The Winter Commuter Blues

(Begins with a musical prelude to the tune of every 12-bar blues song you've ever heard)

I woke up this morning (da-da-da-da)

Had to get out of bed (da-da-da-da)

It was all dark and cold (da-da-da-da)

Thought I'd stay asleep instead (da-da-da-da)

[Something about going to work

General complaint about life being gloomy]

Singin' yeeeeah...

Babe, you know

I've got the winter commuter blues

Yes, that's right folks, life for me at the moment is a bit like a blues song - a blues song, that is, written by an English teacher who lives 45 minutes (in good traffic) away from work and who, therefore, leaves for work in the dark and comes home in the dark. Add to that a goodly (or not-so-goodly) measure of marking, at all sections of the day except for the bits where I'm driving, and you get the idea. So not all that much like a blues song, when I think about it, but I'm maintaining with the comparison because I think it's funny.

Today being Saturday I was able to get up during daylight, and found myself feeling a little like a liberated convict when I went outside and walked around Brunswick to meet friends for lunch, and later on to go for a walk - just a walk - by Merri Creek. It was amazing how much my mind and soul seemed to be revitalised by such a simple act but one which my life of late has not allowed.

My father used to have a saying which he drilled into me from an early age: you change the things you can change, and put up with the things you can't. It's a tad blunt but true enough, I suppose. So in situations like the one in which I currently find myself, I have to ask: what things can I change, and what things must I simply put up with? I can't move closer to work, not just yet - those sorts of things can't be done overnight. I can't change the times of day that the sun is currently inclined to rise or set. I can't do much to reduce my workload. I'm sure, however, that in amongst all the necessity and stress, there's space for change. But I need some sort of distance from the situation to see these things.

This, I believe, is where prayer becomes paramount. Prayer forces us outside of our situation and forces us into God's way of looking at things - very hard when the situation seems all-consuming, but so necessary. Prayer also turns "putting up" with a tough, unchangeable situation into something that might be better called "endurance". Putting up with a situation is done with gritted teeth. Endurance is done with the patient resolve that only the Holy Spirit can fully provide.

So next time I write a (bad) song about my life, I hope it's more like a gospel song, with space for melancholy but also with a heart-lifting chorus about hope and rising beyond my afflictions. But it won't be me writing the song (which may be an improvement in itself). It'll be the power of prayer and the Holy Spirit. It isn't a song I can write myself.

The consolations of sickness

John Donne wrote some of his most beautiful and profound work while in bed sick. The quote from him that everyone knows - the bit about the bell and for whom it tolls - comes from when he thought he had the Bubonic Plague. The depths of despair that serious illness could take someone in Donne's day were enough to give him some of the greatest epiphanies Western literature has about sickness and where it places man in relation to man, and man in relation to God.

My week-long virus is nothing like Donne's. I don't fear for my life, though I do fear the ever-increasing build-up of work I must do. I do fear parent-teacher interviews tomorrow night when I currently have no voice. But no, I don't fear my own death. And why not, I wonder? Is it because my own death simply does not seem to be looming like it was for Donne? He certainly wasn't on the brink of death then, but a man living in such times knew that death was something you cheated everyday, or it cheated you. In the 21st century we treat death with a kind of brazen naivety: an inexplicable mixture of indifference, taunting and the generally idiotic feeling that surely it well never actually happen to us.

Of course, there's a stage in any moderately serious sickness (by which I mean more than a head cold) where we encounter some of what it means to be desperately ill. We feel, in microcosm, what the truly ill feel on a full scale: we have, for instance, days of being unable to get out of bed, where others have weeks, or months, or years. None of this really compares, but it does give you the chance to reflect on sickness and on what it means to be healthy or alive. This, for me, has come at a time when I have decided I need to think more about heaven - about the hope that God holds out for all who believe in Him. It's an idea widely poo-pooed in our death-taunting/death-despising culture, but in John Donne's day, when death was a reality people continually faced, it was something you needed a response to. Today it seems weakness to hope in a life beyond this one. In previous times in history it seemed wise and realistic, for this life didn't offer terribly many hopes in itself.

So, being sick and therefore not experiencing all the joys of being alive, I have found myself reflecting on things like these:

- Thirst: The extraordinary feeling of filling a parched mouth with water; the inexpressible beauty of water's taste in a thirsty mouth, even though it has no taste at all; the thought that, in heaven, we will never be thirsty, and never fail to be satisfied by the continual quenching of our spirits.

- Just Being: The realisation that I have nothing in my hand to bring to God that will wow or amaze Him, but that what He asks of me is to be: to live in His presence, and to know that He is God; that some days, when I have nothing to offer, I should rejoice, because it means I can so much better receive from Him who has everything I need.

- Community: The importance of speech, of sharing words - questions, answers, thoughts on the week. Deprived of that, because I am deprived of voice, I feel something very much missing. This is not a "consolation" in itself, but it leads me to think of the joys that I will return to when human contact will be something I can enjoy again.

- Affliction and shame, and its removal: The feeling that you should not stand too close to people to avoid making them sick too; the isolation that this brings; the knowledge that Jesus stepped into our sickness and didn't care what it did to Him; the knowledge that He touched lepers, washed blind men's eyes clean with His own saliva, bent down and washed His servants' feet. This one will not be ashamed to sit right next to me.

For these lessons, Lord, I thank You that I can be sick.

One for many

Honestly, we don't need more comments on Osama Bin Ladin's death. I have so little to say that would benefit anyone. I would quite happily not comment at all. But it does strike me - that in the quotes that are being tossed around about this event, I'm hearing a number of comments that either sound like, or refute, something along these lines:

"You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."

Do you know where that's from? It's not from a US foreign policy speech. Nor is it from some weighty tome on terror and counter-terror strategies. It isn't from the political right. It isn't even from the political left.

