"The Prophets" by Robert Jones: History and Prophecy

Calling his novel The Prophets and drawing on the Bible for names of characters and titles of chapters, Robert Jones, Jr. invites us to place this historical fiction in dialogue with Christian tradition.

Creation, Sin, Redemption The setting for the story is a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, years before the Civil War. Except for a couple of excursions by members of the slave owner's family, we never leave that plantation. The enslaved characters call the plantation "Empty." They have only a vague sense of what lies beyond its boundaries.

Yet the goodness of creation transcends the brutality of the circumstances. During an ordeal of humiliation and physical pain, the enslaved young men Samuel and Isaiah are still aware how birds, insects, the natural world go on with their lives amid the beauty of field and forest. Forced since childhood to work and sleep among the farm animals, Samuel "the strong one" and Isaiah "the sensitive one" have turned to each other for love and understanding. Their embrace of each other is described rapturously, and their relationship is known and honored throughout the community, at first.

Their world is also suffused with the voices of the ancestors, beneficent spirits who talk to us, speak through elders in the story, and who appear fleetingly to characters, giving encouragement and magically healing. The ancestors laugh at our limited perceptions: "You thought you were the living and we were the dead? Haha" (2). In chapters interspersed throughout the novel, we follow a parallel story of ancestors in a previous century who call a woman "King" and who celebrate the marriage of two young men who are privileged to be appointed "guardians" (187).

The different chapters bring us the voices of different characters, some of them tangential to the story of Samuel and Isaiah. Some of these particular narrators were obscure to me, or just not so interesting. Happily, I remembered a famous author's advice (Virginia? Flannery? I forget) that there's no rule that you have to read every chapter.

What brought me back to the novel time and again was this underlying confidence and joy, suggesting to me that Hebrew phrase from Genesis tov mahov: creation is very good. Love of and between "the two of them" is Edenic in the setting of a stable where the stars shine through a skylight, and the maturing of that love under duress is gripping to experience. The ancestors and the elder women among the community who channel them recall the Bible's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1) and the ministering of angels.

But everything good is twisted by the state of slavery. Under the slave owner Paul, love is reduced to what happens at a clearing known as the "F---ing Place," where he commands couplings with and between his slaves, to rear a new generation of slaves to increase his wealth. Black mothers have borne his light-skinned sons, and his wife Ruth also tries to fulfill her desires with black men.

Paul weaponizes the Gospel. A self-righteous man, sure that his ownership of these people is a sign of God's approval (250), he charges his black disciple Amos to preach the Gospel to the workers with stress on obedience. Paul is appalled when he learns that his young workers Samuel and Isaiah love each other, not just because of passages in Leviticus and Romans that forbid sex between men: Paul had planned for the young men, brought to "the peak state of brawn" by their work in the stable, to sire hardy workers for use and for sale (259). When they don't respond to the women he sends to them, Paul charges Amos to push the community to shun the young men. In the parallel story of the ancestors, it's a cross-brandishing Portuguese captain who introduces the notion that the marriage of the two guardians is unnatural and detestable; the tribe laughs at him.

Under the distortion of slavery, the comfort that the Gospel offers is that of excluding "the two of them" (76). During the sadistic ordeal imposed on Samuel and Isaiah, members of the community jeer, finding "some kind of happiness... in seeing someone else being humiliated for once" (143).

Paul's son Timothy, an artist described as "not a man man," pushes the story to a crisis. We see how he found freedom to express his homosexuality at Harvard and imbibed Yankees' ideas about the wrongs of slavery (202). At home, taken by the beauty of Isaiah and Samuel, he commands them to pose for portraits. He imagines that Samuel and Isaiah will both be flattered and enriched by his attention. He considers that he's doing them a favor when he invites each to his bedroom. Instead, he causes jealousy, hurt, and fury.

"Redemption" in this situation isn't going to be the same thing as a happy ending. There comes with pain a deepening of love (215 ff). Without any spoilers, I can attest that the feeling at the end is of a kind of restoration of wholeness in the embrace of the ancestors. There's also an unforgettable and comforting vision of a man who dissolves into a thousand swirling fireflies (238).

The arc of the story, from creation through sin to redemption, is one that repeats throughout the Bible, and, I believe, in our lives.

Guessing Game

Jones, with his Biblical connections, challenges us to a guessing game: How do the titles fit? The first chapter in the voice of the ancestors he calls "Judges," as in, judges of the story. A chapter that depicts the playful banter between Samuel and Isaiah, that ends with them lying side by side, that deepens into their sharing painful memories, Jones calls "Psalms." Being the songs of David, "Psalms" perhaps recalls the intense love of the youthful David for Jonathan, or the lyrical expressions of joy and pain in the Psalms, or both. The chapter chronicling the ordeal imposed on the young men is called "Babel," perhaps because of the babbling mockery of the crowd; the chapter that follows in which the women heal them is appropriately called "Balm in Gilead." Some of the titles are playful, as when the throwback chapter of two guardians in Africa is called "II Kings."

Likewise Jones's choices of names for his characters. The eponymous prophets would be Samuel, instrumental in ending King Saul's reign, and Isaiah, harbinger of Israel's restoration through the trials of a suffering servant. If we remember that the apostle Paul was also known as Saul, then Samuel's readiness to fight the plantation owner makes the name a good fit. Seeing Isaiah as harbinger of a restoration is harder to do in a literal way. But in his gentleness, unwilling even to make a fist (145), and in his suffering, he may fit the theme of suffering servant.

The other prophet among the characters' names is Amos, known for his call to justice, and that seems ill-applied to the servile character hand-picked to preach. But when we see into Paul's mind, we read how he envies the black man's spiritual visions, causing the slave owner to concede that black people "have souls" (258) and to doubt the rightness his life's work. He finds comfort in Christ's dictum, "Render unto Caesar" and St. Paul's admonition that slaves are to be obedient.

From first to last, however, Jones gives another name paramount importance. Isaiah knows that his mother and father gave him an African name and yearns to know what that is. We already do: the second chapter of the book, called "Proverbs," is a pro- (forward) verb (word) sent out from Isaiah's mother to the son taken from her, whom she calls Kayode. By this name, and the emphasis on Judeo-Christian names, Jones suggests that the spiritual world of the African ancestors is a reality behind and through the one codified in Scripture. I don't take that as a denial of Scripture, but a denial of how the slave owner adapts scripture to his own weaknesses and desires. By extension, Jones indicts the whole white supremacy project.

Social Resonances

In an interview on Atlanta's NPR station WABE, the author said, as if it were common knowledge, that African tribes were far from "binary" in their view of gender. That's news to me, but a cursory look through sources on the internet confirmed what he said, mostly in the context of refuting African regimes that justify brutal persecution of gay men as patriotic push-back against sin brought to their continent by decadent Europeans.

Jones also writes a couple of passages, apt for the time of the story, that encapsulate the mindset and method of white supremacists. When Isaiah sighs, "I get tired. But I wanna live," (301), Samuel thinks:

That was the way of the world as remade by toubab [whites], and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.

In a parallel passage some pages later, Paul's overseer James, resentful to be dressed in raggedy clothes (319) and beholden to his cousin, considers the black people he oversees:

They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul's. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn't be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans.

Yet in this same chapter, he recalls his desire for a black woman who resisted him fiercely. How can he reconcile his desire for her with his belief that she was an "animal?" He rationalizes:

The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind. (321)

Prophecy The ancient prophets of Jewish tradition aren't properly thought of as fortune-tellers but poetic truth-tellers. Like pundits and poets who raise their voices today, they tell the powerful the perspective of the marginalized; they foretell where things will go if the listeners don't listen.

