My darlings, I’m so enjoying our whirlwind tour through the Bible. As a reminder, we’re currently talking about the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which we divide into three chunks: the law, the prophets, and the writings. We started our tour in the very middle, with three of the writing books that are written in poetry, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. And this week, you all read Job chapters 1, 2, and 42 in preparation for diving into the characters a little bit.

We’re not doing a quiz or anything, but you should all remember by now that Job, Psalms, and Proverbs are smack in the middle of the sixty-six books of the Bible that most Christians consider canon. Psalms is filled with psalms, Proverbs is filled with proverbs, but Job is not filled with jobs, instead it’s filled with the character Job, along with other characters who fill very different roles. From your pre-reading, you’ll all recall that Satan is one of the main characters, and due to some conversations between Satan and the Lord, Job is rather badly smitten at the outset of our story.

By the very end of chapter two, the five main characters are introduced: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, of course Job, and the Lord. What follows is a back-and-forth between these five characters, and you already know how it ends, because you read chapter 42, but let’s dig in to some of the meaty bits of the poetry.

After the introduction in the first two chapters, Job opens the poetry with a lament. It’s the saddest of sad poems, and it’s beautifully constructed. Job’s lament ends with these lines:

What I feared has come upon me;

what I dreaded has happened to me.

I have no peace, no quietness;

I have no rest, but only turmoil.”

When I was in college, I took a class called Job and the Joban Tradition, it was taught by Peter Machinist, and one of the things we learned in that class is that Job is a theodicy. It grapples with the question of why do bad things happen to good people?

This term, theodicy, incidentally, was coined by Gottfried von Leibniz, the inventor of calculus, who in addition to being interested in infinitesimals, was also interested in the problem of evil. How can there be evil if God is all powerful.

The first response to Job is by Eliphaz the Temanite, whom I will remind you, sat on the ground without eating or speaking for a week, just to be with his friend Job. None of these characters are slouches as friends. The overall structure of Job is that Eliphaz speaks and then Job responds, then Bildad the Shuhite, then Job, then Zophar the Naamathite, then Job. This repeats three times, and for the most part the friends are pretty supportive, although Eliphaz does get a bit grumpy toward the end. Even though the whole plot is that Job never sins, Eliphaz feels the need to judge. Here’s a snippet of it:

“Submit to God and be at peace with him;

in this way prosperity will come to you.

Accept instruction from his mouth

and lay up his words in your heart.

If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored:

If you remove wickedness far from your tent

We don’t have time to read all of the back and forth, but what we find is that everyone who starts out consoling Job eventually does the same thing as Eliphaz. Bildad and Zophar both get a bit accusatory, and then Job is forced to respond.

“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice,

the Almighty, who has made my life bitter,

as long as I have life within me,

the breath of God in my nostrils,

my lips will not say anything wicked,

and my tongue will not utter lies.

I will never admit you are in the right;

till I die, I will not deny my integrity.

I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it;

my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.

You get the point here. Job is like, nah bro, it’s not like that. There’s a somewhat strange interlude in chapter 28, which almost feels like a standalone song or poem, but that is also beautiful. It’s not attributed to any of the characters, and it’s asking a question:

Where then does wisdom come from?

Where does understanding dwell?

It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing,

concealed even from the birds in the sky.

Following this is another long poem by Job, and then we get a surprise! A character who wasn’t introduced in the beginning steps out of the crowd, and he gives a rousing speech that begins like this:

“I am young in years,

and you are old;

that is why I was fearful,

not daring to tell you what I know.

I thought, ‘Age should speak;

advanced years should teach wisdom.’

But it is the spirit in a person,

the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.

It is not only the old who are wise,

not only the aged who understand what is right.

He makes a good point, but he also brings it home in a way that’s like ten times more judgmental than the three friends, which is looking pretty grim for Job. But don’t worry, the Lord arrives on stage now, and I’m going to switch to the King James version, which you remember is an older translation, but this is some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible, and it’s a more beautiful translation. It’s so beautiful it’s hard to know where to stop, and I’d encourage you all to read it all on your own if you like what you hear.

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man;

for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

declare, if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest?

or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened?

or who laid the corner stone thereof;

When the morning stars sang together,

and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Eep!

Now you already know that in the end of the story, Job and the Lord are cool, but I do want to point out a couple quick little nuggets. The first is that only his daughters are mentioned by name, and Job gives his daughters an inheritance with their brothers. That’s pretty cool

The second is that the end of the story is one of my favorite endings: Job died, being old and full of days. I hope that’s how my story ends, although without the middle part, ideally, where Satan and the Lord collude against me.

Okay, it’s been a slightly longer Meeting than usual, but one more quick piece of business. The three books of poetry are only part of the writings. There’s no assignment for pre-reading for next week, but we’re going to introduce five short books that are easy reading, and if you wanted to read ahead, the one we’re going to focus on is the book of Esther.

The book of Esther is interesting for a bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons it’s most interesting to me is that it actually contains no mention of God, which is, you know, somewhat unusual for being in the Bible.

I love you all so very much, and I can’t wait to continue our tour next week. For now let’s light our candles and think about what the Lord might say to each of us if he called us out of the whirlwind.

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After some discussion with everyone during Lent, we’re going to start a tour of the Old Testament in Meeting today. There seemed to be some general agreement among all the Bruntons-east that having an overall sense of it could be fun and interesting. Today we’re going to do a quick orientation, and then we’re going to start exactly in the middle with the poetic books, mostly because I like them and I think they’re a fun starting place.

So first it’s worth noting that when Jesus talked about scripture, and when he quoted from scripture, what he was quoting was what we call the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that it was all written in Hebrew, whereas the New Testament was written mostly in Greek.

Remember that Jesus grew up in Second Temple Judaism, which we’ll come back to later, but one way you can think of the Christian religion is that it’s an offshoot of Second Temple Judaism, and the reason we say “Old Testament” and “New Testament” is that we inherited the Old Testament from our Jewish roots, and the New Testament was all written after the time of Jesus.

