Early Morning Reflection: Fragility and Reliance on the Precise Wording of Scripture

 

Early mornings have their own breath, before any birds sing or dogs bark or, in my neighborhood, before the neighbors fire up their Harleys to go to work. It's the space between the inhale of full night and the exhale of a new day. Soft and fragile, it comes when the sky turns velvet with the promise of a pink sunrise that hasn't yet come. 

Photos can't capture it because it comes only by feel, so still that its first motion comes from a mosquito that hovers near, not on, my skin. A breeze so insignificant that it gets absorbed into motion of the turning earth at any other time. 

And then it comes. The exhale. That subtle drop in temperature that starts every new day. The ambient movement that precedes first light, creating the slightest of cool breezes, the only one we will get on a day that promises to huddle with humidity and sizzle with sun. A shiver almost comes, but not quite. More a premonition that summer days aren't all beaches and state fairs, that nothing lasts forever, that footing isn't always as sure as it seems. 

And I think of Jerome. Poor, dear Jerome and his Latin Vulgate. 

It took him more than twenty years during the late fourth century and early fifth to translate both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into the learned language of his day, Latin. The result, his Latin Vulgate translation, has been considered the gold standard by many churches ever since. In many ways, Jerome's translation has become our Bible, the one we have trusted all our lives.

And then comes the day when we understand the extent to which Jerome was just a man, inspired by God and prompted by devotion, but hampered by prejudices and the potential for error from misjudgment, illness, and just plain weariness. 

Then comes the day when we come to grips with examples of what effect the fragility of his humanity has on what we are so sure of. The Bible. Our Bible. What we take for granted as true beyond any capacity for doubt. 

Then comes the day when we learn that not every word of the Bible may be what it seems. 

Take Isaiah 7:14.

You most likely know it by heart:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

The Hebrew word used here is almah, a word that was commonly used for a young woman or maiden, a unmarried woman. Jerome knew, of course, that this verse is ideologically paired with Matthew 1:23 and undoubtedly wanted to make sure we made the connection, too:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.

So Jerome in his zeal to clarify doctrine, substituted almah, a word meant to describe an unmarried woman with a word meant to describe a virgin instead. Not a terrible stretch, to be sure, but a stretch nonetheless. By Jerome's deft hand, the prophecy declared in Isaiah is fulfilled precisely in Matthew in a single language we couldn't mistake. Proof of Mary's virginity. Partial proof of Christ's divinity. Perfect. 

But not quite. 

While not quite a blatant mistranslation, it is an interpretation. A well-meaning one, but an interpretation even so. 

And that's the rub.

This doesn't mean that Mary, the mother of Christ, wasn't a virgin, of course. She probably was. Otherwise, what would have been all the fuss? It only means that the Bible, while an inspired document, isn't a word-for-word perfect document, especially in the English we probably all read. Not an infallible Guide for Living but signpost pointing to the God it tries to explain, intended to grow in us a desire for God that even His words will not satisfy.

The Bible is an invaluable guide and companion to a faith based not on its specific words but on God Himself. 

The Bible is a fragile connection to God sometimes, but it is a connection. Like our image in the mirror is not our complete self but a faithful representation, it still tells me valuable information about what I look like. Like the almost indetectable breeze from a mosquito's early morning wings tells me he's there, so does the Bible hover faithfully near to remind me where to look for the breath of God so that I long to turn to Him full-face so as to behold His glory. 

The Bible showcases the way. It points to the path. 

The goal is not the Bible. The goal is God.

 

Mosquito image: Dreamstime

Horizon Image: From my window at Castello di Solfagnano, Perugia, Umbria, Italy, May, 2025

Jerome image: Ascension Press

Gateway image: Entrance from chapel courtyard to garden, Castello de Solfagnano

Ben Franklin on what happens when you sweep your doorstep

Ben Franklin is well known for his respect for the industrious. His Poor Richard alter ego is responsible for familiar advice like "No pain, no gain", "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise", and even "God helps those who help themselves" (No, it's not in the Bible). I just finished his autobiography and realized that tomorrow is the 4th of July, so I thought another of his observations and the actions it prompted might make a good subject for discussion.

