Hack and Spit
How's that for a blog title? Before I begin, many thanks funkiller for noting him it took two years to build an arbor in the backyard. My kind of pace when it comes to construction projects.
Bronchitis, I'm told, runs in my family, at least for my father's mother. Both my father's parents were dead before I was born so I can't verify this firsthand. I've always been prone to chest colds, dry hacking coughs, especially in dry air, and after I had pneumonia at 30 (which I got over quickly, reading Margaret George and floating in the codeine), I had bad bronchitis the year after that, an even worse case my first year up north...coughing so hard I passed out on the living room carpet of our valley townhouse. Since I moved to the mountains I've had only mild to moderate chest congestion, nothing like a real bronchitis, until now.
Two weeks of slow cold virus seemed to drop into my chest like smog and stones last night and I was up at 4 hacking. Yes, I need to see a doctor just in case. Hopefully tomorrow after work or at latest Tuesday morning.
Today I laid around, alone, and read more Madame Bovary.
Something about being sick makes me more susceptible to literature. I remember trying to read The Vampire La something or other, one of Anne Rice's novels, last time I had a bad bronchitis. But then I was taking the tylenol 3's, also. I couldn't finish it. All those vampire guts dropping out in body-deaths seemed somehow too real. Plus I thought the book blew. MB though, isn't grotesque it's just so, so, sad. Determinism, a priest who is an idiot and a God who directly seems to refuse to answer prayer, adultery, vanity, lover's deception; its psychological realism is exquisite, but it's like breathing inside the head of one of Dante's damned.
A good friend of my wife called for her, and I thought it was S, so I answered, 'hi, honey.' She played along for a minute, 'did you just wake up?' But there was something off about the voice and I realized, between coughs, it was our friend. I felt sick to my stomach emerging from Bovary's world into that harmless tete a tete.
Even my faith feels a billion miles away. You mean you actually believe this one Jewish guy was God and died for your sins? Like that. I'm too tired to respond. Why am I not too tired to find the question, the feeling of incredulity?
On that: reading Genesis and then reading summaries of criticism by Bruggeman and von Rad, what might be called Christian higher criticism, was illuminating, even liberating; I can take what I find has spiritual value in the text and leave the rest, understanding G to be written sincerely under the pressure of multiple goals, some cultural-sociological, and millenia or centuries after the alleged events. But laying around this weekend and reading from Raymond Brown's Intro to the NT without actually reading the NT books is much more frustrating. Brown, a now-deceased believer, digs deep, deep, deep in his skeptical inquiry. His contribution in the Intro, almost his unstated purpose, seems to be to take textual skepticism as rigorously far as he can and still retain the gospel kernel. Cool, but reading the commentary without the accompanying scripture feels very de-centering. I know I should be waiting until next year's EFM to dig into the gospel criticism, but I borrowed the book from my priest and it's overdue and I want to blaze through it.
Some of his commentary is wonderful; he throws out gems in spots. Most of it, when possible, takes the rigorous skeptic's side. Jesus' wonderful comments about uncleanness...I don't know the chapter and verse, but he says that what comes out of a man makes him unclean, not what goes into the man. Brown writes these comments off as implausible because of the battles we see in the 50's over kosher foods. In Acts and Paul's letters, we see the church struggling over whether to keep the Jewish purity laws and circumcision. True. Paul makes his case clear on that, and certainly the church dropped those requirements early on (a choice which must have helped it grow, but which also reveals an illuminating new vision for understanding purity). So some later redactor added these statements in the strong, direct speech typica of Jesus and said they were his own words.
I can feel Funkiller wincing somehow.
I don't have an answer for that idea. Would the gospel writers have been so free as to create firsthand a pericope or a saying and attribute it to Jesus? Would they believe themselves to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit and free to invent? Might they not actually be? If not the evangelists, would the apostles have done so? I understand our gospels to be pastiched, drawn from various sources, not always well-organized and hence different in places, but to view them as possible that creative-interpretive is a step. He takes a lot of those.
I'm told in NT times it was common for writers to write in the name of some famous figure, in his mood and legacy, and that some of the NT epistles, lots actually according to Brown, were not really written by their stated authors. Unlike all four gospels, almost all the epistles have a stated author. This is something I need to know more about. James isn't James, Paul only wrote seven or so of his attributed letters, etc.
