Tempus Fugit

A couple of months ago I was driving while chatting with one of my daughters. At some point she wasn't speaking clearly/loudly enough, so I tried to make her more audible by increasing the Volume setting on the steering wheel's sound system controls.

TV and Lent

About 35 years ago I was watching Firing Line, William F. Buckley's TV show. He was interviewing Malcolm Muggeridge, who at some point said, "you know, every important thing I've learned I learned by suffering," or words to that effect. I was about 15 years old, and thought that was a dumb thing to say. Old British twit. I had learned plenty and was not a sufferer by any means. But it was such an intriguing concept that I retained it, even though I didn't understand it....which makes a good motto: remember now, understand later. It would sound better in Latin. Or French.

Anyway, I was raised on TV. Not that I watched some insane amount of it, but it was a normal part of life. But after having kids of my own I began to worry that the quantity & quality of cable fare was more problematic than the programming content of my childhood, both for me and the kids. Not that I did anything about it.

Then about 13 years ago, our pastor, Fr. Day, suggested at Mass that we parishioners consider giving up TV for Lent. I'd considered it before....and passed. But that year while driving home, my Fabulous Wife and I decided we'd try it, cold turkey. The kids were maybe 4 or 5 years old; they were not consulted.

The next day, Monday, I returned the converter box. The cable company rep asked me what was wrong with the cable box? Nothing, we're just giving up TV for Lent. A couple of people thought that was incredible, asked about the thinking behind it. I pointed out we hadn't actually missed any TV yet, and it might not work out.

Monday was awful. So was Tuesday. But by Sunday, we were adjusting. Within 2 weeks, we were acclimated. Easter Sunday rolled around, and we and the kids decided to just leave the TV off indefinitely.

Now, years later, life is good. We adults watch DVDs late in the evening, which is controllable and requires effort. The kids can do the same on the weekends, but they usually don't. The house is quiet, a refuge. Family dinner conversation often extends beyond the meal. The kids turned out just fine. For being teenagers, they are surprisingly unmaterialistic.

And the credit goes to the Church, whose institutional memory knows the value of sacrifice, and suffering (not that this was all that painful, but that's part of the point, like giving blood: actually donating it is easier than anticipating donating it). And of course, we learned from this experience, although at the start all we expected was to suffer, not to learn; certainly not to to learn we could be happier by giving up something that we liked. And in the bigger picture I learned to pay closer attention to what the Church teaches, even if (especially if) it's something I don't much want to do.

Smart Church...she knew this would happen.

Muggeridge, too. Smart Brit twit.

Hanseatische Reise

My fabulous wife runs a travel agency, does cruises mostly. So sometimes we go on the cruises, too. As long as one of us can speak the language, we run our own affairs in the ports. We're doing a Baltic cruise in June; we'll spend a day in the old Hansa city of Rostock. Here's what we have planned for our group:

We take a local ferry from the big cruiseship wharf at Warnemunde right on the Baltic (Ostsee) to Rostock, about 10 miles inland (too shallow for big ships). The name of the ferry is the Rostock 7, which refers to the following old rhyme, dating back at least to 1596. It's called Die Rostocker Kennewohrn, the Rostock Landmarks.

In English it says:

Seven Towers of St. Mary's Church
Seven Streets at the Great Market
Seven Gates lead to the Land (countryside)
Seven Merchant Bridges by the Strand
Seven Towers upon City Hall stand
Seven Bells who together strike
Seven Linden-trees in the Rosegarden
These are the Rostock Landmarks

Using the rhyme as our guide, on our walking tour we'll see St. Mary's church, the Great Market, a couple of the remaining gates & bridges, City Hall, the Rosegarden, stroll along the harbor, and maybe hear some bells, so we'll see & hear what Rostock says we should. I made a map from Google Earth, we'll have a good time, won't get lost. It's all in the old city, so there'll be opportunities for, you know, German refreshments when we need a break. This should take us 'til early afternoon, when we take the ferry back to Warnemunde, and visit that town, which is nowadays a beach resort.