There are some theological implications about calling the two parts of the Bible the Old Testament and New Testament, but it’s still a convenient way to group the books, and it’s been a grouping for a long time. In Judaism, the grouping is called the Miqra, or the Tanakh. The Tanakh is a convenient name because it’s actually an initialism of three words, Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. The Torah is the first five books, the Nevi’im are the prophets, and the Ketuvim are the writings. We’re going to come back to the writings in a minute.

But get that in your head for a minute. There are five books at the beginning that we group together called the Torah or the Pentateuch, or the Law. The story of the creation of the world is there, and the flood, and the story of Moses leading the Hebrew children out of Egypt. The story of Moses receiving the ten commandments on stone tablets is in there, and a lot of additional rules that weren’t on the tablets, but cropped up along the way.

You might remember that Jesus says “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law and the prophets” - when he says “the law” there, he’s talking at least in part about the Torah, and when he says “the prophets” he’s talking about the next broad division of books. When you think about prophets, you might think about Jonah who got swallowed by a whale and barfed out in Ninevah, or Isaiah who unknowingly wrote most of Handel’s Messiah a few thousand years before Handel was born, or you might think about Elijah who fasted for forty days and who at the end of his life ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire.

We’re going to talk about the prophets later, but that’s another broad division of the Old Testament, you’ve got the law and the prophets. When we talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk mostly about characters, because that’s how I think of them, but we’ll also talk a bit about what prophecy means.

The third and final broad category is called the writings, or the Ketuvim, and this is eleven books that are all wonderful. The eleven books include many of my favorite parts of the Bible, in part because we sing them and recite them more than other parts. In particular, there are three books in the middle of the writings that are books of poetry and that’s where we’re going to look today.

But first, one more quick recap. Law, that’s the first five books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The Torah and the Pentateuch are two other names for it. Prophets, that’s a big chunk of the Old Testament, and when we come back to talk about the prophets, we’re going to talk about a lot of individual characters like Jonah and Elijah. And the writings.

In the Christian Bible, the poetry is exactly in the middle, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, those three books, and because of that they’re also easy to find. My recollection is that if you calculate the exact center of the Christian Bible that Protestants use, it’s in Psalm number 117.

There are 150 psalms, and every single one is a beautiful poem or series of poems. In many Christian denominations, it’s traditional to have a psalm sung or spoken in every single service. You might remember that the very first book published in North America was the Bay Psalm Book, which you can think of as kind of a hymnal. Psalms have been set to music many thousands of times throughout the past several millenia, and many of my own favorite hymns are Psalms translated into English and set to music.

Some Psalms are long, some are short, and they’re surprisingly varied as poetry, and they’re the part of the Hebrew scriptures that has most made me want to learn more Hebrew.

Proverbs is the book right after Psalms. Since Psalms is full of psalms, you won’t be surprised to hear that Proverbs is full of proverbs. Aphorisms for living, and you have undoubtedly heard many proverbs from the book of Proverbs recited by people you know. They often have two parts, the this is like this, but the that is like that. My own favorite proverb from Proverbs is, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones,” and it’s sort of what I think about when I’m proceeding through hard times with good cheer.

“Iron sharpeneth iron” is another good one from Proverbs, the second half of that one is, “so one person sharpens another.” We’re glossing over Psalms and Proverbs a little bit, but not because they’re not awesome. They’re awesome, but you just don’t need much orientation to them. Open the book of Psalms and start reading, and you’ll probably like it. Open the book of Proverbs and put your finger on something, and it will probably sound like a proverb. Both books are extremely approachable.

Job is the other book of poetry in the Bible. Don’t get me wrong, there are other poems, but Job is the third book that’s dedicated to it, and unlike Psalms and Proverbs, it’s actually framed as a story about a guy, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that the guy’s name is Job. Job is spelled just exactly the same as the word job, but it’s pronounced Job with a long o. Unlike in previous meetings, this week we’re going to make a short reading assignment, it’s not the whole book of Job, but it’s a little at the beginning and a little at the end.

Next week, we’ll do a slightly deeper dive into the book of Job, and we’ll read some of the poetry in the middle. The part of the story I’d like everyone to read is the first and second chapters, it will take about five minutes, they’re really short chapters. Then skip to the very end, and read chapter 42 starting at verse seven until the end. These two parts of Job are sort of a prologue and an epilogue of a conversation between Job, his three friends, and the almighty, which is written in verse. Next week we’ll read some of the verses together, but you’ll understand it all better with a bit of the story in your mind.

Okay, before we light our candles, just one more quick repetition. The law, that’s the first five books. The prophets, that’s actually most of the other books. The writings, that’s eleven books total, but the three we talked about today are the poetry books that are smack in the middle, Job, Psalms, and Proverbs. You’re going to read the first, second, and forty-second chapters of Job this week, and if you find yourself wanting to read something else, just turn to a random Psalm, or a non-random one and just read the Twenty-Third Psalm.

I love you all so much, and I’m very tickled at this idea. My current thinking is that we’ll spend eight or ten weeks on a whirlwind tour of the Old Testament, and then maybe we’ll go back to our regularly scheduled programming, or maybe someone will want to do something different and they’ll tell me!

For now let’s light our candles and think about poetry.

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We’re going to keep reading about the final days of Jesus from the Gospel of John today. One of the reasons I like reading the Gospels is that they each have a different take on what happened that week, but the accounts of Palm Sunday and the events of that week are all reasonably well synched up - unlike the dinner we were reading about last week where three accounts are about the wine and the bread but the account in John is about dirty feet.

The rough sketch of the story is that Jesus and his friends are in Bethany, which is a couple miles outside of Jerusalem. A side note, the Tomb of Lazarus in Bethany is still a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims. There are at least two churches and a mosque there, and it’s the place where Jesus went from hometown hero to seriously famous miracle worker just before his crucifixion.

