Holy Haunted Book

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Religion is one of those words that defies easy definition. As I’ve suggested before, you know it when you see it, but trying to pin the idea down is a different matter. Consequently, religion is closely related to a number of other areas of interest: philosophy, ethics, monsters, and the paranormal, to name a few. I was interested, therefore to see a blog post recently concerning a “haunted Bible.” Call me naive, but the thought had never occurred to me before: could a holy book be haunted? Churches are notorious for housing ghosts, of course. As someone who’s spent overnight retreats in churches I can vouch for the fact that a sanctuary after dark is a naturally eerie place. I’ve never seen a ghost in a church, however, and I’m not entirely convinced they exist, and if they do, what they might be. In any case, a haunted Bible is a different story.

David Weatherly is a fairly well-known paranormal writer. My web search brought up his blog where he explains that the haunted Bible was for sale on eBay with an asking price of $180,000. The owner, who remains anonymous, claimed to take no responsibility for any damage the supernatural scripture might cause. Instead of thinking that we have here a genuine haunted leather scripture, I know it can be nothing other than a genuine hoax (not on Weatherly’s part). Realtors know well that a haunting can, in today’s climate, counterintuitively drive the price of a house up. With people hungry for some element of the supernatural in their lives, and ghost hunters of all sorts on their televisions, they are willing to shell out a few more dollars to have a spirit around. And since ghosts can’t sign contracts, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there once you move in. The supernatural can, it turns out, be the perfect scam.

If items can be haunted, I suppose a Bible might as well. When an owner, however, turns down an offer of 50,000 pounds that odor you’re smelling is that of a rat. I love old books. I have a few around that have more than a century’s weight on them. Looking at used bookstores longingly, I see first editions of Poe or Shakespeare that sell for far less than the asking price of the most printed book in the western world. Bibles, if you know where to look, can be had for free. I’ve got at least a dozen of them myself. Nothing makes fakery quite so clear as greed. No wonder the haunted Bible was such a disconnect. There’s nothing paranormal about love of money. That’s all too normal for anyone who tries to sell a Bible for implied spirituality.

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Bible Search

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The Bible is, in many ways, not suited to internet study.  Let me explain: this artificial world of the internet is based on searchability.  To search for something, you need to have a distinctive word, a keyword, or catchphrase.  As perhaps the most successful book of all time, the Bible has undermined its own uniqueness.  How many books are titled The Gun Bible or the Dog Bible or substitute your favorite noun Bible?  Web searches for “the Bible” bring up a large number of relevant hits, but then quickly devolve into other Bibles.  Too many Bibles. Not only has the noun “Bible” been appropriated, so have many aspects of its story.  Particularly the Good Book’s penchant for using short, common words for titles of individual books.

Search for Mark, or John, for example.  Don’t bother adding the word “Gospel” since it too has become widely utilized to give any popular subject an air of authenticity.  Not only did the four evangelists write such books—the Gospel according to Biff, Trump, the Simpsons, or Bruce Springsteen will likely pop up ahead of the original fab four.  Or consider the books whose names became common nouns: genesis, exodus, numbers, judges, kings.  Then there are the ambiguous titles: Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Acts.  Sure, you can lengthen them out a bit: Acts of the Apostles, Song of Solomon, the Proverbs of Solomon, but the results you get tend to skew evangelical that way.  Job is just a non-starter. Do you mean employment or enlightenment? Do I need to get a job or to get Job? At least it’s not a popular name for kids.

The other area where the Bible’s success works against it in the computer age is its success at giving names to people.  In a culture so biblically based, the Bible has been treated as a name-list for newborns for centuries.  Even though the Anabaptist penchant for using prophetic names has faded from popular culture, there are plenty of Isaiahs, Jeremiahs, and  Ezekiels out there.  Even some minor prophets, too.  Amos, Micah, Zechariah.  (Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Haggai haven’t particularly caught on.)  Daniel, David, Joseph, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.  We live in a world of biblical nomenclature.  There’s even more than one Jesus running around.  (Jesus, is, of course, Greek for Joshua, so there may be even more than one might suspect.)  I spend a good bit of the day searching various biblical material online.  I wonder if anyone ever imagined, over two millennia ago, that a three-letter name was bound to cause problems in a world of billions? Were it submitted for publication today, the editor would’ve sent the Bible back to the author for a rewrite, along with a list of suitable keywords.