Back to the rhyme, the Niederdeutsch (Low German) version is the original, which resembles modern Dutch as much as it resembles the modern Hochdeutsch version.

Niederdeutsch version:

Söben Toern to Sint Marien Kark,
Söben Straten bi den groten Mark,
Söben Doern, so da gaen to Lande,

Söben Kopmannsbrüggen bi dem Strande,

Söben Toern, so up dat Rathus stan,

Söben Klocken, so dakliken slan,

Söben Linnenböm up den Rosengoern:

Dat syn de Rostocker Kennewohrn.

Hochdeutsch version:

Sieben Türme der St. Marien Kirche,

Sieben Straßen bei dem großen Markt,

Sieben Tore, die in das Land führen,

Sieben Kaufmannsbrücken bei dem Strand,

Sieben Türme, die auf dem Rathaus stehen,

Sieben Glocken die zugleich schlagen,

Sieben Lindenbäume im Rosengarten:

Das sind die Rostocker Wahrzeichen.

The Low German reminded me of some Grimm's fairy tales I'd read in college. They had little Low German rhymes such as: "Manntje, Manntje, Tempe Te, Buttje, Buttje, in der See..."

Turns out that some of Grimm's tales were originally in Low German.... like this:

"Dar wöör maal eens en Fischer un syne Fru, de waanden tosamen in'n Pißputt.."

My modern trans: Das war einmal ein Fischer und seine Frau, die wohnten zusammen in einen Pißputt

My English: That was onetime a fisher(man) and his spouse, they lived together in a pisspot (a chamber pot, a filthy hovel).

Charming. Grimm's fairytales can be quite blunt.

Part of the fun in cruising is that there is every chance to learn something new and unexpected; in this case, some language history, and I haven't even left home yet.

Lent and Meat

My eldest son doesn't eat meat. That includes fish & eggs. I don't remember about dairy products. Anyway, he's not preachy about it, but his quiet example makes me think periodically about the moral dimensions of eating animals, especially during Lent.

I generally assume that our existence, Creation, is the product of God's thought. God thinks the universe, so it is. So we all inhabit God's brain, to put it in physical human terms. And in the Beginning, there was no Sin, and things were in perfect harmony in God's head. But then there was the Fall, and Sin. Consider Sin as the opposite of God, yet existing within his head. Its effects wouldn't be confined to the individual sinner (as we know from practical experience); it could mess up, distort, warp, pervert any other aspects of Creation that it touched. Just to cut this short, St. Paul observed that the wages of Sin is Death, and any universe that includes me dying (dying? dying! ) is obviously screwed-up.

Anyway, back to eating meat, which is related to the Fall.

First notice how much meat Adam & Eve got to eat in the wonderful Garden:

In Genesis, God said,

"Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

Apparently, dominion over animals didn't extend to eating them.

Later, after the Fall when Sin entered the world, Noah kept the animals alive during the Flood. When they left the Ark, God said,

"Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things."

I suppose this is a sort of debt the animals owe to Noah: having saved the animals, and by extension all their descendants, Noah and his descendants are allowed to eat them....although this preceding passage doesn't make it sound like that's especially ok with God:

"And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered."

Which sounds awful. Yet in a sin-wrecked world God allows it. Apparently some things are conditionally tolerated by God after the Fall that would never have been acceptable in the Garden; which is hardly the same as saying they are good, or blessed, or even condoned.

Of course, we're allowed to still eat fish on Friday...but I regard the no-meat stricture as the Church's way to nudge us toward a Garden worldview instead of a post-Fall one.