We’ve talked about the story of Lazarus a few times. The story in the book of John assumes we know about it - “Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” The premise of John’s story that this is what catapulted Jesus to fame, and to the attention of the authorities.

If you’ve ever looked closely at a depiction of Jesus on the cross, there will sometimes be a sign above it that says I-N-R-I, which is an initialism for “Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum” - Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. This is a reference from the Gospel of John:

Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek.

There’s a whole argument depicted there in the Gospel of John, where Pilate seemingly would rather not crucify Jesus, but the religious authorities insist on the crucifixion because Jesus claimed to be both the King and the Son of God. They tell him, “We have no king but Caesar.” Pilate didn’t have jurisdiction over their religious objections, but they kind of paint him into a corner over the political point.

An interesting little side note that relates to a conversation Dan’l and I had earlier in the week - this is actually the only mention of Latin in the whole Bible. Lots of Aramaic, lots of Greek, but Latin occurs only in this notice.

Okay, so back to the story of Palm Sunday

The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,

“Hosanna!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Blessed is the king of Israel!”

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:

“Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion;

see, your king is coming,

seated on a donkey’s colt.”

At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.

It’s worth noting at this point that Jesus doesn’t claim to be a king during his discussion with Pontius Pilate. The crowd had called him king of the Jews, and of course we have the much earlier record in the Gospel of Matthew where the Magi ask where they can find the King of the Jews, but during the discussion with Pilate Jesus doesn’t actually cop to it. When Pilate asks him about it, his response is ““Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”

As depicted in the Gospel of John, it’s a bad week for Jesus, and it includes a lot of people wanting him dead for either claiming to be the Son of God or claiming to be the rightful king.

But I like to think that the message Jesus preached was actually quite a bit more radical than the things they accused him of. And this way of reading it makes a lot of sense in the story.

Saying “I’m the Son of God” or “I’m the rightful king” is one thing, but saying “Every one of you is the child of God and there is no such thing as a rightful King” is a whole nother thing.

We have lots and lots of records of Jesus preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, in fact the word kingdom occurs fifty-four times in Matthew alone, and not once does he say, “it’s mine.” Instead, he says over and over and over, “it’s for the poor” or “it’s for the persecuted.”

He doesn’t usually answer when they ask him if he’s God, but when they ask him about the kingdom of heaven, oh, then he has words and words and words for them. Usually it’s parable beginning with “the kingdom of heaven is like…”

But getting back to the story of Palm Sunday again, we’ve been skipping around a little bit, and I want to end with something that Jesus tells the disciples at the outset of this story of the bad week that we now call Holy Week:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

Let’s think about that while we light our candles. Holy Week is a sad week, but it’s also a week of anticipation. What seeds might you have falling to the ground this week?

I love you all so much, and I can’t wait to see you all for Easter next week to watch the sun rise.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It was so much fun hiking with you all yesterday! The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for it, which I suppose is why we couldn’t get a parking space at Patapsco. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who noticed the sun shining.

The first daffodils are blooming, right next to the house by the fig tree. It’s a sheltered spot there, and they’re always the first of all the narcissus to bloom here, closely followed by the forsythia that are right across from them, and soon after, it’s everything all at once. Only two more weeks of Lent, next week is Palm Sunday, and the week after that’s Easter.

This week we’re going to read an account of the Last Supper from the Gospel of John. It’s substantially different from the other three accounts in the New Testament. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus eats bread and wine with the disciples and delivers a handful of prophecies over dinner. In the Gospel of Luke in particular, he says the words that we Christians all over the world now hear when we celebrate communion in church: “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’”

Celebrating communion in church is a way to remember what’s happening there through a ritual, but the ritual itself isn’t so much the point it is to remember Jesus. I like to take the instruction both a bit more literally and to interpret it a bit more broadly. I know those two approaches are in tension with one another, but bear with me. I like to think that every time we eat or drink, we should pause to remember, not just when we’re in church. When we sing our song before dinner, that’s what we’re doing, in remembrance.

It’s also a part of why Christians fast. Withholding it from ourselves helps us to remember why we eat and drink. The obvious response to that is “because we’re hungry or thirsty.” But fasting reminds us that it’s not actually quite that straightforward. It helps us remember that we also eat and drink because we decide to. And that others, in the worst of circumstances, lack food or drink because they are denied it.

Moving ahead to the story of the Last Supper from the Gospel of John, there is what first appears to be a completely different lesson for us here.

Here’s the pertinent part of the story:

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean.

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.

Notably, just before this scene, John wrote, “the evening meal was in progress” and that’s the whole tale of the meal for John. There’s nothing about the cup and the bread, no new covenant in the blood, just this thing about the dirty feet.

There may be some esoteric meaning buried in it. “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me” sounds like it might be an oblique reference to ancient washing rituals from the book of Numbers, “To purify them, do this: Sprinkle the water of cleansing on them”, but there’s also the meaning that Jesus explains directly: if you can’t let me serve you, you’re not getting it.

In one sense, this telling of the Last Supper is different than the other three Gospels, because instead of eating and drinking together, Jesus is serving the apostles, and commanding them to serve others in the way he served them.

But in another sense, as we refer back to the accounts in the other three Gospels, Jesus is serving food to the disciples. I don’t know if that would have been the role of a host or of a servant in Jesus’ day, but that also brings up a good point: hosting and serving aren’t necessarily so different as I imagine them to be.

One more little tidbit to focus on about this story - last week, Jesus quoted the Psalms, “you are all children of the Most High.” In today’s story, he does it again.

Directly after washing everyone’s feet, Jesus quotes Psalm 41, by way of telling the disciples that one of them will betray him and one of them will deny him. That’s Judas and Peter, though to quote Monty Python, Peter got better.

