wise ass

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

-- Hamlet

“That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”

-- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Experience is over-rated. Some of life’s lessons you’d be better off forgetting. That’s what therapists are for, I suppose, and resurrections -- forgetting.

It’s a fallen world. The humble are reviled for arrogance, while the arrogant are praised for their humility. Was Socrates a humble man, or arrogant? How humble, to put his ignorance on the table! How arrogant, to think his questions worth reply! How dare you, sir, confess to ignorance! Why didn’t you make something up, like the rest of us? You make us all look bad. Hemlock for you, wise-ass.

Given where I started, I’m amazed to be here at all, doing what I do right now. If I can maintain this vector, there’s no telling what I might yet accomplish. It’s the course of my journey that predicts the future, not my inventory of wisdom and foolishness.

It’s not rocket science. Anybody could do it. I note in my heart’s ledger the ways that I can mess things up. Then I do something different. I learn responsibility by naming the thing I shall not do again. That’s what introspection, examination of life, therapeutic progress, are about – the sorcery of names: if you name the beast you have a chance to disarm it, and to open the portal that it guards.

My teachers say I am a teachable person. I provide, for myself and for my teachers, an inventory of my achievements and disasters, strengths and flaws (nowadays it’s correct to call them “growing edges,” since no one’s self-esteem can endure any less than a perfect grade). That’s how one learns to do what one could not do before, what no one (not even one’s friends) thinks one can do.

But gatekeepers are not teachers. They do not deserve one’s integrity. My honest inventory, thrown before the three snarling heads of Cerberus, is so much steak awarded to bottom-feeders. I say, This is where I came from, and this is where I have come to, and look now where I’m going; and they say, That is not what we meant at all, that is not it, at all. Thank you for telling us your faults. We’ve written them down as you told them, and this is now your punishment.

That’s what wannabes do. They close doors, keep you in your place, and confine you to the Egypt that you came from. “Once a slave, you’ll always be a slave. That’s our job.”

Wannabes leave you with a “trust issue.” It’s one of life’s harmful lessons: don’t believe gatekeepers who claim the authority of teachers. Don’t ever “be yourself” with them. Pearls before swine.

This is a lesson you’d be better off without. You must come out of your hiding place, because if you don’t you’ll be a phony, unworthy of trust, a nascent wannabe. Thou canst not then be true to any man. It is only truth that can make us free. We can begin our journeys on no other terrain than the topographies of our selves. If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where to go.

So you have to forget life’s deathly lessons. Like Scrooge, you must wake up one morning and love again, give again of your substance, offer again your trampled heart, name the beast and open the portal that it guards. That’s what I’m doing right now.

It’s been said that the Jews invented guilt. That’s not quite true. What they invented was responsibility. When the exiles came back from Babylon, they wrote about their Triumph and Disaster, and about their Second Chance. It was a history neither triumphal nor lachrymose. We had the blessing, they said, and we lost it, and it was our fault that we lost everything; and now we’re going to do better.

So when I go to Judgment, this is what I will say.

”I’ve messed some things up, Lord. Here’s my ledger, you might have missed a few. I am, as my headmaster used to say, molded out of faults, but faults do not define me any more than bricks define the schoolhouse. Here’s the video; watch my story, and see how far I’ve come. I tell the truth and I’m teachable. I name what I don’t know; I declare what I don’t do well; I tell you what, if I’m not on my game, could go wrong. But notice that, because I name these terrors, things don’t usually go wrong. I’m often on my game.

“I name my faults. It’s the best thing about me, Lord, so deal with it. If You're threatened by my honesty, You are not God.”

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top floor

He dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

-- Genesis 28:12 (NRSV)

. . . Someone to watch over me.

-- Ira Gershwin

The sixty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building (the floor with the gargoyles) is an unexpectedly intimate place. As the elevator opened, a round receptionist with wings blessed me silently from behind his desk, smiling. There were others: a wounded angel on the floor of a corridor, trying every few minutes to get up; a pensive angel in the window-casing of the kitchenette, looking over the East River and the place from which my journey had started – the open ground in front of a derelict asylum on Roosevelt Island.