For Brown, the 'beloved disciple' of John's gospel, its stated eyewitness authority, is a minor figure in Jesus' lifetime who shows up at the foot of the cross when the 12 have run away and whom Jesus actually hands Mary over to for care. Brown believes, 'with most scholars,' that none of the gospels are the product of eyewitness accounts. If we accept Marcan priority, that does seem to weigh against Matthew and leaves only John. I admit John's gospel shows sings of reorginization, redaction, perhaps ammendation, and it's very different from the synpotics. Not many short pithy sayings or pericopes here; we get long near-sermons and some amazing and original miracles. How historic are these?
I don't know and though Brown is a world-famous Johannine scholar (and I haven't read his big work on John) he doesn't really know either; this he admits, but he guesses. Once again, I can see why inerrancy is held so tightly by so many in spite of numerous textual issues. It's much simpler and much more comforting.
Home, alone and sick, this is probably getting blown way out of proportion for me. I understand Genesis in a new way; I'm sure when I get to the gospels and their criticism I'll likewise understand. But today, at least, I'm just down.
***
And one other news flash before I sign off (I'm driving to the airport to get Mikey tonight; about 80 minutes each way).
S just called me and told me my skipper, James, the one who got me into sailing, is planning a trip to the Sea of Cortez next summer. Two weeks sailing in what are supposed to be very beautiful waters. She already told him we were in and I about died; of course we can get 'out' but here's the deal:
one, it will be more than three grand and I don't know how we'd spring that kind of dough; if I could, I think I might want to go to England or France or someplace over the sea.
two, and worse, I'm scared to utter death of flying. I've said it up here before, but I've never been on a commercial jet flight and that only quadruples my terror, quintuples it probably. Something about moving that fast, being that high in the air in such a fragile shell. Sure I commute to work on a major highway, sometimes in wicked weather. I'll scuba dive, sail in some rain and wind, or enter karate tournaments as a white belt. But flying. Oh man. It takes my height fear and cranks it up fiftyfreakingfold. Freaking isn't the word I wanted there.
So what do I do?
I remember thinking James was planning a sailing trip from Berkeley to Monterey. Skipper just said he wanted to take a Monterey trip, and swab that I am, I thought that meant sailing up and down the north coast. It can, but he actually meant chartering a boat out of Santa Cruz and going from there to Monterey; a little skip across the bay, not the rigorous sail I was imagining and actually reading about. I actually started taking classes in Santa Cruz before I knew his actual plan, so I'd have some experience with ocean conditions, with swell. In short, I was petrified.
Once I got out on the water in SC, my last class was in eight foot swell with two to three foot wind waves, and on the Bay in 25 gusty knots with chop and lightning in the distance and rain, I realized I wasn't so afraid. Not that I'm up for sailing in truly bad weather, but much of my terror was the uncertainty of not knowing. Yeah I get a little queasy in eight foot seas, but it wasn't so bad, like rolling up and down gentle hills. The boat still sails. Of course, on a boat, you wear a life jacket all the time and there's a pretty good chance if you sank or fell off somebody would come and get you if someone got on the radio. Flying, to me, feels much more black and white. Your crash, you die. I just can't believe the planes go as incredibly high as they do. I know altitude is safety, but really, I'd rather go a hundred feet off the ground at six hundred miles an hour.
Certainly if I decide to go to La Paz I need to try a shorter flight first. Say, from Sac to LAX, the same flight my stepson has made more than a hundred times.
Lots of people I know fly and come back alive. Actually, probably everybody I know.
Oh boy. For me, flying (of all things) to an unknown country and then living on a sailboat (not a cruise ship, you know, with waiters and things) for two weeks sounds like jumping off the Golden Gate and trying to grab the moon to keep from falling. Yeah, that's about it.
I also know that fears, like the smoking habit, never feel like going away. There are no easy moments. I never feel like, oh, cool, let's go up in that big building now or in that glass elevator or worse, up into that plane! It's hard, almost paralyzing, every step. But my fear has kept me from going lots of places. Visiting scooter more than once, for one; seeing Europe. I'm not rich, but I'm sure I'd have a trip or two to Europe under my belt now. Diving in tropical water: but I'd have to fly! You see. I could drop dead of a stroke right now and what good would all this caution do for me? And I'm not afraid to fly like some people who are afraid but still fly. There's a million of those people. I'm too scared to ever have gotten on the plane.
So there you go. Blog creation out of situation arising mid-blog.
As an old roomate said once of me, 'Troy, you think too much.' I know. So I come here to sort it out and it helps, truly.