We’re going to close meeting today with a stanza from this Psalm that’s an enduring lesson all by itself. One kind of neat point before I read this is that Jesus quoted the Psalms more than any other book of the Bible.

Here’s the two quote and the previous stanza for a little context:

All my enemies whisper together against me; they imagine the worst for me, saying,“A vile disease has afflicted him; he will never get up from the place where he lies.”

Even my close friend, someone I trusted,one who shared my bread, has turned against me.

“Even my close friend, someone I trusted, one who shared my bread, has turned against me.” King David felt it, Jesus felt it, sadly at some point I think every human being probably feels it. I will remind us all that Jesus’ response to this was to wash their feet. Pretty classy guy.

I love you all very much. Week after next, we’ll be celebrating with the sunrise. Tonight, let’s light our candles and remember Jesus as we serve one another.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

I promise our Meetings aren’t going to permanently turn into vocabulary lessons where we only talk about the new words I’ve picked up like Syzygy and selenelieon. But I did learn another new word from an article from the New York Times that was making the rounds on Friday and I can’t help reading the headline:

“Bad News for Friggatriskaidekaphobes: 2026 Has Three Fridays the 13th”

Friggatriskaidekaphobes. That’s a good mouthful. Apparently in common years, that is to say, years that are not leap years, when the year begins on a Thursday, we have three Friday the thirteenths, and this happens to be one such year. And apparently there is always at least one Friday the thirteenth every year.

What had especially gotten me started thinking about Friday the thirteenth was remembering Friday, March 13 six years ago, which was the first day I didn’t go into the office during the pandemic. I looked up our Notes for Meeting from that day, and my notes inspired me to revisit some of the same topics. We opened with a reflection that our family was especially lucky, because our school and church and farm weren’t being too interrupted:

Since it was already our practice to do these things at home, we’re just kind of continuing on as we were, except with less driving, right?

Remember that we didn’t have any idea at the time it was going to last as long as it did, or that so many people would die. It’s strange to look back on it. At the time, my artful transition from “hey we’re in a global pandemic” to “let’s talk about Lent” was this:

One of the things that I really love about Lent is that it’s a practice that anyone can do completely on their own.

As you kids have all gotten older, I’ve been delighted how intrigued you seem to be by organized everything. Organized school, organized clubs, organized religion, organized sports. I sometimes wondered when we started homeschooling if there would be lingering disdain for such things, but there doesn’t seem to be so far. But it is also nice to remember that you don’t need a school to learn things, you don’t need a church to worship as you please, you don’t need a team to go for a run, and you don’t need to go to an office to get work done.

Fasting during Lent is a practice that’s mostly done at home, or really wherever you are, and I like it for that. But it’s also like many of those other things on the list we might do on our own; I’m not the only one doing it, and I feel a sense of community and purpose with everyone else who is doing it with me. When I run, I do think about other runners and then sometimes I even get together and run with them! When I learn, I learn from someone else who once learned the same thing. When I fast, I fast together with everyone else who is fasting, this season it’s even more together than usual, with Lent and Ramadan coinciding. Close to two billion people around the world who might keep some level of a fast.

Last Sunday, Katie and I went down to Annapolis and met Tomi in the morning, and we all went to St. Anne’s together. The service was different from our family’s usual Sunday night routine, but it shared all the same themes we talk about at home. Importantly, it reminded me of another thing that Christians all over the world do as we celebrate our Lenten fasts, reflecting on the life of Jesus.

With that in mind, right where each of us are, on our own, but also together, here are a few verses from the Gospel of John to get us started:

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.

John is probably my favorite of the four Gospels. I wonder if I’m supposed to have a favorite Gospel? The author dives right into our controversial topic.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus asks, “Who do people say that I am?” but here in John, it’s just “I and the Father are one.” John records that Jesus narrowly escapes being stoned for blasphemy by the religious authorities who say this:

“We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

I want to reflect for a moment on the truth that Jesus was a known blasphemer, and it made people mad, mad, mad. It’s not the first time such a thing happened, and it won’t be the last. Socrates was famously killed for the same reason. And in the Gospel of John, Jesus extricates himself from the situation by quoting scripture, but it doesn’t work, so he runs away.

It’s a foreshadowing of what happens later, when he doesn’t run away, and we should think about that during Lent, as well. Jesus dies. But we haven’t come to that part yet, we’re still in John where Blasphemer Jesus quotes the Psalms to a group of men who are getting ready to stone him, and the quote he picks is this one, I’m going to quote it from the King James Version like I learned it as a kid:

I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

There is in fact a long history of our most ancient scriptures reminding us we are the children of God. In the book of Deuteronomy, chapter fourteen starts with, “You are the children of the Lord your God.” From the prophet Hosea we read, “In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”

Jesus quoted the Psalms, “all of you are children of the most High.”

I like to imagine Jesus with a message that’s actually far more radical and blasphemous than, “I alone am the special-est special one who is specially particularly only the one who can talk to God.”

Instead, I imagine the message to be, “Of course I am the Son of God, because obviously. And so are you, also obviously.”

And before anyone accuses me of blasphemy, because I’m like the Jesus in the book of John, I really will just run away across the river, but before anyone tries to accuse me of blasphemy, here’s what Jesus hisownself said in the Gospel of Matthew, and as I read this I wonder if maybe that’s my favorite Gospel, but I digress, here’s what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew:

Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

I love you all so very much. Let’s light our candles and reflect on how much we can learn from ancient blasphemy, together and completely on our own.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

Dan’l and Lina and I finished reading Slaughterhouse Five a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking a lot about one specific aspect of the book, which is that it consistently juxtaposes the ordinary and the absurd and the horrific, sometimes all within the same character on the same day. Aliens, and a bird tweeting, and bombs dropping. The firebombing of Dresden.

Against that backdrop, I was downstairs playing Hollow Knight, maybe that’s the aliens in my story, when Lina came down and got us all to come outside.

