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Our tolerant times allow us to smile wanly at the fool’s misalignment with reality, but not to savage him with demeaning words.

Not so the biblical proverbs. In the Bible’s sinecure of realism, the fool represents a rogue threat to communal health. He is not merely exercising individual preferences or making choices that one might not care to follow. He is a shredder of valuable cloth, an undiscerning revolutionary against the nourishing status quo that has taken generations to construct.

He is not, as with us, to be pitied but rather condemned and rooted out. If he will not listen, he does not only show himself without hope. He proves himself lethal.

None of this falls easily on our exceedingly patient ears. Perhaps we can strain our perceptive empathy just enough to see the point of a tranche of proverbs that delineates the unreliability of the fool:

It is like cutting off one’s foot and drinking down violence,
to send a message by a fool.
The legs of a disabled person hang limp;
so does a proverb in the mouth of a fool.
It is like binding a stone in a sling
to give honor to a fool.

If the notion of severing a limb or drinking violence seems disproportionate to a fool’s penchant for screwing up any representative task, of harming our reputation and misleading a business partner in our name, that is a problem of our own perception and we must name it. Perhaps we have not valued reliability deeply enough. Maybe we have underestimated the power both of word and of truth.

The second and third of the quoted proverbs show both the fool and the one stupid enough to commission him with any important task to be pathetic. If we do not recognize his lethal habit of error, we have become like him.

Fools employ fools.

A esa hora cuando el atardecer solemnemente da espacio a la noche, cuando la mitad del cielo se pone celeste espejo y la otra toma un tono amarillo celeste, pintado al final de destellos naranja.

A mi lado iban dos chiquillos felices con la expectativa de disfrutar el viaje, el resto era gente como yo, contenta de regresar a casa.

El pito ensordecedor del tren anunció la partida, arrancó bamboleándose por aquellas calles antiguas llenas de casas de otro tiempo, por aquellos barrios testigos de una oligarquía cafetalera que le dio fisonomía a la economía de este país. Continue Reading »

Nos conocimos hace aproximadamente 15 años, cuando yo estaba en los afanes de un matrimonio y maternidad recién iniciados. En ese primer encuentro su entusiasmo fue vehemente, a mí apenas me alcanzó para sonreír fríamente.

Han pasado los años y sin vanidad puedo asegurar que ese entusiasmo continúa allí, a pesar de su amor no correspondido, con su mirada tan incómodamente fijamente en mí, midiendo mis gestos y mis movimientos, con su interminable vicio de obtener de mí una caricia o una palabra amorosa, percatándose humildemente de que para mí no cuenta, pero persiste, cada día me espera.

Como cualquiera que se sabe poseedor de un amor tan grande, mi indiferencia se ha agravado. Mi prisa por acabar esa relación es tan apasionada como su insistencia en continuar junto a mí a pesar de cualquier cosa.

Aunque tengo que admitirlo con pesadumbre, ya sea por obligación o costumbre se ha hecho parte de mi vida. A pesar de mi empecinado afán por no darle más terreno, se incluyó sin permiso en mi anecdotario y hasta se ha inmiscuido con los míos, con mis amistades.

En fin, no sé si esta experiencia es única o si usted ha vivido algo semejante, pero seguramente cuando Tina mi perra ya no esté, voy extrañar ser el objeto de su amor.

No hay cosa más hermosa que ver llover en mi país. No hay cosa más bendita después de los calores de marzo capaces de freírnos hasta los sesos, que escuchar allá en la lejanía, en las montañas, el rugido de los incesantes relámpagos que sin ton ni son descargan su luz intermitente y lo hacen retumbar todo como anticipo a los primeros aguaceros.

Y una vez que cae el primer “baldazo”, la creación suspira de descanso por el “agüita” bendita con que el Todopoderoso le muestra su misericordia. Todo se pone más verde, si es que eso es posible y para rematar se suelta un olorcito a tierra mojada delicioso preludio a los meses de meses de agua incesante que los alicios del norte se llevan a partir de noviembre para dar cabida al verano “helado” de diciembre.

Pero en el sentido más folklórico del costarricense el concepto de aguacero también tiene su peyorativo, y es cuando después de una mala acción o travesura recibiendo la justa retribución decimos que a alguien le llovió parejo.

Continue Reading »

Writing his poetry while seated on ash and blood, the writer of the biblical book of Lamentations finds just the syllables for his poignant scream:

He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
and made me cower in ashes;
my soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, “Gone is my glory,
and all that I had hoped for from the LORD.”
 
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
and is bowed down within me.