Love to all that read. Blog helps.
Bronchitis, I'm told, runs in my family, at least for my father's mother. Both my father's parents were dead before I was born so I can't verify this firsthand. I've always been prone to chest colds, dry hacking coughs, especially in dry air, and after I had pneumonia at 30 (which I got over quickly, reading Margaret George and floating in the codeine), I had bad bronchitis the year after that, an even worse case my first year up north...coughing so hard I passed out on the living room carpet of our valley townhouse. Since I moved to the mountains I've had only mild to moderate chest congestion, nothing like a real bronchitis, until now.
Two weeks of slow cold virus seemed to drop into my chest like smog and stones last night and I was up at 4 hacking. Yes, I need to see a doctor just in case. Hopefully tomorrow after work or at latest Tuesday morning.
Today I laid around, alone, and read more Madame Bovary.
Something about being sick makes me more susceptible to literature. I remember trying to read The Vampire La something or other, one of Anne Rice's novels, last time I had a bad bronchitis. But then I was taking the tylenol 3's, also. I couldn't finish it. All those vampire guts dropping out in body-deaths seemed somehow too real. Plus I thought the book blew. MB though, isn't grotesque it's just so, so, sad. Determinism, a priest who is an idiot and a God who directly seems to refuse to answer prayer, adultery, vanity, lover's deception; its psychological realism is exquisite, but it's like breathing inside the head of one of Dante's damned.
A good friend of my wife called for her, and I thought it was S, so I answered, 'hi, honey.' She played along for a minute, 'did you just wake up?' But there was something off about the voice and I realized, between coughs, it was our friend. I felt sick to my stomach emerging from Bovary's world into that harmless tete a tete.
Even my faith feels a billion miles away. You mean you actually believe this one Jewish guy was God and died for your sins? Like that. I'm too tired to respond. Why am I not too tired to find the question, the feeling of incredulity?
On that: reading Genesis and then reading summaries of criticism by Bruggeman and von Rad, what might be called Christian higher criticism, was illuminating, even liberating; I can take what I find has spiritual value in the text and leave the rest, understanding G to be written sincerely under the pressure of multiple goals, some cultural-sociological, and millenia or centuries after the alleged events. But laying around this weekend and reading from Raymond Brown's Intro to the NT without actually reading the NT books is much more frustrating. Brown, a now-deceased believer, digs deep, deep, deep in his skeptical inquiry. His contribution in the Intro, almost his unstated purpose, seems to be to take textual skepticism as rigorously far as he can and still retain the gospel kernel. Cool, but reading the commentary without the accompanying scripture feels very de-centering. I know I should be waiting until next year's EFM to dig into the gospel criticism, but I borrowed the book from my priest and it's overdue and I want to blaze through it.
Some of his commentary is wonderful; he throws out gems in spots. Most of it, when possible, takes the rigorous skeptic's side. Jesus' wonderful comments about uncleanness...I don't know the chapter and verse, but he says that what comes out of a man makes him unclean, not what goes into the man. Brown writes these comments off as implausible because of the battles we see in the 50's over kosher foods. In Acts and Paul's letters, we see the church struggling over whether to keep the Jewish purity laws and circumcision. True. Paul makes his case clear on that, and certainly the church dropped those requirements early on (a choice which must have helped it grow, but which also reveals an illuminating new vision for understanding purity). So some later redactor added these statements in the strong, direct speech typica of Jesus and said they were his own words.
I can feel Funkiller wincing somehow.
I don't have an answer for that idea. Would the gospel writers have been so free as to create firsthand a pericope or a saying and attribute it to Jesus? Would they believe themselves to be under the influence of the Holy Spirit and free to invent? Might they not actually be? If not the evangelists, would the apostles have done so? I understand our gospels to be pastiched, drawn from various sources, not always well-organized and hence different in places, but to view them as possible that creative-interpretive is a step. He takes a lot of those.
I'm told in NT times it was common for writers to write in the name of some famous figure, in his mood and legacy, and that some of the NT epistles, lots actually according to Brown, were not really written by their stated authors. Unlike all four gospels, almost all the epistles have a stated author. This is something I need to know more about. James isn't James, Paul only wrote seven or so of his attributed letters, etc.