This was the last stage of a processional,* nine “scenes” of angelic presence – or absence – across midtown Manhattan. There was the back room of a peep-show with bins of books about angelic manifestations. There was the third floor of an office building, now the locker-room of angels. There was an apartment on Forty-First Street, their recently abandoned barracks. On the fifth floor of the arrow-shaped old New York Times Building, I walked on a landscape of sand from which lilies, great white feathers and Gabriel’s horn had sprouted. In a tiny top floor office, a teletype machine banged out repeated warnings of time’s end, curling its paper onto the floor like ribbon candy. In an abandoned theatre behind Applebee’s, I saw from the stage, by work light, that angels were ascending and descending between mezzanine and balcony, while Jacob dreamed from a chair in the bare orchestra.

And here in the Chrysler Building, a messenger stood by the window in a glass-walled office, in my world and not. I approached. He turned. Through the glass, he looked me in the face. I could not bear his gaze. He saw beyond me. I did not doubt his concern, but he knew much more than I.

Several years later, I met Alice. She had been a fashion designer, and beautiful. She left nothing to chance. She was very “private,” had never married. Choosy about whom she loved, she loved those people well. Not a mother, but an unforgettable auntie.

She didn’t feel well, and went to the doctor, and learned that day she had inoperable cancer. The “progress of disease” – strange term we use – was swift. I met her a few weeks later, when she could no longer get out of her daybed in the capacious parlor. Her ceiling was so high that light from the big front window did not reach it.

For a “private” person, a person who draws a veil decisively on the holy of holies and presents herself as an artifact, the intimacies of care at the end of life are excruciating. All is now revealed. There’s no backstage any more. Every bodily process is someone else’s business. She could no longer self-produce; her appearance now depended on people who knew everything there was to know, who in every cover-up must be co-conspirators. Before she was sick, Alice never appeared anywhere without her wig. Her contest with terror: how to give away her secrets without losing herself. From the wreck of her show, could she recover soul? Could she let others love her in this way, and with grace?

She looked into the shadowed ceiling one evening, and a figure hovered there. The figure saw her. She let the figure see her. When she looked back, the figure was not there any more.

As people approach their end, it’s not uncommon for them to have experiences that we must call (because our experience does not confirm them) hallucinations. In dreams or in waking life they see persons who have died, or they may see messengers. Some are comforted, and some are terrified.

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

“I felt all right about it.”

“It’s as if the angel were watching over you.”

“It seems that way.”

I had gone to the sixty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building less than two years after the twin towers became pillars of flame. The fire had gone out by then, and the smoke no longer blew over Brooklyn, but the city still felt apocalyptic. The messenger looked me in the face, and I looked away. I let him see me, and I let him see whatever it was that he saw through me. When I looked back, he was turning toward the window again, gazing at the city with compassion too great for intervention. Is there anything you can do? I thought. And then again, Never mind; just keep watching, I think I’ll be all right if I know you’re watching.

For Alice and me, it’s almost enough.

*The Angel Project, a site-specific installation directed and conceived by Deborah Warner, Lincoln Center Festival 2003.

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preposterous enterprise

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

-- Thoreau, Walden

Eyner iz keyner.

-- Yiddish proverb*

One is none, says the proverb. By yourself you’re nothing. Not the kind of folk wisdom that Americans like to hear. We think we did it all ourselves, by smarts and hard work. We created the new world, and birthed ourselves into it. We pioneers will do just fine, thank you, with the land we took from the people who were here before us, so leave us alone to work our slaves, or to buy the cheap product of their labor. We don’t want your meddling. Except for the fire department. And the police department. And my social security check. Oh, and roads. Oh, and the electric grid, and a cellphone. Oh, and lots of cheap petroleum bought and begged from Oriental despots and banana dictators. Oh, and lots of abominably expensive and marginally effective health care, paid for by somebody or other as long as it isn’t us.

Unitarians, American to the core, don’t like to hear that eyner iz keyner. We think that one person standing alone is everything. Emerson said “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” What would be the point, he asks, of communion with other souls? “Men descend to meet.” We don’t believe in congregating; which is why our congregations are weak, and then we blame that weakness on our ministers. Emerson soon left the ministry, beating his congregation to the punch, and made his name as a solo act. Clever he was.