It's from the Bible - and it didn't refer to Osama Bin Ladin, or to anyone like him. It referred to Jesus Christ, the one man who died so that many could be saved.

In all the chatter and fuss over Bin Ladin's death, I hope that we can take a moment to think about another death - one far more significant, one with ethical implications that are utterly wonderful for all people, for all cultures, in all situations. It needs no political theorists to critique it. It needs no article by Noam Chomsky, or a counter-article by a retired president of the USA. It cannot be deconstructed and cannot be avoided. It is real, and it is life-changing and it demands more than a comment or a blogpost. It demands our life, our all.

Do you mean that literally?

One of the best insults a contemporary atheist or secularist can level against a Christian is to say that they "take the Bible literally". This seems roughly equivalent to other insults such as "thick as a plank" or "the same IQ as a bit of plankton". This attitude, I suppose, stems from the perception that there are details in the Bible which are so patently ridiculous that no intelligent person could possibly consider them to be true.

Now, this is an interesting idea, because it raises so many wonderful questions. Here's just a few of the key ones:

1) If it's stupid to take the Bible literally, does that make it smart to take it figuratively?

2) What does it mean to take the Bible literally?

3) What does it mean to take the Bible figuratively?

4) What is the purpose of the Bible?

5) What makes anything "patently ridiculous"? Common sense? If so, what makes "common sense" common?

I might just leave a few of those questions to sit and settle with you for a while, not because I'm not interested in answering them but because they get asked so rarely that I feel like the moment should be savoured somewhat. What I am most interested in looking at, however, is the second question:

What does it mean to take the Bible literally?

Now, on the surface this seems simple. Taking it literally means believing it word for word. The fact that Biblical literalists are so widely criticised suggests that this word-for-word reading is the problem. Of course, not taking it literally should not necessarily mean dismissing it wholesale, and this is a point worth considering. Certainly, taking something figuratively rather than literally is often necessary. Every student I've ever taught knows that, when a person says they have butterflies in their stomach, they don't mean it literally. Yet taking this saying figuratively is not an instantly straightforward process. Certainly, the words in that context did not mean exactly what they seem to mean. If I say that I have butterflies in my stomach, I do not mean that actual butterflies are actually in my actual stomach. So what do I mean? For many people, liberating the Bible from literal meaning seems to open up the possibility that it means, well, whatever we want it to mean - by which logic saying, "I have butterflies in my stomach" could as easily mean "I am nervous" as it does "I've got indigestion" or, to put in one from left-field, "I have a giant alien sitting on my front lawn at the moment."

Now common sense says that the third option is ridiculous, the second unlikely, and the first most logical. But this assumes that we are operating under a tightly structured system of linguistic cues and symbols, whereby "butterflies in the stomach" clearly refers to that fluttery feeling of mild nerves or anxiety, and should not be taken to mean anything else. That seems rather rigid, doesn't it? Couldn't the saying mean...well...something else to other people? No, of course it doesn't. We all know what the phrase means, and anyone who takes it to mean something else needs to learn the correct meaning to avoid further awkward confusion. All of which goes to say, I suppose, simply that a symbol, while not to be taken literally, may still have quite a clear, set meaning - one which is possibly true, in a rigid, objective sense, even if someone may hear the saying not knowing what a butterfly is or how it feels to have some inside one's stomach.

Generally, when people talk of "taking the Bible literally", it is with an understanding of "literal reading" as a sort of subtle-as-a-sledgehammer, zero-nuance reading that would, if taken to its logical extent, make a reader of "Song of Songs" wonder why the lover would feel so strongly for a girl whose breasts are gazelles and ancient architectural structures simultaneously.

Do I take the Bible literally? Yes. Does that mean I believe that the book of Leviticus provides the only necessary guidelines for how doctors should treat leprosy? No. Does this make me inconsistent in my faith? Not at all. Taking the Bible literally should not mean reading it without thought, application or interpretation. It means, for a start, being able to distinguish poetry from history, prophecy from theology, a narrative from a letter, a song from an instruction.

An interesting recent approach to reading the Bible literally came from A.J. Jacobs' "The Year of Living Biblically", a slightly satirical look at applying the Bible wholesale into one's life. I was naturally inclined to dislike the book, but this review from Bible scholar Ben Witherington has made me more open. Nevertheless, Witherington still makes the point that behind the

surveys and studies that Jacobs does in this book is the sort of flat hermeneutic applied to the Biblical text, assuming that it all applies to all God's people at all times, rather than a more covenantal approach which says that there are different regulations for differing times in the history of God's people as the covenant and its rules are changed by God.

In other words, actually applying the Bible does not mean reading every word exactly as it appears and pulling it directly out of the text without thought about what it really means. That kind of practice is not only bad Bible reading. It's bad reading. If that's what it means to take the Bible literally, then I can see why such a practice would be ridiculed.

Only, it isn't. Very few people actually read the Bible like that. At the very least, they know that "gazelles" means something other than the literal animal, and that two metaphors can be used for the one thing without contradiction. Taking the Bible literally works if we understand that literal reading is not unsubtle, ignorant reading, but a practice of reading which seeks to understand what the text meant to its original readers, in its original context, and how this applies to us today. It isn't a free-for-all process of "make of this text whatever you want". Nor is it a rigid, unthinking quest which reads a book of symbolic love poems as a textbook on biological deformity and sexual curiosity.

So, to bring this to some sort of conclusion: let's all agree to be readers of thought and subtlety, who can tell a symbol from a "fact" without losing too many hairs, and who can take as much meaning and truth from a poem as we can from a textbook. We might start to see that the Bible, contrary to popular opinion, is worth reading, worth applying, possibly even - yes, possibly even worth believing.