At first I thought there was something wrong, but about halfway up the stairs I started to hear the cacophony of frog-song from outside. I think she opened the front door just as I was coming up into the kitchen, and wow, just wow, wow, wow. It’s really funny to me how suddenly it seems to happen every spring. Just one evening the sun sets, and it’s crazy loud, and there are a hundred frogs in our little pond. Some combination of temperature and time of year and we still haven’t done anything to interrupt their annual cycle.

Back before we had dug the frog pond, I’m sure you all remember this, but just indulge me telling the story again, back then we had a pretty substantial mud puddle on that side of the driveway, and one season a frog or maybe it was a toad, but your mama figured out that somebody had laid eggs in it, and she pulled a hose across the driveway and kept that mud puddle filled with water for the six weeks or so it took those tadpoles to find their way out of the mud puddle.

Being the very romantic partner that I am, I special-ordered a copy of The Book of Frogs by Tim Halliday. The cover calls it “The life-size guide to six hundred species from around the world.” I haven’t compared a picture of our spring peepers to the Pseudacris crucifer picture in the book, but from the description this is unmistakably our species:

“The Spring Peeper provides one of the first sounds of spring, the male’s distinctive ‘peep’ being heard by day and night as long as the temperature is above freezing.”

And

“Within a chorus, adjacent males often form duets and trios, alternating their calls with one another. If a rival mail gets too close, they switch to an aggressive call, which is a stuttering trill.”

They’re on page 318 if anyone wants to read more about them. I know that Meeting is supposed to be mostly about the Bible, but I this is arguable the Bible of Frogs. One of the cool things in the book is actual size photos of all the frogs, and page 318 also includes a drawing of one puffing up its neck pouch for a peep.

There are a thousand other little signs of spring and of normalcy. Katie took a picture of the crocuses peeking up yesterday. Crocuses? Croci? Crocuses sounds right to me. Lina noticed snowdrops blooming in front of the porch where I hadn’t exactly planted them but also hadn’t exactly not-planted them. I made a snowdrop Kokedama two seasons ago, but it didn’t work very well, so I just abandoned it by the front porch. Lo, and behold, they took root and are now blooming where they were not-quite-planted.

One of my favorite signs of spring, besides the peepers, is how the buds of the trees just swell up until they look like they’re about to burst, which I suppose they are. All of those sycamore trees we planted last season look like they made it through the winter. I saw swelling buds on all five of them yesterday.

Part of the reason I always talk about what’s happening right now when we have Meeting is that I think it’s an important practice, to notice the world around us. The seasons moving, the frogs coming back, the buds swelling and bursting into flower. not just what we saw on the news. That too, but not only that. Noticing the turning of the seasons is my act of rebellion.

Before the peepers came back, which seems like it’s obviously the most important story for Lent, I was all set to talk about Elijah.

I’ve been reading about him a lot this spring. Part of the reason is this wild story in the New Testament that we call The Transfiguration, where Elijah and Moses appear and Jesus becomes radiant with them. I sort of imagine his face glowing like Moses’s did when he brought the tablets down off the mountain, but because of that story I’ve been sort of thinking about Jesus and Elijah and Moses, and this story about Elijah stuck in my head.

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.

The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by that food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There he went into a cave and spent the night.

I’m especially drawn to what the angel tells Elijah there, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”

The backstory of Elijah is a little bit horrific. He’s learned that Ahab and Jezebel have killed a bunch of prophets and they want to kill him, and now he’s suicidal, so he lays down under a bush.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.”

Then, someone wakes him up and feeds him, and he’s okay to keep going a little while longer, well, quite a bit longer. And in the next part of the story, Elijah stands in the doorway of his cave and hears the voice of God. He’s sad and tired and depressed about the state of the world. He stops and listens, and he can hear the voice of God.

A still, small voice, we learn.

I don’t want to package anything up too neatly hear, but I do want to say, listen to the peepers tonight. Let their voices fill you up, and let everything else that’s happening to you and that’s happening in the world, let it still be there, too. Hold them all at once, but don’t let go of the still, small voice or voices that you can still hear.

I love you all so very much, you fill me with such a feeling. I hope everyone’s Lent is going okay, and that you’re remembering it starts new every day, but especially today. Let’s light our candles and think about Elijah and about peepers.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

I learned a new word when I was reading the news this morning. Selenelion. Apparently, on Tuesday morning we may be able to see the fully-eclipsed moon and the sun at the same time, which is called a selenelion. The eclipsed moon is also called a blood moon, because when it ducks behind the shadow of the earth, it takes on a reddish color.

Actually I also learned a second new word, which is one I’d heard before but wouldn’t have been able to explain what it meant. Syzygy, which is spelled s-y-z-y-g-y, which feels like an extremely unlikely spelling to me, but the meaning is just when the sun, moon, and earth are in a straight line with each other.

I got curious about how long we’ve been able to predict astronomical events like these ones and wound up learning about Edmund Halley correctly predicting a solar eclipse in 1715 and then again, even more accurately, in 1724 using lunar tables. But way before that happened, there’s a story that Thales of Miletus predicted a total solar eclipse in 585 BCE, an event that has been called the birth of science. If you want to celebrate it as the birth of science, the exact date you’d celebrate would be May 28th, and this year would be the two-thousand-six-hundred-eleventh birthday, but I’m a little skeptical of the story. It feels to me more like “hey I knew that was going to happen.” I understand that the ancients had a very different model of solar eclipses than Edmund Halley did, although we’re often underestimating them.

One thing we do know is that eclipses were often recorded, and that it’s possible now to pinpoint the exact date, like that May 28th date in 585 BCE, which can tell us the exact day and time that the omen occurred, which by the same account that puts Thales of Miletus there, tells us there was a battle going on, and that the eclipse was treated as an omen.