When Ben lived in Philadelphia as a youngish man who had already started a flourishing printing business, it was still a very young city, just getting started on what was to become a notable future, the same as the man himself. One might say they grew up together. One might even say they helped one another along and one way they did so began pretty humbly - by Ben observing a woman sweeping the street in front of her house.

In those days, none of Philly's streets were paved and it takes little imagination to understand what happened when it rained. Carriages and horses made the dirt streets a quagmire through which not only they, but men and women, had to trudge, all dragging through clinging mud, towing it with them wherever they went. 

One day, Ben observed a woman sweeping away the loose dirt in front of her house and asked why she did that. When she told him that it kept the mud down there when it rained, he, because he was Ben Franklin, had an idea. What if they paved the streets with bricks? It sounded like a fine idea and as things turned out, Ben got it done. But the way he got it done was what impressed me. He found the bricks, and found the people to do the work, then got the immediate neighbors to pitch in a little bit, just a few pennies each, to finance the work done in front of their house. Just their house, the part from which they would directly benefit. 

And something happened.

Actually, two somethings.

First, the street got paved. The mud abated. When it rained, everybody looked at their improved circumstances and took pleasure in the results. A good thing for everyone.

Also, however, something else happened. Now, Ben didn't write about this, but I got to thinking. When Philadelphians looked at their lovely paved streets, they had to be thinking, "Look what we did." Emphasis on the WE. Everyone who benefited from the project, from the residents to the bricklayers, realized not only a practical benefit from it, but could see their own participation in it. Every day, when they swept the newly laid bricks outside of their own homes. 

And that happened, I believe, because the project was accomplished not through taxes by some amorphous THEY but by people they talked to. People who had a recognizable face and with whom they'd had conversation. Neighbors. Friends. Strangers who helped each other. They'd built something. Together. And they enjoyed the fruits of their labors together. 

And they celebrated every day by sweeping.

Don't think people sweep their sidewalks anymore? You're wrong. The first time I went to Italy, on my first morning in Rome, we were staying in an Airbnb on a quiet street and I woke to singing. When I opened the shutters, I looked down. There, in front of the shop below our apartment, the shopkeeper was sweeping the sidewalk outside of his store, singing some pleasant little ditty I couldn't understand, and happy. Happy to be sweeping. Happy to have a sidewalk to sweep. Happy. 

And he was beautiful. Like Ben. Like working together for the common good with people we can embrace when the work is done. Projects that have human faces. 

I smile to think what might still be possible. Happy Fourth.

First Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Society

Second Photo credit: Alamy

Posture

 

Stand Up Straight.

Put Your Shoulders Back.

Lift your chin.

LOOK AT ME.

All my life. The reminder to have good posture. I still think about it, looking at recent photographs of an old woman with back bent, walking with determination sometimes, but now needing to consciously adjust my spine so as to even approximate something straight. 

The years did it.

The flower is worn for sure, but the stem doesn't reach up rightly anymore, either. I look often at the ground rather than the sky. It looks likes defeat. It looks used up, and maybe it is, or nearly.

There are times when insight and adventure still reign, and the 'A' side of life still takes hold - when I buy a ticket for Italy or hop on the Queen Mary, or sign up for college - but on many days, I'd rather just take a Tylenol for the aches, lay down on the couch, and nod off, realizing that someday, sooner rather than later, I won't wake up. 

I pretty much know what it is. Something happened to the angst of living, the tortured thoughts that provided steam for my engine, the knowing that what I had was not all there was to have in this world. That there was more, and I wanted to taste it. At first it was more money or more excitement, but became later desire for more understanding, more light, more space.

And I found a lot of it. It turned out not to be too complicated. It was simple, and still is, God lays it before me every day. The wonders of clean breath. The golden light of evening. The feeling of sand on bare feet. The sound of someone calling me grandma. I remember (or think I do) an interview with Raymond Burr when he retired and was asked what he was going to do with himself, saying something like "I'm going to sit in my garden and watch my lemons grow." I didn't get it at the time. Now, I do. 

