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Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar does not come off well in the biblical book of Daniel. It is not difficult to find in the text’s description of his behavior the definition of a neurotic fool.

Yet below the obvious humorous touches in the book’s way of telling a story, a more subtle irony may be detected. Frankly, it is difficult to know whether this kind of thing is really there or whether we read it into the text because we rather like this kind of thing. One such soft-spoken irony is borne along by the Aramaic word gala’ and related forms. Continue Reading »

ROI: Proverbs 28

We parents watch attentively for the return on our investment.

Parenting is not a catch-and-release endeavor nor a spectator sport. To the contrary, our identity is wrapped up in the results. To some degree, they define us.

Those who keep the law are wise children,
but companions of gluttons shame their parents.

We have tools, with our modern discourse of individualism and our casual approach to rectitude, for letting ourselves off the hook quite quickly when our grown child runs amock. Indeed, we may have needed to react against the rigid assumptions that wrote off a parent for another adult’s deeds. Continue Reading »

coherence: Proverbs 28

When we unreflectively take ‘democracy’ as our self-evident starting point, we gain individual rights and untrammeled liberties at the loss of other blessings. The economic and social benefits of prizing liberty are so obvious that we absolutize them. We convert the gift into the god. We idolize the product rather than the maker.

We behave stupidly, mistaking the part for the whole. We become fools.

It may be impossible for us to share all the assumptions that undergird the biblical proverbs. Indeed it may be unwise. History means something and ‘originalist’ attempts to re-make our society according to an ancient blue-print always fail. We are called to be wise, not antiquarian. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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 many 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 their own loss, the vocabulary of their 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.