Recall that solar eclipses and lunar eclipses are both at syzygys, do you like how I used that word that I just learned the meaning of? In a solar eclipse, the order of the syzygy is sun then moon then earth, so the moon is between the earth and the sun, and the moon casts a smallish shadow on the earth, so it only blocks out the sun in a specific place, which as the relative positions of all three of them change, looks like a shadow traveling in a line across the surface of the earth.

In a lunar eclipse like we’re having on Tuesday, the earth is in the middle, and it casts a large-ish shadow on the moon, and everyone on earth who can see the moon sees the same thing. It’s another kind of omen. In the Revelation of John of Patmos in the New Testament, it’s part of the weird prophecy/dream sequence:

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood

Now, in this prophecy the next thing that happens is the stars fall out of the sky and the figs fall off the fig tree, and then someone rolls up the sky like a scroll. So, grain of salt.

But it does seem to be a reasonable enough description of a solar and lunar eclipse that we can pretty easily imagine John of Patmos would have at least had some cultural knowledge of what was going on. And that rings true in ancient sources. In the Old Testament prophet Joel, we hear an echo of the same thing:

And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

Even though we know the cause of an eclipse is a syzygy, that’s the fourth time today I’ve used the word syzygy, even though we know it, it still seems pretty remarkable. And we still learn something from it. I’m planning to get up on Tuesday and see what I can see, although it might be a little hard to see from Right Field Farm, but the rest of you should get somewhere above the treeline or skyline and make sure you have an unobstructed view to the west, or to the east and the west if you want to see the full selenelion, the sun and the lunar eclipse at the same time.

Apparently the atmosphere acts as a prism, which is why even though it’s a syzygy, that’s five, you can still see both the sun and the moon, and the earth for that matter.

Before we light our candles and think about all this, I want to read one more eclipse quote from the Old Testament, this one from the prophet Amos, we’re actually going to read two parts of his prophecy. First,

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night,

who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land— the Lord is his name.

Such poetry. It’s not the only time Amos mentions an eclipse, and we know that a total solar eclipse happened where he lived in 763 BCE. We know because we can calculated it, but also because we have contemporary Assyrian sources that mention it.

The meaning, again, was different from what we might ascribe to it today, and we’re going to read a little bit more from the prophet Amos.

For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins.

There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts.

Therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times, for the times are evil.

Seek good, not evil, that you may live.Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is.

Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy

I was especially noticing the verse there in the middle, “therefore the prudent keep quiet in such times,” but I’m going to have to think on it some more. The closing is really what sticks with me from it - “Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy.”

Let’s light our candles and think about syzygy, there’s my sixth lifelong use of that word, and selenelion together, but let’s also not forget that the turning of the seasons and the spiraling of our little planetary system can still inspire us to turn away from wrong and turn toward good.

I love you all so very much, and I can’t believe we get to have all four of you home next weekend, it’s going to be an epic total eclipse of my heart.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

It’s hard to know exactly who to blame for what’s going on with the weather, but I blame the groundhog. I can hardly believe we’re getting another big winter storm and the snow isn’t even completely melted from the previous one. Capital Weather Gang is calling for three to six inches of accumulation for us, which would be fun and cozy if we weren’t just getting over weeks of snowcrete.

There are signs of spring as well, though. I was delighted on Thursday and Friday when the snow cover melted enough that I could see the snowdrops starting their glory run. Every year after they bloom I’ve been carefully transplanting a few, well maybe more than a few, and we’re starting to have a little glade between us and Will and Kelsey that feels magical in the very early spring.

The hellebores are starting to peek their blooms up as well, they’re not open yet, but they sort of shoulder out of the ground, and when I was out taking pictures of the snowdrops and noticed a few purple shoulders peeking out from last season’s raggedy foliage. Snowdrops are always the start of spring for me, followed closely by hellebores and then daffodils.

This morning I was listening to Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, and I learned that the word Lent comes from the Old English word for spring, lencten. And even though it sounds like the Modern English word lengthen, it’s not exactly the same, although it is a reference to longer days. Which is perhaps the most visible sign of spring to me.

I really love how mixed up everything gets when any religion meets culture. Lent is the English word for today, but in other languages, but especially in Latin, the period is named for the forty days, and in fact today is known as Quadragesima Sunday, or Fortieth Sunday. We can get a sense of how Lent has evolved since the ancient times - since we count forty days differently now, skipping Sundays and going all the way to Easter.

Today would have been the start of the fasting season in some places, and if you’re not already set on your practice for this year, it’s not too late.

Actually on the topic of it not being too late, I’ve messed up my fast every single day so far. I’ve been keeping a fast with no food and water from sunrise to sundown. Part of what inspired me this year is that Ramadan and Lent started on the same day, which doesn’t happen very often. It’s not impossible this will be the last time in my life, or at least the last time that I’m young and healthy enough for this kind of fast.

It’s a form of fasting that’s got ancient roots, and was for the first few centuries of the Christian church the normal way to do it, actually I don’t know if they did sunrise, they might have only eaten after sundown, but abstaining from food and water during the day for forty days does have a history.

In the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, it’s how Moses communes with God when he gets the ten commandments:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

We’re going to come back to Moses in a minute, but I want to finish a different thought first, which is that during my four-days-so-far of fasting, I’ve found myself mindlessly sticking something in my mouth to eat it at least once every day. On Thursday I went to a cut flower meeting where one of my friends had made lemon poppy seed sourdough, and I remembered my fast just as I was swallowing my second bite. Or on Saturday when I was cooking dinner, I grabbed a bit of fried potato and popped it in my mouth to eat, just out of habit.

Part of the reason I’m sharing this is just to say that there’s no such thing as breaking a streak during Lent, we just start anew with each breath. If you had a hard time with setting your intent or keeping your intent, Quadrasegesima Sunday is a great time to reconnect to it, but so is every following day.

I’m reminded of the verse in Lamentations that says, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” I try to remember that whenever I’m starting over, which your mama reminds me is every time I take in a breath.