Jones, building on Christian and African tradition, telling in a poetic way his story from a different century, is also speaking to our times, and to the future.

In that passage of Samuel's thoughts about his white masters, Jones writes

They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.(321)

Probably writing that well before the summer of 2020, Jones could have been looking back on George Floyd's death, the rising up that followed, and the continuing reaction of Trump and his ilk. It also describes the racist attacks in Chicago in the summer of 1919 (see my post about a poet's book 1919 (08/2020).

With the beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and a community, The Prophets also tells of racial injustice and exploitation of all kinds, a story that was and is. How can we ensure that story is not still to be?

Poem and Puzzle: Eliot's "East Coker"

It's a T. S. Eliot kind of day, all in-between:

• Grey, just above freezing, the deck not iced but frosty enough that squirrels shied from the peanut feeder on the slippery bannister;
• Lent starts tomorrow, but I'm fasting now (liquids only; colonoscopy).
• It's break time, but I've no place to break to.
• And Psalm 39 appointed for today expresses something between resignation -- "I am but a sojourner with you, / a wayfarer, as all my forebears were" -- and hope that "I may be glad again / before I go my way and am no more."

The commentary in Forward Day by Day suggested that we read T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" for his meditation on the themes of the psalm. Having time on my hands, I've done just that.

Eliot makes us fight for what we get in his lines. As we do with crossword puzzles in the Sunday New York Times, we look for themes, we haul out the dictionary, and, when we see intersections of words and meanings, the struggle can turn even a commonplace thought into an exciting discovery. No fun if you look up the answers in the back.

So I'm writing before I take a look at any helpful website commentary. In the same way, I got a lot out of "Little Gidding," another of the Four Quartets. See my blogpost "Just a Closer Walk with T. S. Eliot" (05/2014).

I. I sketched a picture of what I think is going on. A wayfarer walks a lane just wide enough for him to squeeze up against the embankment to let a van pass by on its way to the village. Sunrise light casts shadows across the lane. There's an open field where once there may have been houses or a factory.

There's warmth in the air, and the poet slips into archaic language when he tells us that, at midnight in midsummer, "you can hear the music" of "daunsing" and "matrimonie" of villagers in centuries past.

The moment is enveloped in a thought we've heard before, and will hear again: "In my end is the beginning." He elaborates in lines reminiscent of Ecclesiastes: "there is a time for building / ...And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane." Alliteration or rhyme brackets some beginnings and ends, as the ground contains "bone of man and beast," "fur and faecies," "dung and death"; "country mirth... long since under earth."

"Dawn points," he writes, "and another day / Prepares for heat and silence." Are we on the coast? "Out at sea the dawn wind / Wrinkles and slides." I like that one.

II. While the scene seems to be summery, this part begins with a question, "What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the spring...?" A list of "disturbances" expands quickly from "creatures of the summer heat" to roses to constellations to cosmic cataclysm in fire, and, eventually in ice. Pretty grim. My feeling is, "late November" isn't the time of the year, but the poet's time of life.

After a space, the poet seems to comment on the poetry of the previous stanza. "That was a way of putting it -- not very satisfactory." He "starts again," reflecting that age has not brought the "autumnal serenity" he had expected, and there's

At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment...

That's a wise observation, not an uncommon one, but elegantly expressed.

This little meditation on age slips into another weird midsummer-night's-dream fantasy, like the country dances of Part I, this one about "a dark wood...menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment." Instead of wisdom, old men's "folly" is "fear" of fear itself and of "belonging to another, or to others, or to God."

Ok, what is God doing here? I guess He's been hovering all along, above that vision of the end of the universe and the allusions to Ecclesiastes. Now that God's involved, the aging poet makes an observation that might fit into a Psalm: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

III. Suddenly we're not on a country lane anymore as the poet writes a psalm for modern times. "They all go into the dark," not only "vacant interstellar spaces" but also "the vacant into the vacant," by which he means all those titans of modern life, "The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, / The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers..." and even the "Stock Exchange Gazette." They're all vacuous entities, Eliot says, echoing Ecclesiastes' "vanity of vanities."

Updating Psalm 102, the poet imagines a theatre, lights dimmed between scenes, with "a hollow rumble in the wings" as "the hills and the trees, the distant panorama / And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away."

"Or," he continues, there's that awkward pause in conversation on the London tube "And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen / Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about."

A thought about "when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing" becomes a sort of prayer: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" and also without love "for the wrong thing," while "there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting." It feels like we've reached a low point in the trajectory of the poem, and that the poet is receptive to some kind of insight. He pauses to consider his own writing again: "You say I am repeating / Something I have said before."

When he adds, "I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?" I wonder if he's doing some self-parody. There follow the most Eliotic lines of all, paradoxes that kind of make sense but don't do much for me, including, "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not," which seems to be the unremarkable observation that on a journey you're neither still at point A nor yet at point B. "And what you own is what you do not own" is true in the sense that ownership isn't forever. When we get to "where you are is where you are not," I think of a parody by Broadway writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green (11/2006), who imagined how the author of The Cocktail Party might write a Burlesque sketch, with lines like, "The pants that you are wearing are not the pants that you are wearing."

IV. We're on an operating table under "the steel" scalpel of a "wounded surgeon" probing "the distempered part," which rhymes neatly with the "healer's art" and the "fever chart." There's a nurse, too,

Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

Was all this foreshadowed by the "ether" in the previous section? "The whole earth is our hospital" the next stanza tells us as the rhymes continue to click into place, until a stanza about "dripping blood our only drink" and "bloody flesh our only food" brings to mind Christ's eucharistic prayer just as we reach a surprise rhyme for "blood": "we call this Friday good."

It's Good Friday? We're reading a poem for Holy Week? Are we thinking of Christ's crucifixion? Is there an Easter dawning ahead of us? And why does he call the surgeon "wounded" and the nurse "dying?" By Christ's wounds we are healed, says Scripture, but the analogy doesn't fit, especially when we include the nurse.

V. "So here I am," we read, a poet in middle age between two wars, still learning how to write. Eliot describes so well what agonizes a writer: "every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure." The things one knows how to say are things "one no longer has to say." Picking up on the war reference, the poet has some fun, telling us that every new piece is "a raid on the inarticulate" with "shabby equipment" in the "general mess" of "[u]ndisciplined squads of emotion." It's all been said before anyway, "by men whom one cannot hope / To emulate." I get this stanza more than any other in the poem.

But what happened to Good Friday? The prayer of waiting for hope, love, and faith?

The poet is drawing threads from the whole poem for a conclusion. The final stanza brings us back to the home remembered in Part I, the "pattern" and "burning" of Part II, and the meditation on age from Part III. "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living." With memory, not just of one's own life, but of generations, there's "a lifetime burning in every moment." "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." I like that. Do we have an object for this "love," here? A partner? Self? Humanity? God?

It feels like we're heading to a synthesis, and we are. "Old men ought to be explorers," he muses. "We must be still and still moving" --Ah, one of his trademark incidental paradoxes-- "[i]nto another intensity... a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation." Yes, we all go into the dark. But now it's in a good way.

I did roll my eyes at the so predictable last line. I guess it was inevitable for a poem that begins, "In my beginning is my end."

Checking my Answers From The Poetry Foundation I learn that Eliot's family traced its background to the village of East Coker, so the memories of "matrimonie" centuries before and references to names on stone are connecting him to that place in time. He wrote the poem in 1940. I also read that Eliot did have sonata-allegro form in mind when he composed his The Four Quartets, each poem opening with a meditation on the theme of time, with statement and counter-statement; each poem following a roughly similar arc through its movements as a sonata is supposed to do.

