Troubles with Jesi

If I’d said Jesi, my father would have said, Mind your language son.

Let me explain. Jesi is an ostensible plural for Jesus. Saying Jesus unless praying to him or praying about him to God the Father or talking about him with a potential convert amounted to saying the Lord’s name in vain. Doing this repeatedly (in pluralis) would be tantamount to the Unpardonable. I would have been in trouble, trouble that I don’t even like to talk about today.

Today I have other troubles with Jesi. It’s not at all that I have trouble with the troublesome fact that Jesus is white to some many while some other color to some other Othered few. Way back in March 2013, a blogger named Joel was asking this parenthetically,

Although I have to agree, that maybe we are done with white Jesuses (or is it Jesi?)

This one Joel was confessing that he was having to agree with a blogger named Rod, and I am reading along as if I’m the only me reading this and this is the only Rod and that is the only Joel in the world asking the question, or is it Jesi?, as if there is more than one to talk about.

Today I have other troubles with Jesi. It’s not at all that I have trouble with the troublesome historical Jesus quest. A little later, in later April 2013, there was this blogpost:

Jesus’ Remains: Teaching Multiple Jesi
Posted on April 19, 2013 by mattsheedy by Kate Daley-Bailey

And then there was this trouble in the bible blogosphere:

Within that religion of authenticity, there certainly exists a wide diversity of Jesuses. Having just posted on the futility of traditional historical Jesus research, I find this point well worth underlining. Thanks, Kate!

and this one:

The diverse conclusions drawn by researchers investigating the historical figure of Jesus is, at worst, an indication that historical methods do not successfully counter our penchant for making Jesus as we desire him to be. Diverse Jesuses (or Jesi, as Kate Dailey-Bailey prefers) are to be found as far back as we have literature about Jesus. And we could say the same about Socrates.

and that one:

Then McCullough mentions in “Jesus: All Things to All People” a recent blog post by Kate Daley-Bailey titled “Jesus’ Remains: Teaching Multiple Jesi” where it is observed that “…our job…is not to magically distill the ‘real’ Jesus from the swill of theology and political packaging, but rather to highlight the nuanced processes of constructing ‘Jesi’ and query the discursive strategies deployed to flesh out the impoverished Jesus.” In other words, most historical Jesus scholars do not find the “real Jesus” they seek, but rather create another Jesus for all to consider, so a more fruitful approach is the embrace the reality we won’t find the ‘real’ Jesus by becomign aquainted with the multiple depictions of Jesus (she calls them “Jesi”) available to us.

James McGrath challenges this pessimism in “Is Historical Jesus Studies Futile?”

Do I get that? One mattsheedy and one Kate Daley-Bailey and one [Pat] McCullough and one James McGrath and one Brian LePort talking about the same thing. Or is it the same things? Is it one Jesuses or two? Is it one plural? Two too? Is it Jesi?

Once elsewhere at an Other blog I posted this one post. I entitled it The Prostitute. And I talked about Rahab in it. And I talked in it about the one name Joshua. And I talked about it in Hebrew (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ).

But I don’t think I talked about it in Greek (Ἰησοῦς). There are many of them, I might have said. The plural of course is Ιησουοι? But is this Joshuas or Joshi? Jesuses? Jesi? Greek or Latin? You see my troubles? (Not a white man sang, once upon a time in some historical moment, Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen Nobody knows but Jesus.)

in my day / nightmare

in a hurry
i got up got break / fast, got milk
i kicked the cat / nap habit to near noon
i fell off the wagon / hard and fast / asleep / on a cushion
in a hold
in a boat
in a storm
in a panic, a hurry / a flurry, not snow, some / thing furring, purring and / furry, not sleep, some / conscious- and wake- / less ness monster / some body else /
in conscious ness / asking / Why / are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? / and
i am / still /
i am still hearing / lions and tigers and bears, Oh my!

in my day / nightmare
i kicked the cat
in a hurry

Second Things Left Out

And I never looked
At the Greeked word Αββα
The same way
After I saw how she
Had been named

In ΠΑΡΑΛΕΙΠΟΜΕΝΩΝ Β
In “Chapter 29″ (the first verse) you
Must read into the second
Sentence to get her
there

There is no objective place,
Anne Carson once told Will Aitken,
just like there is no third gender;
you’ve got to be in one place
or the other.

Whoever translated 2 Chronicles, man
Or subjective woman, where? in Alexandria?
In Egypt of Hagar,
Who named God first in her own mother
Tongue:  El Roi, she spoke,

According to the first book of Moses,
The man whose name was also first
Spoken in Egyptian, by a woman, Delivering
Him out of water and blood
Let my people, Go.

