Alan Jacobs

houghtonlib: Bible in Greek, Romans 1:1-7, [Papyrus, ca. 300-ca. 350 AD]. Houghton Library, Harvard University

[gallery] houghtonlib:

Bible in Greek, Romans 1:1-7, [Papyrus, ca. 300-ca. 350 AD].

MS Gr SM2218

Houghton Library, Harvard University

[gallery] Malcolm waiting

In the beginning was the Word. But now the Word can say nothing; not a syllable of meaning. He who was with God before the beginning of the earth, whose speech made the light, is helpless and half-blind; blurred and bound and held in the warm dark. He made all things, and without him nothing could ever have been made; but now he can only grasp a finger and search for kindly human eyes, asking for protection in the big world. God is newborn, newly breathing, a baby; and in him the makings of the universe are only seeds and memories. God the Creator needs love. Breast milk, covering, a cradling arm.

What is his birthright? What will he inherit? The heavenly messenger Gabriel called him the Son of the Most High. He has no palace; not even a bed to call his own. He sleeps in a feeding trough, hastily lined with straw. His mother is poor, and people laugh about his father. He will bring his mother the sorrow of unspeakable loss when he is old enough. Through this child God blesses the weak, the helpless, the poor and the very young.

Through him the meek inherit the earth. Through him the light shines in dark places and is not overcome: — because the darker the night, the brighter shines this light, the Light of the world. The weak tonight become the sons and daughters of God. If today you are strong, then reserve your greatest tenderness and your greatest respect for the weakest among you. And if today you are weak, the light is already shining through you, shining now.

That light is the light of all humanity, which God this night made holy through his Son our Saviour named Jesus: poor woman’s son, and the child of the Most High. Thanks be to God.

In the beginning was the Word. But now the Word can say nothing; not a syllable of meaning. He who was with God before the beginning of the earth, whose speech made the light, is helpless and half-blind; blurred and bound and held in the warm dark. He made all things, and without him nothing could ever have been made; but now he can only grasp a finger and search for kindly human eyes, asking for protection in the big world. God is newborn, newly breathing, a baby; and in him the makings of the universe are only seeds and memories. God the Creator needs love. Breast milk, covering, a cradling arm.

What is his birthright? What will he inherit? The heavenly messenger Gabriel called him the Son of the Most High. He has no palace; not even a bed to call his own. He sleeps in a feeding trough, hastily lined with straw. His mother is poor, and people laugh about his father. He will bring his mother the sorrow of unspeakable loss when he is old enough. Through this child God blesses the weak, the helpless, the poor and the very young. Through him the meek inherit the earth. Through him the light shines in dark places and is not overcome: — because the darker the night, the brighter shines this light, the Light of the world. The weak tonight become the sons and daughters of God. If today you are strong, then reserve your greatest tenderness and your greatest respect for the weakest among you. And if today you are weak, the light is already shining through you, shining now.

That light is the light of all humanity, which God this night made holy through his Son our Saviour named Jesus: poor woman’s son, and the child of the Most High. Thanks be to God.

It is fascinating to observe that, in the very dawn of science, Bacon, the spokesman for the empirical approach to nature, shared with Shakespeare, the poet, a recognition of the creativeness that adds to nature, and that emerges from nature as “an art which nature makes.” Neither the great scholar nor the great poet had renounced the Kingdome of Fayrie. They had realized what Bergson was later to express so effectively, that life inserts a vast “indétermination into matter.” It is, in a sense, an intrusion from a realm that can never be completely subject to prophetic analysis by science. The novelties of evolution emerge; they cannot be predicted. They haunt, until their arrival, a world of unimaginable possibilities behind the living screen of events, as these last exist to the observer confined to a single point on the time scale.

Oddly enough, much of the confusion that surrounded my phrase, “a nature beyond the nature that we know,” resolves itself into pure semantics. I might have pointed out what must be obvious even to the most dedicated scientific mind: namely, that the nature which we know has been many times reinterpreted in human thinking, and that the hard, substantial matter of the nineteenth century has already vanished into a dark, bodiless void, a web of “events” in space-time. This is a realm, I venture to assert, as weird as any we have tried, in the past, to exorcise by the brave use of seeming solid words. Yet some minds exhibit an almost instinctive hostility toward the mere attempt to wonder, or to ask what lies below that microcosmic world out of which emerge the particles that compose our bodies, and that now take on this wraithlike quality.

