pits and wrinkles

eternal diphthong

aï

Years ago Stan Freburg starred in a Sunsweet commercial for pitted prunes. Someone offered him a prune. He gazed critically, saying he didn’t eat wrinkled fruit. However, when it was pointed out that Sunsweet had gotten the pit out of it, he ate it and conceded it was tasty and sweet. Ever picky though, he commented, “still rather badly wrinkled, you know.” The commercial ended “Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles.”

eternal diphthong

umbrella

naïveté

naïveté: “... are you the only stranger in these parts (Luke 24:18) who... ” ... does not understand why, at two-twenty in the morning, you are awakened by the sound of a truck cranking up in the darkness where Calhoun Avenue crosses West Beach Drive and disappears into its riparianism -- cranks up in that darkness, backs out into Beach Drive, shifts into go, and rumbles off into what’s left of the night? If, on his dawn walk, Detective Dog goes there with his glass, he likely will spy more solid evidence than tire tracks.

As for umbrella: “Sorry dear, I was working late, it couldn’t be helped, the crowd stayed late because of the rainy weather.” The rain is the umbrella that covers the story.

Still raining. Or, again. Rain as a diphthong gliding from place to place. The rain is sporadic, comes and goes. After thunder, lightning and rain cancelled my early Thursday morning walk with Robert yesterday, I later walked alone, twice. My cover: an umbrella. My umbrella: my walk.

It rains even under the grotesque cedar tree remnant that is MLP.

Whoever reads this is reading my diary. Once, in my teens, I read a girl’s diary, a forbidden and dishonorable act on my part. Though I put it back carefully, not carefully enough to notice the feather she had left on top of it. She confronted me, enraged at my violation of her privacy. It was indeed quite private, if titillating. But certainly on my part an outrage, which I denied.

This is neither diary nor journal. Musings to confront self, and to annoy someone, anyone who peers into my window.

Last summer I went on three different Ignatian retreats, five days each, one in June, one July, one August. My spiritual advisors recommended journaling, that I take up journaling. A journal is not unlike a diary where one jots down. And while helpful to the writer, it may say too much or in time be hurtful to a reader. Recently I read (and blogged about) an article by a woman who, in going through her mother’s things after her mother’s death, found her mother’s journals. On one page from long ago, her mother had said how annoying she found her daughter, who, then a little girl, always came wanting a hug. Now in her twenties, the daughter was crushed, terribly hurt.

Digressively, I totally do not understand the mother, because my own most precious memories are of hugs, my children running to me for hugs. Hugs, and holding loved ones, half of them dead now. But that’s not the point, which is caution in what one jots down. I do not journal, nor do I keep a diary: I blog. My blog posts may be as private within me as anyone’s journal or diary. So, what may seem the ramblings of a madman may, truth, be my walk in the rain with an umbrella.

a diphthong is gliding without pause from one vowel sound to another

a triphthong glides without pause along three vowels, or vowel sounds.

as in chanting,

thuh-uh Lord be-e wi-ith you,

a-and al-so with you,

(now the triphthong) li-i-ift uh-up yo-ur ha-arts

This is no example, but brings to mind an Episcopal bishop who, with his specific Southern accent, stretched and worked the word “God” out to three syllables. Gah-ah-ahd. I can do two, but not being from Charleston, I can’t make God a Triphthong.

an umbrella is cover for walking in the rain

Sunday’s lectionary sits on me. Two men are walking to a nearby village and are joined by someone they don’t recognize. His disciples, only last Thursday they had supper together, and they knew him; but now they don’t recognize him. This is not a modern encounter in which you don’t recognize Father Xavier at Walmart because he’s not wearing a collar, and he's in line at the check out lane, pushing a buggy with two bags of chips and a case of beer; this is the evangelist Luke at work with his umbrella, crafting theology for the ages. There are no straightforward gospel stories, the evangelist never leaves his umbrella at home. Why don’t the travelers know Jesus? Oh, is it raining, yes, it’s raining. They don’t know him because he’s different. He’s different, how is he different? Keep reading. At supper, he takes, blesses, breaks, gives and vanishes. Vanishes? why/how did he vanish? Keep reading. They rush back to Jerusalem to tell the others, and as they are talking about him he appears in the midst of them. It’s not a bedtime story, Luke walks through the room with an umbrella. Luke means for you to “get it.” Jesus comes wherever two or three gather in his name, and he vanishes at will. Maybe you get it, maybe you don’t. Probably not. You probably think it’s like not recognizing a Baptist in the package store, but it’s Luke’s assertion of the Risen Lord.