One wonders how may millions of readers—each placed in a moment as real and significant as that of the poet who lamented Zion’s devastation—have found in such stark realism the descriptors of her own loss, the vocabulary of his bereft agony.

This would be enough to justify these poems, for we borrow words most needily when our throat chokes up and the words we thought we knew remain stuck in our lungs. Continue Reading »

The writer of the New Testament ‘letter’—it is hardly just that—to the Hebrews does what attentive readers of sacred literature instinctively do: he fills in the blanks.

The enigmatic figure of Melchizedek deserves a Guinness Book of World Records category all his own. One would have to define it as ‘most suggestive figure about whom the least is said’. This odd king-priest meets the patriarch Abraham on his way back from a spasm of righteous warfare and receives a tithe of the man’s spoils. Then he’s gone from the record, as quickly and with as little comment as he entered it.

The consequence is that the tradition records widespread speculation regarding his whereabouts, his significance, and what other stunts he might have pulled that landed on the biblical cutting-room floor. Hebrews is one voice in that tradition, a contemplation of Jesus’ priestly role in the light of Melchizedek’s superbly mysterious precedent. Continue Reading »

This very world, this very contradiction—unabridged, unmitigated, unsmoothed, unsimplified, unreduced—this world shall not be overcome, but consummated. It shall be consummated in the Kingdom, for it is that world, and no other, with all its contrariety, in which the Kingdom is a latency such that every reduction would only hinder its consummation, whereas every unification of contrarieties would prepare it. It is a redemption not from the evil, but of the evil, as the power that God created for his service and for the performance of His work.

With all the herding prowess of the aphorism, a popular saying corrals us into agreeing that the heavenly minded are no earthly good. The apostle Paul will have none of that kind of celestial religion.

In a letter that has much to say about transcendent matters, Paul directs a torrent of words to the necessity of working hard and the requirement of self-reliance.

Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.

It may be that some members of the early Christian movement did conclude that the imminent return of their Messiah drained the sweaty tasks of world-shaping, spouse-sheltering, and child-feeding of their pertinence. Why invest sweat equity in an asset whose value was bound to expire tomorrow?

Or perhaps some were simply lazy bums, with no need of ideological support for their innate inertia.

Regardless, Paul will not have the community he shepherds burdened or blemished by those who will not lift a finger to provide for themselves. He comes within a hair’s breadth of painting them out of the family photograph.

No doubt faith is a little too conveniently blamed for the foibles of the inactive and dependent. Yet it must be admitted that a pernicious logic is available to the pious who would rather avoid work than embrace it.

Paul disowns that line of thinking and brushes up against doing the same with those who adopt it.

Sweat and a bit of muddy grunting, it turns out, resound with more sanctity than the hummed hymns of the sleepy.

Worship is a crystallized form of proximity to YHWH. The joy and completion we feel in worship do not demean similar experience elsewhere, for ‘liturgy’ is expansive without hegemony, inclusive with no eradicating instincts. Worship’s embrace shelters those it gathers in but none is lost there, none negated.

Though worship is an intensified version of wider life lived before YHWH, there is nothing like it.

Worship is paradoxical to the bone, for though YHWH ‘fills both heaven and earth’, as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, it is worth the trek to his house to encounter him as he can be known nowhere else.

Some are fortunate enough to linger in that dwelling place.

Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself in which to set her young, near Your altar, O LORD of hosts, my king and my God. Happy are those who dwell in Your house; they forever praise You.

We come in, we go out. We make pilgrimage, we return home. We weep, shout, lift our hands, stomp our feet, spin our bodies like a top without the embarrassment we would feel in doing so anywhere else, because to stand before YHWH’s altar is like nothing else we know.

Yet it is like everything, for all life lived purposefully culminates in this, in doxology.

We may admire the fortunate sparrow and the swallow, who bears and nurtures her young in the rafters of YHWH’s house, so close that her babies might topple onto his altar were they to stray too early from the confines she has lovingly built for them. Yet we cannot stay, as she does. We can only depart when the hour for homeward things is due, worship so sewn into our hearts that we live longing for our next visit to this place, so like the rest of our lives, so unlike anything, so near to YHWH whose invitation shall one day no longer speak of adjournment.

During a recent business trip to Sopron, Hungary, I booked flights through Budapest, supposing this to be the quickest way to the city of Sopron, way out on Hungary’s western border with Austria. I was wrong. Vienna would have been them logical choice.

No harm done. I purchased a Hungary Rail Pass through my US travel agent and had a delightful—if eventful—trip from Budapest to Sopron and by return. Continue Reading »

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