Lisa Ampelman in America: A Jesuit Review adds that the four quartets are suggested not only by four places of importance to Eliot, but also four seasons and four elements. I'm guessing "East Coker" is summer and fire.

The village of East Coker is also where Eliot's buried. In his beginning is his end, indeed.

Richard Blanco's "How to Love a Country": Good Question

How to Love a Country is a collection of poems by Richard Blanco, who rose to national prominence at President Obama's second inauguration when he read the poem he composed for the occasion, "One Today."

"How to love a country?" is also a fraught question.

Is "country" a geological space with geographical borders? In Blanco's "Complaint of El Rio Grande" (9), the river speaks to us as a personal, eternal entity, "meant for all things to meet..."

to make the clouds pause in the mirror
of my waters, to be home to fallen rain
that finds its way to me, to turn eons
of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles
and carry them as humble gifts back
to the sea which brings life to me.

Without wading into partisan politics, Blanco's river persona speaks from a humane place broader than national policy. Another poem "Using Country in a Sentence" (31) begins, "My chair is country to my desk," the desk is country to his chair, and he imagines "A mountain as country to the clouds that crown and hail its peak, then drift...." He describes a classroom map of the US and how he fell in love with "blue stare of the Great Lakes, and the endless shoulders/ of coastlines, the curvy hips of harbors, rivers/ like my palms' lines traced with wonder from / beginning to end" (68).

Is country a culture? Blanco writes a tribute to his Cuban father, "the exile who tried to master the language he chose to master him" (28). To the boy he punched in fifth grade, the poet admits "I ... envied you -- the americano sissy I wanted to be, with sheer skin, dainty freckles...that showy Happy Days lunchbox..." (29).

Is "country" a system of government? Blanco writes how the words Life, Liberty, Happiness for we, the people "buzz[ed] off the page" in school and "into my heart's ear" (68). His "Declaration of Inter-Dependence" riffs off of lines from famous American texts. Such has been our patient sufferance conjures the image of a mother waiting at the checkout line with her three children feeling both "joyful and bruised." After Jefferson's line we have petitioned for redress, Blanco tries to be empathetic to both sides in a violent encounter of a sort all too familiar:

We're a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We're the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We're the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn't shot. (2)

The title "Election Year" for a poem about a garden alerts us to allegory as "overnight, a vine you've never battled" shows up to take it over (6). Why use the screen of allegory to write about Trumpism? He writes of "something we can only / speak of by speaking to ourselves about flowers...tended under a constitution of stars / we must believe in..."

Can "country" include people with a background different from yours? Blanco finds commonality in aspirations. "Staring at Aspens" is subtitled "A History Lesson," as the poet mixes the long history of the Dine tribe through the Long Walk and the subterranean connection between all the aspens in a field, "all born from the same roots they share, [learn] how they thrive as many, yet live as one" (14). Taking on the persona of a daughter from China detained months at Angel Island in 1938, Blanco has her write to her father that she understands why fellow detainees write curses on the cell walls, "But those words never are mine -- /nothing can stop our sun, our moon ... nor what I have dreamed in you..." (16).

And what is to "love" a country? In "America the Beautiful Again"(66) he remembers his mother singing O beautiful, "her Cuban accent scaling up each vowel," and the boy Blanco feeling closer to America's spacious skies at an Independence Day parade when he's lifted up on his father's "sun-beat shoulders." Lamenting the combative shouting that he sees on TV, he exclaims, "How I want to sing again" in "harmony" with his divided country, "beautiful or not," from sea to shining sea.

But love of country is more than nostalgia. "[T]o know a country takes all we know of love," Blanco writes:

to keep our promise every morning of every
year, of every century, and wake up, stumble
downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down
at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed,
still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk.

"What I Know of Country" (68-70)

A big fan of Blanco's earlier collection of poems and his memoir, I was intrigued when I heard Blanco explain on Atlanta's NPR station WABE-FM how he struggled with commissions that came his way after the inauguration. How do you write authentic poetry when entities that commission you to write will expect you to express their visions? Then, invited to write on the theme of "borders," Blanco felt liberated, realizing that borders can be political, personal, and psychological. How to Love a Country is a "mosaic" of poems on that theme.

I admit that I was put off at first by dozens of pages that look like prose essays. But read them aloud, and you appreciate how Blanco the poet plays with language. In the excerpt I quoted from "Declaration of Inter-Dependence," opposites balance to suggest how the black teen has no viable choice, and alliteration propels us from blast and bullet to guilt and grief. Often his poems develop as lists or litanies, thoughts with the same initial word: "Until...." or "Let...."

As in "Declaration," Blanco creates several poems with lines of found text as a matrix. Blanco borrows familiar lines from prayers and scripture (Where there is hatred, let me sow love... A time to rend, and a time to sew... And if I should die before I wake...) for a pair of poems about the Michael Brown shooting and its aftermath in "St. Louis: Prayer Before Dawn" (55) and "At Dawn" (71).. "Poetry Assignment #4: What Do You Miss Most?" alternates passionate lines paraphrased from Blanco's stint teaching poetry writing to prisoners with the dispassionate commentary of the teacher (53-54).

I also cringed at the more blatantly political bits. When Blanco stereotypes upper-middle-class middle-America middle-brow people by their cocktails (1), free-trade coffee, and their green lawns (8), my cringing is mitigated by the fact that he includes himself with them. When he's congratulating himself for playing cultural ambassador to Cuba, his Cuban limo driver, dealing with the Castro regime's impact on his family, blows up at Blanco (23), Why don't you write a damn poem about this?

After living with the book for some months, I appreciate how Blanco finds something personal and universal to grasp even when he writes about subjects that divide Americans.

More of my blogposts about Richard Blanco
• Solace in Blanco Verse for Midlife, Midwinter Blues was what I wrote when some lines by Blanco helped me through a couple of dark hours of self-doubt.
• Review of Looking for the Gulf Motel: Not Grievance but Gratitude.
• "It Takes a Pueblo": Richard Blanco's Loving Memoir (review of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood)
• See a curated list of my posts about Poetry and Secular Psalms.

Paul's Not-So-Requited Love for the Corinthians

After re-reading 1 + 2 Corinthians, what strikes me most is Paul's anguished affection for the church he founded. In our textbook for the program Education for Ministry (EfM), author Mark Allan Powell traces the ups and downs of a relationship he calls "not-so-requited love" (314).

[Image: 2 Corinthians 11.32-33. Paul escapes Damascus in a basket. "If I must boast," he writes to critics who call him boastful, "let me boast of the things that show my weakness."]

Powell describes the city Corinth as a sort of counterpart to Athens. Wanting the prestige of Athenians' elevated culture, wealthy Corinthians spent lavishly on arts and entertainment.

Paul's efforts won Jew and gentile, rich and poor to the church at Corinth. But not long after he left for other missions, concern for status distorted relationships within the church and diluted the gospel message. In Powell's formulation, a faction of the Corinthians "identif[ies] only with the risen Christ, not with the crucified Christ" (297). Paul drives home his message that freedom from judgement under the Jewish law does not mean "anything goes": "all things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial" (1 Cor 6.12). The benefits he means are unity and the glory of God.

Paul keeps writing letters to his beloved church. Though we don't have these other letters, we do have a sense of what they said. Paul refers to one of these in 1 Corinthians, and to others in 2 Corinthians, along with allusions to a disastrous visit in the time between 1 and 2, when a member "did [Paul] wrong" (7.12) and Paul left in anger. Paul refers to his challenge to the church, sent by another letter, "to prove their obedience by disciplining" that member. He admits that he has put off another visit because the prospect of another rejection was too great for him. 2 Corinthians is the letter he writes after hearing from Titus that the Corinthians have done as he asked.

