Kings and Rubber Cigars

Today is the epiphany, or the theophany if you're Coptic, which always seemed a better name for me since the point is that the day represents the revealing of the theos, or Godness of Jesus, roughly "God Appears" in English. (apologies to those whose greek is far better than mine.)

In most traditions, it celebrates the day the Magi followed the star of Bethlehem to pay their respects to the baby Jesus. "Magi" is a Persian word usually associated with Zoroastrianism, meaning "priest" or "philosopher," but often translated to "wise men" or "king" in English.

The Magi are only mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew. It doesn't mention their names, their countries, or even how many there were. There being three of them, their three different nationalities and their three names are all part of supernumerary and not canon Christian traditions.

Much of the traditions we associate with the Magi come, not from the Gospel, but from the Old Testament, particularly from Isaiah predicting the coming of the Messiah. They bring gifts to the newborn "king of the Jews," or "the true king of the Jews," or "Messiah." Their presence and their naming the baby "King of the Jews" is what first reveals Jesus as the Messiah, and so that's why we celebrate it. It also predicts the next step in the Jesus story, where the acting King of the Jews, Herod the Great, seeks to destroy the baby before it can take his throne, forcing the holy family to escape to Egypt, much like Joseph did.

In English tradition, Ephiphany is associated with wassailing, or the visiting of orchards to procure their cider, which should have a reasonably strong alcoholic content by this time of the year, so it's a good day to get smashed and sing. In the American tradition, you're also supposed to have your Christmas decorations down by today, so you can start putting up your Valentine's day decorations.

We three kings of Orient are

Trying to smoke this rubber cigar

it was loaded and exploded

spreading us ever so far

How to Paint: Lesson One

If I'm gonna do this painting thing, then I'm gonna do it for mastery, not to pass the time because I got nothing better to do.  That sounds like a bold statement for somebody who quit doing it for almost thirty years and was only moderately talented to begin with.  All that's true, but I'm just that kind of an asshole.

I have weird ideas about art.  They're similar to my weird ideas about religion.  Both involve chasing something you can't ever touch and most never catch even a glimpse of.  Beauty is a fundamental force of the universe, both creating and destroying; it is a principal motivator in whatever game God plays.  It's a principal element in what drives him to create, essentially us, as well as everything else, but then also to destroy the same so that its fleeting temporal nature magnifies the intensity of its value.  That its overwhelming power can exist only in the liquid nature of time encourages us to persevere, even though we are meek and puny in the face of beauty.    

Because art and beauty have no structure or definition, I figure if I go about it also without structure and definition, then I'll just get lost and confused and probably drink myself to death like Hemmingway.  Just kidding about that, although losing his path really is how Papa died.  Watercolor is a new medium for me.  That's good, though.  That means I can't use shit I learned when I was sixteen as a crutch.  I have to learn all new disciplines, all new methods, and perspectives.  Since I'm moving into the second half of a centenarian life, I have to be mindful of constantly learning new things to keep my mind exercised to prevent its decline.  I've seen what happens when it declines, and I don't want that.  Since music, dance, and science seem out of the question, art must be the way to go.  I'm not spending the rest of my life learning new words for scrabble.

All of that unnecessary verbiage aside, here's the plan:  five new watercolor paintings a week.  They may be exercises, or they may be an attempt at finished pieces, but there must be five of them, at least nine by twelve inches in size.  Because all my research so far says that drawing is a key element of watercolor, then I'll need to do at least five drawings a week, separate from the painting, although they can be used to prepare myself for a painting.  Draw it once as a drawing, draw it again as the underpinning of a painting, like so.  That's a total of ten hours a week working on this project.  That's nothing.  I used to spend twenty-five hours a week sitting on my ass at scrooges.  This is a lot more productive and a lot less likely to lead me into chatting up a woman who might ruin my life.  The food won't be as good, though, and sometimes I really miss whiskey and tobacco.  There may be weeks when I do ten paintings, but there have to be at least five.  It's too easy to "think about" painting without actually doing it.  I did that for longer than some of you have been alive.  

None of this is to say I will be any good.  None of my efforts to paint or write or draw or sculpt or act is to "be good" or seek approval; it's about whatever that's inside me needs coming out, and it won't leave me alone unless I let it.  There were times in my life when I would do these things and not tell anyone, not my wife, not my mother, not my father; it's not about that.  What's different now is that I've found that it's actually kind of nice if I share what I'm doing.  Sharing is good like Mrs. Nelson said.  Naps are good too, but I've napped too long.  It's time for work.

Lessons of the Cross

 

Despite what the Beatles tell you, the amount of love you give does not equal the amount of love you take. In many lives, the amount of love you put into the world greatly out measures the amount of love the world returns to you by the final act. They know this, but they move forward despite it, because they know a secret.

You must go, fearless, into the abyss of this inequity because if you do not, there is no life at all. Most of the people who know this terrible secret never mention it. They serve, they love, they suffer, they die, and they do it for you. That is the lesson of the Christ.

I'm not Jesus. I cannot promise you love and life and redemption eternal because, unlike Jesus, I have not seen it. For all I know, it could be a myth created to make us feel better.

What I do know is this: if you falter, if you fail, if you do not make your proper contribution to this cycle of declivity and suffering, then those who come after you will have even less love, less opportunity, less hope, than you had. Only through your sacrifice is their redemption possible. That is the lesson of the cross. Turn away if you must, but the price of your absence will be paid not by you but by those who come after.

Journeys of Faith

The Christian apologists I depend on the most are Spong and Lewis (C.S., not T.W., although T.W. is way up there). There are oceans between their perspectives, but I believe Christology is that deep and varied if you give it a chance.

The question every Christian must answer is "do you believe?" and I never know how to answer that. I do not have child-like faith, but I didn't have it as a child, either. I was, and am, a very nervous and frightened child. That makes it very difficult to have a complete and blinding faith in anything or anyone.

There was a time when I chose to disavow all childhood instruction and memes and tribal fielty with regards to Christianity and start over, to rebuild my faith on my own terms as an adult. Begining from a position of no belief, I rebuilt the foundations of my faith, brick by brick to discover what I really felt and what I could really present as my own life.

In my journey to rebuild my faith, I included two atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins. I didn't think I could make an honest conclusion without considering all sides of the issue, and for people without faith, these two are among the best. 

Dawkins' ideas about memes actually provided me the building blocks of my new faith. Combining Dawkin's theories about memes with Jung's theories about archetypes allowed me to hypothesize that maybe this is the language by which the divine communicates with us, and that's why these memes and archetypes repeat themselves in nearly every culture. It's a way to deliver these gigantic ideas to us in smaller, digestible pieces.

Faith is a journey, not a destination, and it's a journey we make every moment of our entire lives; even if we tell ourselves our minds and our hearts are settled on the subject, they never really are. Lewis is somebody you might think had a settled and firm faith, but if you read A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, Joy, you'll see that even Lewis had an evolving and changing faith and faced days when the well seemed dry and unrecoverable.

I start essays like this thinking by the end, I'll come up with some sort of constructed and complete point, but on this particular subject, I never do. Maybe there is no focused point in faith. Maybe there's not meant to be. Maybe we're not able to complete this mind journey while we're alive. Maybe that was the point all along.