Trouble is, we are not who we are on our own. Emerson, on his own, needed his audience. He descended to meet them, or at least to meet their money, as an athenaeum star. His audience paid for that haunted house in Concord. It was they who supported the transcendental circle of his less entrepreneurial clients.

And Thoreau was not on his own either. He built a hut by Walden Pond, where his mom would sometimes bring him lunch. And where, in a ten minutes’ walk, he could have the companionship of Lydian Emerson, his second mom. On the other side of the pond was the railroad to Boston, which fascinated him immensely. “I went to the woods to live deliberately.” Yes, and also to tell us about it. He had us in mind from the beginning. He kept account of his expenses because he had something to prove to us. It was important that we be amazed, and scandalized, by his pretty hut.

The one who hears a different drummer is not eyner, not alone. He is with that drummer, no matter how distant, whose authority he accepts, whom he follows and whose approval he seeks.

I am older every minute, more crotchety, more introverted, more jealous of my space and my time. Perhaps because I have not found them yet. When will it be, my time and place? How long, O Lord? Does it come this side of mortality? As the limit takes its contour, color and texture, like the distant mountain approaching over a once endless plain, I scan the horizon for a verdant glen that might belong to me, where I could, as they say, really stretch out. Perhaps it never appears. There are only these compromised places, these opportunities that are already polluted, and must be saved. How long must I wait? No waiting at all, this is the occasion right now, this ridiculous apartment where if I stretch my limbs I strike somebody’s face. My full extent, my personal space, are not to be found on this crowded island, but on the other side of the river. And I don’t mean Jersey.

The blessings are here in our jostled, preposterous enterprise: existence, as the philosophers say, rather than essence. I have been too long from this private dilemma of mine, this prayerful combat, this wrestling with words like Jacob with the messenger. But I am not solitary even here. The words come from somewhere: all night they ascend and descend, and when they touch bottom I must fight with them for blessing. No blessing without injury, no sacred time that is not out of joint. If you have a long reach, there are strangers, sojourners within its span. Their requirements are always a surprise.

On my own, I am not who I am. I am my daughters’ father, my wife’s husband, my dearest friend’s dear friend, my client’s counselor, any American’s fellow citizen. I am the one who loves as I can those who love me, and would love the rest if I knew how. I move among the poses and scripts of love; I learn more and better ones as I grow older. If I could not find these poses, remember the scripts, I would be lost. But in the leaps between them, I might recover my soul.

*Bennett Muraskin, Humanist Readings in Jewish Folklore (Farmington Hills, MI: Milan Press, 2001), p. 190.

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terrible concern

First, be who you are.

-- Forrest Church, Love and Death

“Here there be monsters,” they said on the old maps, meaning to warn us away. But it also entices us.

Follow your bliss, says a mytho-psychologist who captured the popular ear. Wherever it leads you, venture the best you are, and be all you can be. Yeah right. The monsters can hurt you. And the people who love you get hurt with you. When your bliss has been maimed, what have you got left?

Authenticity has great press. Great liberal press. We’ve charged ourselves with the duty of being, each in our own way, real. Trouble is, we’re as secretly lustful for judgment and institution as the straw reactionaries we pummel in our proclamations. We are closet Calvinists, predestinarians in a changed shroud, but substituting diagnosis for anathema. We don’t say damn you to hell for your heresy; we say we’re terribly concerned about you. And thus I fashion your authenticity into a different thing – your “issue.” There’s no defense against that terrible concern.

A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing. We’ve all inhaled a little psychology. How could we not? If we’ve survived to our present age, we’ve learned a thing or two about what people are really going to do – as opposed to what they say they’re going to do, perhaps even think they’re going to do, perhaps even think they’ve done. We may have had, delving into Freud or Jung or Horney, an Aha! moment, saying “I did that,” or “That’s how I spent my twenties!” Or even easier: “That’s my mother!” or “That’s my boss!” or “That’s you, you jerk!” It’s not rocket science. No higher math required. Any English major can shoplift the lingo, and recite the scripts over wine and cheese.

There is, of course, a healing art of counseling. Growing into it takes long practice, under close supervision, within strict boundaries. Within my own little front yard, I say that I have powers to Hear, to Name, to Bless and to Travel. Modest powers, far from the fantasies of heroism that might seduce one to ministry; and yet, when carefully deployed on the right ground, strong. I learn what I can do by learning again every day what I can’t do. Over and over again, the skin of my face hardens into a mask, to be shattered again only by reality. Mine is a Department of Reality, a Negative Way.

