*
A novel? A diseased allegory? Here is the plot of "The Ridiculous Knight" with pointers to the chapters.
*
A suburban church has gone into an interim condition -- an emergency wrapped in cotton? -- after the former rector known as "Father Sam" is forced to leave in order to dry out. [ADD DATE POINTER]. The church is fairly well demarcated into insiders and outsiders ("the broken") [DATE]. But in fact the insiders are broken too, and one example is the conflicted character Don [DATE]. He is a youth minister, teacher and gung ho Christian, one who has "washed his hands" like the speaker of Psalm 26. But he breaks down when he accidentally touches a student, not because of what he's done but because of all the things he thinks about and doesn't do. [DATE] He disappears and abandons his apartment and his cat. [DATE]
Meanwhile one of the church's members has been entrusted with church finances -- not a great idea. [DATE] It takes a criminal to spot another, they say, and the only person whose suspicions are aroused is a slightly seedy ex-con named Dave. This man somehow becomes the main character of the "novel" against his will and against anyone's will.
When the de facto leader of the church, a woman named Elise, discovers that Don is missing, she seems to panic and asks Dave to go on a quest of recovery. [DATE] The quest takes him through the allegorical land of his own sexual trauma and self doubt -- no end or bottom to that land! He meets the false Duessa, in fa light from Spenser's Faerie Queene epic, as well as the vicious "Sans" brothers -- without law, without faith, without joy -- and a guardian angel or 2: the asexual girl Elf and the anchoress, who sometimes plays the role of Wisdom as best a mere human can. [DATE]
Dave passes through 3 temptations. He and Elf free Don from some ugly sexual game playing, too mean and futile to be described. [DATE] But Dave becomes emmeshed and re-entangled in his own trauma when the man he rescues kisses him in Christian love. [DATE] And so Dave disappears. [DATE] Someone perhaps Elf may need to go on a brand new quest.
The spiritual reflections that sometimes hide the narrative, and at other times move it along, offer, not an explanation of the story, but the reason that the story is worth telling and living over. No ridiculous knight ever reaches his shelter on earth.
*
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Monday, November 15, 2004
2nd Epilogue: The Missing Retreat
*
A few days later or perhaps more.
I can take you where I think he is, Elf said. Dave is probably back in the barrio, recuperating.
After all, even our town, nice as it is, has its own sort of skid row.
Elf sat in the right hand seat while Elise drove, rather stiffly, through the part of town she'd never had much occasion to visit. Signs were sometimes in foreign languages, storefronts were largely broken and empty. The blight seemed kin to an organism, it had a biological outline. One was really afraid to touch this part of town. There were some churches on corners but not the kind she'd ever considered going inside. Former dry cleaners that now said Assembleo de Cristo in crooked lettering. But of course people live here, souls that is, so I should be drawn, not repelled. It was always possible that the human repulsion one felt was a kind of sin in disguise.
Up there is the anchoress's place, Elf said. The lady who made the hot meals and had the emergency beds. She would be, I pretty much think, a good person for you to talk to, Elise, but whoa, what has *happened* here?
Where are you pointing to anyway?
They drove by a beaten up old warehouse, maybe a warehouse, now tattooed with grafitti, otherwise exorcised and empty, and now there was a straggly charter school, barred from outside entry, with a Tongan guard in front. So where is her, you know, her hermitage? Elise asked.
All I see is a vacant lot.
Elf didn't answer. Her jaw hung open. There was nothing, no hermitage, no house, no garden, no toolshed, no mud, no whirlpool, no people, no anchoress, no anger. Nothing.
There might have been an aroma of Christian spirit hanging in the air. But no thing tangible.
*
"My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." [Psalm 38:11, KJV]
the end
*
A few days later or perhaps more.
I can take you where I think he is, Elf said. Dave is probably back in the barrio, recuperating.
After all, even our town, nice as it is, has its own sort of skid row.