There's another tension between Paul and Corinth. Between letters, a group of traveling preachers seduces the Corinthians with letters of recommendation, superior erudition, some kind of different teaching (a "glory gospel," Powell calls it), and commanding physical presence -- all while mocking Paul for ineloquence, dubious authority, "weak" physique, and boastfulness. Paul answers them with ridicule of his own. My favorite part is where Paul plays "can you top this?" with a list of humiliations he has suffered for Christ. To be so weak and yet so successful, he must have God on his side (12.9-10, Powell 320).

Powell finds evidence of a happy ending. The Corinthians valued the letters enough to copy and preserve them. Then Paul writes in Romans of his success raising funds in Corinth.

Powell likens 2 Corinthians to a Hollywood sequel that doesn't hang together as well as the first. Powell lays out how scholars have accounted for the abrupt changes of topic and mood. The theory is that the missing letters are actually patched into the text of 2 Corinthians. One place is clear-cut, where an impassioned plea for reconciliation cuts suddenly to a section about mixing with pagans (6.14-7.1), then resumes (7.2). Powell gives details with caveats (313). For me, it's an elegant and pleasing way to read the letter.

Powell ends with a wry sequel. 40 years after 2 Corinthians, the Bishop of Rome writes scathingly of factions in the church at Corinth who defy church elders. Powell asks, "Where have we heard that before?"

"Simply Sondheim" Live Stream: I'll Drink to That

Another first for COVID-19: For once during a Sondheim revue, I didn't have to hold back from singing with the actors, because it was live-streamed from a laptop in my kitchen. As the orchestra segued from number to number, I, martini in hand, rode waves of music that I've known and loved for 50 years, and the strong emotions that go with them. Sondheim puts character into the music and the lyrics, giving actors ample opportunity to inhabit their roles and show off their singing chops.

Thankfully foregoing novelty interpretations, this production still held surprises even for this veteran Sondheim fan. I kept a list:

• Two songs about traveling bumpy roads of life pair well to make the opening number: "Merrily We Roll Along" and "Bounce"
• I was delighted to see some songs that I've only heard, "Saturday Night" and "Country House"
• The delight for me of "Now/Soon/Later" has always been in Sondheim's blending of three distinctive songs into one trio, but closeups helped the actors to bring out the erotic tension built into the song
• The actors doing the father and son made "Impossible" from Forum as sweet as funny, joining together on one of my favorite Sondheim couplets (there are so many!) "the situation's fraught, / fraughter than I thought"
• "Poems" builds to a joyous conclusion as two men bond through a friendly haiku competition
• A suite of songs from Passion encapsulated the story, every character's feelings so raw and yet so eloquently expressed
• In "Something Just Broke" from Assassins an assortment of Americans of different times and walks of life sings, "Something just spoke / Something I wish I hadn't heard" and I teared up thinking of the recent assaults on our institutions
• "Finishing the Hat" is a miraculous expression of what it feels like to be an artist wrapped up in your work; the actor made clear the subtle argument of the lyric and the strong feeling behind it, ending with a defiance I didn't expect: "Look, I made a hat -- where there never was a hat!"
• In "The Right Girl," a man sings about the wife he adores who doesn't love him, and about a mistress who, in this interpretation, appears on stage, though he never looks at her when he sings to her -- giving the actress motivation to sing, when he exits, "Goodbye For Now"
• Two songs about obsession overlapped musically for strong combined effect, "Not a Day Goes By" and "Losing My Mind"

Simply Sondheim is live-streaming from Signature Theatre and Marquee TV until March 26. Conceived in 2015 by Eric Shaeffer and David Loud, orchestrated for 16-piece orchestra by Sondheim's longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick, this refreshed version, filmed on stage, is directed by Matthew Gardiner.

The only thing missing is applause.

[See a curated list of numerous blogposts about Sondheim's musicals and about other Sondheim revues at my Sondheim Page]

For Frank Boggs at 94

In 1973, I was a freshman in the Westminster Chorale, directed by Frank Boggs, "Mr. Boggs" to us. We were learning Vivaldi's Gloria. I'd never heard Baroque music; I'd never sung Latin or even seen it; I had no idea what a church Mass is.

When we came to the second movement, Mr. Boggs translated the text et in terra pax hominibus, "and on earth, peace to all mankind." The music was somber and slow. Frank paused rehearsal to ask, "Now, why would Vivaldi choose to set such a joyous message in a minor key?"

I'd never thought to ask why any artist ever did anything. He listened to our theories and never gave a definitive answer. So the discussion continued among us, coming up again even after graduation.

In that one moment, I was learning lessons that have carried me through 45 years' singing in church choirs and 40 years of teaching middle school English and drama:

• how to deepen my faith through music
• how to appreciate the thought behind art, and --
• how to teach!

Happy birthday, Frank. The Lord bless you and keep you.

[This is the text of a message recorded for presentation to Frank on his 94th birthday February 3rd. The photograph is a portion of the photo collage I made for FB's retirement, showing photos of Frank ca. age 50 from my years in his Chorale, 1973-1977. In the lower left is a photo of Frank with wife Doris, taken in Moscow, June 1977.]

Other Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• Echoes of My Teacher's Voice(01/2019)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews of Frank's performances that I've written over the years.

Theology for Breakfast: Comfort Food in Forward DxD (Nov '20-Jan '21)

For the past several years before every sunrise I've read daily reflections published in Forward Day by Day for Bible readings allotted each day to Episcopalians by our Book of Common Prayer.

The issue concluding today covered a momentous three months. An election, presidential tantrums while dozens of courts slapped down baseless accusations of fraud, a make-or-break run-off for two Senate seats in my state of Georgia, a mob attack on the Capitol with intent to stop certification of the election and calls to execute the Vice President and Congressional leaders. In these two weeks, the pandemic's post-holiday surge forced our school to go remote. Add to all this that my brother-in-law died the day following the election, and you can see why I've needed some reassurance.

I found comfort and some amusement in the pages by Mariclair Partee Carlsen, rector of a church in Pennsylvania.

Carlsen likes food.

• Rev. 19.9 reminded her of Fr. Robert Farrar Capon's spiritual memoir - cum - cookbook The Supper of the Lamb. As the "alchemy" of cooking transforms ingredients into something "magical," writes Carlsen, "the rough parts" of our lives combine in "a whole that transcends its constituent parts, all through Christ's love and the heat of struggles and mistakes."
• From gardening, she knows that "first fruits" (James 1.18) are the prettiest of the season, but the smaller, lumpier fruits at the end of the season are just as nutritious and frequently sweeter -- and she's sure God loves those of us who may feel more like that latter than the former.
• Among all the Advent readings about dire end times, she pulls out another kitchen reference from Zechariah 14.21: When Messiah comes, even the ordinary cooking pots will be sacred as the vessels on the altar.

Carlsen responds to readings from Luke 16. When Jesus says "Whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much" (16.10), Carlsen says that, just as little lies can escalate in a dangerous way, a "small instance of love can snowball into a life lived with tenderness, compassion, and grace." Noting that all the dialogue in the parable of Lazarus occurs between the rich man and Abraham, she wonders what Lazarus would have to say. She asks us to consider who we are in that story.

About James, Carlsen guesses that he probably "wasn't much fun to know," but she thanks God for people like him, "speedbumps for the rest of us who lack their discipline...with one toe in the fountain of life."

