Where the remainder pile in that bookshop is concerned, i have no free will. Books often come in pairs, but today I couldn’t leave without a set of three; God’s Last Words, The Book of J, and The Devil in the Shape of a Woman.
Why am i reading about how the Bible has been read? In part this goes back to my fascination with the combination of Taoism with misogyny+anti-technology elisions in Ecclesiastes. I knew i was groundless in understanding, missing connection to a world of biblical hermeneutics, without which i’d be underequipped to think this through. I took a look at the tradition and shied right away; no ten years in a theological seminary for me, looking for questions that i’m half-sure I won’t find, finding too much that I cannot accept. S’s mother, perhaps keen to reclaim her seed’s seed for Judaism, offered God Is A Verb and a syncretic approach not unlike S’s own pick-and-mix mysticism. I enjoyed it, didn’t fire with it, and dropped the thread for some time.
Recently T drove a spike through my mind, pile-driven with puritan sermons supporting a Word-literalist worldview unlike anything i have known a peer to express; a complete and perfectly-circular honesty of intent; a meta-framework for understanding what has been meant.
The King James is a great program; it makes my thoughts ring in syncopated metre. It jars me all the time with statements like “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (I was told that i was a witch once, by a person who otherwise called me very accurately from almost no context. This was meant in the “we are all witches” / “we are all christ” sense, but i found some “truth” (or at least “truthiness”) in the statement. (Not in the wiccan sense; i still think that’s mostly disingenuous schlock and self-involved creative anachronism.) Thus the third book I picked up; while i’m in the geopsychic hotspot of puritanism and its discontents, i might as well learn in-place about what happened here hundreds of years ago.) I’m more or less scared to get to the post-gnostic bits near the end, Paul of Tarsus‘ flashes of casual violence and offhand misogyny; how can one read past this, if one cannot draw a line in the text?
Yet if all of us have been for some time cursed; to be subordinating and subordinated; to be conflicted with desire; in communication only to be displaced; then i always want to know why, with the insistence of a six-year-old child; to help figure out how the curse is lifted. I don’t expect to find out myself, but am glad to have an extra reason to try, wanting to understand my friend.