Elf sat in the right hand seat while Elise drove, rather stiffly, through the part of town she'd never had much occasion to visit. Signs were sometimes in foreign languages, storefronts were largely broken and empty. The blight seemed kin to an organism, it had a biological outline. One was really afraid to touch this part of town. There were some churches on corners but not the kind she'd ever considered going inside. Former dry cleaners that now said Assembleo de Cristo in crooked lettering. But of course people live here, souls that is, so I should be drawn, not repelled. It was always possible that the human repulsion one felt was a kind of sin in disguise.
Up there is the anchoress's place, Elf said. The lady who made the hot meals and had the emergency beds. She would be, I pretty much think, a good person for you to talk to, Elise, but whoa, what has *happened* here?
Where are you pointing to anyway?
They drove by a beaten up old warehouse, maybe a warehouse, now tattooed with grafitti, otherwise exorcised and empty, and now there was a straggly charter school, barred from outside entry, with a Tongan guard in front. So where is her, you know, her hermitage? Elise asked.
All I see is a vacant lot.
Elf didn't answer. Her jaw hung open. There was nothing, no hermitage, no house, no garden, no toolshed, no mud, no whirlpool, no people, no anchoress, no anger. Nothing.
There might have been an aroma of Christian spirit hanging in the air. But no thing tangible.
*
"My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off." [Psalm 38:11, KJV]
the end
*
Sunday, November 14, 2004
1st Epilogue: Church function
*
Checks were bouncing. Mary Louise was mysteriously gone (new start in Las Vegas, they said). Absconded with funds not hers? We're talking plain thievery. How sad. Church membership somewhat dropping. The interim rector a mild bashful sort, out of his depth in a shallow pool. Still the church moved ahead through time, it persisted, it was like a barge, sometimes bumping the side of the canal, yes. But standing still was no option at all.
Elise, sitting in a folding chair at the church function, watched the early refreshments (out of her own purse) run out. Why aren't you upset and concerned about the money, Elise? I don't know, I just rarely am. Someone stole church funds but a church is more than its funds. She felt too heavy to move around but hardly wanted to. Kindly folk shifted through the place. It was odd, everyone always made fun of a church. That was because people's goodness, or at least their aspiration to be good, stood so exposed in a church. Being laughed at can be really not so bad.
Sometimes I see someone looking at me in church who is thinking I'm a good person and then I try to be what they see against my basic evil nature, which of course wishes to be otherwise. But momentarily at least, I am good. So, over all, the effect of this place on me is good.
After the minister's wandering grace the people all began eating the main course. A young woman stuck her head into the room and backed out, then came all the way in. Then turned back to the door and talked through it to someone one couldn't see. Something in Elise's heart began to tingle like the music in "Shaker Loops". Her thoughts started to flutter and she put her plate down.
Then the young woman came back into the room leading a gloomy stranger behind her and the stranger was somehow Don. Elise's husband stood up and started to approach, then became still. They all were still really. Even the little ones at their special table. Still. For a moment the room was as absorbent and tender as a paper towel.
Nobody spoke. The stranger moved toward Elise through recognition that was baffled. Because he was different. Oh Don.
Are you more of a Christian? Less of a Christian? Out of the fold? Huddling in some place we can't follow?
Oh, my heart is hurting for joy, Elise said. Oh Don. Oh Don.
*
We brought him back, the young lady sad, the elfin creature, the little elf, indeed Elf. Dave and myself but mostly Dave really. We did bring him back.
But Dave got lost on the way. We don't know where Dave is, we've lost track of him. We had only this partial success, as you see.
Oh Don! Sweet child, you sweet child (Elise said).
[So ends the first epilogue. The second epilogue immediately follows.]
*
Checks were bouncing. Mary Louise was mysteriously gone (new start in Las Vegas, they said). Absconded with funds not hers? We're talking plain thievery. How sad. Church membership somewhat dropping. The interim rector a mild bashful sort, out of his depth in a shallow pool. Still the church moved ahead through time, it persisted, it was like a barge, sometimes bumping the side of the canal, yes. But standing still was no option at all.