The ominous promise to separate sheep from the goats (Mt. 25.32) prompts Carlsen to observe that all of us are goats some of the time, sheep some of the time. Drawing on several other parables of Jesus, she opines that Jesus searches for the sheep in us, "searching for us like lost coins, lighting lamps, sweeping out the farthest corners, refusing to count us as lost." She adds, "We are compelled to do this same searching" in strangers we meet.

I'm eager to get the latest issue, which seems to have been delayed in the mail.

[My articles about many previous issues of FDxD, along with my articles on many other aspects of the Episcopal experience can be found in a curated list at my page Those Crazy Episcopalians]

Acts of the Apostles: Joy and Encouragement

At the start of this sequel to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus ascends to the clouds, and a couple of “men in white” (angels, natch) tell the bewildered apostles to stop looking upwards – it’s up to them, now. From then on, a small band of Jesus’s followers grows by leaps and bounds. Lame beggars leap and bound for joy, as the power of the Holy Spirit fills the apostles. Magicians vie with apostles and lose. Authorities religious and imperial try to silence the apostles, to jail them, to banish them, but cell doors open of their own accord, earthquakes crack chains, and the Spirit gives the Christians just the right words to convince more and more to follow Jesus. Even death, the stoning of Stephen, the slaying of James, increases the resolve of the faithful.

Saul, arch-enemy of the Christians, converts on the road to Damascus and becomes preeminent evangelist and organizer.

Dissension and “sharp contention” arise, especially when Peter ministers to a Roman centurion and when Paul reaches out to gentile communities. In the last chapters, Paul outwits the authorities, pitting Pharisee against Sadducee, using his status as a Roman citizen to get out of one scrape after another. Each authority passes him up the ranks until he reaches his goal, Rome.

That’s how Acts reads when you take it in one sitting. (I actually stood under the kitchen light the whole time, and I did take a break mid-way for breakfast.) Like an epic movie about rebels facing an evil empire, it’s fun, it’s encouraging, it’s involving. It’s even funny in places. There’s the one about the seven naked exorcists, and Paul’s invitation to the Roman governor to join the faith, “I wish you were as I am--” adding a diplomatic hint, “except for the chains.”

In his book Introducing the New Testament, Mark Allan Powell raises questions that scholars and the faithful have raised about Acts from the beginning. Why in Acts does Paul not speak any of the doctrines he hammers in his letters – about the crucifixion and justification by faith? (Powell lists five major discrepancies, p. 213). Powell surveys different answers, but comes down on the common-sense observation that Paul in Acts is speaking to non-believers, while he writes in his letters to organized churches.

Powell gives us a long list of parallels between Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts (Powell 215). Both books begin with a preface to Theophilus, the descent of the Spirit, a sermon on prophecy fulfilled, and the healing of a lame man; parallels continue to the ends, where a Roman centurion endorses the hero (Jesus, Paul) and there’s a statement of Scriptures fulfilled. Besides the formal parallels, the two books share concerns for the poor and outcasts, an open mind towards pagans and opponents in the Jewish community (222). I noticed also attention to women in positions of influence that’s uncharacteristic of scripture outside of Luke and Acts.

Powell addresses the fact that anti-semites have drawn on Acts to justify their hatred. Powell considers the book to be an endorsement of Judaism. The ministry to the gentiles in Acts is a “continuation” of mission to Israel (219). Israel did not fail, and the church has not “superseded” Israel, Powell writes. Rather, as the Hebrew prophets foretold, Luke sees in the Jewish Christians the “remnant” of Israel (220).

Concluding his chapter on Acts Powell allows that modern Christians don’t experience their faith this way. He likens Acts to an agency’s PR brochure, neither making things up nor denying problems, but foregrounding his message:

Sometimes miracles do happen. Sometimes prayers are answered, heroes are rescued, pagans are kind, martyrs die bravely, and people of faith turn the world upside down (17.6). Remember those times.

Reading Acts this morning, I had a flashback to the only other time I read the book straight through. It was for a Bible class in high school. Back then, I was emerging from years of teenage agnosticism, and this book grabbed my imagination. Even today, I feel, if I weren’t already a faithful Episcopalian, I’d want to join this movement.

Trump Channels Charles I: Lessons of 1642

Capitol insurrectionists January 6 chanted "1776." But the rebels in that year were thinking of 1642. [See A Tale of Two Kings at the Journal of the American Revolution]

By 1642, King Charles I of England had ruled by himself 11 years, the very definition of an autocrat. Flaunting norms, he ruled by executive orders while he rejected mounting demands for him to call elections for Parliament. But when his pet projects and high life style exhausted the treasury, he had no choice: "No taxation without representation" was already an English tradition, and only the House of Commons could raise taxes. Charles reluctantly acceded to elections for a new Parliament. When his opponents won a majority, he ordered another round of elections. Voters named more opponents to this second Parliament than to the first. The House of Commons immediately took to voting on resolutions taking Charles to task for abuse of power.

The King marched on Parliament with soldiers at his side. Stunned by this breach of tradition, his subjects bowed to His Majesty, until Charles ordered his soldiers to arrest leading lawmakers. There were gasps and vocal protest. The leaders, warned in advance, had gone into hiding. Charles, aware that he'd made a royal blunder, said lamely, "I see that the birds have flown," and went home. Parliament, now more unified against him than before, continued their business with renewed vigor.

This past week, our President urged supporters to prevent the normal processes of our representative democracy. When he saw the resulting destruction and the revulsion that he had caused, he lost his head. On screen, he mixed messages:  "go home," "have peace," "these people are evil," and, in a lame conclusion, "We love you; you're very special." Congress went on to certify the election, much of the President's support having evaporated. Cabinet officials, corporate allies, and Republican legislators abandoned him over the next couple of days. A laughing seventh grader told me, "Twitter put Trump in 'time out.'"

[Images: Above, painting of Parliament, formerly kneeling, rising up against Charles I, by Charles West Cope from 1866. Then, the President's supporters crashed through gates and glass doors and entered the House of Representatives, shouting threats to Vice President Mike Pence and legislators. "The birds had flown."]

The ascent of Parliament in 1642 didn't have a happy ending. Civil war followed. The supreme victor was Oliver Cromwell, head of a Puritan faction in Parliament. He decapitated Charles, expelled his opponents from the House of Commons and, in mirror-image of Charles I's "personal rule," ruled with a rubber-stamp Parliament for 11 more years.

Still, in the long run, 1642 established the principle enshrined in our founding documents of 1776 and 1789: the "rule of law," meaning rulers must obey the rules. That includes those who make the rules and those who enforce them: none have absolute power over any other person, nor absolute impunity.  So, too, the voting majority may have their way, but they're limited by the laws that protect the minority's inalienable rights and their voice.

When the majority becomes the minority, they can be secure within the same framework, so long as we all play by the rules and accept the judgments of the referees. That's the lesson of 1642, followed by the other, darker lesson: when one side stops abiding by the rules, the other side can feel entitled to do the same.

Let's hold the line in 2021.

[I used to teach the English Civil War to 8th Graders from Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples. That was over 30 years ago, but his vivid writing lives in my memory. I may have appropriated some of his language in my account.]

Tail End of the 12 Days of Christmas

Tomorrow, the 12th day of Christmas, is a Teachers Work Day; classes begin Wednesday. Even this morning, I have to do some prep for the semester ahead. Familiar anxieties are welling up about things I should be doing and things I should have already done. So, let me savor this last morning prayer time before vacation ends by reflecting on how my church has supported me this season.