We’ve talked about this before, but there are actually forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, which means there are also six feast days, canonically each of the Sundays starting with today. I’m celebrating my fast a little differently, still keeping with the forty days, but I’m being flexible about if the feast day happens on Sunday or on a different day, for instance if Zoe and I decide to brave the thundersnow tomorrow and meet for lunch, that will be my feast day instead of today. Although the weather is not looking auspicious.

I want to get back to the topic of Moses and his forty day fast, though. The next verse after he comes down from the mountain with the tablets, we learn this:

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.

I doubt this will happen to me, and I don’t think it’s just because I missed a couple days, but apparently I wouldn’t be the one to notice if it did happen anyway. But I do want to zero in on the end part of that verse, where it says that Moses had spoken with the Lord.

The point of Lent is not only to give something up, it’s the time for Big Renewal. It’s the time to speak with the Lord, to serve others, and maybe even if my face isn’t glowing with the radiance of the shekinah glory, it is indeed my hope that there will be a noticeable change wrought in me, even if I don’t know exactly what it is.

I hope you are all having a good fast, and if it’s not perfect, well, I see you there, and I welcome you to the human race. I love you all so much, and I hope you’re warm and cozy in this snowstorm, which with any luck may be our last of the season, although according to the groundhog we might still have a couple more weeks of this coming.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

What a treat that I got to see all of you this weekend, even briefly. I don’t mean to taunt anyone who couldn’t be there on Saturday morning, but when I got to Zoe’s apartment to pick up Katie after she stayed over to watch the Olympics, there was coffee cake just coming out of the oven, and it was SO GOOD!

Katie and I stayed there at Zoe’s apartment and chitchatted with her and her roommates just long enough for the coffee cake to be ready to eat, and we watched one of them play a couple rounds of Mario Kart in the living room

It gave me such a powerful wave of nostalgia. I told them all that thirty years ago, my roommates and I were doing the exact same thing, playing Mario Kart in the living room of our college apartment, although I will confess that Zoe and her roommates are a little neater than we were. We even had younger siblings visit us!

The apartment my roommates and I rented was the upper two floors of a house, and I lived there until I moved to DC right at the beginning of 2001. This was before the days of ubiquitous wifi connections being fast enough for video games, so when we would play something like Age of Empires, we would string ethernet cables through the hallways and network our computers the old fashioned way. One of my favorite memories of that game was starting a game one Saturday night and getting so lost in it that when I next looked up it was time for me to get to the Sunday School class I was teaching.

Most of the time, watching TV or playing video games was a fun and healthy way to disconnect, and no matter what jokes people make about screenagers and their screens, we had plenty of screens in our apartment, they were just a bigger, and at least one of my roommates watched TV almost all the time when he was awake and at home.

But all good things must come to an end, and I moved to DC, where I was both busy and lonely, well, at least until I met your mama, but shortly after I moved to DC, I started playing a very silly arcade style game I found on the Internet that was, for whatever reason, extremely addictive for me. There were times I would play it for twelve hours at a time, times when I really wanted to be doing work, but it was just hard for me to unplug. I still don’t know exactly why, it just released the exact right little dopamine hit every time I captured some bees inside of a bubble, which was literally the whole premise of the game.

Whenever I’ve gotten that obsessed with anything, whether it be a silly video game or something else, it’s always such a strange experience. I want to be doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. In my mid twenties the thing I was supposed to be doing was usually writing code, and I did spend a lot of time doing that, but sometimes instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing or that I wanted to be doing, I was staring at my screen, capturing flying bumblebees with a bubble wand.

Most the time, an obsession like that one just kind of runs its course. Either it gets boring, or it eventually becomes enough of a problem that it becomes urgent to deal with. Quitting is hard, not quite as hard as it was to quit cigarettes, maybe, but still hard. And made harder by the fact that it was always just a click away.

I’ve been having the same kind of problem with my phone recently, which is a little more dangerous than a single arcade game, because it’s effectively bottomless. And for me lately it’s been the problem of having all these places where I can just scroll through short videos effectively forever. You kids have never experienced this, but it’s not unlike flipping channels in the old days, where you’d have fifty cable channels and a remote and just browse from show to show to show, except the short videos take longer to get boring than channel surfing did.

I’ve tried a few tricks that have helped. I put my phone on black and white mode, which surprisingly makes it a lot less interesting. I use the focus friend app, you wouldn’t believe how nice my bean’s apartment is, it’s like getting obsessed with that almost fills my need to be obsessive. The thing is, I don’t really get much from scrolling on my phone, and almost anything that I could be doing instead is what I’d rather be doing.

As I was thinking about writing for today’s Meeting, I kept returning back to the book of Romans, which has lots of gems in it, but I’m going to read a verse from chapter seven now:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

This is written by the Apostle Paul, and he’s talking about himself, and it might be the most relatable thing in all of his letters. “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

Yikes!

I guess I’m not the very first person who’s had a problem with being able to control my own attentions and desires. Someone else has run into the same problem.

Paul winds up talking a lot about the difference between the Spirit and the Body, which is very much in keeping with a first-century-CE idea, but it’s not too dissimilar to a way we have of thinking about addiction and obsessiveness now. Our bodies can become reliant on something, whether it be the aforementioned cigarette, which I became physically addicted to in my twenties, or if it be a silly video game that titrates out just the right amount of dopamine, or if it be a pocket-based supercomputer that trillionaires have spent ungodly sums of money to make it as easy as possible to flip through short videos.

When I think of the Spirit in this context, the Spirit is the part of me that wanted to not smoke a cigarette, or the part of me that wants to put my phone down. And the part that doesn’t want to is, well, my blood chemistry and my eyeballs and my silly fingers who just aren’t cooperating.

I’m suspicious of mind-body dualism, this idea that there’s a me and another me, and one of them is separate from the other one. And I’m especially suspicious of the idea that is present there in the book of Romans that the capital-f-Flesh is bad. Later in chapter eight, Paul says it like this:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.