Elise, sitting in a folding chair at the church function, watched the early refreshments (out of her own purse) run out. Why aren't you upset and concerned about the money, Elise? I don't know, I just rarely am. Someone stole church funds but a church is more than its funds. She felt too heavy to move around but hardly wanted to. Kindly folk shifted through the place. It was odd, everyone always made fun of a church. That was because people's goodness, or at least their aspiration to be good, stood so exposed in a church. Being laughed at can be really not so bad.
Sometimes I see someone looking at me in church who is thinking I'm a good person and then I try to be what they see against my basic evil nature, which of course wishes to be otherwise. But momentarily at least, I am good. So, over all, the effect of this place on me is good.
After the minister's wandering grace the people all began eating the main course. A young woman stuck her head into the room and backed out, then came all the way in. Then turned back to the door and talked through it to someone one couldn't see. Something in Elise's heart began to tingle like the music in "Shaker Loops". Her thoughts started to flutter and she put her plate down.
Then the young woman came back into the room leading a gloomy stranger behind her and the stranger was somehow Don. Elise's husband stood up and started to approach, then became still. They all were still really. Even the little ones at their special table. Still. For a moment the room was as absorbent and tender as a paper towel.
Nobody spoke. The stranger moved toward Elise through recognition that was baffled. Because he was different. Oh Don.
Are you more of a Christian? Less of a Christian? Out of the fold? Huddling in some place we can't follow?
Oh, my heart is hurting for joy, Elise said. Oh Don. Oh Don.
*
We brought him back, the young lady sad, the elfin creature, the little elf, indeed Elf. Dave and myself but mostly Dave really. We did bring him back.
But Dave got lost on the way. We don't know where Dave is, we've lost track of him. We had only this partial success, as you see.
Oh Don! Sweet child, you sweet child (Elise said).
[So ends the first epilogue. The second epilogue immediately follows.]
*
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Story (Part 8): The Third Temptation
*
As if shaken free of allegory the warehouse seemed cold and bare. It was like the garage of one's childhood where the kids would go together to escape the heat, sitting on the cement floor and eating Popsicles. It was as close to cool as there could be. But here, in this cool place, the prodigal son, the fallen Don, sat propped against the wall. The dirtiest of all the walls. Dave found a pair of old overalls and threw them on top of him. He was no longer leashed like a dog but he still looked like an animal until he put the overalls on. Then he almost regained the dignity of a human. But not quite. He sank back to the floor, too beat and ashamed to stand.
I think this sh**ty place is just where I belong, he said, wetting the asterisks with his spit. No way, Jose (Dave replied). Elise is holding onto little Tinker Bell for you. That whole weird church is waiting for you to at least come back and show them that you're still alive.
There's been so much churn, some people are holding their breath waiting for you. Hey, it's not gloating. Everybody breaks. Some people are really quiet about it, that's all.
Okay, Don said. Then: Can you help me up stranger?
*
He was like a child inside the body of a football player. Dave reached down to his armpits and lifted. Slippery, harsh. This was like manual labor in the prison yard, don't think about that. A demoralizing smell. So much of life is nothing but an effort not to be demoralized.
There was a third person in the room watching. Who was watching? Who stood there in the darkness? Was it the prison guard? The guard was corrupt, a criminal himself, bought off, paid to be bad. The guard pretended not to be a criminal. Pharisee. Pretended not but was.
Bad people blocked the sight of the good one who stood over all. They couldn't block it forever. You had to hold out.
A third person watched. Then Don got up on his feet. He reached forward and embraced his rescuer, a Christian embrace. A Christian embrace. Can we all be brothers? Can we love each other as our savior asked us to? You know, just brothers, nothing more? And then the third temptation stepped out of the wall rubbing its hands, smiling, indeed gloating. Dave's body fell into the embrace like a traveller stepping in a warm bath. Overwhelming memories filled him of the prison, of being passed around like a slave. The most terrible thing in the world. Even the memory was bad as a bone breaking. He shivered and tried to step out of his skin, like the dead rat once picked up in an old swimming pool whose innards just slipped out of its skin. Help me, Jesus, now more than ever.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Don was saying. Please take me back so I can -- I don't know, let's go see Elise. Make things right somehow. I am so grateful.