Hours before sunrise each of the past 11 days, I've re-read a lot of the prophet Isaiah and more scriptures about Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. The readings are prescribed in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for the "Morning Prayer II" liturgy during the 12 days of Christmas. Familiar as these readings are, they feel fresh and urgent as the story unfolds morning by morning.

At noon for each of these days, our clergy at St. James have live-streamed services alone at the altar, sometimes with a lone lay reader to assist, in compliance with COVID restrictions for the Diocese of Atlanta. We don't get communion, but their thoughtful sermons have highlighted a different theme for each day.

With a short Compline liturgy at sundown, these liturgies for morning, noon, and night have kept me grounded in the meaning of the season even absent all the services, choir practices, and social gatherings that comprise my Christmas memories for 60 years.

Since Advent,I've skipped the canticles appointed in the prayer book, substituting Advent and Christmas hymns. I sing by myself at my kitchen table -- kind of sad, kind of funny, but I'm thankful as I sing that the songs bring to memory sounds of choirs past, including voices of singers no longer with us. I saved three of my favorite carols for today: "In the Bleak Mid-Winter," "What Child is This?" and "Silent Night."

At the tail end of the morning service comes "The General Thanksgiving," meant for unison recitation by a roomful of believers. I've memorized it so that I can recite it to myself in tedious or anxious times -- often at red lights. When I speak the words "we give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving - kindness to us and to all whom you have made," I immediately think of one creature He has made, the one curled up these cold mornings in the dog bed in the kitchen, or else on a cushion in the den. As I go on with the prayer, I massage her from head to tail: "We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life...." She exhales with a sound that I would make during an exertion, but from her it seems to be an expression that she, too, is feeling thankful for her creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.

A bit further in the General Thanksgiving, we pray to keep "such an awareness of your mercies that we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives...." My hand's sense memory helps me to remember how I bless Brandy with a back rub every morning, and how she blesses me just by existing.

May this morning ritual, continued in the year ahead, keep me aware and thankful.

"Fulfilling the Scripture" Isn't "Proving a Prediction"

In today's gospel reading, Matthew tells us how Joseph fled to Egypt to save his little family from Herod's slaughter of the innocents, "in order that the scripture may be fulfilled." In today's sermon, Fr. Daron Vroon took the trouble to look up the scripture from Hosea, where the context is clearly not a forward-looking prediction but a backwards-looking statement about how God led His people out of Egypt in the time of Moses.

[Photo: Screenshot of Fr. Daron Vroon, Associate Rector of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA, from the live-streaming service January 3, 2021]

When we run across problems like this, Fr. Daron said, we tend to blame the writers for their naive ways or their careless use of sources. Fr. Daron reminded us that the author is not the only person involved here; we readers may be the ones who are reading the words incorrectly.

Fr. Daron went on to show that Hosea is depicting Israel as God's child -- cared for, led out of Egypt, educated with the law -- but, after all that, worshipping idols, disappointing the Father. Hosea tells Israel to get back on track.

Already, Fr. Daron's had made clear what was coming: The story that went awry in the time of Hosea is fulfilled in Jesus.

Fr. Daron quickly sketched out how other Hebrew Scriptures -- the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs, the erotic poetry of Song of Solomon -- are fulfilled by the person of Jesus.

The church fathers, whom Fr. Daron has been re-reading recently, saw every such problem in Scripture as an opportunity to think more deeply. Will do.

Bark! The Herald Angels Sing

On the Seventh Day of Christmas: In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, today's gospel reading was in chapter 2 of Luke, about the angels appearing to the shepherds. So it's still a good time to share this image, a photo of Brandy and me by Susan Rouse, superimposed on a watercolor by Susan.

[For a curated list of reflections on dogs in our lives and in our spiritual lives, along with links to many more photos of Brandy and my other beloved dogs before her, see my page Loving Dogs]

"The Particulars of Peter" by Kelly Conaboy

In the book The Particulars of Peter (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020), author Kelly Conaboy lists the times when she loves to watch Peter her dog: when he's eating, sitting still, choosing a toy, sleeping, and

While he's pounding his front paws on the ground and thrashing his body around upon my return home, seemingly unable to control his indomitable joy.... While he's sniffing a single leaf for a very long time. While he's paused, one paw up, catching a scent in the air like a tiny detective. (89)

That all these particulars of Peter also describe my Brandy -- and Mia before her, back and back through half a century of dogs (see my page Loving Dogs) -- may suggest to an unsympathetic person, you've seen one dog, you've seen 'em all.

There's truth to that. I've been re-reading Montaigne, who was fascinated 450 years ago by his sleeping dog's dreams of chasing rabbits just as Conaboy and I are today. So there's a true corollary: You've met one devoted dog caretaker, you've met us all. So is there some problem with that?

Like Conaboy, we spend money on merchandise and time on activities, all because we do not want to disappoint our dogs. She takes Peter to a dog festival "Woofstock" (32), dance lessons, obedience training, DNA testing, and ghost hunting. Peter generally doesn't seem too excited by these, but Conaboy enjoys interacting with him in these different situations.

Like Conaboy, we shell out monthly for pet insurance. It's worth it to know, when the vet tells her how many thousands of dollars Pete's surgery will cost, that she doesn't have to think about the unthinkable alternative. At least, not yet.

One chapter lays out answers to the inevitable question, "Will My Dog Go to Heaven?" Conaboy interviews theologians who disagree. She quotes the Catholic Catechism's teaching that animals bless us "by their mere existence" and so "they deserve kindness," even as we eat some and wear some (226). She concludes that there's "beauty" in being

...lucky enough to have an ephemeral piece of light as a part of your life, aware of its impermanence from the beginning and loving it wholly anyway. Knowing someone who is only good, and getting to be their caretaker. Letting this dog believe that you are the sun and moon, even though you are just human. Protecting them until you no longer can. (228)

So this document of Peter's particulars, being also a reflection of Brandy's, and Mia's, is a way for Conaboy and me and all of us to cherish and honor our dogs. Only Conaboy makes money on it. "What a scam!" she writes (intro, p. xiii).

Thanks to Suzanne for this book, a Christmas gift. She has known me and my dogs Beau, Luis, and Mia. We've taken long walks to get to know Brandy. She invited me for Christmas with her, tiny Tabby, and tinier Darcy.

Because I do look for any excuse to include photos of Brandy, I add Conaboy's list of Pete's poses that Brandy also performs:

1. Cinnamon roll: Curled, circular, ready to be picked up by a large spatula.
2. Superman: Arms stretched out before him, soaring through a dream.
3. Gossip sphinx: A modified "sphinx," which is when he sits like a sphinx, gossip sphinx finds his head lowered between his paws, perched and ready to hear who did what. (109)

My photos include Brandy in her cinnamon roll/gossip sphinx combo, and also a pose I call "Squirrel Patrol."

Left: Suzanne's little guy Darcy on a day that followed weeks of daily visits to feed him and Tabby, when he decided he could trust me. Now we're best buds.

Cycling America Virtually: Elko, Nevada

←← | ← || →

275 miles to Elko, Nevada From Pocatello, Idaho, I completed the 275 miles to reach Humboldt National Park near Elko, Nevada. (I actually ride around Atlanta, but I'm logging miles across America, with photos courtesy of Adobe.)

I connect to Elko, home of the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an event now called plain "Elko" by cowboy cognoscenti. I relate through radio commentator Baxter Black, "cowboy poet and former large animal veterinarian" who provided poems and commentary on NPR for many years. In tribute, here's my poem about an actual experience at the end of my bike ride:

Doggerel

When I had a-pedalled to virtual Elko,
I groaned as I hoisted myself from the saddle.
Unsnapping my helmet, unstrapping shoe Velcro
I came face-to-face with some actual cattle.

