“I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”
C.S. Lewis - Introduction to "On the Incarnation" by St. Athanasius
01.25.07
Posted in Reflections at 9:28 am by Adam B.
Both Greek and Hebrew classes have assigned reflective interactions with the text that I translate each week. I may occasionally reflect through the blog, as now.
Thus far Hebrew has been much more difficult than Greek. I am at the point in both languages where I am supposed to be translating, albeit inaccurately, texts from Scripture. I am still heavily tied to Bible Works for help, but that is mostly because we have not learned all the tools that are required for basic reading. This is my first actual translation work in Hebrew and, despite the suffering it has caused me egotistically and emotionally, I think I am really going to love reading in Hebrew.
For one thing the Hebrew scriptures are much more poetic and subtle than the New Testament writers. The only one who comes close to the subtlety and beauty of communication in the New Testament is Jesus himself. I have to admit that sometimes he is so subtle that I don’t get him. Some of the word plays that come through the Hebrew text, however, are already open to me and I can enjoy what the writer of the book was doing. In the beginning of Ruth, for example, the author explains that there was a famine in Bethlehem. We know of Bethlehem as the City of David, or the place where Christ was born, but during this time there was no David and no Christ. Bethlehem is actually two words in Hebrew, “house” and “bread”. If you did not know that Bethlehem was a city the text would read, “there was a famine in the house of bread.” Ironic. Later, God visits the people by giving them food. The text reads, “by giving to them food.” The word “to them” is the same as the word for “bread” with the exception of a vowel sound, and vowel were not written in the original text. It looks like a repetition of the same word, but it is simply a device that adds color to the text and reminds the reader that the house of bread has been replenished by the Lord.
These are not reflections on the text, per se, but my enjoyment of the literature that I am working with. This text is actually about the woman Naomi. The story begins with a man, his wife (Naomi) and their two sons. They are forced out of the land of Judah by a famine and they go to live in Moab. While there the sons take wives, one of whom is Ruth (pronounced Root:). They are there nearly 10 years and the husband and the two sons die. Naomi speaks to her daughter’s in law and tells them to go live with their families and take new husbands. They refuse. Naomi explains that she has nothing to offer them, “are there still sons in my womb for you?”
To understand what she meant by this it is important to not that in that day men were important to women. Women needed men to provide for them, protect them, and to give their life meaning by giving them someone to serve and by impregnating them. Now you may or may not be thankful that our lives are so different from theirs, but my description of that time is not inaccurate. Jobs were not open to women the way they are today so without a man they could not support themselves or their families. A woman’s value was found in bearing and raising children and in seeing their children become successful enough to support them when they were old. At the beginning of this story we find Naomi in a desperate situation. All of her men have died. Her daughter’s in law feel that they should stay with her but she says no. In effect she is saying, “your whole lives are ahead of you. If you stick with me you will be manless for the rest of your lives. Why live a meaningless and purposeless existence with me when you could go and marry someone else and bear children?” That is what she meant by saying, “are there still sons in my womb for you?”
Ruth’s sister agrees with Naomi and they all cry and she leaves. Ruth, on the other hand, refuses to leave. The rest of Ruth will be an account of her godliness and the blessings given to her by the Lord. This point cannot be missed, when Ruth stayed with her mother in law she was giving up any hope of a meaningful life. This was not an obligation on her, but she did it out of love for Naomi. “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.” It may not sound “spiritual” to follow God for the sake of someone else, but that is not the point here. Ruth shows character in every way, and she fulfills the law by honoring her mother and sticking with her. No matter why she became a follower of God she was devoted to him none the less. Such nobility earned her a spot in the canon of God.
When I began to reflect on this passage I realized the terror that must have gripped Naomi when her men died. She said her life was bitter because the hand of the Lord was against her. What else is she supposed to think? All meaning, all purpose had been stripped away from her. If it had not been for Ruth she would have had nothing. It made me think of how fragile life can be. A small thing can change your life forever. She had it all one day, and the next her life, for all practical purposes, was over. She gave up hope.