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Religious Laughter

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Reader’s Digest famously runs a feature, “Laughter: the Best Medicine.” I’m not a Reader’s Digest reader, and I’ve generally only seen it on coffee tables and bathroom cabinets of friends. Still, that’s the feature to which I always find myself turning. The jokes, this being Reader’s Digest, are always inoffensive. Safe subjects that are nevertheless funny. Usually. As adults we come to know that the taboo subjects of childhood are often the funniest. Off-color jokes about sex or religion, sometimes both together, elicit the most boisterous laughs. We don’t use them, however, because someone will surely be offended.

A recent article in The Guardian by Gary Sinyor raises the question of religious humor. Sinyor, who is Jewish, wrote a comedy play called “NotMoses.” As he farmed the idea and advertising around to advisors and friends, he was warned how he might be putting his life on the line for his humor. Reflecting on this, he comes to the conclusion—spot on, in my opinion—that the religions that don’t laugh at themselves are somehow insecure. His parade example is Scientology, as humorless a religion as exists. As he points out, although widely banned, many Christians found Monty Python’s Life of Brian very funny indeed. Of course, some branches of Christianity weren’t, and still aren’t, laughing.

Photo credit: Richard from Canton, Wikipedia Commons

Photo credit: Richard from Canton, Wikipedia Commons

The world can be a humorless place. There is so much to worry about: the ill treatment of women, starvation, horrific diseases, Donald Trump. What right have we to laugh? I once had a close friend with cancer. Most would agree that this is no laughing matter. During treatment this friend lost all her hair and at one point another friend encouraged her to laugh about it if she could. “If there’s nothing you can do about it, you might as well laugh,” was the advice. In poor taste? Perhaps. Nevertheless, there was some truth to it. My friend recovered. The disease is not something she cares to talk about. Nevertheless, humor helped her get through it. The most serious things, in other words, sometimes cause us to laugh. Religious comedy, after all, is not laughing at religion, but at how seriously we take religion. There is a difference. And laughter can, even if I got it from Reader’s Digest, be very good medicine indeed.

Footprints in the Snow

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A friend keenly aware of my interest in the unusual sent me a story about the “Devil’s Footprints” that sometimes occur in snow. The article focuses on an instance in England in 1855 but which was reprised in 2009. The prints, made by a bipedal, cloven-hoofed animal, surmount tall barriers and occur on rooftops as well as on the ground. Such a phenomena is not limited to England. Associated with the Jersey Devil, similar unusual trails were reported during the flap of sightings in the early part of the last century here in New Jersey. As the piece on Mental Floss states, this is most assuredly not diabolical work, but it does make me wonder why people associate the unknown with the Devil.

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As a character in world religions, the Devil can trace his (and, like God, he is almost always a male) origins to the Zoroastrians. Zoroastrian theology is a dualistic outlook: ultimate good versus ultimate evil, Good God versus Bad God. The idea synced particularly well with the burgeoning of apocalyptic thought that hovered in the air during the time that the people of ancient Judah came into contact with Persian thinking. The idea was toned down, of course, to a being with lesser powers than God, but still a real foe with which to contend. By the time of the New Testament, the Devil was ensconced and associated with the Persian accuser known by the title of “the Satan,” or the divine prosecuting attorney. How this character came to be associated with strange footprints in the snow traces an odd trail indeed. The key is the cloven hooves.

No description of the Devil exists in the Bible. The best evidence suggests that the horns, goatish bottom, and cloven hooves come from an association with the Greek demigod Pan. Why Pan was singled out as a particularly bad god is not known. He was popular in ancient Greece. It is certain that the Jews of Jesus’ time would not have recognized a cloven hoofed beast as devilish. The livelihood of too many relied on sheep and goats. Once the transformation took place in the imagination, unexplained cloven footprints appearing in the night suddenly became those of the Devil. As Stacy Conradt points out in her Mental Floss post, several suggestions have been made for creatures of the natural world and their snowy markers. We don’t know what makes the footprints, however, and winter is all the richer for it.