It was a shock to be done with achieving, but most days, it leaves me content. Now that my job is more giving away then grasping, I can relax a little. 

It doesn't look all that great, but it feels pretty good.

Photos by the author from her garden

Mary's Great Commission

 

I been reading a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest. He is the founder of Homeboy Industries in the Los Angeles neighborhood that is the gang capital of the world and Homeboy provides them a way back into a godly and productive life.

As a part of what he does, Greg celebrates a lot of church services in detention facilities and to do it, he had to learn a whole new language – not only Spanish, but Homie. And the Homies he tries to help have to learn a new language too because when he teaches them the Bible, he uses a lot of words they don’t know, so both sides have to do the best they can to make themselves understood and what happens is that when they engage in conversation, the homies substitute words they do know for words they don’t. The results are sad, awkward, and funny like these:

A young Homie who wants to read a Bible verse in church might say:  "This is a  reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Filipinos". Or someone who was hungry and looked for help might tell him: "I had to go eat at the Starvation army". Once one of the young men who worked in his office gave him this phone message: "Professor Davis at UC wants you to give a talk and he says to be sure to tell that you will be constipated".

 But we do the same thing. We can’t help it. We only know what we know and when we talk about what we don’t know, we have no choice but to do it in terms of what we do know. It’s the only way we can relate to something. It even happens when we read the Bible. Like this passage:

 Luke 10: 1-2,: After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.

Or this one:

Matthew 28:18-20: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you". 

The likeliest way to read these is as evangelists, that it means we are to go to work for God. It's a thing, and a familiar one. We want to be one of those to whom God says, Well done, at our life’s end. To get there, we must work. Work is what we know. Work is our language of faith.

But I keep running into a problem with this. Quietly, in the background, something else is going on.

John 12:1-8, Luke 10:38-42: Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.

“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

 If the highest service we can render to God is to do the work that must be done, to bring in the harvest, to spread the gospel, then where does this come from? Mary, Jesus says, has the better part. The better part of what? Of Jesus? Of obedience? Of a life of faith? I think the answer to all of these is yes, but that’s the problem. Mary’s approach is one of contemplation, not work. All she did was make a frivolous gesture of love and then sit and listen at Jesus’ feet. Nothing got done. No souls were won. No additional seats at their table were filled with converts. But this, Jesus said, was the better part. This is for us, like for the homies, the part we don’t know.

 The fields may be ripe and we may be asked to be fishers of men, but this kind of work may not be the only kind of work Jesus is talking about. After all, when you think about it, God does not need us to win souls to Him. He is perfectly capable of doing it all on His own. In fact, the little bit we can do would be useless without the part only God can do. This is what Jesus called the better part. We can’t do what He can and somehow, we have to understand that without Him, all of our outward kingdom work will fall short.

In the end, we can’t convert anyone. We can’t bestow faith. But we can do something we are repeatedly asked to do. Love. Love God and love one another. The Bible tells us to work for the kingdom a handful of times, but tells us to love more than 500 times and that love for God just because He is God is the highest love there is. Not because of something He did or because of something He gave, but just because He is God. 

 Mary and Martha did not agree about the best way to love Jesus and they’re a great example of the tug of war we still fight between the active ways to love God and the contemplative ways to love God. Contemplation – sitting and waiting at Jesus’ feet – is not productive. It is not measurable. It doesn’t get anything done but according to Jesus, it is the better way.

Ok, I know that someone needs to mow the lawn and take the garbage out to the curb on Thursday evening. And, if we are going to open our church doors for community events, someone needs to bake and grill hot dogs and do dishes. Beware, however, of patting ourselves too vigorously on the back when those things are done and we go no further. We have given our work to God and He is undoubtedly pleased with it. But unless we go to that secret place where only we two are together in mutual love, we have not given Him that one thing He wants most. We also spread the gospel by being it rather than by doing it.

