In praise of bookshelves

As I watch my friends and colleagues using their electronic reading devices, and delay purchasing one myself for as long as possible, I’ve begun to notice and admire physical bookshelves more than ever before.

There has been much speculation on what will happen to the book of paper and binding, but not much, yet, about the architecture of what holds them.

In a friend’s Brooklyn apartment recently, I couldn’t help but notice the way in which authors were shelved side-by-side. A popular biography of Einstein sitting beside Bill Clinton’s autobiography. Memoirs of Jimmy Carter and Michael Lerner leaning against one another. Was this intentional? My friend’s bookshelves held many books by and about “big” thinkers and actors on the world stage.

Visiting another friend for dinner one night, I quietly trolled the bookshelves, pretending to be on my way to the bathroom. His were more enjoyable for their juxtapositions. Ezra Pound’s Cantos sitting next to The Complete Verse of Lewis Carroll, and Philip Roth novels on the same shelf as P. G. Wodehouse. It is impossible to imagine those pairings in real life – only on bookshelves can such people come together!

Be careful, the “hypocrites” are us

So, here I am in Brooklyn this week, with the opportunity to go to mass on Ash Wednesday morning at a nearby progressive Catholic parish, an opportunity not afforded to me in my little village in Vermont. Ash Wednesday is, of course, the beginning of the season of Lent and a time for serious introspection, focusing one’s life on repentance for what has past, and beginning again at trying to do good in the world.

With all of that in my mind, at mass I heard that familiar passage from the Gospel of Matthew read aloud. “Jesus said to his disciples,” it begins, and goes on to say, in summary: Go and perform good deeds, and repent of your sins. Oh, and don’t do it like the hypocrites.

            Here’s the problem: The identity of these “hypocrites” is probably misunderstood. Jesus says:

 

“Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them… When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others.”

And then later, Jesus says:

 

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them.”

So, all of those hypocrites are in synagogues, far from where Jesus might be worshiping on a day like this. Right? No way.

Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was a rabbi. In fact, he was talking only to Jews when he said those words. This means that the correct interpretation today for the twice-repeated phrase, “as the hypocrites do in the synagogues” would be, “as the hypocrites do in the churches.” The hypocrites are us.

I am among many people today energized by the explosion of information about the Jewishness of Jesus. These resources are changing how Christians and Jews relate to each other, and how Christians understand the origins of their faith. One immense, recent, insightful book is The Jewish Annotated New Testament, which my local book group has just taken on. Thousands of Christians and Jews (our group includes both) are using it to discover the context in which Christianity was born.

How many Christians misunderstood the meaning of Jesus’s teaching today? They may have walked home, to the subway, to their cars, off to work or shopping or whatever, thinking that as long as they were not like those hypocritical other people, they would be okay before God.

Here’s the worst part: Perhaps they passed by a synagogue as they left church. I passed two in Brooklyn on my way back to the apartment. I wonder how many Christians thought to themselves, seeing the entrance to a synagogue, Those Jews, they are so unlike Jesus, and so different from how Jesus asked me to be. That would be to completely misunderstand the message.

If we are going to use Jesus’s teachings, during Lent or at any other time, I hope we take away that they are about how to be good twenty-first century Christians, not how to be bad first century Jews.

Symbolism in the medieval imagination

There is a marvelous legend from the Middle Ages. Perhaps you have heard it.

The son of Adam and Eve, Seth, returned to the site of the original Garden of Eden, to try and obtain mercy for his dying father. He was met at the gates, which, as the Bible says, are guarded by cherubs carrying flaming swords.

Seth met the cherub and asked for some sort of mercy for his father — something that might possibly save him.

The angel handed Seth some seeds from the Tree of Life.

Seth took those seeds back and planted them, and they grew into a new tree. Meanwhile, Adam died. But the tree that grew from Seth’s seeds was later cut down and became the staff that Moses wielded when he raised the serpent (Num. 21). Then, it became part of a bridge in Jerusalem. And a little while later, it floated in the pool of Bethesda, when the waters, there, were causing miracles.

It was also at about that time that the pole from the tree cut down by Moses, that grew from the seeds planted by Seth, those seeds coming from the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life, was taken from the pool in Bethesda and used to make one of the crosses used for executing criminals on Golgotha. Jesus died upon it.

 

The benefit of doubt, as Lent approaches

In days such as these, as Lent approaches, I keep reminding myself to live and love the mysteries of faith—rather than always trying to explain them. The questions never cease. And there’s no virtue in pretending that all is clear and simple, or that what didn’t make sense has somehow faded away.

I remember the last lines of a poem by the late Welsh priest, R. S. Thomas, in which he describes the experience of sitting alone in the tyrannical quiet of his church one Good Friday:

 

The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

 

Let them stay there for now: the questions. But keep practicing. A spiritual life is all about practice, after all.