Jack Pelham

There is ever the hope in this world
That evil can be quietly avoided
And will simply go away
Without our heroism.
And we should know by now
If we can manage to pry open
Even one eye half way from its slumber
That it often does not.

Northrup Frye says in his 14th of 25 lectures and The Bible and English Literature (emphasis added):

But scientists, of course, like anybody else, find that they can’t get along without creation myths; and eventually we have a Big Bang creation myth, which says that the world exploded, oh, say fifteen billion years ago or thereabouts, and has been scattering in all directions ever since. Well, that’s fine: what happened before that? And you immediately are up against the fact that as long as you are thinking of the order of nature, the conceptions of beginning and end do not apply. But we begin and we end, and because of what Thomas Pynchon calls creative paranoia in the human consciousness, we insist that because we begin and we end, beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the scheme of things. …

I’m not sure whether Pynchon and Frye and I would see eye to eye on all of this, but the point raised here (and highlighted on boldface) seems a good one to me. And while I don’t think Frye would agree, I’m not sure that the Bible story is actually telling us about an absolute beginning (Genesis) or an absolute end (Revelation). Rather, I think we may mistake it as such based on the very sort of bias that Pynchon calls “creative paranoia”.

Interestingly (and as Frye points out in earlier lectures), it is difficult for us to imagine either the beginning or the end of time, and yet even so (in my opinion), so many of us seem so adamant about holding to a model of the world in which time has both a beginning and an end. But I do think I see in the Bible (and extrabiblical Hebrew culture) texts various hints that a physical world existed before the curtain rises on Genesis 1. And I hope to have the time to write about that in this year.

Similarly, I suspect that life goes on on Planet Earth after Revelation 22, and that it is simply not the sort of end that many presume it to be. O for the time to write it all out, making my case!

Am I built special
As if commissioned
For particular works
Not germane to everyone?

You can fuss all you like
About winter I suppose
But do check yourself
With an honest admission
That not once in your years
Has Spring ever failed
To come around again.

Some you will think
Have left too early
And some too late.

But at length
You too will leave
And go to where you
Can talk it all over
With the Dispatcher.

He does not entirely
Lose an argument
Who learns from it.

If you wanted to straighten out
A boatload of Bible interpretation problems,
You could start by seeing to it that never again
Would anyone mistake themselves for being
In the immediate audience to whom
A passage was written, when they are not.

Many a good this has been resented
Because it is not that—
Many a good then
Because it is not now—
Many a good who it is
Because of who it isn’t.

And we have not yet learned
To bear disappointment
Honestly and justly.

If you’re interested in studying the Bible, you may find that your friends at church are not. And if you learn a lot while studying the Bible, you may find that it’s causing conflict with your friends who are not learning a lot.

This is quite to be suspected, and it’s because one of you is showing more interest in God than are the others. Let me assure you, what you are doing is quite OK with God. Though your friends may raise an eyebrow at this, God does not. In fact, if the scriptures are to be believed, it seems God would like your friends to be studying, too.

Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.

Psalm 111:2 ESV

I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.
 I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.

Psalm 119:15-16 ESV

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Matthew 22:37 ESV

It was their first date
And she could see how he cared
About who she was
By the fact that he
Had a thousand questions
And strove to understand her life.