The Price of Academic Publishing

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During seminary, I believe it was, a professor once told those of us in class, “You don’t get rich in academic publishing.” As the author of a widely used class resource, he added, “unless you write a textbook.” Both sides of his observation are true. I work with many young scholars who haven’t published as much as I have and I have to “manage expectations.” No, that monograph will not become a bestseller. Libraries will buy it, and, statistically, a few hundred people will read it. For those who play the more lucrative game of being acknowledged experts, however, cash can be freely flowing. The public is hungry for authentic information on religion. Despite what we’re told in the media, people are very curious about the truth.

My own academic career ended before I could crank out all the books I’ve got in my head. You have to reach a certain stage of academia before that begins to happen. I’ve been working on my writing in the meantime, and I think I might be able to reach that crossover crowd that writes for non-professionals. I’m not sure I’ll have the time, but the ideas and, I hope, the skills are there. This all came back to me when preparing my taxes. One of the truly religious certainties of this world, taxes are, I know, for the common good. At least in theory. I never complain about them. Preparing them is a different story. My little book, Weathering the Psalms, followed the typical academic course of being largely ignored. I received a small royalty check for it. I wished I hadn’t. You see, I use TurboTax to file my return because someone with as simple an economic life as I have finds hiring a professional superfluous and, ahem, not cost effective. We don’t own a house or any capital. We just hope we’ve paid enough to get a little back in the spring.

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Then I came on the 1099 for my meager book royalties. (They were in the double digits, just to give you an idea.) I tried to enter it into TurboTax. Uh-oh. That kind of income requires a separate form. “Congratulations,” the screen said, “on earning money from your freelance business.” That can’t be good. It turns out I had to purchase an add-on for TurboTax to handle this new tax scenario. The add-on, literally, costs more than the amount of royalties. Technically, then, I lost money on the publication of my latest book. Those are the harsh realities of academic publishing. An abstract publisher contacted me a few days later—would I like to do the abstract of my own book? Why not? I’ve paid for it. If I ever get back into academe I’m going to write books people will want to read. In the meantime, I write them to contribute to the tax base. At least academically.

Faith for Sale

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Materialism can be defined in a number of different ways. One of the more common is that people desire material things. We want stuff. Now, we all need things to survive. My sympathies are always with the poor for whom each decision can be a potential tragedy. Spend too much on something and you may not have enough left to purchase something you need. As people, though, we all long for nice things. So it is that places like dollar stores exist. The dollar store is not the same as the “five and dimes” with which I grew up. The latter stocked things that were, in large measure, practical. Things you might need: pencils, string, soap. A dollar store, however, may lead you down a different path. A lot can be had for a dollar. Some of it may seem to promise more than it can deliver.

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My wife sent me a photo of a dollar store where the window was lined with what appears to be religious statuary. I’d be lying if I weren’t to admit that my first impulse was to go and purchase some cheap salvation. I’m sure the statues aren’t made of stone. I’m not even Catholic, so I’m not sure a one-dollar Mary would help with much of anything. Still, it is something to buy. Something material. Something that seems to make promises beyond itself. Here is the danger of the dollar store. It’s only a dollar!

Every now and again I play with this thought-experiment: if I knew that I would only survive one more year, what would I buy? Many things seem superfluous in the face of eternity. Would material comforts, or larks, do anything more than depreciate the little I would leave to others? That game tends to show materialism in a rather crass light. What do I really need to buy? We all have our weaknesses, for sure, but it can’t hurt once in a while to think that the material is just that: material. And we might have a very different set of values if we didn’t measure worth in terms of material gain. Faux-stone Mary would likely back me up on that.

Grim Where?

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An inordinate amount of my childhood time was spent on television. While the device of the day had been around for a decade already, I was among those who grew up learning that watching was easier than reading. Like most children, I took the path of least resistance. I watched. As a teen, however, I rediscovered reading and from that time television began to take a back seat to books. When the great switch-over to digital occurred we didn’t get a conversion box, and we could never really afford cable for as little TV as we watch. When a program gets commended, or if nostalgia takes too great a toll, we can always purchase programs—the price of watching television without the commercials. So it was that I began watching Sleepy Hollow. Very quickly in the first season the monster of the week trope was established as the plot grew more and more tangled. The Bible was so prominent in that season that I wrote an academic paper on it.