And so in a simultaneous movement one of them stepped out of danger. And one stepped right in. And it was the same step, just 2 different sets of feet!
*
As if shaken free of allegory the warehouse seemed cold and bare. It was like the garage of one's childhood where the kids would go together to escape the heat, sitting on the cement floor and eating Popsicles. It was as close to cool as there could be. But here, in this cool place, the prodigal son, the fallen Don, sat propped against the wall. The dirtiest of all the walls. Dave found a pair of old overalls and threw them on top of him. He was no longer leashed like a dog but he still looked like an animal until he put the overalls on. Then he almost regained the dignity of a human. But not quite. He sank back to the floor, too beat and ashamed to stand.
I think this sh**ty place is just where I belong, he said, wetting the asterisks with his spit. No way, Jose (Dave replied). Elise is holding onto little Tinker Bell for you. That whole weird church is waiting for you to at least come back and show them that you're still alive.
There's been so much churn, some people are holding their breath waiting for you. Hey, it's not gloating. Everybody breaks. Some people are really quiet about it, that's all.
Okay, Don said. Then: Can you help me up stranger?
*
He was like a child inside the body of a football player. Dave reached down to his armpits and lifted. Slippery, harsh. This was like manual labor in the prison yard, don't think about that. A demoralizing smell. So much of life is nothing but an effort not to be demoralized.
There was a third person in the room watching. Who was watching? Who stood there in the darkness? Was it the prison guard? The guard was corrupt, a criminal himself, bought off, paid to be bad. The guard pretended not to be a criminal. Pharisee. Pretended not but was.
Bad people blocked the sight of the good one who stood over all. They couldn't block it forever. You had to hold out.
A third person watched. Then Don got up on his feet. He reached forward and embraced his rescuer, a Christian embrace. A Christian embrace. Can we all be brothers? Can we love each other as our savior asked us to? You know, just brothers, nothing more? And then the third temptation stepped out of the wall rubbing its hands, smiling, indeed gloating. Dave's body fell into the embrace like a traveller stepping in a warm bath. Overwhelming memories filled him of the prison, of being passed around like a slave. The most terrible thing in the world. Even the memory was bad as a bone breaking. He shivered and tried to step out of his skin, like the dead rat once picked up in an old swimming pool whose innards just slipped out of its skin. Help me, Jesus, now more than ever.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Don was saying. Please take me back so I can -- I don't know, let's go see Elise. Make things right somehow. I am so grateful.
And so in a simultaneous movement one of them stepped out of danger. And one stepped right in. And it was the same step, just 2 different sets of feet!
*
Interlude: The ark
*
The ark! Elf walked outside the dead warehouse and looked up at the ark.
The ark was in fact the entire planet and its boundary, for humans, was this blue sky the color of a cop's uniform. Once the billboards were turned off the stars could pierce your heart again.
How had we ever allowed so much human wrongness to enter such a sacred place?
*
The ark! Elf walked outside the dead warehouse and looked up at the ark.
The ark was in fact the entire planet and its boundary, for humans, was this blue sky the color of a cop's uniform. Once the billboards were turned off the stars could pierce your heart again.
How had we ever allowed so much human wrongness to enter such a sacred place?
*
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Story (Part 7): The Mask of Sorrow
*
The bar -- or is it a casino? or a communal performance space? -- or a sick child's video game, hidden from parents? -- what word fully covers this space? Is it the inside of a pinball being tilted by Satan? Tell me, is this the inside of your fevered nightmare? Or the side effect of a drug from the sixties? Or is this someone's everyday reality? And where is God, can our loving God be found even here? Even in this space? So is it that even in the human's denial, God cannot deny himself? Can this truth be applied?
The entrance is of tapestries but the tapestries move. They before your eyes and cling to you as you move through. Zeus and Apollo gallop through their multitudinous loves. There is a hologram of a Christian politician consorting with the Caesarites. He holds up a coin with his face on it, winking and smirking like a fratboy. Is this what it means to be "wise as serpents"? As the spectators clap, Sans Foy and his gang walk through the image and disperse it into a flickering migraine.