This is a good place to press delete, but I’m not done.

Our psalm for Sunday, specifically Psalm 116, verse 15.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” Startling, but the psalmist’s sense is better captured in modern English translations, “How painful it is to the Lord when one of his people dies” -- his people, those he loves, those on whom he lavishes his chesed, his lovingkindness. How painful to Adonai the mavet of his Chasidim.

Why is Hashem pained so? At mavet, death, are Hashem’s chasidim lost to him, as lost to him as they are to us who yet live, breathe, struggle and weep? What did the psalmist believe about mavet? Not the same as we believe in the 20th century, clinging to “the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love” (BCP 481). The psalmist more likely would have believed that at mavet, death, Hashem’s loved ones were blessedly relieved from suffering, into oblivion, living on in the hearts, minds and memories of their loved ones; perhaps drifting in shadow, perhaps the shadows of sheol, the pit. But the psalmist would not have believed that at mavet the chasidim’s nephesh, soul, would go to paradise; because the psalmist would have understood nephesh as in the April 1912 Washington Post headline about the Titanic sinking, “ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED SOULS LOST,” a soul being a living, breathing being. How then to reconcile with Luke 23:43 Jesus dying on the cross, telling the thief dying on the next cross, “he said, ‘today you will be with me in paradise’”

καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ Ἀμήν σοι λέγω σήμερον μετ' ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ

and he said to him Amen to you I say today with me you will be in the paradise.

Did Jesus say “Amen to you I say, today with me you will be in the paradise” or did He say “Amen to you I say today, with me you will be in the paradise.”

Remember, this is my blog and my umbrella. Comes to mind my Greek parishioner who ran an eccentric store in Apalachicola. At the front entrance, hanging from ceiling upon entry, the shopper was confronted by a large piece of brown cardboard, torn from a larger box, on which was scrawled, "We think our prices are fair. If you don't think so, you don't have to shop here."

parádeisos – an ancient Persian word meaning "enclosure, garden, park."

When would they be together in paradise? But first, what did Jesus mean by paradise? Jesus only says it in Luke. What did Luke mean for us to understand that Jesus meant by it? We can't tell, though we might conjecture. Jesus‘ exact words from the Cross would have been said in 33 AD; Luke didn’t write it until, perhaps 85 or 90 AD, some scholars say as late as 130 AD. If by “paradise” I am thinking of streets paved with gold, that’s Revelation 21:21, the Apocalypse of John, perhaps 90-95 AD, all of which throws a kink in notions of who believed what, when, about paradise. But the gospels seem to convey that to Jesus, paradise meant going to be with the Father, feasting at the table with Abraham.

It thickens. When? When do the thief and Jesus meet in paradise? On Good Friday, Jesus descended to the dead, the old Apostles Creed says “he descended into hell,” these days we prefer to say “he descended to the dead.” The Latin line in the Apostles Creed is descendit ad inferos from the Greek source, Ephesians 4:9, "κατέβη εἰς τὰ κατώτερα μέρη τῆς γῆς" ("he descended into the lower, earthly regions"). But inferos is not what Jesus promised the Thief, Jesus promised him paradise. However, when Jesus rose on Easter Day he told Mary, “I have not yet ascended to the Father.” What about his promise to the Thief? Ah! Ah!!! Easy! Let’s move the comma! (which is not there at all in Luke’s running together koine Greek). Instead of Amen to you I say (comma), “Today with me you will be in the paradise” we can read Amen to you I say today (comma), “With me you will be in the paradise.” Settles the soteriology of it yet removes timing as an issue.

Still rather badly wrinkled, you know. What about the gold pavement vs the garden or nice park? In C.S. Lewis‘ book The Great Divorce, there’s no pavement at all, it’s all nice green grass.

nicht verstehen? es tut mir leid, meine Damen und Herren, aber es ist mein, nicht wahr, it’s my blog, isn’t it.

Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles.

TW+