stories of the Hebrew Bible, to commission them as an inerrant scripture, to use them in the context of the Biblical key-text "Go, and do thou likewise," is to profane the very essence of spirituality.

And quite likely, those Hebrew Bible stories are as factual as the plots of CSI, Dallas, Star Wars and countless action-packed DVD's of drama, sex, violence and excitement.

Nenad, my personal thanksgiving to you. I have told you this before. For your suggesting we share this journey together. For your sharing of a perspective that is so liberating to me. And yes . . . for being my "instigator!" Enough so to get me into horrendous trouble in retelling a story from one of those little museum dioramas we looked at together, from those leapin' words of learnin' in that library, for egging me on to the edge of the precipice . . . but not shoving me over!! Sort of!! LOL You know I love you for it.

For a spiritual journey, whether one knows they have one or not, is a characteristic that defines humanity.

It is so good to be human.

The Refectory Manager