Education & All That

A couple of days ago, I was in an online discussion about whether schools (colleges, esp.) should focus on transmitting the knowledge required to do a particular job, or strive to produce a well-rounded person who may (or may not) have a special skill. I reflected briefly on my own school career, and what I valued about it, and responded thusly:

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In college I saw lots of smart, ignorant people (not excluding myself). College was more about training; less about education. The university was expected to produce money-makers, young energetic capitalistic chainsaws. Not citizens; not....human beings in the fullest sense of the term. I half-joke about my school career, K through Master's degree: I had one subject in K-12 that was about educating me, as a citizen of America, and the world: Latin. And in college I had one subject that did the same: Art and Architectural History. All the rest was training (I exaggerate a bit) to make money, to be productive in the ways that can be measured on a W-2.

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It's true: all we need to be affluent is training. But I see that what I value more are mostly things that don't make money: Scrooge's change of heart in A Christmas Carol; Rembrandt's portrayal of forgiveness in The Prodigal Son; van Gogh's wheatfields; Dorothy realizing there's no place like home, because the people who love her are there; the selfless love of husband and wife in O. Henry's Gift of the Magi; the fact that I could say 'philosopher' or 'logos' to Socrates or Jesus, and they would understand me; that math shows me the Mind of God; the transcendence of Hagia Sophia; that Debussy stood on Tchaikovsky's shoulders, who stood on Beethoven's, who stood on Mozart's, that they each successively created what their musical predecessors could not have imagined; that God bursts out of his children, and in their own unique ways they express his creativity and love.

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The difference between education and training: between living, and getting & spending; between citizens and consumers; between babies and masses of tissue; between a nation and a population.

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I figure it's better as a society, a family of Man, to be less well trained, and better educated. That does beg the question of who is going educate whom in exactly what, but that'd require another post.

Mary, Does that Sweatrag Look Rolled-up to You?

I saw this article about a month ago, did a little research then....seemed unpersuasive to me:

Why did Jesus fold the linen burial cloth after His resurrection? I never noticed this....
The Gospel of John (20:7) tells us that the napkin, which was placed over the face of Jesus, was not just thrown aside like the grave clothes......

It goes on from there, you can find it online all too easily. The rest of this post won't make sense without reading the original article.

The article's based on the King James version of John 20:7, and depends a good bit on the English words napkin, and folded.

The word napkin shows up 3 times in the whole KJV:

Luke 19:20 And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin:

John 11:44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

John 20:7 And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

Napkin's a translation of σουδάριον, soudarion, from the Greek stem for sweat, with the following Bible meanings (per Strong's Concordance):

1) a handkerchief

2) a cloth for wiping perspiration from the face and for cleaning the nose and also used in swathing the head of a corpse

Notice in none of the 3 occasions napkin is used in the KJV does it have anything to do with eating or mealtime (nor do Strong's definitions). Later translations than the KJV (I checked about half a dozen) don't say napkin anywhere, since its use in the KJV is now archaic, and its modern association with mealtime can be confusing.

Now, folded is intended to translate the Greek word ἐντυλίσσω, entylisso, which has the following Bible meaning:

to roll up, wrap together.

In the KJV NT entylisso is used only 3 times:

1. Matt 27:59 And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth...

2. Luke 23:53 And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.

3. John 20:7 And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

In no case does the online KJV I searched substitute the word fold for wrap. About half of the later translations say fold here; the others say wrap or roll up.

The NT KJV does use the English verb fold once, by the way, here:

Heb 1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

The word the KJV is translating is ἑλίσσω, helisso, which isn't really the Greek word for fold, anyway (that's δίπλωμω, diplomo; like some English word...I forgot what it is).

Helisso and entylisso are related, they have the same root meaning of rolling or twisting, which is like our Greek loanword helix. So even the Greek word the KJV translates as fold has rolling or twisting as its base meaning. As it turns out, later translations don't say folded, but rather rolled up. My guess is the KJV team used fold since people in their day (and ours) would fold clothes, not roll them up; but later translators used rolled up to stay closer to the Greek verb.

So the whole business in the email about folding napkins at mealtime is made up as far as I can tell.