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Over the past few months my wife and I have been working through season two. The DVD version was delayed and we only watch on weekends. Recently we finished the eighteen episodes of the second installment. Clearly the budget had improved over the first season, but the Bible, it was also clear, had diminished. Throughout the first season the driving motif of the story was that biblical “prophecy” (from the book of Revelation) was unfolding in Sleepy Hollow. This is what one scholar has termed a “local apocalypse.” Throughout season two, however, the end of days is shut down. Molech, its architect, is killed. The headless horseman is less Death than a jilted lover. The second horseman, War, loses his armor and dies.

Magic, however, along with special effects, take on an increased roles. Instead of turning to the Bible to solve problems, the most helpful book to have on hand is a grimoire. Sleepy Hollow, which is anything but what its name suggests, is full of monsters. Powerful magic is required to contain them, and, it seems, the Bible is no longer needed as a tool to take down evil. Perhaps there is a parable at work here. I was drawn into the series by its biblical literacy, as well as its literacy in general. More action has been introduced, and fewer books. It’s a pattern I’ve seen before. I suspect I’ll watch season three presently. When I do I’ll be casting a wistful eye on the stack of books I have yet to read, and I’ll be wondering if reading may not have become easier than watching.

What You Pay For

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VampireHunterWhen a friend pointed out the easily missed 2001 film, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, (well before Seth Grahame-Smith came up with the same role for Abraham Lincoln) I knew I was duty-bound to see it. As regular readers know, although I’m not a fan of gore or violence, I have a soft spot for vampire movies. Vampires, although often evil, are frequently presented as conflicted characters. As former humans they have some level of sympathy for their victims, while at the same time, all people are objectified for the vampire. We are food. This low-budget, independent film didn’t promise to deliver on many levels, but as the end credits show, they did shoot enough film to be able to cut out a few bloopers. The story, in as far as there is one, has Jesus fighting lesbian vampires in modern-day Ottawa (where the film was shot).

Not that the film was serious enough to invite critical dialogue, I did wonder what Jesus had to do with the whole thing apart from the shock value. There were a few cute moments, as when the “atheists” pile, clown-like, out of a car for an extended fight scene, but the lead could have been any character apart from one scene where a miracle does occur. Jesus fights with his fists, not with supernatural power. Tossing in Mary Magnum and “professional wrestler” El Santo, the movie came close to the screwball level of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It’s difficult to critique a film where logic isn’t held accountable for the plot—the only thing to keep the film going is the action of a particular scene. And that, as I’ve intimated, can’t be counted on.

Interestingly enough, Jesus is treated throughout the film in a positive way. Although he doesn’t use supernatural powers, he is the “good guy” and is even tolerant of alternative lifestyles as long as love is the basis of relationships. The movie is biblically literate, using the Good Samaritan in a scene that underscores the accepting nature of the new millennium Jesus. The vampires don’t add much to the lore of the monster. They can be out in daylight because it is cheaper to shoot film that way, but the plot does come up with an explanation for it. Vampirism, at the end, can be healed by prayer, and when Mary Magnum, El Santo, and Jesus go their separate ways at the end, we are left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Death by Molasses

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Ninety-seven years ago today, 21 people were killed by molasses. Even having lived in Boston, I had never heard of the Boston Molasses Disaster. Credit for my awareness has to go to my wife, who read me the story from the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. I had no idea that molasses had been weaponized. The sweet sap, apart from making cookies, can be fermented into ethanol, used for munitions manufacture. In the North End of Boston a hastily constructed tank holding about 2 million gallons of molasses burst on this date in 1919, creating a sticky, 25-foot-high wall that raced through the North End at 35 m.p.h., killing those unfortunate enough to have been in the way. According to the Companion, 150 others were injured.