Of these images some are real and some are merely projections of brightly dyed photons that the sound of a gong will destroy. They say that fiction hardens people and encourages them to treat their neighbors as only fictions like itself. Watch what happens. Duessa dances on the bar while Moloch her slothlike manager (predatory old guy in leather and steel) ogles her wiggle from a low side table. Is it really a woman dancing or an animated image? What a terrible thing to have to ask. Is it real, the little dagger hanging from her heart? Or is it just a prop on her costume?
You tear my heart in two, she sings.
*
I want to stop living the life I'm leading, she cries. An Arab boy walks up to her and tried to touch her. Her image goes up in flames but there she is on the other side of the room, wearing a new non costume and surrounded by Renaissance cupids. She has 2 leashes in her hand. Each holds a man topped by a dunce's cap. I can't seem to get them to heel no matter what I do.
Do not describe more. Allegory's deepest wish is to point to God. When Allegory discusses the world it does so reluctantly, in deep and resonant euphemisms. If you touch the world without a mediator you will be defiled, and this she knows. She wants to lay all her words in God's hands so that what they depict will become tolerable and cease to harm. But artists (like myself?) exploit her and use her to depict all the things that are too vile to be described on this "as is" basis, things whose depiction outside God (if there is such a place?) would make the heart stop -- as for so many people it already has! The way evil invades the soul -- that is the very topic that Reader's Digest decided not to tell you about. Not everything is external. Nor can an artist safely discuss it without becoming unwillingly immersed in what it is and what it does. You must somehow learn how to walk through dirt and stay clean, like a forties gumshoe. But the Black Maskers pretend it is easier than it is.
*
Inside the mildewy vestibule with its dripping glitter, Dave fell onto his knees because, as Lincoln once said, "there was no place else to go". Elf hovered beside him looking fiercely left then fiercely right. She carried a knife from Wisdom's kitchen, something Dave didn't know.
Thank you , Lord, for existence. Thank you for pain. Thank you for this plowing and harrowing of my heart because in this condition it is just like a heavy metal dial pointed straight at reality. At least I beg you to make it so. Yes indeed.
Even here, God is good.
*
Then the 2 giant brothers, Sans Loy and Sans Foy, dragged their brain damaged uncle Sans Joy into the room and propped him up against the bar. The wood shifted with distaste. They saw the interloper on the edge of the battlefield. Pressed forward.
Colors of some other team, a gang we don't like. Not good not good.
Their movements were slow and larded over, as though their inner heat was on reserve or their memory was running low. The closer voice was unsteady like a frayed tape: Get out of this place, stupid Christian. The one in front had a power saw in his hand. Dave was about to be cut in two. And the fool was on his knees praying! So Elf closed her eyes and plunged forward with the blunt knife, hardly good enough to cut butter, but terrible all the same, and she felt herself as much under attack as the goon, because she had been a committed pacifist all her life, but was someone else now that commitment was more than a name she liked to use. And it seemed that something inside her was painfully tearing, now it was torn. Yet the knife fell as through butter or Jello, there was no body inside the person she attacked. Sans Foy split open like a vegetable as Sans Loy bellowed in pain, was it pain or a construct's rendition of pain? The moan came of herself. And Dave cried out: Please no violence. Let's find another way.
The 2 dogs were loose and one of them, hardly human anymore, was nipping at the image of Sans Joy on the bar floor, but it was like one delusion chewing another. Were they real? The Cupids fled screaming, the allegory dispersed. Moloch withdrew for a better occasion, or fled like an abject coward, pursued by a man in the shape of a dog or the other way around.