The only significance I know of regarding the rolled-up headcloth is that it shows Jesus' body was not hurriedly snatched by robbers, e.g, in the Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1708–1710) by Matthew Henry:

"The grave-clothes were found in very good order, which serves for an evidence that his body was not stolen away while men slept. Robbers of tombs have been known to take away the clothes and leave the body; but none ever took away the body and left the clothes, especially when it was fine linen and new. Anyone would rather choose to carry a dead body in its clothes than naked. Or, if those that were supposed to have stolen it would have left the grave-clothes behind, yet it cannot be supposed they should find leisure to fold up the linen."

Next thing you know, someone will be adding other jots & tittles on their own authority...like this:

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So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.

(Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith alone without the deeds of the law)

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Just speculating.

Anastasis

Last week we were discussing the physical literalness of Jesus' death: that not only did Jesus' Human nature die on the cross, but so did his Divine nature....which the kids don't grasp right away, because of course, God can't die, right? Well, in this case he can and did, and how that can be is a mystery....which we don't understand, but then God is more than we can figure out. And remember, Adam & Eve thought they had God figured out.....turned out to be a big mistake on their part.

So some of the things we look at as part of this need for the Sacrifice to be, you know, sacrificed, killed, are bits of Leviticus 4 & 5 (they already know about killing & eating the Passover Lamb). There's a lot of this going on:

"the bullock shall be killed before the LORD...and the priest shall make an atonement for him as concerning his sin, and it shall be forgiven him." The bit about atonement & forgiveness is repeated 9 times in these two chapters. You'd think with all that sacrificing, atonement, and forgiveness, everybody'd be going to heaven, but noooo. Why not?

I get a volunteer Jewish sinner to come up & whisper to me some sins, and as a Levite priest (and also a sinner) I say, "Uh, oh, that sin's gonna cost you a lamb and two doves. A really nice lamb, not some scrawny thing you got on sale." The sinner hands over the sacrifices, I kill them, make atonement, he's forgiven. All done, off to heaven? No, the problem is our sins are such an offense that we can't make it up to God on our own. It's like when I was a callow youth and broke a neighbor's window. My ability to atone was at the level of taping the pieces back together. A nice gesture, but it's still a busted window. I wound up needing my father to apologize and fix the window to get things properly restored. So, as I needed my father to atone for my mischief, we need a perfect Lamb to perfectly atone for our sins.

Now I ask, if we need Jesus the perfect Pascal Lamb's death to atone completely for our sins, to redeem us, did all these good people doing their best go burn in Hell before Jesus was crucified? The kids intuit correctly, no.....but...

That was it for the class period. Next class will start with recalling from the Creed, "he descended into Hell"......where was that exactly, and was Jesus dead when he was there?

First we'll discuss Sheol and Gehenna, Hades & Hell. I'll run through the parable about Lazarus in Abraham's bosom.

Then I'll hand out the scene at the top of the page, known in English as the Harrowing of Hell; in Greek, the Anastasis (ανάστασις) , the Resurrection.

[Hey, let's digress and check out the Greek on the fresco: Over Christ's head is H ANAsTACIC, the Anastasis (the odd-looking T is a contraction of a lower case s and and a capital T). To the left is IC, short for IECUC, Jesus; to the right, XC, you guessed it, XRICTOC, Christos. I wonder, considering all the time a fresco or mosaic takes, why save 10 minutes by abbreviating? Am I digressing?]

In the Anastasis we'll see dead Jesus breaking down the gates of 'Hell,' and yanking Adam & Eve out. On the left we see old King David (now there's an expert sinner...can you say Uriah and Bathsheba? They know that story.), young King Solomon, and John the Baptist (the 'Forerunner'). On the right, Abel (the 'Protomartyr') with his shepherd's crook, and other heaven-bound folks I don't know...probably prophets.

I anticipate a lot of 12-year-old brains on fire; we should have some good discussion.

This will lead us into the next chapter which runs from Jesus' burial up to the Ascension and possibly including Pentecost.