The Homies used words they knew to deal with concepts they didn’t know. They were often clumsy doing it, but Greg, their spiritual advisor, loved them for the effort. Mary spilled perfume on Jesus’ feet because she didn’t know any other way to show Him how extravagantly she loved Him. It was awkward and wasteful, but Jesus loved her for it – not in spite of it, but because of it. Find a way to show your love for God that doesn’t involve a lawnmower or a kitchen or study or evangelizing, a way that doesn’t involve anyone else but you and God. An intimate act of love. Sing. Ponder. Pray. And give it all you have, because it all belongs to God, anyway.

Out of place, out of time

 There is a palm tree outside my window here in Rome - a big one reaching onto my second story and up into the third. The hard tangled knot that sprouts it's leaves is at eye level and the branches sway in tonight's wind. 

No one associates palm trees with Italy. This is hardly the tropics. It feels like they don't belong but because tonight is one of those that won't let me sleep simply for the sake of fomo, I'm watching the tree. And of course, I haven't missed it. The broad Atlantic Ocean was like that. Just there and perfectly itself. 

No one associates rain with Italy either, but we got that tonight, too. Hard short rain so bright that it fizzled from my street lamp like electric current in accompaniment to thunderclap that rattled against the coliseum stones and made it sound like God was not only bowling, but was doing it on marble.

I didn't get much sleep tonight, but in turn didn't miss any of the life that happens while we're checked out. Some nights are just magic. Oh Rome, you can be a hard-edged mistress, but tonight you danced for me, twirling your bright bangles against the dark.

Ah, the birds are singing. The world still turns and I'm still alive. Was starting to wonder if I'd run out of time. Not yet.

Perfectly Round

 

The pantheon in Rome, Italy.

It's the oldest intact house of worship on the planet. Really. Even for people who don't care about history much, and there are a lot of you, that's kind of a thing. 

Anyway, I went to church there today. And  I learned something. Not about history, but about the nature of  God. The thing is, the pantheon was first built in 600-something BC. At the time, it was dedicated to all the known gods at that time. All of them. And the Romans weren't just hedging their bets with their own gods. They had a shrine there for the Unknown God (check your Bible. It's there) just in case they'd missed anyone. Turns out that the one they  missed was the One that hadn't quite come yet.

Well, the pantheon is a church now. A Roman Catholic Christian church. And all the statues of Roman gods and goddesses inside are gone, replaced by Jesus and Peter and Mary, but it turns out that the remodelers haven't forgotten their pantheistic roots. You see, the pantheon is one of the most famous buildings in the world, even in Rome, where famous buildings literally line many streets and the rubble from them sits in piles in alleyways and out of the way corners. There is just something about this place.

Some of it has to do with the building itself - the way it's designed. There's that open oculus in the top - literally an open hole - that makes you feel like God always has a birds' eye view of what's going on inside. And then the shape of it is perfect. It's  not only a two dimensional perfect circle. It's a three dimensional one - the same size top to bottom as it is side to side.  The acoustics are beautiful and the symmetry gives an occupant a feeling of things being just right: God saying He had created it to be Very Good.

Then there are the people. Every color, every shape, every nationality. The building calls them to worship there together as one people. They may no longer be worshiping a pantheon of various gods, but they worshiip together a God who brought them all together conceptually. They are all in Him: every facet of man and life and nature. The hush there has little to do wtih priests or ritual. It has more to do with continuity in a line that extends from the first days of creation through the dawn and maturation of mankind to today. 

And it is beautiful. 

There are familiar places where we join familar faces in worship. But then there are places where we knjow no one, where nearly everyone speaks a language we don't understand, and yet that is where God drives home His point. Come to me. Everyone. Love one another. 

The family of God is bigger than we ever imagined and it takes flying to the other side of the world to begin to understand. It is possible to share the kiss of peace with people who would otherwise be foreign and strangers but, in this context, are brothers and sisters. When God says He brings all people together, He isn't kidding. He gathers people from disparate times and geographies and worldviews under one perfectly round roof and says, "Follow Me."  

I can do that.