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We’ve all heard about the slowness of sap in January. Apparently the temperature had risen to above freezing this particular day, after several days of seasonal chill. The tank containing the heavy fluid burst under the strain. I have to admit that visions of walls of water have always frightened me. The images of the Boxing Day Tsunami back in 2004 were horrifying. I’d read of pilgrims to Petra (if you’re not familiar with Jordan, think of the crevasse through which Indiana Jones and company ride at the end of Last Crusade—that’s Petra) being drowned by sudden meltwater from distant mountains suddenly filling the canyon without warning, and shuttered. Having walked Hezekiah’s Tunnel without a flashlight, such images can be all too real at times. Would the offending wall made of molasses have made it any better or worse?

The tragedy is that the event is so little remembered today. I’m sure long-time residents of Boston still tell the tale of death by confection, but why don’t we hear of such things in the natural course of things? I suppose there are too many disasters to follow them all. Millions had just died in the nightmare of the First World War. The strange fate of those individuals killed by molasses might easily be overlooked, despite the fact that the goo had more victims than the Boston Massacre and the Boston Strangler combined. Maybe it’s just that things seem to move a little more slowly in January, but I feel as though I’d missed a part of history about which I might have been informed if I had more of a sweet-tooth.

Local Lore

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SomersetOne of the true joys of having more than a day off work at a time is the privilege to spend days reading. Although I read on the bus as a matter of course, it is a defined time, and editing isn’t as much reading as most people think it is. While doing research for my Sleepy Hollow paper, the question naturally arose: where did Washington Irving get the idea for the headless horseman? According to Irving’s biographers, the story was not an uncommon one. Headless ghosts are not unique, and he wrote the story while living in Europe as part of the serialized Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. There is no practical way to know where he first heard the story. During my research I heard of a local source: Legends and Lore of Somerset County (New Jersey), by Michael Haynes. In this little compendium of stories of my current county, there is a claim that Irving learned about the story right here in New Jersey, where a traditional headless ghost rides. Again, it is impossible to say where he got the idea, but people like to feel that their local traditions are important enough to engage a major writer’s imagination.

Haynes presents several other regional tales that may rival the Jersey Devil and give ghosts a location just down the road. I suspect most places have tales of ghosts and mysterious beasts. It is always interesting to find out about those lurking in your own neighborhood. Scholars are now beginning to turn their attention to the sanctity of space. Location is very important to mobile beings like ourselves. The place where we find ourselves becomes “our place” and with the patina of time, often a personally sacred space. Tales of what happened here often take on the cast of the supernatural.

Local history has always held a deep fascination for me. Any region that I know, in a sense, intimately, is a region that has become part of my personal history. My region of Pennsylvania, for example, defines me although neither of my parents, or their parents were born in that state. And Massachusetts, Michigan, Scotland, Illinois, Wisconsin, or New Jersey, places I’ve lived, have become somehow alive with history. Legends and Lore of Somerset County contains tales that are not always believable in the workaday world we inhabit, but that’s the beauty of sacred space. Going beyond the mundane is entirely the point. Although Washington Irving may or may not have first heard of the headless horseman here, we have that legend, and there’s only so much that history can do to remove such a claim.

Top Predator

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The reboot of Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, has been on my mind. Back in the early days of this century I hadn’t bothered to see either Jurassic Park II or III. The original, despite its faults, was like a childhood dream come true. I’ve always felt that dinosaurs (along with vampires and pirates) made for the best movies, although space has to be right up there in the top since 2001 (not the year, the movie). Since the summer I’ve made a point to carve out time to finish out the holy trilogy of dinosaur flicks. I liked the character Dr. Malcolm in the original, but he should’ve never been the main character of the sequel. The Lost World almost lost my resolve to see the series through. The story was unvarying: humans meet dinosaurs, dinosaurs chase humans. New and innovative means of trying to contain or exploit them try to demonstrate the evils of hubris and greed, but dinosaurs always prevail. Jurassic Park III was a bit better, going back to the original formula but adding something bigger than Tyrannosaurus Rex—the Spinosaurus. It was unbelievable, however, that a paleontology doctoral student couldn’t recognize it, thinking it a mere Suchomimus. At the turn of the century, new dinosaur finds had suggested that Spinosaurus was larger than T-Rex, and the movie reflected the new top predator of the time.

