What Jesus Meant

No doubt a life of Jesus should be written on one’s knees, with a feeling of unworthiness great enough to make the pen drop from the hand. A sinner should blush for his temerity in undertaking such a work.

-- Francois Mauriac

Before leaving the foreword and going on to the main text, I want to bring out one more point. In steering us away from interpretations that make out Jesus to be no more than a great teacher or even a prophet, that is, a mortal like you and I, Garry Wills does caution us from falling back to the extreme of narrow literalism.

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To accept the gospels as an authentic account of what Jesus meant should not make us revert... [to] treating everything in the gospels as literally true in a later sense of historical truth. The gospels express the ineffable in the language appropriate for the task, a language inherited from the Jewish scriptures. Luke’s gospel, for instance, spells out the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation in the poetic forms of divine birth, because he and his fellows knew that this is what the Christ event meant. To believe in the gospels is to take everything in them as meant, though at various levels of symbolization. To read the gospels reverently is to keep asking, through all such symbols, what Jesus means.

-- Garry Wills, “What Jesus Meant”
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Is that clear? on how we should read the gospels. It’s not to me. Jesus’s divinity is not a symbolization in this argument, keep in mind! What is real and what is symbolic? Fishing for an interpretation can be mysterious in itself, it seems. I suppose it would have to be, though, when you loosen the boundaries on what we generally accept to be reality, when you are looking for the divine truth through the bare bones of our alphabet. But I am game. At the very least, I think of it as a meaningful enterprise, and maybe you get more out of it the more you put into it.

Of Russian Literature

Thanks to make_me_stay, we have a poem to share. On the lure of Russian literature. I know that the_real_girlie has been wading in those deep, oppressiver waters herself. For my own part, I have been out of the mood. Though, I would not mind book-blogging "The Demons" and "The Brothers Karamozov" some day, if my life could be long enough. As it is, my life feels more like a haiku than a grand Russian novel. But who knows?

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I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don't care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall.
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn't be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.

-- "Changing Genres" by Dean Young