[I was recently meandering through farmland when a couple
of sheets of paper stapled together, caught my attention. A southerly was
howling, but beyond that I have no clue to their provenance. Well-schooled in The
Famous Five, though, I am always ready for adventure, so I began to read. Unfortunately,
what I later discovered was bovine faecal material had obscured the letterhead
and the details of the addressee. Ah well. Life’s great mysteries … But I read
on, and you may too]
Dear and Most Esteemed Professor
I hope you will pardon my addressing
you thus, or indeed having the temerity to address you at all, but when we met
you were so emphatic that this is what – (or is it who?) – you are, that I fear
it would be remiss of me to offer any lesser form of salutation. Even so it is
a mere shadow of the reverence with which, your insistent tone made clear, with
which you are accustomed to being addressed. And rightly so, I hasten to add,
for there was no room to doubt the gravitas of your claims.
But oh my goodness, how gauche
of me! Of course you won’t remember having met me. So august a personage
as yourself meets countless admirers, even before enumerating those of lesser
significance. Those who, like myself, were foolishly unaware of your momentous
significance, but who inevitably become devotees when you delineate the height and breadth and depth of your
wisdom and authority.
I am naturally so thankful that
the scales that once covered my eyes fell from me at the time of our encounter.
You were very patient as you made clear the vast repertoire on which you draw,
vast deposits of wisdom that I cannot begin to fathom, but which you were
graciously willing to hint at by outlining your all but endless catena of
qualifications and roles.
So while I realize that your
remarkable prowess for recall would normally need no external aid, I recognize
too that this mere iota, jot, tittle, zeptomoment of consciousness will have
been filed under “r” in the vast corridors of your experience. I must therefore
(and please grant my unworthy self your gracious tolerance) momentarily plead
your anamnesis of that fractured happenstance in the narrative of that your greatness,
which you so graciously outlined.
You will of course be familiar
with anamnesis, for your vast knowledge of languages ancient and contemporary inadvertently
burst forth from your shield of modesty when you mentioned that you would give
me no more than a gamma minus – it occurred to me that your mastery of
languages was demonstrated even more vividly by your easy segue from one
Mediterranean language to another – for the work I was undertaking in your presence.
But oh dear: I had forgotten to
mention the circumstances of our illuminating encounter! Despite my gross inadequacies
I had been asked to facilitate – (never “lead” when such majesty of mind was participating!) – a confluence of representatives
seeking to, I think the cliché could become “future scan,” for a corporate organization
of which you are a part.
You may recall the meeting? It
wasn’t significant on the international scale of things to which Dr Google
later assured me you are accustomed to contributing. But then as a learned academic
and influencer of human society you wouldn’t know of this infradig font of
information. Nevertheless, the degrees of passion that you and others exhibited
meant that even the most sclerotic of synapses, the most saturated of minds may
have registered some imprint of proceedings.
It was, if I recall, a
faith-based, Christian faith even I think, assembly (though of course evidence is
often hard to accrue at these gatherings). I recall some ambivalence about
this: was this not also the meeting at which one of those present, (who you and
your fellow participants described in terms of inseparably close kinship, a
brother) expostulated loudly, proclaiming “this is bullshit” before making a
dramatic, Shakespearean even, exit?
But that was before the process
had begun, so perhaps my gamma minus recall has conflated events: perhaps that
explosion of faecal passion emanated from the more agricultural environs of the rugby match that I watched later? It’s so hard to recall
such details: “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” But I digress
again. Flimsy minds do that, I’m sorry.
Oh dear, the digressions have
threatened to overwhelm the point. Where was I?
Ah, but I recall! I had in fear
and trembling approached your personage to glean your name. It seemed so unhelpful
to be stumbling along, fatally flawed by comparison with you, who had emerged
as a frequent interlocutor in proceedings, without some sort of nomenclature.
The frequency and stridency and repetitive nature of your expostulations and
other ejaculations had brought you to my attention. I was of course immediately
aware of your equanimity – how could I be otherwise? Once, when a diminishing
inflection and catatonic pause had punctuated one of your fiercely rational outbursts,
I had errantly deduced that you had made your point and begun to continue my
own work. You rightly set me back on the path of obeisance, demanding an apology
for speaking before you invited me to do so. It might have been then that I decided
most cravenly to seek identification of your person? Or maybe it was when I
attempted to answer one of your interjections about process, fallibly attempting
to give words to procedures far beneath your contempt, and receiving your just admonition
that I was treating you as an infant.
I wasn’t of course. I was so
aghast at daring to give words to process when a learned professor sat at my
feet that I lapsed into the prelinguistic utterances of a mere infant. No
wonder you were bemused! No wonder not
amused! The shame. Had you only spoken earlier of that which a more discerning soul
than me would have intuited I would oh so gladly have vacated the floor, for
such opportunities to sit at the feet of greatness are so rare, and your
leadership would have proved infallible.
