Sarx

HE PATRISTIC Take on the Bible must, at once, seem very liberating to anyone who has suffered under a fundamentalism and yet infuriating to anyone who wants to dissect the text, crossed with historical research and cultural anecdotes about the “real meaning” of a certain phrase or political antecedents of such-and-such set of imagery.Clement calls the Bible the First Sacrament. That is important for a couple of reasons: it reminds us that there is an outword and visible sign as well as an inward and invisible grace. There is a deeper meaning here, beyond words. We all know this or else we’d all read Greek and Hebrew: there is a meaning that transcends the words and has nearly nothing to do with a simple word-for-word correspondence. Secondly, like the other sacraments, the Scriptures are intended for the Community. The Scriptures cannot be read outside of that Community any more than a priest may say mass standing alone, in her fuzzy slippers, at 3AM before her opened refrigerator or a man might baptise himself. A community is needed for the sacrament, Church is needed.

I struggle with the quest for meaning in the text because I do want to know why the Gospels use the world for leavened bread in discussing the Last Supper, instead of unleavened bread (as they should if it’s a Passover Seder). I do care that it shows, rather early on, that the Jesus-people had moved away from direct sacrificial content (in the Passover Seder) into the world-sanctifying mode of the Shabbat Kiddush. Adding another level to all this religion geekery we pick up the traditional, Patristic admonishment that we should be using yeasted bread: un-yeasted bread is dead, unrisen and while Jesus is alive and risen. Yeasted bread is alive. (It was St Anslem that inserted Passover imagery into the Eucharistic rite – it is almost entirely missing from the Eastern Eucharist.)

But, as you can see from that, this quest for meaning can get locked in one place: a head game.

The readings in Roots this time around, follow hard on the conversation we’ve been having in several places around the web, starting with Donald’s post on Episcopal Cafe about the context of parables.

Clement (following the Fathers) wants us to look deeper than just the words.

[Origen] is an inspired interpreter of Scripture, and if his thought has had to be corrected on other points, it remains fully and directly nourishing in this field.
The bitter rind is the letter that kills and that has to be rejected.
The protecting shell is the ethical teaching, that, as a necessary part of the process of going into greater depth, requirres a course of careful purification.
The then the spiritual kernel is reached, which is all that matters, which feeds the soul on the mysteries of divine wisdom.

Reading Clement talking about Origen’s Almond a thought popped into my head, that, for the Fathers, the scriptures were, in a way, rather like a Tarot deck of images: a collection of images that tell stories in a context provided by the reader.

Anyone who has studied the Tarot knows that there are thousands of books out there and it is, certainly, helpful to read a few: specifically the ones that treat the myriad images of each card as in a dictionary. Rather than tell you the “divinatory meaning” of a given card, it’s more important to explore why there are ravens on it or why the path is shown as a rainbow. To what purpose is the sky black with only a cold bright line of dawn? Why is this image a snowstorm but that one is a spring day?

Back in the day, I learned the most I’ve ever learned about Tarot Cards one night at a charity Halloween party. My friend Patrick and I read cards for around 100 people in the course of the evening – they paid their $10 to the charity and we got 10 or 15 mins with each of them. I started out the night talking about the “real meaning” of the cards like a proper fundamentalist. The evening ended with me shuffling cards and telling stories to people. Those stories connected to each other and connected to people. In the 15 mins they began to open up, warm to me and to the process of seeking for meaning. It strikes me that that’s the way the Fathers and Mothers drew on the images in scripture.

There is no “one right meaning” to a Tarot Card: rather there is a story told by the Reader in conversation with the Querent with an eye towards discerning meaning and arriving at wisdom. The fundamentalist goes to the Tarot deck with one book in her head and can tell you exactly what each card means. The, pardon the phrase, Patristic card reader will want to know you, your life, your patterns. She will want to see your face light up when she says “Marriage” and she will know that such is the way you see your own life going and will script the reading accordingly. Properly done, it’s not “fortune telling” at all, you see.