To learn the modest use of my powers, I must myself at some time have been heard, blessed, named and traveled with. Henry Nouwen says we are wounded healers, naming the wounds of others as we come to know our own. There’s no objective knowledge of another’s pain – they call it “com-passion,” a suffering with the Other. Beware the ones who have learned a little, and speak without supervision. Beware the ones who do not know their issues, but have pried open the cabinet of lingo. Beware the pourers of salt.

I came back from the den of lions with a limb missing, bliss mangled. Years later I returned to the place where monsters be, because I wanted, where faith had died, to grow new faith. I came back ready to defend myself from terrible concern. Ready to name the shoplift, claim my ground and hold it. Ironic that, prepared to protect myself, I did not have to. Or perhaps not ironic at all but rather instructive. Instructive about egos and about monsters.

The secret of healing is that there is no secret. It’s hidden in plain sight, too ordinary for words, always to be dis-covered, which is the precise meaning of re-velation or apo-calypse. “The people’s peace,” says one of our poets, is “not past our understanding,” but “falls like light upon the soft white tablecloth.”* It’s far too dumb for Unitarians; no diplomas required.

“April is the cruelest month.” (If Eliot had never written another line, this would make him a great poet.) As we become who we are, Reverend Church, how shall we protect ourselves? And what must we do to protect others? The faith that was lost is lost. New sprouting hurts. Every new life is also a grief.

*John Holmes, in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 164.

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marking time

In illness there are no “negative emotions,” only experiences that have to be lived through. . . . The ill person’s suffering should be affirmed, whether or not it can be treated.

-- Arthur W. Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness

It’s hard to watch a person suffer. Are you just going to sit there and watch? says the voice. What earthly use are you?

Well, perhaps I am no earthly use. Which does not mean that I am no use at all. But my use might be unearthly, my portfolio uncanny.

My ministry is, by definition, to those who have given up cure. If there were a cure for this cancer, that congestion of the heart, this massive insult to the brain, that insurrection of the nervous system, then the client would be somewhere else. The person in the bed is going to die with this disease. Can I help them live with it? (That is what palliative care means.)

“You’re not going to die of this,” a doctor once told me, “You’re going to die of something else.” This was his version of good news. This body, any body, my body, your body, is chock full of mortality. We’ve all got things going on in us that sooner or later could kill us but won’t, because another assassin will get there first. “You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that,” says one of Beckett’s clowns, we’re all dying of mortality. But can we live with it? (This is what the care of souls means).

“It’s taking forever,” he says.

By “it” he means his death. He wishes it would hurry up.

“What’s it waiting for? I’m tired.”

It’s a long train of humiliations.

“I want it to be done with.”

We’ve been through this before. He won’t take his life. He once thought he would, and told me that he had acquired the means – but that turned out to be a hoax, a pep-talk to himself.

No one should have to die in pain – that’s one of our mottos, but the remedies aren’t perfect. Each has side-effects that, in the very particular circumstances of one person’s mortal expedition, may be unacceptable. Too often our people must choose between pain and confusion. Some people would rather suffer their pain than let their brains go muddy.

His body has turned malicious. It’s one dirty trick after another. We treated him for tremors, but the medication made him nauseous all the time; withdrawal took weeks, during which he suffered both tremors and nausea.

One of his unacceptable dilemmas has gone out of whack. By night he is incontinent, by day he can’t pee; for two days now he has been in retention. That’s why he’s in the hospital unit today rather than at home.

He has a gift for intimacy. I said to him once that when he dies, God will be very glad to meet him – because he has a tender heart. His close friends visit, and the people who are paid to care for him begin to love him. When he isn’t wishing to die he gets dragged back into life, kicking and screaming, overcome by his talent for attachments.

So he’s not depressed. There is joy in his life, and a wicked sense of humor. But this is not what he presents to me recently. For me he reserves the desolation. I should feel flattered. When I come through the door, the show is over.

“This isn’t a game any more,” he says.