This is what it sounded like:

The Cloud that Has No Number

 

A year ago, I graduated from college. This year, I'm finishing my last class, one called God, Faith, and Reason. It was supposed to act as finish of sorts, a way to tie up the ends of what I'd wanted to learn. In the end, it's been only a bit of that but actually rendered what I'd learned both necessary and irrelevant. Two things, only one of which I'd wanted, but that desired thing not able to come to bloom without the one I didn't end up much needing after all. Go figure.

This is my final paper.

I’m not going to write a final paper. I’m writing a position paper instead, a kind of summary, a statement of what Philosophy looks like to me now. Maybe it’s a final position paper. Whatever. I’ve used Philosophy, you know. Used it as a tool to mine for something else. Not for itself, not for knowledge or for proof, not even for the meaning of life. I’ve use Philosophy to find the rest of God. And through grace and perfect timing, and prodding, I believe I did.

In the end, Philosophy doesn’t have as many answers as I thought it might. And Philosophy professors certainly don’t. Most Philosophers do an odd concentric dance that draws circles around the God I was looking for, ever expanding and contracting, around Him, but each stuck away from the center in their individual orbits of pet theories. I still blame Descartes more than anyone, who started with faith and tried to use logical progression to prove God and ended up only handing down a bloodless Thinking Thing. Yuck. After Descartes, most of them got lost in the Disneyland of Reason, systems, hermeneutics and dialectic. Even the best of the moderns – Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard – stopped short at the points of their own relative stakes in the ground.

The odd thing is that when you say that Kierkegaard is your guy, I get it. He has the awe and wonder, along with the angst that makes him relatable. In my mind, however, Kierkegaard’s angst is exactly what keeps him from going all the way in. He’s made the leap of faith, all right, but stopped on a ledge part way down the chasm at the place that demands he let go of the philosopher in him in order to grab onto the God in him. He won’t let himself be taken by the mysticism that has to be God. He mocks the philosophical logicians, but in the end, is still one of them.

I guess it happens to all of us. The leap of faith isn’t one and done. That’s why I liked John Caputo so much. What a great way to end this! He picks up all the pieces philosophy left ungathered, mashes them together, and then says effectively, ‘See how beautiful it all can be!’ Caputo saw what has happened to faith.

“Faith” now stood in much sharper contrast with “reason” than could ever have been imagined by the authors of the Confessions or Proslogion, who viewed their books as an exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. ….What had disappeared under the guns of modernity was the robust faith of the medievals where fides and intel-lectus, the love of learning and the love of God, went hand in hand. (Caputo, On Religion, 61)

In fact, as much as I enjoy him, Socrates might carry some of the blame for this, too. He, for all of his exalted forms, enjoyed slicing and dicing mankind and thought into categories that were, although not as remote and detached as Aristotle’s, were certainly elitist and divisive. After all, look where they led him…

For my money, the PreSocratics made the least mess of it all. I’ll take Thales’ “The world is full of Gods” as an appropriate entry point anytime. Spared the ability to disassemble reality into its sensible component parts, he assumed that the world and God were one and he was right. Caputo got it, too.

Human life has a dark center, an unlit core, a concealed depth, to which we have at best limited access. That is the ultimate condition under which we live our lives...as soon as we come to be, we find that being is already up and running. (Caputo, 77-8)

In other words, deep calls to deep. We live, we experience being, hidden from one another but together. The gathering of saints.

Now I am sliding near another cliff, bracing for another leap, this one into a mystic cavern whose occupants no longer need to know why. An orange cat is already there, and the rose, both of which instinctively live within what they were made to be without wondering what it might be like elsewhere. I have one advantage over them, though. I am warned. The cliff is sheer, and the road back no longer available, but I am not afraid.

It may be that I will haunt a classroom again, but I will probably not ask again to be graded or to earn a credential. A door is shutting, and I’m not sure yet where the opening one leads. There is a Cloud of Unknowing there, though, that I want very much to breach. You know what I mean. The woods were dark, but I’m coming out of them now and I have appreciated the company of my Virgil.