It is the little boy in me that keeps me coming back for dinosaurs. Some of my favorite toys were cheap, molded plastic dinos, and when my daughter was young we bought her all the more realistic (and pricey) Safari versions. When I get to the store, I still stop and look at the species we never acquired and make a wish. I think it’s because dinosaurs represent something we can never have. Species that grew to enormous size and had armor-like skin, and even, if some paleontologists are to be believed, considerable intelligence. Of course, that may just be the movie talking. In a world where all things are equal, we’d never stand a chance against dinosaurs. They are like reptilian deities.

When Amanda Kirby (ironically, the only adult to be addressed by first name in the movie by new acquaintances; the males are called by their titles even after they’ve been through several dinosaur attacks together) sees the incubators at the compound, she says, “So this is how you make dinosaurs.” Dr. Grant (let’s give him his title) responds, “No, this is how you play God.” Playing God is a trope as old as science itself. Planting crops to grow where you want them to grow is playing God in its own way. Creating uncontrollable forces that can destroy you seems to be a uniquely human trait. And so my imagination is drawn back to dinosaur days. Those who make the movies tug on wishes that any mere creature would have: to create its own gods and somehow manage to survive them. Hubris, it seems, is just as human as dreaming of dinosaurs.

Feasting

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In addition to music, Christmas has also been associated with seasonal foods. Unlike today, when we think of foods primarily in terms of either fast food or culinary sophistication, Christmas dishes of yesteryear often had religious symbolism. While singing an English carol, for instance, you might hear of figgy pudding. I tried my first when living in the United Kingdom and it was nothing like the images its name conjures. It is more like a dense cake made of raisins and dried fruit, set aflame to burn off the brandy. Sometimes it is topped with holly. According to an interview on NPR, the Christmas dessert, in addition to taking weeks to make, contains thirteen ingredients, to symbolize Christ and the apostles. The holly is to represent the crown of thorns, and the flames the passion. That’s a lot of theology to stomach. (In seminary I had friends who used food analogies for theological purposes, but I suspect they didn’t know it was such an ancient tradition.)

Christmas cheer, I would’ve been shocked to learn as a child, generally involved spirits. For example in A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens reverses his entrepreneurial relationship with Bob Crachit over a bowl of smoking bishop. I had always supposed this was a kind of soup or stew, but, again NPR comes to the rescue with a piece about Christmas drinks. Smoking bishop was made of port, and, according to the NPR story by Anne Bramley, is of the class of Protestant drinks called “ecclesiastics.” These were various alcoholic drinks named after Catholic church offices that Protestants used to poke fun at the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Catholic tradition.

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A Christmas Tree primer

It is difficult to conceive of anything more basic than food and drink. All living things require nourishment. It stands to reason that when religious sensibilities began to appear that they would certainly be associated with the necessities of life. Holidays, as necessary breaks from the mundane, offer opportunities for bringing theology to the table. The most basic of ingredients, as any observer of biblical holidays knows, can contain more than just nutrients and roughage. There is a symbolism in what we eat. In these days when it is fashionable to declare religion nothing but stuff and nonsense, it can’t hurt to stop and look at what might be on our plate or in our cup before declaring it to be mere animal nourishment.

Away in a Manger?

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The holidays are a time for getting together. At a friend’s house over the weekend, we were talking about nativity scenes. I mentioned a story about how a nativity scene had been missing the infant Jesus and he said he’d be right back with a solution. I have to admit that I’ve never seen Sweet Baby Jesus porter before. “Place that in your manger,” he said. I assume this is a seasonal brew, intended to draw the semi-religious toward a kind of holiday cheer. Now, blasphemy in a bottle is nothing new. In fact it’s quite common, I expect. Nevertheless, a bottle that says “One sip and you’ll claim the name” might be offering a salvation that it simply can’t deliver.

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Growing up, Christmas never had any connection with drinking. My father was an alcoholic, and inviting this particular spirit to the holidays seemed misguided. Still, I recognize that in many cultures tipples were a way of coping with the excessive periods of darkness. Even in these days of ubiquitous artificial lights, I find that the darkness just outside bears a considerable weight. We festoon our houses with colorful lights to ward off the night. We prepare special foods to take our minds from the bleakness outside the window. And yes, some turn to Sweet Baby Jesus to offer its own kind of shine.