Or maybe it is. A waiting game. And I wait with him. It’s tedious. Tick tock.

“So there’s no joy left in your life.”

I wait.

“You don’t feel like yourself any more."

I wait.

“Robert,” I say, “is there something I should be doing?”

Tick tock.

“No. This is okay. This helps.”

What is this?

Tick tock.

I’m marking time. I’m celebrating his illness. He’s making a song of it, and an audience is required. I’m the audience.

I want to get on stage, of course. I want to play a transformative obligato of my own. I want to change things.

But I’m not invited. It’s his show. He calls the cues.

If I weren’t there, this time would be unmarked. Life is what can’t be rehearsed.

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expensive commodity

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime.

-- Anonymous

It’s a popular aphorism. It’s not in the Bible, though some would like to find it there. The people who want to find it in the Bible are the goats of Matthew 25, the ones who want an anti-prooftext for inconvenient obligations to “the least of these members of my family.”

Just because it’s not in the Bible, of course, doesn’t prove it isn’t at least partly true. To save a person from starvation, you must help him both in the short term and in the long term. It’s important to know the difference. If you bring the starving man a fish today, you haven’t accomplished much if you have to bring another fish tomorrow. But there’s little point in teaching a man to fish if – well, there are a whole lot of presuppositions to this educational program, without which it’s nonsense.

Teaching a man to fish – let’s flesh that out. Placing in everyone’s hands the infrastructure of opportunity, that’s what teaching a man to fish means. In America we don’t guarantee happiness; but we guarantee the pursuit of happiness. Though we don’t guarantee success, we guarantee hope. It sounds so simple, and inspiring. But hope is an expensive commodity: look at what is presupposed.

You must save the man from starvation: that’s what the fish is about. Then, having preserved his life, you must save him from helplessness: that’s what the education is about. 

S = FE. Salvation is the product of food and education. If either term is zero, there is zero salvation.

Until he knows how to fish, the man must be fed. There’s no point in teaching him to fish if he starves to death before he graduates.

There have to be teachers. People who know how to fish, but also how to explain fishing to others, must be compensated for leaving their poles and bait, and dedicating themselves to pedagogy.

There has to be a reliable supply of fish. The river hasn’t been diverted to irrigate desert golf courses. The pond wasn’t drained to fill back-yard swimming pools. The Megalithic Fish-Stick Company hasn’t over-harvested the species to extinction, and Foulblot Industries hasn’t poisoned the stock with unnatural sludge. These interests will no doubt protest against our restrictions.

The tools of fishery must be available. If bamboo and worms don’t naturally occur in profusion, they must be available at a reasonable price. (When we say “Reasonable,” we mean that the fisherman can buy what he needs without putting his future in hock, and All-Glutinous Bank will not repossess his gear in the first lean season.)

It’s assumed that thieves of the blue or the white collar won’t be stealing the catch or the tools. We have therefore taxed ourselves to support a police force for prevention of theft, a court for bringing malefactors to justice, and a jail for the serving out of sentences.

It’s assumed that if the man catches more fish than he needs for the day, he can preserve the product or sell it for profit. There is therefore salt or refrigeration to preserve a surplus, and there is a well-policed market where the day’s prices are fairly determined. The Blutocrats won’t be permitted to put him out of business by flooding the market.

This teaching of a man to fish is a damned expensive proposition. It requires a community of institutions and mutual loyalties. It requires an ethic of the Common Good – the Invisible Hand’s more idiomatic name. We have to invest resources in our aspiring fisherman for a considerable period of time; it’s not obvious when we will reach the break-even point on our investment, though sooner or later, on average, it happens.

It ain’t no free lunch, this teaching of a man to fish. And it ain’t natural. If anyone in nature manages to catch a fish, with his hands or his teeth or his toenails, everybody else tears fish and fisherman to pieces if they can, trying to get a piece of his action. The most brutal then takes all. If people don’t act this way, it’s because they’ve become unnatural. They’ve learned that they don’t like being alone with their food.

Human beings have for the most part from the very beginning behaved unnaturally. This is a good thing, because it allows more of us to eat and survive, setting aside surpluses and arranging recreation, making art and doing philosophy. It turns out that we don’t just grab what we want, not most of the time. We invent fictions called property and law, justice and generosity, and our unnatural behavior makes life something more than a food fight.So let’s teach the least of these members of Yeshua’s family to fish – after we have fed them. But teaching them to fish is harder and more expensive that simply feeding them.

