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.
Mind Your Language 