The holidays mean many things to many people. The commercial aspects appeal less and less as the years go by, but having some time off work to be with family and collect my thoughts grows more important each year. What makes a day holy, I expect, is that you have things that are otherwise difficult to find. Life, for many, is a long series of denials of what they really want. When the holidays come, they indulge. Who am I to begrudge someone else of what makes their ordinary days sacred? Who indeed?

Factor Fiction

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An article on CBS that my wife sent me tells how Costco mistakenly labelled a shipment of Bibles as fiction, setting off a tweet-storm. Some offended, some applauding, a 140-character barrage ensued as Costco apologized. What was the fuss about? As a person who has experience with both fact and fiction, it has become clear to me over the years that these categories are not nearly as sharply defined as they might appear. We make labels to help us categorize a confusing reality. Our brains, nevertheless, easily accept fiction as fact, at least for purposes of getting along in the world. The earth is spinning, right now, at over 1,000 miles per hour. We don’t perceive it, and in fact, it took not a few deaths and apologetic clerics before it was admitted that evidence we don’t feel proved the case. Each day we choose to believe the fiction that we are holding still and the sun goes overhead. Is anybody tweeting about that?

One of the angry bird calls pointed out that Costco (which apparently now has an imprimatur) doesn’t label their Qurans as fiction. How many Christians have read the Rig Veda and not wondered whether its proper label fell on that side of the pricing gun? The matter of fact or fiction is one of opinion. Even those books bearing the label of non-fiction are interpretations of evidence. When it comes down to ultimate truth, where it lies is always a matter of faith. Who buys a Bible at Costco anyway?

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When I was a child and Amazon did not exist, buying a Bible was itself a kind of sacred act. You wouldn’t think of going to Wal-Mart to do such a thing. You went to the Christian bookstore (or, I suppose, if you grew up in a city, a secular bookstore might do). You talked to clerks who knew the differences between versions. The place smelled of leather and velvet. It was a place dedicated to the truth. Costco is a big box store. Buying in bulk implies something. Ironically, those who angrily tweet about the Bible’s label don’t seem to realize that Bible selling is big business. You won’t find much in the way of small publishers’ literature in such a store. Next to your giant cartons of cereal and immense packages of diapers, why not tuck in a Bible as well? When you get home you can tweet about how much money you saved buying eternal salvation in bulk.

Forward Planning

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Smallmindedness bothers me.  Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim any great intelligence for myself.  I’m just an average guy who thinks too much.  No, the smallmindedness that I despise comes in capitalist colors.  More specifically, it comes in the form of business-speak.  This is a language in which I make no claims of fluency, but in which I am forced to converse from time to time.  I believe there is a secret coven of businessmen hidden in a dark board room determined to make themselves sound intellectual by cobbling together polysyllables.  Business is, at the heart of it, really simple.  I want your money; how little can I give you for it?  They call economics the dismal science for a reason.  In any case, the other day I was confronted with the phrase “forward planning.”  It was like one of those moments when you walk into the wrong room and you’re disoriented for just a second or two because what you see is not what you expected through that door.  Forward planning.  What other kind of planning is there?  Backward planning?  Victims of time have no choice in the matter.
 
I’m bemused by the ubiquity of “best practices.”  No, thank you.  I prefer to use worst practices.  Of course we all want to do things the best way possible.  Putting insipid neologisms in the way is not how one achieves it.  What’s wrong with just saying what you mean?  Oh, I forgot—the guys in the shadowy boardroom.  There’s nothing like lingo to substitute for depth.
 
At a campus book sale a few weeks ago, I found a copy of the Compact Oxford Dictionary.  Fully aware that any word can be instantly searched online, I hefted the two, heavy volumes and for six dollars walked out with over a million words.  People on campus looked at me funny.  Someone even asked why in the world would I buy a dictionary?  There are plenty of answers I could give.  I could say that I like the feel of something solid in my hands when I practice scholarship.  I could say that it impresses people when you show them how small the type is.  I could say that I have some leaves I’d like to flatten effectively.  The truth, I suspect, you’ve already divined.  I bought these books because no matter how much you look, you won’t find “forward planning” listed anywhere as a legitimate concept.

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