This suburban fam'ly had put up a stable.
A calf stared at me with eyes widened and soggy.
I said, "Little dogie, I'd chat, were I able,
but it's late. I'm awaited by my little doggie."

[Photo: Same cows at that fam'ly home, ready for their closeup]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.

Midnight Atlanta: Layers You Didn't Know Existed

Murder, cops, feds, an investigative reporter, stake-outs, fist fights (baseball bats included) and shoot-outs: Thomas Mullen gives us all those elements for Midnight Atlanta, latest novel in his Darktown series. But the emotional through-line is a love story, as cops black and white in Atlanta, 1956, learn to appreciate and trust each other.

The murder of Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta's black-owned newspaper, sets off an investigation that involves many of the high-profile tensions that roiled the country in the mid-1950s. The editor Bishop had traveled to Montgomery. Was he involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the bus boycott going on then? Bishop had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, as many black leaders had done. At a time of intense Red Scare, was he a blackmailer, or blackmailee? Atlanta's modernization meant destruction of black neighborhoods but also opportunities for the black middle class. Had Bishop fallen afoul of one side or the other in that conflict? Just two years after the notorious acquittal of Emmett Till's killers, has Bishop outraged white supremacists by uncovering love letters from a white woman to the black man she accuses of rape?

Mullen maintains a third-person narrative voice but follows several different characters who are following different threads of the investigation. These are appealing people whose personal development is at least as interesting as the crime story.

Readers of the series will know and love Tommy Smith, the reporter who discovers Bishop's murder. A veteran of World War II and one of Atlanta's first black cops, he hung up his uniform at the end of the previous story, and now he's wondering why. He thinks of his own father home from World War I lynched for wearing his uniform, "an event [Smith] had no memory of, yet it was the defining moment of his life," still "haunting" him (344). He's also having second thoughts about Patrice, a restauranteur who gives him grief when he seems to be seeking a second-night stand. He's getting serious about her at a time that her white clientele are boycotting her for openly supporting desegregation.

Smith's ex-partner Lucius Boggs, upright and uptight, seems to be softening his self-righteousness and hardening his ambitions. Tiny powerhouse Dewey Edwards makes a good new partner for him. When they team up for a potentially dangerous visit to a white private detective in the boonies, Dewey slaps Boggs's shoulder and says, "Oh boy. This gonna be fun" (210). It is!

But Smith's ex-boss Sergeant Joe McInnis has most to learn about his relationships -- to Smith, to the black men he commands, to his family. In the earlier books, we learn that his command of the new black police force was punishment for his uncovering corruption on the all-white police force some years before. Though unhappy with the job, McInnis has been tough but fair. In Midnight Atlanta, he's offered a new position, and, to his own surprise, he asks for time to think about it. The rest of the novel, he's studying his own relationships and beliefs.

We first see him with his teenaged son, trying to explain whether his command of the black force makes him a "n----r-lover." McGinnis responds, "I work with them. We solve problems together"(40). He adds, "They're just folks." In the course of the investigation, McInnis reads Atlanta's black newspaper and reflects

It was like reading dispatches from a different reality.... McInnis had been operating in this other realm for the past seven-plus years, yet to read their perspective on stories he'd heard differenty elsewhere -- or, in most cases, hadn't heard at all -- was a reminder how separate from them he remained. (146)

Meeting people on his beat by lunching at black-owned restaurants, he becomes aware of the "layers" that black people deal with "that he didn't even know existed" (219).

This case puts McInnis on the side of his men against other police and the FBI. When Smith is hospitalized, McInnis brings gruff sympathy and a proposal to work together. He asks Smith to trust him, and is genuinely offended to be doubted (287). Smith points out that McInnis risks retaliation from the department if not from the FBI: "Why bother?"

"For the same reason you're nearly getting yourself killed trying to find out the truth."

Smith wondered if that could be true. Hoped so. Wasn't sure.

[McInnis said], "First the Bureau jerked me around and then they beat up one of my former officers."

Smith doesn't say, "I didn't know you cared," but that's the feeling.

Mullen doesn't make it easy to oppose racism in Atlanta 1956. McInnis's son gets beaten up. A character, Cassie Rakestraw, who has been sympathetic in previous novels, now leads opposition to racial desegregation. McInnis and his wife are ostracized by the PTA. When you fear for the safety of your children, when the value of your dream home plummets if a single black family moves nearby -- can you afford to do what you know is right?

Some other crime novel series have nearly choked on personal miseries and flaws that the authors pile on with the goal of character development. Henning Mankell's Wallander, Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, Ann Cleeves's Perez all became morose, angry, unbearable to read about; sometimes I skipped over Sue Grafton's chapters about Kinsey Millhone's personal life. At least so far, Mullen's characters are developing in ways that make them more appealing and more tightly bonded -- to each other, and to us.

More about Thomas Mullen's Darktown series.

• The first novel in the series had special resonance in the weeks after George Floyd's murder: "It seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction...good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). See "Darktown: Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948" (06/2020)
• "Lightning Men: Dark but not Bleak" (07/2020). The book's title refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: Comedy Turns Tragic

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, movie (2020) and play (1984), is a comedy that flirts with tragedy. Tragedy hits back hard. [Photo: Detroit News]

The story is set in a Chicago recording studio one hot afternoon in 1927. Ma Rainey is (and actually was) a Blues diva, with a retinue of musicians, a servile nephew, and a sulky mistress Dussie Mae. The comedy of it starts with the way the title telegraphs Ma Rainey's basic attitude, Kiss my a--.

Two white men who kiss it throughout the film bend to her ever-more-whimsical whims, all the while telling each other "I know how to handle her." So Ma arrives late? Ok. She rejects their play list? Ok. She wants a Coke? Here you go. The men gape from the recording booth while Viola Davis as "Ma" downs that Coke with gulps of ferocious satisfaction. Her nephew gets to record the intro to her song? He stutters? No problem. While they kowtow, her game is, How Low Can You Go?

Comedy thrives on pairings, and there's a second diva in the group, the new trumpeter Levee, played by Chadwick Bozeman. Before Ma Rainey arrives, the dialogue is all trash-talking among the musicians, Levee calling the others a "jug band." The insults fly with laughter, there's singing, there's some playing, and Levee even dances on his brand-new pointy-toed yellow shoes. It's good-natured fun. When we see Levee flirting with Ma Ranee's girlfriend, we can see, complications will ensue.

So far, so comical.

But Ma Rainey's identity comes from her past. She's "mother" or "queen" of the Blues, though she doesn't take credit. "I don’t sing the blues to feel good. The blues is a way of understanding life," she tells her sideman Cutler. Her imperious manner protects her from the indignities inflicted on a black woman. She tells Cutler that, once they've got her voice on record, the white men will just roll over in bed, zip up their pants, and leave her behind.

Viola Davis, ensconced in padding, layers of make-up, and gold teeth, shows us that Ma keeps her guard up all times. We sense bitterness, loneliness, weariness. Only a couple of times -- cuddling her girlfriend and finishing her song -- does Davis let Ma express joy.

Meanwhile Levee's identity is wrapped up in his future. He's a band-leader-to-be, a star soloist-to-be, a composer who writes lying down while his jokes with the band hit home harder than the players are used to.

Bozeman has a winning smile, but in his eyes we see relentless energy with an edge. He feels like he's stepping into his future now, and he's not letting anyone stand in his way. Those yellow pointy shoes make a good symbol for Levee's ambitions.

