Friday, February 17, 2012

At the end of the week I have a chance to read, to climb back toward the liberal intellectual world, a book my father nudged me toward for offering a clean fresh look on how the Gospels might be interpreted. In King Jesus, Robert Graves, informed by extensive scholarship, proposes a version of the original story, along with popular misinterpretations and mistakes in the narrative as passed down in Christian tradition.

This exercise of the mind brings back to me the riches of my father's thoughtful mind and gentle spirit. He attained much in his lifetime, and he was your basic kind and broadly intellectual college professor, who would touch on Yeats in the course of his botany lectures, who had a great grasp on the life of the mind. And compared to his achievements, his good works daily as an educator, a son can sometimes wonder how well he has honored such a tradition. And I know I have had my issues, discovering how to be in academic trouble, for whatever reason, in a time when it's better not to be. And of course the usual issues often come up, concerning what one is doing with his path in life and all that sort of thing.

The best thing one can do, actually can do, is realize in some way that he is 'sick,' in some way, or to put it better, and aligned with a helpful tradition (to say the least), in need of a physician. So one turns to a book, and this one about, well, wise people, from Hillel on through to a Jesus struggling with how to bring the Law of Moses along in a living world. Graves description of Hillel, through the eyes of Jesus, gives us a poor man who studied the Torah, stayed humble, kept a fine sensibility about all things meaningful, all the while maintaining his connections to the trade of carpentry, that is to say, an unpretentious fellow.

It is easy, I would gather, to be down on yourself for the life of trade that you've fallen into. But it is good medicine to look at it another way and see that maybe just so you have in fact accomplished some good in the world, some extension of kindness toward your fellow human being and neighbor in the course of your work. Maybe you don't specifically, in particularly authoritatively tangible ways, help people. But I know, in my gut, and from my own experience, that one's conscience can make you feel sick about yourself, and that what one really needs then is some form of acceptance, a permission to be good and kind, even as that might strain upon one's worldly logic.

And in a public house, I think the offer is primarily of kind acceptance, so that people can be themselves, let the demons of their guard down, and relax in some way, which then in turn gives them permission to not just sit around feeling guilty about all their lusty thoughts and of what they've done, but to have a sense of themselves as good and soulful people, a regaining, if you will, of humanity.

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