For Brown, the 'beloved disciple' of John's gospel, its stated eyewitness authority, is a minor figure in Jesus' lifetime who shows up at the foot of the cross when the 12 have run away and whom Jesus actually hands Mary over to for care. Brown believes, 'with most scholars,' that none of the gospels are the product of eyewitness accounts. If we accept Marcan priority, that does seem to weigh against Matthew and leaves only John. I admit John's gospel shows sings of reorginization, redaction, perhaps ammendation, and it's very different from the synpotics. Not many short pithy sayings or pericopes here; we get long near-sermons and some amazing and original miracles. How historic are these?
I don't know and though Brown is a world-famous Johannine scholar (and I haven't read his big work on John) he doesn't really know either; this he admits, but he guesses. Once again, I can see why inerrancy is held so tightly by so many in spite of numerous textual issues. It's much simpler and much more comforting.
Home, alone and sick, this is probably getting blown way out of proportion for me. I understand Genesis in a new way; I'm sure when I get to the gospels and their criticism I'll likewise understand. But today, at least, I'm just down.
***
And one other news flash before I sign off (I'm driving to the airport to get Mikey tonight; about 80 minutes each way).
S just called me and told me my skipper, James, the one who got me into sailing, is planning a trip to the Sea of Cortez next summer. Two weeks sailing in what are supposed to be very beautiful waters. She already told him we were in and I about died; of course we can get 'out' but here's the deal:
one, it will be more than three grand and I don't know how we'd spring that kind of dough; if I could, I think I might want to go to England or France or someplace over the sea.
two, and worse, I'm scared to utter death of flying. I've said it up here before, but I've never been on a commercial jet flight and that only quadruples my terror, quintuples it probably. Something about moving that fast, being that high in the air in such a fragile shell. Sure I commute to work on a major highway, sometimes in wicked weather. I'll scuba dive, sail in some rain and wind, or enter karate tournaments as a white belt. But flying. Oh man. It takes my height fear and cranks it up fiftyfreakingfold. Freaking isn't the word I wanted there.
So what do I do?
I remember thinking James was planning a sailing trip from Berkeley to Monterey. Skipper just said he wanted to take a Monterey trip, and swab that I am, I thought that meant sailing up and down the north coast. It can, but he actually meant chartering a boat out of Santa Cruz and going from there to Monterey; a little skip across the bay, not the rigorous sail I was imagining and actually reading about. I actually started taking classes in Santa Cruz before I knew his actual plan, so I'd have some experience with ocean conditions, with swell. In short, I was petrified.
Once I got out on the water in SC, my last class was in eight foot swell with two to three foot wind waves, and on the Bay in 25 gusty knots with chop and lightning in the distance and rain, I realized I wasn't so afraid. Not that I'm up for sailing in truly bad weather, but much of my terror was the uncertainty of not knowing. Yeah I get a little queasy in eight foot seas, but it wasn't so bad, like rolling up and down gentle hills. The boat still sails. Of course, on a boat, you wear a life jacket all the time and there's a pretty good chance if you sank or fell off somebody would come and get you if someone got on the radio. Flying, to me, feels much more black and white. Your crash, you die. I just can't believe the planes go as incredibly high as they do. I know altitude is safety, but really, I'd rather go a hundred feet off the ground at six hundred miles an hour.
Certainly if I decide to go to La Paz I need to try a shorter flight first. Say, from Sac to LAX, the same flight my stepson has made more than a hundred times.
Lots of people I know fly and come back alive. Actually, probably everybody I know.
Oh boy. For me, flying (of all things) to an unknown country and then living on a sailboat (not a cruise ship, you know, with waiters and things) for two weeks sounds like jumping off the Golden Gate and trying to grab the moon to keep from falling. Yeah, that's about it.
I also know that fears, like the smoking habit, never feel like going away. There are no easy moments. I never feel like, oh, cool, let's go up in that big building now or in that glass elevator or worse, up into that plane! It's hard, almost paralyzing, every step. But my fear has kept me from going lots of places. Visiting scooter more than once, for one; seeing Europe. I'm not rich, but I'm sure I'd have a trip or two to Europe under my belt now. Diving in tropical water: but I'd have to fly! You see. I could drop dead of a stroke right now and what good would all this caution do for me? And I'm not afraid to fly like some people who are afraid but still fly. There's a million of those people. I'm too scared to ever have gotten on the plane.
So there you go. Blog creation out of situation arising mid-blog.
As an old roomate said once of me, 'Troy, you think too much.' I know. So I come here to sort it out and it helps, truly.
Love to all that read. Blog helps.
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