It goes like this:
καὶ ὄνομα τῇ μητρὶ αὐτοῦ
Αββα
θυγάτηρ Ζαχαρια
And the name of his mother, so it goes, is
Father, or

Abba as a term of address
(roughly speaking, affectionate or warm)
“when I think about you I feel something good.”
in any case more compatible with an attitude of affection,
love, trust or respect than of fear.

(Roughly speaking, ΠΑΡΑΛΕΙΠΟΜΕΝΩΝ Β or
“Second Things Left Out”
Is not poetry at first or
May make a rendered second mistake or
Two, what a Freudian, Oh dear. O indeed!)

2 Chronicles

When Dad acted
As if he had outgrown
His eyes that ran
To and fro
From one woman
To the next,

He paid
Me to memorize
2 Chronicles 16:9
In the King James
In Honolulu where
The girls with long legs and flowing hair and beautiful eyes and perfect breasts by the water would wear
Bikinis in my puberty:

For the eyes of the LORD run
to and fro
throughout the whole earth,
to shew himself strong
in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward
him.

He did not tell me that
That was
Not the whole verse,
And I never looked
Either.

5 private prayers

1. Wow, I believe in you and give you thanks for that. What separates natural and supernatural except human beings of disbelief? I just read Faulkner’s and Kumin’s Bear. Wow.

2. So this morning, I sit, my fingers on this keyboard making meaning of it all in a way that another human being’s eyes might make sense of. It’s not just communication in the senses of relevance theory, of one message leaving me and entering another some comprehended as if that message is the salient thing. No, rather, I’m leaving this message here for the eyes of God, who knows me and made these fingers of mine that type out this message of mine. I give you thanks for that.

3. So the scriptures. Which ones, and how much meaning is left here in them as if for me, as if some message to me that I must get and understand and then believe lest I go to hell for lack of that? I thank you for that, and give that to you.

4. It’s true, absolutely so, that coffee from beans in cherries on trees in the ground in various countries of this third rock from the sun have been ground and brewed and that it pours under my grateful nostrils across an equally appreciative tongue where it travels to warm my inner most parts and to speed my blood in an awakening that I might take for granted like I do daily with the holy spirit. The whole creation groaneth. But the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. I type on. I thank you for that.

5. I do not know whether my right hand knoweth what my left hand doeth. The Lord’s Prayer is not one of giving thanks but is one of what Aristotle’s twenty-first-century disciples might call epideictic rhetoric, though in private ostensibly, a contrast to giving alms so that one’s own hands literally know what each other is giving and a contrast to loving praying in public like the hypocrites and like the heathen whose doing tzedakah is merely the βατταλογήσητε ὥσπερ οἱ ἐθνικοί, which is funny written in Greek since Matthew’s original readers were not to be readers of such battalogesete hosper hoi ethnikoi according to the preaching of this one Joshua [ יהושוע, Ἰησοῦς ] of the first-century. The miracle, the naturalsupernatural thing, to me anyway, this late in the morning of human history, is how five and five fingers cooperate as two hands in unity, on a keyboard not made for dark mornings, a maybemonsterous thing like a threeinone god who leaves much to mystery in secret privately and just-the-two-of-us. In private we may muse that the prayer starts with one voice plural to Our Father who art in heaven. Upon profound reflection we get the irony of the Lord’s Prayer being a public one. Why not then blog it? Why not write a gospel, by hand, and have him ask a three-in-one Greek-rhetorical question?

Οὐκ ἔστιν μαθητὴς ὑπὲρ τὸν διδάσκαλον οὐδὲ δοῦλος ὑπὲρ τὸν κύριον αὐτοῦ. ἀρκετὸν τῷ μαθητῇ ἵνα γένηται ὡς ὁ διδάσκαλος αὐτοῦ, καὶ ὁ δοῦλος ὡς ὁ κύριος αὐτοῦ. εἰ τὸν οἰκοδεσπότην Βεελζεβοὺλ ἐπεκάλεσαν, πόσῳ μᾶλλον τοὺς οἰκιακοὺς αὐτοῦ.

Why not type that the ways David Stern and Willis Barnstone do, without question marks and with exclamation points, the both of them!

A talmid is not greater than his rabbi, a slave is not greater than his master. It is enough for a talmid that he become like his rabbi, and a slave like his master. Now if people have called the head of the house Ba‘al-Zibbul, how much more will they malign the members of his household!

A student is not above the teacher,
nor a slave above the master.
It is enough for the student to be like the teacher
and the slave like the master.
If they call the master of the house Baal Zevul,
lord of the flies,
how much worse will they call the members of
the household!