Is there something here we fear to face, except when clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in this age of power to admit mystery and beauty into our thoughts, or to learn where power ceases?

— Loren Eiseley, “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,”

The American Scholar (1964)

The Christmas story is not just about the birth of a very good man. As it’s been read and understood across the centuries, it’s a story about God deciding that he “belongs” with human beings — all human beings, but especially the ones who most readily feel left out. We all recognise the shepherds and the wise men around the crib — but we don’t so often recognise that shepherds in those days were not cuddly figures of folklore; they were listed among the classes of people who couldn’t be expected to keep their religious obligations properly and were likely to be a bit threatening to town dwellers. And the wise men are magicians or astrologers, slightly fishy figures from the point of view of a strictly religious Jew of that age, not part of the Chosen People.

In other words, when God turns up in the shape of a human life, he doesn’t go to the obvious people, the religious or the respectable. He heads for the edges of society, as if to say “You’re not forgotten” to those most likely to feel like outsiders.

And Jesus in his adult life does just this again and again — which means that those who seek to live as friends and followers of Jesus must also be ready to be found in the company of people who fear that there’s no one there to speak with them or for them. Their job is to create a sense of belonging, a trust that there is always someone who has a stake in the well-being of even the most troubled and troublesome — someone for whom it matters desperately that they are cared for, rescued from destructive and self-destructive lives, given a hearing and an opportunity.

It is fascinating to observe that, in the very dawn of science, Bacon, the spokesman for the empirical approach to nature, shared with Shakespeare, the poet, a recognition of the creativeness that adds to nature, and that emerges from nature as “an art which nature makes.” Neither the great scholar nor the great poet had renounced the Kingdome of Fayrie. They had realized what Bergson was later to express so effectively, that life inserts a vast “indétermination into matter.” It is, in a sense, an intrusion from a realm that can never be completely subject to prophetic analysis by science. The novelties of evolution emerge; they cannot be predicted. They haunt, until their arrival, a world of unimaginable possibilities behind the living screen of events, as these last exist to the observer confined to a single point on the time scale.

Oddly enough, much of the confusion that surrounded my phrase, “a nature beyond the nature that we know,” resolves itself into pure semantics. I might have pointed out what must be obvious even to the most dedicated scientific mind: namely, that the nature which we know has been many times reinterpreted in human thinking, and that the hard, substantial matter of the nineteenth century has already vanished into a dark, bodiless void, a web of “events” in space-time. This is a realm, I venture to assert, as weird as any we have tried, in the past, to exorcise by the brave use of seeming solid words. Yet some minds exhibit an almost instinctive hostility toward the mere attempt to wonder, or to ask what lies below that microcosmic world out of which emerge the particles that compose our bodies, and that now take on this wraithlike quality.

Is there something here we fear to face, except when clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in this age of power to admit mystery and beauty into our thoughts, or to learn where power ceases?

You know one of the things about that piece that I think readers might ignore, it ends with a discussion about the death of American cemeteries. Fewer and fewer people are being buried. More and more of my friends now are being cremated and their ashes, I don’t know where their ashes are anymore. They’re somewhere in Idaho, they’re somewhere on Muir Woods in someplace. That revolution, which I think is related to the fact that we don’t want to live on the earth anymore that there is an anxiety about being here, about being in this place at the same time that the cultural left has come up with this idea of green nature. We all have to become green. Well, nature is primarily brown in the world, you know, and the lessons of nature lead to nature, they don’t lead to this perennial spring.

Or to say it another way, you cannot have spring without winter. That this sentimentality about our lives where people are not buried. So a good friend of mine died; he asked two women friends of his to take his ashes, we know not where. And another friend of mine calls up and says, “I’d love to go see. I’d love to pay my respects, I couldn’t come to the funeral, could I go to the cemetery?” I say, well I have no idea where he is. The death of the newspaper is being told in the cemetery, in the fact that we are not writing obituaries, many of my friends have died without obituaries, because it’s no longer a civic event to die — it’s a private event. You understand? And so, you know, that fact that the newspaper was the receptacle not simply of news of our birth, but of our death, that fact is really the reason why an obituary for a newspaper becomes in the last several pages an obituary for a cemetery.