Diary of a Wimpy Catholic
Hearing Ben Carson quote Proverbs on humility and fear of the Lord inspired me. There he was, a neurosurgeon and liberator of conjoined twins, a former professor of medicine, synthesizing faith and science and burning The Donald with truth in charity. I decided I must find a favorite Bible verse of my own.
That I don’t have one already might come as a bit of a shock, but I’m Catholic, not evangelical. Our theological disputes rarely turn into games of the dozens with Bible quotes offered up in place of squibs beginning “Your mama so fat that…” For my purposes, it’s enough to know that St. Paul, in first Corinthians, said something about a foot, and that Jesus said something about an extra pair of sandals in Luke. Google will furnish the rest in a pinch.
Besides, the essence of both Testaments, all 70-odd books, can be boiled down to last Sunday’s Gospel reading, which concludes with Jesus telling the disciples:
Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it.
Yes, yes. Put aside the butter and the dressing and eat your vegetables plain. And like them. Everything circles back to that single stern directive, even the parts that seem to promise a change of pace. Is your couch among the dead? Pick up your cross and follow me. Yeah, jerky, you get an “A” for imagery with your nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon — now take up your cross and follow me. The Holy Writ is like a bulging bag of cookies containing a single fortune.
I should come clean and confess that I sometimes find myself in the grip of – I hesitate to call it depression. The worst kind, the catatonic kind, cost an old friend his promising army career. Only once did I get to observe its effects up close, and it was a horror like nothing I’d ever seen.
But at certain moments, bad memories, along with harsh judgments on the affairs of the present and bleak predictions for the future, multiply like amoeba until they’re fairly squirming inside my head. Squirming like bugs, I should say, because French colonial soldiers serving in austere outposts like Abomey and Sidi Bel Abbès reported similar symptoms and spoke of avoir le cafard – having the cockroach. After their example, I’ll call it the Brain Bug.
Though not to be compared with leukemia or cerebral palsy, the Brain Bug can make taking care of business exceedingly hard. For as long as it lasts, “Take up your cross and follow me” carries the flat, tyrannical ring of a Soviet slogan. Together with Flannery O’Connor’s line about faith not being a fuzzy blanket – which I always imagine delivered with a hag’s cackle – it becomes another bug wriggling in the pile.
Trust a Protestant to repurpose the Word of the Lord from torture device to chicken soup for the soul. A few weeks ago, with the Brain Bug laying its poison eggs, I Skyped with a friend of many years, the wife of an Episcopalian priest whose defense of Christian orthodoxy forced him to flee – there is no other word for it – to a parish in the Far East. After inquiring after local color like typhoons and the habits of mongeese, I let the Brain Bug speak for itself. Mostly, it agonized over the future, which looked bare of any rational hope.
This dear woman began, “Well, you know what the Old Testament says about…”
“Life is like a box of chocolates?” I interrupted with a growl.
“No!” She said. “Now listen.” I imagined her teaching Sunday school and shut up. “Do you know that old negro spiritual that goes “Dem bones, dem bones/Dem dry bones”?
“You mean, ‘The head bone’s connected to the leg bone’, and like that?”
“That’s a bastardized version,” she said primly. “The original refers to the Book of Ezekiel. God showed Ezekiel a valley filled with bones, and these bones had not seen life in a long, long time. They were bare and white, absolutely dry.”
It was, I had to admit, an arresting image. I live in a valley in the desert near a park stocked with animals, and I’ve seen what the sun and the carrion-eaters do to the bodies of those who misjudge oncoming trucks while crossing into human space. Within a few weeks, their bones are white and shiny. Scattered, they look like toys – the remains of a Build Your Own Jackrabbit set, from Mattel.
The minister’s wife continued: “And then God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and when he did, he saw the bones come together again, and then he saw tendons and muscle and skin begin to cover them, which must have looked pretty disgusting, when you think about it.”
I was thinking about it, and I had to agree. It called to mind a scene from The Mummy. None of it had any obvious relevance for the worries I’d just confided, but her telling had a performative quality that made me grateful to her for taking the trouble and, perhaps more importantly, hypnotized me in the manner of a bedtime story. For the moment, the Bug held its peace.
“So you had these bodies, with skin and muscle and intact organs, lying still on the desert floor. And God breathed life into them. And they all stood up together and formed ranks. And then he told Ezekiel, ‘Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ He told Ezekiel to prophesy to them, ‘I will bring you up from your graves and settle you in your own land, and you will know that I am the Lord’.”
Whether from the story itself or the pleasure of recounting it, her face was practically aglow. To my surprise I could picture that great getting-up and feel God’s pity for those people who had lost their hope and whose muscle and tendons – the flesh that answers the will – had been eaten away by, among other creatures, bugs.
So if anyone asks, my favorite Bible verse is now Ezekiel 37:6, or as King James’ translators rendered it: “And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.” It’s a long one, a regular embarrassment of riches when it comes to predicates. But it is physical and practical – who wants to go around without sinews? Best of all, it gives people some leave to doubt the Lord until the good things start happening.
Thank God they didn’t have crosses in Ezekiel’s day.
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