Which begs the question of whose household am I in, whose lord of whose flies? Whose dog and who’s master and which bear, ask the human William Faulkner and the human Maxine Kumin. After all these years, my first grade teacher who taught me but for one brief semester, my first firstgrade teacher, is a poet and found me on facebook and said one of my posts there reminded her of what Faulkner and what Kumin wrote. How do miracles like that happen? What separates the literal and the poetic literary except human beings of disbelief? Wow, I believe in you and give you thanks for that.

mainly blogging at BLT

This is just a quick note.  I’m mainly blogging elsewhere for now:

http://bltnotjustasandwich.com

“Jim” James Merrill Gayle, my father

This morning I told my wife what I still hear of a certain voice. Some of it is dying out, but much is very much alive.

His very last words were “Thank you for coming.” Those are the words he spoke to two widows, his Vietnamese language teacher and her sister, who had come to visit him and his wife in their home. The two were there with him and his wife in their bedroom, standing next to his hospital bed. They stood together, his best friend and these other two good friends, the three of them soon to share a bond of grief. I was there too, standing, listening. The next day, more of his family called on the phone and even more came to be there to stand by him. And that day he passed on from this life.

The day he passed on was exactly half a century to the day when he stood by her hospital bed, when she gave birth to me. I first heard his voice fifty years ago, on that day when my mother brought me into the world. He spoke some of the first words I ever heard. And I heard him speak his last words; these are the words I remember best. “Thank you for coming.” His name is Jim Gayle, and he’s my father.

If you’ve visited this blog before, then you may recall that my father’s words inspired it. “Mind your language,” he told me. And so I tried. Now I want to remember some of the things he said, while his weak voice is still so strong in my ears. His voice grew weak as he battled cancer for 20 months. He called his battle his “climb” up the mountain. The irony of his voice, and his body, growing weak is that his spirit grew so very strong.

Many days recently, he recounted to many who listened, how God would wake him in the night to get him thinking about his relationships. He had been a missionary much of his life, but as he faced disease and death, his mission was to focus on loving people in a different way. He had been the “head” of his household, the “head” of his wife his “helpmeet.” But after getting sick, he started treating her as his best friend, and he called her his “soul mate,” and he taught her to take the lead in driving their car, in controlling their finances, in doing the yard work, and in so many different ways that he had before taken charge with. He treated her as an equal, but he told everyone who would listen that she was “God’s greatest gift.” He told her, often, openly, how much he loved her. He made her laugh with gentle humor. He touched her. He worked to stay alive, up through their 54th anniversary, and ten days beyond it. And he reconciled with his children, telling them he’d failed, that he had loved unevenly, selectively, and he made this right. He told us how much he loved us, what he saw as our strengths, encouraging us by saying with detailed specificity how proud we made him. He always asked about every family member when one of us called him, and we called every day we weren’t there with him. He recalled how he’d had resentments and had had unsolicited advice for those less fortunate, but how he had more recently heard God saying how much He cared for these, and my father then started caring for these same ones, with a profound compassion. He developed an intense and authentic curiosity about and interest in others like I’ve never seen in anybody else in my fifty some years.

This post is not a shrine to my father, however appropriate such a thing might be for some in the cultures I grew up in.

this post is not a shrine or altar

Rather, I’m wanting to remember how my father sounded. It’s harder for me, and perhaps that’s okay, to hear his harsh tones. Many days, fear, shame, and guilt were my response to his strong voice. I hear, and want to hear more often what I recall of, his weak raspy voice that was so strong with his interest in others, so accepting, but so valuing and validating. So, let me leave this post to my father’s voice. First, you can look at some of my favorite pictures of him. Then, you’ll be able to see the beautiful service my mother planned to remember him with so many others (I think around 700 to 800 came). Finally, you’ll hear his actual voice, both spoken and in writing (in an interview and then in his Caringbridge blog).

Here's Jim Gayle with cancer but undiagnosed, visiting a new friend in Viet Nam who is diagnosed with AIDS.

Here is Jim Gayle and his wife with a group of friends in Viet Nam. He gave this family a new motorcycle, some 39 years ago. The man sent a letter read at Jim's memorial service just days ago, publicly thanking Jim and his wife for a private gift of money with which he had purchased a brand new motorcycle.

Jim Gayle's grandson, my son, drew this picture of him at the top of the summit. On the left side are Jim's last words spoken: "Thank you for coming."

Jim Gayle's daughter-in-law, my wife, wrote the obituary on the left side of this memorial service program. Jim's sweetheart, my mother, planned the service and invited those noted on the right hand side to participate in his memorial.

——————————————–

Jim Gayle is interviewed in the following video. Here are two links where you can find the interview and hear one of his friends talking about what she learned from him:

http://camranhorphans.org/

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Vietnamese-orphans-mourn-missionary-142393535.html

Here are some handwritten notes from my dad, likely, written before I was born in a book I found in his study not many days ago (“Who am I? People or position, power, etc.”) :

——————————————–

In his last 20 months, my father (with my mother) kept an online journal as he “climbed the mountain,” battling cancer. These are the last words he wrote. You can find the journal here:

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jimgayle