Reading Gregory of Nyssa talk about the Life of Moses as a type of the Christian Journey, the fundamentalist in me wants to whamp’im up side the head and say, “Dude, none of that stuff is in there!”. The Tarot card reader in me wants to applaud as new meaning comes out of ancient symbols: the burning bush as the Virgin Mary; the Pharaoh’s daughter as “profane philosophy”, etc. Reading the way the ancients pulled prophecy out of the Psalms to prove Jesus as Messiah, one wants to invalidate their claims by showing the correct historical context. The Tarot card reader in me, however, wants to enter into the discussion.

I don’t want to belittle the scholarly approach, but we can get stuck on the bitter rind, that way. For scholastics can be as fundamentalist as textual literalists: both parties, sans humility, can end up claiming to know the exact meaning of the text. Derek points out that many modern tools can either be Anti-Catholic or Anti-Jewish. I think a better criticism (as I pointed out in my comments over there) is that they are Anti-Mystery. In that same conversation, Donald says,

My own experience as a preacher and teacher is that our people WANT to ‘know’ what everything in a parable stands for and work hard to make interpretations that will do that for them, focusing most of their energy on the parts of the parable they find problematic or disturbing. It’s similar, I think, to trying to find ‘the moral’ or ‘the lesson’ in the parable. Both seem to be a way to tame the wild beast that Jesus the storytelling, provocative teacher has loosed on us.

It is this quest to know everything that is the problem: it denies the mystery. We realise the mystery is SO vast that we start to pare it down to something knowable. “This is a koine saying that means X”. “This is a Jewish symbol that means Y”. The Fathers in our reading are quite clear that the Scriptures are part of the infinity of God with many untamed depths. They may be culturally Jewish or Gentile. But they must speak to us now. Our lack of humility before the scripture leads us to believe we can know everything by caging the text in some historical then. But the Scriptures are part of a living tradition: the meanings we weave from them now are just as valid as – but never invalidating of – the meanings previously drawn. Only in humility can we accept that the only advantage we have in time is that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Likewise the Patristic Tarot Card Reader must also come with more humility – or she can end up thinking the text has no meaning in and of itself. She knows there is meaning in it, hidden deeply and even just on the surface. She prays to weave it into and out of the lives of her listeners and, because she does it in community – in Church is the only place Bible can be read – she trusts God’s spirit to do his part; the part she can not do.

When Clement reminds us that Scripture is not just “esoteric” I don’t think he’s guiding us towards anything less symbolic. He says,

There is a diversity of approaches to suit all conditions. Equally there are different stages on one and the same route. That is why we need to know how to carry along with us, without trying to hurriedly to explain them, the words that so far remain closed to us. Life, the partial deaths that life brings, the better reception of grace, all these may one day make us capable of understanding them.

He then goes on to cite two passages from Pope St Gregory Dialogos’ commentary on Job to the effect that the images, the mystery in our Tarot deck speaks to all of us, high and low, cultured and uncultured. The following is one of my favourite stories. It shows up in a biography of John Wesley. In our context, I think this is the story of a simple, lay Tarot Card Reader preaching…

In the days of John Wesley, lay preachers with limited education would sometimes conduct the church service. One man used Luke 19:21 as his text: “Lord, I feared Thee, because Thou art an austere man” (KJV). Not knowing the word austere, he thought the text spoke of “an oyster man.”

He explained how a diver must grope in dark, freezing water to retrieve oysters. In his attempt, he cuts his hands on the sharp edges of the shells. After he obtains an oyster, he rises to the surface, clutching it “in his torn and bleeding hands.” The preacher added, “Christ descended from the glory of heaven into… sinful human society, in order to retrieve humans and bring them back up with Him to the glory of heaven. His torn and bleeding hands are a sign of the value He has placed on the object of His quest.”

Afterwards, 12 men received Christ. Later that night someone came to Wesley to complain about unschooled preachers who were too ignorant even to know the meaning of the texts they were preaching on. The Oxford –educated Wesley simply said, “Never mind. The Lord got a dozen oysters tonight.”

In order to read and preach Patristically like the Preacher, I think we need to plough forward into scripture, praying for more meaning, and looking with what Starhawk has called (in The Spiral Dance) the Acrostic Vision: seeing both what is there and what is hidden within what is there.

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I focused on “bible” this time because I normally really like to talk about Eucharist and Baptism… Bible teaching seems to be my favourite, though.