At night I took refuge from work and its pains in the early morning with an old children's book of ours.  I'd ordered another copy of it from the old book sellers of Amazon, wishing to give it as a gift to my niece and nephew, but the 'very good condition' copy that arrived has a musty feeling to it, and with its inked in dedication, I thought I'd better just hang on to it.  Brian Wildsmith's Illustrated Bible Stories as told by Philip Turner.  There's just something nice about a book you grew up with, and at various times in your more mature life, returning to it has been a good balm for soreness of all forms mental, physical, of the heart, of the soul, of the agitated blood.

The tree pollen has come forth, and in the beam of a flashlight or a bicycle helmet lamp, the grains of it are visible and granular, coming down like a very fine precipitation, particles afloat riding sideways and down in the breezes of nighttime.  Sneezing, puffy eyes, itches of the sinus.  And you can plainly see, buds on trees, the first of the flowering pink ornamentals here and there, the peek out of the magnolia, and the rose-like offering of the Camellia tree out even in the cold that has returned after two very warm days when no one needed a jacket.


An old book in one's sickbed, with brief text and pictures colorful and evocative of ancient times in the holy lands.  Adam and Eve.  Cain and Abel.  Noah.  Abraham and Isaac.  Jacob.  Joseph.  Moses.  Joshua.  Samson.  Samuel.  David.  Elijah.  By the waters of Babylon.  Beautiful stories.  And with the paintings of watercolors with the line structure of ink drawings that depict these stories in prismatic color, so do the old stories tell us of our light, broken into the different colors in all their shades.

And it dawns upon one, in an hour of need and the dissatisfactions that come even when we are giving of our good efforts, this is our story.  This is my story.  I am part of this.  Part of that long history of the communion of the human spirit, ready, hearing the voice of the One God.  Part the tale of our part of the bargain with God, the Commandments.  The difficulties borne, the history of a people, wandering, besieged, battling...  There is no New if there is not this Old.  The Old is what we all are coming from, and somehow, as dumb as it might sound, it is good, very good, to know.  And I say to myself, yes, I remember.  For there is morality, moral lesson, the things of every adult maturity as far as making good decisions and doing the right and the good within these old pages, here of childhood, from 1968, the publisher's date, when I was three.

So, this is why I have acted the way I have acted.    There is the element of the prophet in our lives and their little insignificant life stories.  The same struggles.  The same awakenings, at odd lone moments when little seems as alive as the stars far away, to the holy good of God.



There you are yourself, in some sort of biblical situation, out in the desert, an exile, wandering, much like the people of the tribes themselves, subject...  And while you work away in slavery, still, there is something going on, something good, and it has to do with your own particular talents.

And here you are awakening to the old stories, the true deeper reality, found not to be the one of solely in the Buddhist sense, accomplished lotus style, or of the wisdom of the Zen monastery, but that of a collection of special people, who are caught in the act of realizing a positive reality, not simply a negative reflective one, (such as 'thou art that which is.)  There is something real behind it all, and real reasons to do things.

Then your own story comes into focus.  Everything is taken in stride.  If you came afoul of certain people, so what?  If a particular girl didn't work out, so what?  The true nature of your purpose as a human being had not come forward to you yet;  it was not made clear what it was.

The special talents of particular individual men are made for the times in which they must find themselves in.  A holy light, a star, shines over them, in time, marking their coming into their maturity, as to when they are ready for the deeper understanding, the one that makes all other things fall of as meaningless.

Interestingly enough, the standing up requires none of the special acts we might take as one bearing upon such.  A liberal can only be so much of a liberal fighting for every liberal cause before imploding into meaninglessness.  The ways of joining the religious order might seem promising, but that might not be the only way, nor necessarily the best, nor necessarily better than going it out on your own, communing yourself with the soul and its realities. A hard obscure path, one no one was witting of, could be far better, perhaps.

The old stories have a commonality, in that they are of a story that shows a new leader, a new kind of leader, to be called for.  The established leadership has become stiff, inflexible, unseeing...  And along comes a man, maybe even not even yet a man, not quite, unexpected, different, wise in a way that is not of previous wisdom's canned vintages.

What would this, what does this, look like...  It would on the one hand fulfill prophecy and the subtle pattern.  Recalling a steady theme that has not been honestly recreated in a legitimate fashion.  Like that of The Shepherd, the being gentle and wise who can overturn the mighty Pharaoh, by knowing "God's Will."

But no man, as such, can describe himself, but by the words of others.  Higher words.  Better interpretations.  Wisdom.  The acknowledgment of all the hard work, toil, exile, or rather, of all those things that make for that which feeds a true spiritual life of leadership and insight.

One can only take an almost joyous solace in rejection of a people who have lost all sight of the righteousness of the judgments of the Lord, who have conflated their own as if to make a marketplace, a business culture out of the temple that is justice.

God will judge.  He will judge you and I.  It will not be left up to the economy, nor to money and material riches.  It will not be the judgment of your neighbors, your classmates, the popularity contests, the tastes of those who hold themselves up as being so gifted as to discern the human heart through appearances.  The low will be raised, for their willingness to serve, for their patience, for their steadfast belief that the transient opinions of people mean little compared to being aligned with God and the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament is the vines from which the grapes spring forth, upon which they are nourished by the water that falls as rain and the sun that shines and the earth itself, rooted in a hard stoney existence in otherwise barren soil.  The New represents the wine, which comes forth out of the tenderness of man, his understanding of the divine and divine processes everywhere as yeast and fermentation and the maturing of the juice.  Wine is the symbol of this carrying on...



But it is a judgmental world we live in.  Perhaps it's on a shallow level, the judgment which is the meat of the banter of a city and its pecking orders.  They'll hit with a cudgel and then express surprise at the hurt, and that you are the one at fault for being hurt.  Maybe particularly in intimate matters.

I'd seen enough.  I'd even lived a life not that far off from Jesus, as much as you could get away with unnoticed, and it was something no one even wanted to notice, and the thought of it even being possible would never have crossed their minds.  It was easy to go along unnoticed.  As if good was not even visible anymore, should it arrive and pass by in front of you...