How easy is it to destroy a life? I was reading a book the other day, A Tale of Two Cities in fact, and I could not understand a sentence on the page. I read it over and over again and I could not grasp any meaning from the text. I continued to read thinking it would become easier, but it didn’t. I got so frustrated I set it down and found something easier to understand, Five Views on the Law and Gospel. After a few pages I comforted myself that I could still read. A few days later I resumed A Tale of Two Cities happily surprised that I could now understand it. What happened? Did I have a concentration lapse? Maybe. It got me thinking about my life. What if I could no longer read. What would become of all the work I have done, of everything I have poured myself into? I would have to pursue different ends, a different career, who knows. That might have been a little of how Naomi felt, except she was not young enough to truly start over.
How much do we need God. Such a small thing can make or break us. Without his hand to guide us where would we be, who would we be? With out his power protecting us how could we avoid disastrous calamity? And yet, how often do we thank God that he has sustained us unscathed one more day? How often do we ask for daily bread truly believing that he is the Provider and without him we could come to ruin in one day?
Lord, bless you for not turning away from us despite our thankless hearts. Thank you for not destroying us despite our pride. Thank you for taking on our weakness and sticking around.
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01.08.07
Posted in Literature at 3:55 pm by Adam B.
I read this book on the plane coming home from visiting my family in Michigan. It was the first time that I had read it, although I am told I tried once before and I am sure that I should have read it in High School but didn’t. Of all the books I’ve read lately it was not my favorite, though I can understand its enduring value.
This book was written in 1960 and has some harsh criticisms of racism. The father in the book is a noble lawyer whose feelings about guns rival Macgyver and the narrator is his daughter, although I thought she was a boy until page 32. This book had a habit of tricking me into thinking I was reading about one thing when I was actually reading about something else; not that it was supposed to be that way, I’m sure. I just found myself frequently confused. I read one section three times before I figured out that it was referring to a guy peeing on his front lawn. By the end of the book I was used to the vague style so it hardly bothered me that it never actually said who killed the guy. And yes, I know what really happened… it was aliens.
The children in this work were innocence embodied and racism is a learned madness. In order to cope with the pervasive insanity one must appear insane to be different and yet left alone. This was wonderfully illustrated by the man who drank coca-cola out of a bag so that people would think he was a drunk and not bother him about living with blacks. The father/lawyer in the book was let off the hook by the people (though not completely) because he was a single dad doing the best he could. Time and time again he shows compassion mingled with wisdom and a determination to raise his kids straight in a crooked world. He is the hero who never goes looking for a fight but always finds himself in the middle of the action. If injustice is a white shirt he is the stain of justice that cannot be bleached out.
I have been happy to see that many classic works unashamedly exalt Christian values and even Christ himself, while offering criticisms of Christians in general. This even handed way of dealing with ideal Christianity vs. actual Christianity allows the gospel to be a key player in a novel without overpowering the reader with a three point presentation about sin, faith and the resurrection. In this book, as in many other, the church is a place of both forgiveness and prejudice, of persecution and of love. Such is the balance of law and gospel that we all must maintain. To know the difference between Good and Evil is to be like Adam (and Eve), to offer forgiveness in spite of that knowledge is to be like Christ. While innocence is used to accentuate and illuminate the problem of racism in this book it was not the innocence of children that made the difference but the wisdom of the father. Our only hope is to move from the blissful shores of innocence, through the gates of knowledge and into the twin fields of wisdom and compassion if we hope to be like Christ.
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01.02.07
Posted in History at 11:57 am by Adam B.