*
The blood is supposed to be over. The blood of Christ is to be the last blood shed on earth, an end to the shed blood, so that all the violence afterward -- in Iraq or at home -- is really just the thrashing of the ones who have not heard the news, not really heard it, like the soldier on the island who didn't realize that the war was already over so kept fighting. And there are others who can't seem to subsist in a world of peace. The ones who need war. Elf, please (Dave said), withdraw your sword and acknowledge the new realm. But when she pulled her hand loose, dropping the sword into the vat of melting lard, she found she had cut the night club's power cord somehow. The delusions sank slowly to the floor. It was nothing but an unused warehouse that they stood within. Duessa now looked 60 years old or perhaps more. Her white mane hung brittle on her shoulders like Christmas tinsel when the holiday's done. I am really a Christian myself, she cried. I go to church. I uphold family values.
This is just my work! It has nothing to do with -- with.
She sank "on top of" her knees on the cement. I don't like anything about myself. I am not going to defend myself.
But if you were inside me you'd know how I got here.
I would pray now if you only let me pray. But nobody listened to her, for good or for ill, and inexorably in the course of the dream time, the melting swirling lard that had been her bodyguards rose and covered her voice for good.
*
The bar -- or is it a casino? or a communal performance space? -- or a sick child's video game, hidden from parents? -- what word fully covers this space? Is it the inside of a pinball being tilted by Satan? Tell me, is this the inside of your fevered nightmare? Or the side effect of a drug from the sixties? Or is this someone's everyday reality? And where is God, can our loving God be found even here? Even in this space? So is it that even in the human's denial, God cannot deny himself? Can this truth be applied?
The entrance is of tapestries but the tapestries move. They before your eyes and cling to you as you move through. Zeus and Apollo gallop through their multitudinous loves. There is a hologram of a Christian politician consorting with the Caesarites. He holds up a coin with his face on it, winking and smirking like a fratboy. Is this what it means to be "wise as serpents"? As the spectators clap, Sans Foy and his gang walk through the image and disperse it into a flickering migraine.
Of these images some are real and some are merely projections of brightly dyed photons that the sound of a gong will destroy. They say that fiction hardens people and encourages them to treat their neighbors as only fictions like itself. Watch what happens. Duessa dances on the bar while Moloch her slothlike manager (predatory old guy in leather and steel) ogles her wiggle from a low side table. Is it really a woman dancing or an animated image? What a terrible thing to have to ask. Is it real, the little dagger hanging from her heart? Or is it just a prop on her costume?
You tear my heart in two, she sings.
*
I want to stop living the life I'm leading, she cries. An Arab boy walks up to her and tried to touch her. Her image goes up in flames but there she is on the other side of the room, wearing a new non costume and surrounded by Renaissance cupids. She has 2 leashes in her hand. Each holds a man topped by a dunce's cap. I can't seem to get them to heel no matter what I do.
Do not describe more. Allegory's deepest wish is to point to God. When Allegory discusses the world it does so reluctantly, in deep and resonant euphemisms. If you touch the world without a mediator you will be defiled, and this she knows. She wants to lay all her words in God's hands so that what they depict will become tolerable and cease to harm. But artists (like myself?) exploit her and use her to depict all the things that are too vile to be described on this "as is" basis, things whose depiction outside God (if there is such a place?) would make the heart stop -- as for so many people it already has! The way evil invades the soul -- that is the very topic that Reader's Digest decided not to tell you about. Not everything is external. Nor can an artist safely discuss it without becoming unwillingly immersed in what it is and what it does. You must somehow learn how to walk through dirt and stay clean, like a forties gumshoe. But the Black Maskers pretend it is easier than it is.
*
Inside the mildewy vestibule with its dripping glitter, Dave fell onto his knees because, as Lincoln once said, "there was no place else to go". Elf hovered beside him looking fiercely left then fiercely right. She carried a knife from Wisdom's kitchen, something Dave didn't know.
Thank you , Lord, for existence. Thank you for pain. Thank you for this plowing and harrowing of my heart because in this condition it is just like a heavy metal dial pointed straight at reality. At least I beg you to make it so. Yes indeed.
Even here, God is good.
*
Then the 2 giant brothers, Sans Loy and Sans Foy, dragged their brain damaged uncle Sans Joy into the room and propped him up against the bar. The wood shifted with distaste. They saw the interloper on the edge of the battlefield. Pressed forward.