During breaks in the recording session, Wilson gives his lead characters stories so well-told that they move the action forward, though we only imagine the scenes. These aren't funny, but painful, eerie, horrific. Levee is the last to tell his story, and Bozeman invests it with such passion that we understand what drives Levee and what makes him dangerous when his identity is threatened.

We've been set up from the start for a face-off of the divas. The tragedy is that the showdown is refereed by the white men in the room who can bank more on Ma's past than on Levee's future.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom comes early in August Wilson's career-long project to dramatize black life in 20th century America, one decade at a time. To give the story its historical context, the film begins with images of Ma Rainey singing for a crowd of black men and women in a tent set up in Georgia woods, then images of the Great Migration north, and more images of Ma Rainey the star on stage in the city.

Denzel Washington, a producer of this film and star of the movie Fences made from another Wilson play, has announced his intention to bring all ten plays to the screen.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Chadwick Bozeman's final work, is dedicated to him.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

• Director: George C. Wolfe
• Writers: Ruben Santiago-Hudson (screenplay by), August Wilson (based on the play written by)
• Viola Davis ... Ma Rainey
• Chadwick Boseman ... Levee, trumpet
• Colman Domingo ... Cutler, trombone
• Glynn Turman ... Toledo, the pianist
• Michael Potts ... Slow Drag, the bass player
• Jeremy Shamos ... Irvin, the agent
• Jonny Coyne ... Sturdyvant, studio owner
• Taylour Paige ... Dussie Mae, girl friend
• Dusan Brown ... Sylvester

The Sabbath: More than a Day Off

At the start of a slender book The Sabbath (1951), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel avers that civilization advances by conquest of spaces. Judaism offers something else, a civilization rooted in time. (The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.)

We commonly say "time is fleeting" but Heschel points out that only things don't last. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem's temple, Jews re-conceived a temple in time, "an insight that made history" (53). Judaism remains; the empire of Romans, supreme conquerors of spaces, passed long ago. Judaism already differed from their neighbors' worship of gods identified with sacred objects, sacred animals, and sacred sites. The burning bush that manifests God to Moses is an image for time: "Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed" (100).

Heschel's book is on the reading list of Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension of the Episcopal School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee TN. Our group had just considered the way that Mary's song Magnificat conceives of past and future being already present, as if time were a building or container, not a road. One of our students with close knowledge of Spanish told us that Spanish expressions for time speak of volume, not passage. So I was primed to read the first chapter of this book, "A Palace in Time."

But I got pretty confused pretty quickly. Noting that EfM calls The Sabbath a "prose poem," my EfM co-mentor Susan says that I shouldn't try to find a sustained argument in the book.

Good idea. I came to the book expecting the rabbi to enumerate good things that stem from obedience to the third commandment. I would say a day of rest, with a worship service, is a ritual that solidifies a religious community; is a nice retreat from the pressures of civilization; is good for your mental health; is for (everybody say it together) "recharging your batteries" before the work week. His daughter Susannah Heschel shoots down all of those ideas in her preface, adding that, for her father, "the Sabbath was a complement to building civilization, not a withdrawal from it" (xiii).

Heschel's real mission is to open us up to loving the Sabbath, an "intuition of eternity" (ch. VIII) that crowns the work week. "Work with things in space," he writes, "but be in love with eternity" (48). The book is a grab bag of ways to help us to see the Sabbath.

He cites ancient Rabbis who called the Sabbath both a bride to be loved and a queen to be obeyed (62), and he takes some time to write why we should take the metaphor seriously, but not literally -- which would be idolatry (59). To think of the day as a bride is "not personification of the Sabbath but an exemplification of a divine attribute...God's need for human love" (60).

To me that seems a stretch, but I'm not sure if Heschel's colloquy with rabbis of other centuries is not a sort of scholarly banter, a game. How seriously are we to take a rabbi's statement that telling a falsehood on the Sabbath is impossible, not because lying is forbidden, but because of the nature of the day itself (20)? Heschel relates some weird allegorical stories --such as one about a rabbi who spends 24 years in a cave buried naked in sand up to his head -- and then derives lessons from the stories. As he piles on the lessons, I feel like he's sculpting with smoke.

He mines more solid material when he and the rabbis pick at lines in Scripture. We read that God on the seventh day both "rested" and "finished creation." How could He be said to do both? Heschel and his rabbi friends of ages past offer the ingenious solution that God finished creation by creating the day of rest. That makes the Sabbath, not an absence of work, but a positive presence, the crown of all creation (22). When Exodus 19.1 tells us "on this day" the Hebrews came to Sinai, why doesn't it read "on that day?" Heschel concludes that this day is that day, an everlasting eternal event (98). I'd call it a typo, but I'm glad to see it Heschel's way.

Chapter VII is more poetry than prose, an insider's view of Sabbath liturgy, an appreciation of how chanting from the Psalms and Song of Solomon can affect us.

Just as I was reading Heschel's book, the latest issue of The Atlantic (Jan-Feb 2021) arrived with an article about "the Sunday scaries," an affliction that staff writer Derek Thompson describes as a "flood of anxiety" that we feel "as the weekend winds down." We feel worry about not being prepared for the work week ahead, and guilt for being unproductive. Thompson reviews an anthropologist's recent book about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who seem nonchalant about the future and indifferent to getting ahead of each other. Thompson concludes that anxiety on Sunday is a price we pay for civilization, at least until we can tamp down our need to compete with each other.

Thompson could look closer to home for a solution. His article never mentions church or sabbath.

Heschel's prescription for the Sunday scaries is also his prescription to make Americans truly free and independent. "There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things" (89). He advises, "All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day," not as a day off, but as the day that gives the other six days their meaning.

Let Us Now Praise Bats

Bats possess super-powers. Alone of all mammals, they fly on their own; they emit high-pitched sounds through specially-convoluted nostrils and from the echoes locate with deadly precision erratically-moving targets such as moths; to viruses, they possess immunity that scientists are now trying to understand. And they sleep upside down!

[Information and the photo of the handsome upside-down bat come from "The Virus, the Bats, and Us" by David Quammen in The New York Times, December 11, 2020.]

Bats live as long as 30 years.

Bats spread pollin and seeds necessary to the life-cycle of vegetation from which we derive nourishment, including many fruit trees.   They eat hordes of crop-destroying insects.

A bat of some sort makes one of every five species of mammal on earth.

Bats are accessories to the spooky stories that both frighten and delight children. See in my photo collage two of the batmen I adored in primary school, Adam West as "Batman" and Al Lewis as "Grampa Munster." Another batman, Dracula, is pictured in my appreciation of bat-mospheric art that I posted on Halloween 2017:

This time of year, when our first cold days hammer shut the coffin of summer, before we experience sunlight sparkling on the frost of winter, it's natural to sense what the ancient Celts called a "thinning" between our world and the world of our fears, embodied by those scary monsters.

Bring on the bats, the howling wind, the branches scraping the window, and the ghosts of decades past. (10/2017)

Bats need our help. North America's bats are being wiped out by "white nose disease" caused by a fungus imported from Europe by some tourist spelunker. Immune to rabies and other viruses, bats don't spread them; our species has to invade theirs to catch anything from them. Yet some media figures blame Chinese bats for COVID-19, some misguided communities in the world go on periodic genocidal rampages, and my own neighborhood chat board re-circulates falsities about the little creatures.

The Bible mentions bats only one time. Bats are listed with birds in a list that includes eagles, gulls, and pelicans, all branded with the word "abomination" (Leviticus 11.19). But "abomination" here specifically means "not to be eaten." So I like to think of this as a stricture for the mutual good of Israelites and bats, two of God's chosen species.

Let us cherish -- at a respectful distance -- bats.