Some of the books I have been reading reflect on the Industrial Revolution. I had never given it much thought myself seeing as I always lived in a world full of cars, heavy machinery and plastic high-performance yo-yos manufactured in China. It is easy to understand the Socialistic hope that existed while the Revolution was taking place. One book (Crime and Punishment I believe) explained how machines would be built that could harvest at the rate of 10 men. Imagine, 9 men all sitting around while 1 man does enough work to feed them all; a picture of Utopia. Of course we know it doesn’t work that way. In actual fact, 1 man owns the machinery so he puts the other 9 out of work while he gets rich. Ideally he will produce the goods so cheaply that his 9 neighbors can’t compete on their own land so he will buy them out and they will move to a tenement in the city.
I was talking to my dad about something completely different and he found it interesting that the birth of Psychology roughly coincided with the Industrial Revolution. As we pondered this connection we thought that perhaps men never had time for self-reflection or intimate conversation before the Revolution. They were all too busy working their tales off to consider how much they hated their father or to contemplate the damage done since they were never breast fed. Religion was sufficient to tell men why they failed and if they didn’t want to think about it they secretly worked on Sundays.
There were several other breakthroughs around this time as well: radio, the moving picture show, and eventually TV. Even before this progression Vaudeville had taken off where performers would travel the country doing comedy and entertaining acts. Vaudeville produced famous Radio and Televsion teams like Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges. In the Industrialized world entertainment boomed and became an industry unto itself.
I think entertainment answered and continues to answer the problems raised by industrialization. You have 9 guys out of work, and 1 guy who is bored because work is too easy. What can they do? Entertain him. He will gladly pay them to do amazing and yet meaningless things. The flaw in the pre-industrial attitude that I mentioned above (the idea that 9 guys can relax if 1 is producing enough for them all) is that men have to work to get paid. There is no way the 1 will support all 9 while they sit on their butts. In addition, the work has to have either value or skill. You can’t say to the 9, “dig this hole and fill it back in all day and I will give you your share.” This is what we do to prisoners, not free working men. In our day we might even consider that torture, I’m not sure. No real man can be happy producing nothing without skill. For work to be satisfying it must either produce something or require skill. Entertainment, while producing nothing, requires skill, a great deal in fact. Not everyone can tell a joke and make people laugh, not everyone can do 15 hoola hoops on roller skates and not everyone can make out with someone in a way that makes people want to keep watching. Skill. Everyone knows that sports accomplish nothing and yet we all sit in awe because of the skill that we don’t have. 9 people without work will either beg or learn to do something no one else can do (or never thought of doing) in such a way that others will want to watch.
In a strange way entertainment also answers the problems that are supposed to be addressed by psychology. Instead of using our free time for self-reflection or conversation we can ignore our lives by indulging in mindless entertainment or by creating a life we can be proud of on the internet. Psychologists have responded by calling said entertainment an overindulgence and a form of psychosis. Can we blame them? How would you feel when your job was threatened by a low budget TV program with a single word title?
In this way entertainment has met our every need. It is one of the largest industries in this country generating tons of money that is spread through TV and Movie studios, through movie theaters and broadcasters, right down to the Targets and Walmarts. What would we buy with all the extra money produced through industrialization if we didn’t have music for our ipods and if only educators had stereos, DVD players, TV’s etc. I think the common person would still have a radio for the news. The “news” on TV is not informative, it is just entertainment that happens to accommodate certain facts about things going on in the world. We have diversified entertainment considerably since the “golden years” of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen. One person will like an unending supply of Romance novels, another Sports with all its excitement and statistics, another Soap Operas, and on and on it goes. We often define ourselves, by our work yes (”I am a writer”, etc.), but also by the entertainment we enjoy. “I like country music, Seinfeld and long walks on the beach” might quickly sum up everything we need to tell any candidate for marital bliss.
Can we imagine a world devoid of entertainment for its own sake? I am sure there has always been time for at least some leisure, but today we have entertainment systems. I go back and forth on whether we live in the ideal world or whether we have lost something significant but we can’t remember what because American Idol is about to come on.
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