When I think about it with my own modern sensibilities, circling back to what we said before, I definitely have blood, and my blood definitely has chemicals in it, and sometimes that blood chemistry seems… I dunno… determined, if blood chemistry can be determined, that blood chemistry seems determined to get me to smoke a cigarette or scroll on my phone or whatever other thing that my higher desires would like to resist.

How do I know they’re higher desires? Well, because when the higher desires win out, I feel better, I do better, for others, for myself.

Before we light our candles, we’ll end on an even more optimistic note from this same part of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul outlines this whole thing about the ongoing battle between the spirit and the body, but then tells them “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.”

I love all you children of God so much, and I hope you’re always able to do what you want to do. Katie reminded me earlier that this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Seems like it might be a good time for me to give up staring at my phone, I’ll have to think about that a little more. Let’s light our candles and think about it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notesformeeting.substack.com

Today we’re going to spend a little time with a parable that Jesus told, the Parable of the Sower. But first we’re going to talk a bit about the genre of parables, and what they’re for.

I can’t remember how many of you were here at the dining room table when Tomi was talking about Plato and esoteric knowledge, but I don’t think it was everyone, so a brief recap is in order. Tomi was mulling over an approach to reading Plato, well, really of reading philosophy, that was advocated by a philosopher named Leo Strauss.

Strauss was born in Germany, and taught most of his career at the University of Chicago, but for his final three years of academic work, he was a scholar in residence at St. John’s. He and his wife are both buried in Annapolis, I think in that cemetery right there where General’s Highway meets West Street, across from the mall.

Strauss advocates for a reading of Plato, where we see both a plain meaning and an esoteric meaning. When you hear the word esoteric, think of something that’s not for everybody, it’s just for the inner circle, or the already-initiated. Strauss argues that this is how philosophy would have been read and understood in the time it was developed, and he strongly dislikes at least some of the more modern readings of these texts.

There are plenty of reasons a person who was thinking and teaching and preaching and writing in the ancient times might have wanted to obscure some of what they were saying, and indeed there were lots of people who didn’t write anything down. Socrates comes to mind, but also Jesus. He never wrote anything down, and everything we know about him was written down by other people, and most of those weren’t first hand accounts.

Jesus certainly did speak in parables, but it’s also worth remembering that the people who wrote about the things Jesus said may have also had their own reasons for being a little obscure with some of the teachings. Still, one important way of reading the accounts in the Gospels is to consider them the way people might have read them when they were written.

In the Gospel of Mark, there’s a nod to the esoteric view, this part of the story is from right after Jesus tells them the Parable of the Sower, and the disciples ask him about it.

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,

“‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding;otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”

Here we have a nod to that idea there are some secrets for the insiders that are obscured from outsiders, which is what esoteric means. Esoteric is for insiders. Notably, Jesus is quoting the prophet Isaiah there at the end, giving us a sense of who the insiders might be.

So let’s rewind and read the parable itself.

“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

The thing that I’m struck by when I read this parable, is that it actually seems pretty obvious. Of course I’ve known the story since I was a kid, and we used to sing it as a song at church camp. But also, Mark records Jesus telling the disciples exactly what it means in the next section, right after he tells them how mysterious it is.

When I was talking to Lina about it, I told her I thought the writer of the book of Mark might just have been trying to make the reader feel smart, or feel like one of the insiders instead of one of the outsiders.

The surface meaning also just makes a lot of sense, and the funny thing about the surface meaning of this parable, is that it’s story about esoteric knowledge. It’s a story about what happens when you tell a story, actually when you tell anything to different people who are differently prepared to hear it. Here’s the explanation Jesus gives in the book of Mark:

“Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Part of what this story is telling us is that we need to look deeper than the surface of stories, that the story might not be just a story, that we actually have to think about it for a little while, we have to let it put down some roots and grow.

That word, Word, is one of the areas we might look a little deeper in the story. The word Word, or Logos in the Greek, is one of the words we use as a synonym for Jesus. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. So here, the writer of the Gospel of Mark is telling us that the Word isn’t going to take root everywhere.

But also, it literally just means word, same as in English. Anything someone might tell us or anything we might tell someone else.

I like this story a lot, but I’m a little suspicious of the idea that it’s esoteric, for two reasons. The first is that for something clever, it’s pretty obvious. The second is that it seems counter to the whole ethic of spreading the word, which Jesus is pretty insistent on. To me, the story isn’t so much about insiders and outsiders as it is about pausing and considering more deeply.

When I was Tomi’s age, I was working for Dale Thiele on his ranch, changing irrigation pipes. Hopefully Dale doesn’t get wind of this, but one of the things he told us to never ever ever do was to drive on any of the fields where crops were planted, and of course we never did, except once I just really needed to turn around in a field with newly sown rye, and so I did.

It packed the soil down just a little, you could hardly see it, but every time I went to go change irrigation in that field for the rest of the summer, you could see the tire tracks. Well, not the tracks themselves, but there was a perfectly shaped pickup-turnaround strip of rye that never grew as well as tall the rest of the rye in the field. At the end of the season when it was harvested, the rye in those tire tracks from the pickup were about six inches shorter than everywhere else, and I thought about the Parable of the Sower every time I looked at them.

The story took root in other ways those summers, too.

One way of thinking deeply about something is to just think about it for thirty years and then tell your kids or your friends about what you’ve figured out in those thirty years, and that’s not exactly esoteric, but it’s still special. I also like that the someone special in this story is a farmer, which I imagine lots of his audience could relate to. In some other parables, the hero of Jesus’s story is a fisherman or a servant.

I like to think the parables were mostly about bringing more people in rather than about keeping certain people out. And what this parable tells me is, maybe think about things like they’re on good, strong, deep soil. That’s what I’d like us to do while we light our candles.

I love you all so very much.

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