Colors of some other team, a gang we don't like. Not good not good.
Their movements were slow and larded over, as though their inner heat was on reserve or their memory was running low. The closer voice was unsteady like a frayed tape: Get out of this place, stupid Christian. The one in front had a power saw in his hand. Dave was about to be cut in two. And the fool was on his knees praying! So Elf closed her eyes and plunged forward with the blunt knife, hardly good enough to cut butter, but terrible all the same, and she felt herself as much under attack as the goon, because she had been a committed pacifist all her life, but was someone else now that commitment was more than a name she liked to use. And it seemed that something inside her was painfully tearing, now it was torn. Yet the knife fell as through butter or Jello, there was no body inside the person she attacked. Sans Foy split open like a vegetable as Sans Loy bellowed in pain, was it pain or a construct's rendition of pain? The moan came of herself. And Dave cried out: Please no violence. Let's find another way.
The 2 dogs were loose and one of them, hardly human anymore, was nipping at the image of Sans Joy on the bar floor, but it was like one delusion chewing another. Were they real? The Cupids fled screaming, the allegory dispersed. Moloch withdrew for a better occasion, or fled like an abject coward, pursued by a man in the shape of a dog or the other way around.
*
The blood is supposed to be over. The blood of Christ is to be the last blood shed on earth, an end to the shed blood, so that all the violence afterward -- in Iraq or at home -- is really just the thrashing of the ones who have not heard the news, not really heard it, like the soldier on the island who didn't realize that the war was already over so kept fighting. And there are others who can't seem to subsist in a world of peace. The ones who need war. Elf, please (Dave said), withdraw your sword and acknowledge the new realm. But when she pulled her hand loose, dropping the sword into the vat of melting lard, she found she had cut the night club's power cord somehow. The delusions sank slowly to the floor. It was nothing but an unused warehouse that they stood within. Duessa now looked 60 years old or perhaps more. Her white mane hung brittle on her shoulders like Christmas tinsel when the holiday's done. I am really a Christian myself, she cried. I go to church. I uphold family values.
This is just my work! It has nothing to do with -- with.
She sank "on top of" her knees on the cement. I don't like anything about myself. I am not going to defend myself.
But if you were inside me you'd know how I got here.
I would pray now if you only let me pray. But nobody listened to her, for good or for ill, and inexorably in the course of the dream time, the melting swirling lard that had been her bodyguards rose and covered her voice for good.
*
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
The Pseudo Evangelical's Trap (10/19/04)
*
The Pseudo Evangelical’s Trap
The anchoress was so angry that she almost seemed out of control.
But if Christ is who he says he is, we have no time for the games played by pseudo evangelicals, definitely not just no time but less than that. Less than none.
What do you mean, game? Here is what I mean. The pseudo evangelical – Jerry Falwell or President Bush or, for that matter, that person, whoever he is, who heads the Southern Baptists – pretends that evangelizing non Christians is a high priority. And he speaks the old words of evangelizing, from Luke and Paul, while knowing perfectly well that these particular words will fail, will never reach a non Christian. So his effort fails and he knew that it would fail. And he is happy that it failed. He expected it to and enjoyed this expectation, since it made his own club membership all the more exclusive!
Because nothing that he did was ever really directed to the non Christians who are in desperate need of his help. Everything he did was really directed to Christians, shall I say pseudo Christians of his own neighborhood, the pseudo evangelicals much like himself, who now can of course smugly congratulate themselves on this “effort” that was no effort at all. And they can say that, well, they tried, although clearly they didn’t. Of course it was no valid effort if it was predeterminded to fail and if it even congratulates itself on its own failure. We have a very deep hypocrisy here, to be sure.
What would it be to be an actual evangelical? It would be to speak the language of the one you wish to save. It would be to show, no, not only show, but to feel concern for the person you would otherwise be manipulating into Christianity. Christ uses persuasion and Christ plays fair.