From now on, certain people are forbidden to speak of teaching and fishing. The free lunch crowd, the grab everything that ain’t bolted down and run for the hills gang, the give me everything I want right now and never send the bill cabal, the balance the budget by cutting taxes club, the goats of Matthew 25 – they don’t know what it means to teach a man to fish.

Hey you. Just shut up.

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merrie band

He makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do.

-- Plato, Symposium*

Socrates was a flute-player of no mean skill. He could seduce with music, but he is more famous for seduction with his words.

I once traveled across the continent to spend two weeks with a teacher of performance. He let me join his studio, where he taught how infinite space could be bound in a nutshell. I learned to be as large or as small as I chose. I learned that if I needed a costume or a set I didn’t deserve them. No need for lights camera action: it was I who would turn on the lights. Or not. If I needed a script, I did not deserve one. I could never be lost, because the air, this sound, that light, the landscape in that window or this object close to hand right now, were more story than could be exhausted before night fell.

He stopped once, as palpable ideas swung round his head like pendants of a mobile, interrupted in their orbits. I’m sorry, he said. I’ve spoiled you now. You’ll never see the theatre again as you used to. You can’t go back. No, I’m not sorry, he said. You’re spoiled.

And I was.

Yeshua, they say, walked the streets, the hills and seasides, and drew people to himself. The rules of folklore require us to number his merrie band at twelve; but scripture makes it clear that they were more than twelve. He spoiled them. They could never go back to the farm, to the fishing-boat, to the tax office, once they had roused the sleeping power within them. Why fish for fish, when you can fish for souls?

Once, when they had lost everything and betrayed the cause, they tried to go home. On the road to an otherwise unheralded place, they talked with a stranger about what they were leaving behind. Honoring the commandment of hospitality to sojourners (“for we were sojourners in the land of Egypt”), they broke bread with him, and saw who he was. Then they understood that they could not leave him, for even the mode of their despair had been changed.

The first democracy put Socrates to death. He was too much for them. How can we levy taxes, they said, and hold festivals, and conduct wars, when the people are taught to hate their lives, and the wise are shown to be foolish, and the worse is made to appear the better cause? This is not the orderly process of citizenship. We already know, they said, how to live, and who is wise, and what is better. Better be happy about it. The realm needs happy people, and those who long to live differently are its enemies.

So Socrates was a corrupter of youth. He spoiled them. He made them long for something better. He made pictures in the mind – or did he play the tunes? – of justice and virtue, truth and beauty, beside which every law and proposition, poem and painting looked tawdry. These youth could never look at their elders again in the same way. And the elders weren’t used to being looked at this way, the new way learned by youth. They wouldn’t kill the children, so they killed the piper who had taken their minds.

Yeshua too corrupted the youth. He took them from their useful labors, and set them to wandering the streets and the hillsides, confessing that they ought not to have lived as before. They rehearsed a better kingdom, where lions and lambs lay down together. Where there was darkness, they turned on a great light, and in that light the shabbiness of the mighty was revealed. The newly naked wise and mighty struck back of course.

Today the name of Pontius Pilate is shorthand for the false innocence of bureaucrats. Meletus, Anytus and Lycon are known only as weaklings who could not abide honesty. The words they tried to suppress have “gone viral;” spreading from soul to soul with the speed of light.

John Lennon is supposed to have said that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. That, as far as I can tell, would be true of eternal life as well. It’s never what we expect, as we fix our eyes on noble purposes or their failure. It’s something that slips in at the periphery, the corner of the eye, like that stranger traveling the road with us, to whom we confide our troubles.

The Divine Domain is the last thing we expect. It’s what we didn’t plan for, and we’re slow to recognize it. Socrates taught that writing is false, and his pupil immortalized him in books. Yeshua, who spoke scripture from his heart to the illiterate and desperate, was crowned hero of a new scripture. But when we see it, we are spoiled for mere mortality. We can’t go back, because Emmaus isn’t what it used to be. It has changed. We are changed. He is risen.

*trans. Benjamin Jewett

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