But, dim as I am, I was yet to
concretize the inchoate or perhaps instinctive knowledge that your obvious mana
was so imprinted with academic imprimatur. I was so aghast that my words were
less – well, less alpha magnus I guess – than you would wish. When later I
learned from you of your intellectual and systematic magnitude I was overawed. But
I was already overawed, as I have mentioned. So much greatness!
Ah, these digressions must end. I
am, forgive me, so valuing at least the pretence of discourse with your
learned self. As you may know, or would know had you ever had cause to notice
my insignificance, I have an interest myself in that faith-based organization for
which we were both, on that day, seeking to discern (or in my far less
academically gifted, more stumbling way, “imagine”) a future. It is an ancient
and was once a trusted corporate organization. Yes, that, even though your kin’s
faecal outburst serves as a reminder of the Teutonic fall from standards of
decency that even those claiming access to prim holiness eventually undergo.
But knowing now that I momentarily
walked in the shadow of such intellectual grandeur as yours, I am, loathe
though I am to trouble the greatness of your mind with mundanities, emboldened
to ask a question of exegesis. You see your particular wing of the corporate body
has drawn firm lines in the sand. You have objected strenuously to “otherness”
of sexuality, based on a text or two from ancient writings. Clearly my
exegesis, by which the central figure of the New Testament extends radical
hospitality and welcome to all, is flawed.
You see, when I inadvertently took
to heart and method the observation of the author of one of the biblical letters
(a sermon, in fact[i])
that those who behave like children should be treated like children, when I inadvertently
responded to what seemed to this more flawed human being to be mere petulance
and intransigence, when I treated the source of the interruptions accordingly
as childish, I accepted your remonstrance and apologised. Maybe after all it
was at that moment that I needed to ascertain your name (with full knowledge of
the weight of “name” in both Māori and Hebrew traditions) and was emboldened
as if by the Spirit to seek the information from you, for I perceived your sense
of importance and of en-title-ment.
So I sought your name.
I received instead an emphatic
enunciation of your title, you see, hence the hyphens. I don’t suppose you saw
what I did there, but never mind.
Tangentially, perhaps, I received to
my surprise an uninvited insight into one of those great moments of the
biblical narrative that you and your kind so vociferously espouse. You see when
your Jesus (and mine) was interrupted by pompous critics in the marketplace he
suddenly burst into an exposition of the word “father.” “Call no one on earth
your father,” was, if I use correctly my terribly flawed gamma minus anamnesis,
his response.
Many of your kin – who knows, perhaps
you too? – used to be fond of quoting that verse (Matthew 23.9, if your august busyness
clouded out the memory). Actually it followed quickly on the heels of a series
of sayings about “tying up heavy burdens, placing them on the shoulders of
others,” sayings that would have of course nothing to do with the attitude that
many of your kin have extended to those of “other” sexualities (not to mentions
faiths, cultures, and who knows what other demarcations). Funnily enough, and
again only if my anamnesis is not fatally, irretrievably flawed, that sort of
demarcation was the flash point that led circuitously to the day and the circumstances
on and through which we momentarily met.
But, your worthiness, I wonder if your
immeasurable expanse of intellectual vigour might help me with the one question
that I want to put to you, that is the purpose of this brief (by biblical
proportions) letter?
You see, as I mentioned, when I asked
your name you gave me instead, emphatically, your claim to greatness. “I am,”
you intoned sonorously, “Professor …” oh heavens, after the
emphasis on your title I forget the rest. I was so overawed, I suppose. Then
you delivered a quick curriculum vitae … I learned in brief but laboured
sentences of your many claims to be infinitely superior to your struggling
interlocutor.
I realised that in a corporate
community in which sola fide (you’ll know the Latin, of course) is all
but a mantra, the claim is empty. Your degrees, your curriculum vitae,
these rather than empty claims of “Christ who lives in me,” were your claim to
satisfaction, redemption, and first-class residency of the Reigns of God.
So my question at last: is a
phylactery merely a phylactery, or might it be all the paraphernalia by which
you exclude, belittle, and silence those you consider unworthy of your
greatness?
You may of course want to read
all of Matthew 23. Though I suspect so great a repository of knowledge will
know it by heart. Though hearts can accrue scar tissue, I guess.
Enquiring minds want to know.
That’s all. In abject humility of course …
[1]
You are familiar with
endnotes, so I am sure you won’t mind looking up Hebrews 5:11-14. Indeed you
might even like to refer to my book exegeting that sermon, though of course you
may award my work that same γ- that you awarded my flawed
presentation.
[at this point the page was
smudged. As mentioned above, pseudo-scientific analysis suggested a bull had deposited faecal
matter. … Sadly (or not) I guess we’ll never know the author]