The deepest scandal of our church is not gay bishops or whatever but the fact that evangelicals are comfortable not really being what they say, only speaking the words to their own comfort. And they slap Christ in the face whenever they do this. And that no longer matters to them!
By this time the anchoress was so mad that she could hardly speak and Elf had to calm her down, soothe her back into a normal non-fanatical humanity -- the kind that says “Let us endure awhile and see injustice done.”
And the blond young man they called the Southerner gently rebuked her: Ma'am those people you critique all tend to come from my neck of the woods. And when Northerners critique them out of context, even though what they say may be right, or have some right in it, it still becomes wrong because it never makes mention of the *context*, ma'am. Their context or *your* context either. And you kept telling me that true faithful conduct was a *place*, was not just words, but now I don't know whether to believe you.
And I do surely know that you're not claiming that *this* place is the model that *they* are going to follow? Not Duessa with her bloody dogs and all those prostitutes tortured like rabbits? Please, ma'am.
I counted on you to be balanced.
And Elf said: I always felt that the part in the Lord's prayer about trespasses was really saying: Oh please, do not demonize.
Even the demons are pitiful in a way.
Oh you people, the anchoress said. Just leave me alone. I may apologize tomorrow. And I may not!
Meanwhile, the convict, the ridiculous knight, lay on the floor snoring like a sawmill. A big quest tomorrow.
*
The Pseudo Evangelical’s Trap
The anchoress was so angry that she almost seemed out of control.
But if Christ is who he says he is, we have no time for the games played by pseudo evangelicals, definitely not just no time but less than that. Less than none.
What do you mean, game? Here is what I mean. The pseudo evangelical – Jerry Falwell or President Bush or, for that matter, that person, whoever he is, who heads the Southern Baptists – pretends that evangelizing non Christians is a high priority. And he speaks the old words of evangelizing, from Luke and Paul, while knowing perfectly well that these particular words will fail, will never reach a non Christian. So his effort fails and he knew that it would fail. And he is happy that it failed. He expected it to and enjoyed this expectation, since it made his own club membership all the more exclusive!
Because nothing that he did was ever really directed to the non Christians who are in desperate need of his help. Everything he did was really directed to Christians, shall I say pseudo Christians of his own neighborhood, the pseudo evangelicals much like himself, who now can of course smugly congratulate themselves on this “effort” that was no effort at all. And they can say that, well, they tried, although clearly they didn’t. Of course it was no valid effort if it was predeterminded to fail and if it even congratulates itself on its own failure. We have a very deep hypocrisy here, to be sure.
What would it be to be an actual evangelical? It would be to speak the language of the one you wish to save. It would be to show, no, not only show, but to feel concern for the person you would otherwise be manipulating into Christianity. Christ uses persuasion and Christ plays fair.
The deepest scandal of our church is not gay bishops or whatever but the fact that evangelicals are comfortable not really being what they say, only speaking the words to their own comfort. And they slap Christ in the face whenever they do this. And that no longer matters to them!
By this time the anchoress was so mad that she could hardly speak and Elf had to calm her down, soothe her back into a normal non-fanatical humanity -- the kind that says “Let us endure awhile and see injustice done.”
And the blond young man they called the Southerner gently rebuked her: Ma'am those people you critique all tend to come from my neck of the woods. And when Northerners critique them out of context, even though what they say may be right, or have some right in it, it still becomes wrong because it never makes mention of the *context*, ma'am. Their context or *your* context either. And you kept telling me that true faithful conduct was a *place*, was not just words, but now I don't know whether to believe you.
And I do surely know that you're not claiming that *this* place is the model that *they* are going to follow? Not Duessa with her bloody dogs and all those prostitutes tortured like rabbits? Please, ma'am.
I counted on you to be balanced.
And Elf said: I always felt that the part in the Lord's prayer about trespasses was really saying: Oh please, do not demonize.
Even the demons are pitiful in a way.
Oh you people, the anchoress said. Just leave me alone. I may apologize tomorrow. And I may not!
Meanwhile, the convict, the ridiculous knight, lay on the floor snoring like a sawmill. A big quest tomorrow.
*
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)