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I am a man of frail, faint faith — ὀλιγόπιστος, oligopistos, as Jesus frequently calls his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel — and spending a Lent in reflection on death has not engendered an efflorescence of unwavering confidence in me. In hymn, Death no longer can appall, but once the hymn is over I’m as appalled as ever.

What I lack in faith, though, God provides in a generous abundance of the lives around me. Last night, Margaret and I felt the radiance of the reverent faith of the servers at St. Luke’s; they enacted the church’s believing through their unornamented observance of the ceremonies of the Easter Vigil. A moment-and-a-half’s reverent kneeling, a careful step, a creed in motion.

And several weeks ago, when Lent was new, Seabury gathered around the altar for a Friday midday mass, and someone had brought Elizabeth, a year-old child, along. Elizabeth was dressed in marvelous, brilliantly colorful clothing; and at the beginning of a season I had committed to spend in reflection on death, I was moved to tears by the glorious human gesture of dressing up our ephemeral, vulnerable mortality with all the bold grandeur that craft can muster. I will soon die, Elizabeth will soon die, but for these few days we can defy corruption with love, can defy gray ash with vibrant color, by God we can live!

My feeble faith doesn’t matter that much, in the end. A faith deeper and stronger, fuller and wiser, truer and more durable catches me up and bears me beyond the bounds of what my hobbled imagination can posit, to Truth that I cannot comprehend. Unlimited by the horizons of my judgment, faith surrounds and inhabits me, and John’s reverence, Elizabeth’s luminous attire, my weak faith, these provide a staging-ground for God’s invincible grace. Here I kneel; I can do no other.

I filed my taxes electronically this afternoon. Though I have lots to say about my paper for next Saturday and Easter and stuff, today I’m just purging the tax experience from my mind. Thanks for the helpful advice — we’ll definitely take it once the trauma has abated.

Meantime — beginning at sundown — Happy Easter!

Betsy Devine is a very funny woman, but she’s also an implacable enemy of political fustian. She’s sunk her teeth into the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal and serves up all the details that more conventional news sources don’t think fit to print.

If you noticed my recent reticence online, I can explain that this year I’m having a particularly acute case of my annual tax-phobia-stress. Every year, I resolve to track down an accountant to do them for me; every year, I put it off till too late. I’m going public with this year’s panic so that there’s no chance that my irrational dread be a secret, and that anybody can ask me, “Have you gotten your accountant yet?”

I think I have all the information I need to get my taxes out this weekend without filing for an extension. I am really, really determined to not do this next year.

The Secretary of the Chicago Society for Biblical Research has been after me for a long time, to read a paper at one of the meetings we hold (meetings that I hardly ever have time to go to, so why I should be reading a paper at one escapes me). The papers I remember typically concern Chicago-school sorts of interpretive questions — detailed social and litarary analyses of texts, good stuff — so when he emailed me a few weeks ago, I said that there’s really nothing I’m working on now that would answer. “Well, what are you working on?”

At this point, most of my readers would have had the common sense to cough, or change the subject, or lose his email. I, however, am simple enough that I just told him what was on my present work agenda (kneading some of the ideas from my last year of lectures and papers into a preface for the Fortress Press book) — not at all the usual run of CSBR fare, more broadly hermeneutical. “We can take a hermeneutics paper,” he said. “Plus, it would be really rough; it’s work in progress,” I apologized. “We assume that all these papers are work in progress,” he assured me, and I had no polite way out.

So a week from Saturday, I’ll be presenting a paper on the legitimacy of academic biblical interpretation, a sort of mirror-image consideration of the questions concerning theological interpretation that I’ve been chewing on for the past year. Few in the audience will have heard my previous talks, so I can reuse some of that material, and I’ll bend it around to confront a different set of questions, but I still have to come up with a formal academic paper for the scholars of one of the world’s most theologically-sophisticated cities, in ten days.

More later. Rolls eyes, smacks forehead, again.

Prayers and heartfelt sympathy to Jeneane and Halley. We’re holding your hands, wiping your eyes. We love you and we’re with you. You too, Joey.

It’s seventy degrees outside — and the heat has finally come on in my office.

At the end of a busy day, I wish I had something short enough and weighty enough to blog. There are plenty of topics about which I have long pieces to write — but they come in second to doing taxes and writing the preface to one of the books coming out this year. I have been reflecting a lot about death this Lent, and I expect to write down some of the cosmically-inconsequential, but personally important, nexuses of what I’ve been trying to think out.

Margaret’s coming home Wednesday; they’re actually getting near the end of classes, and she’ll be home for some of the summer. That’something I haven’t even vaguely dreamed of: being together every day.

But now it’s time to go to sleep.

Show me someone who doesn’t care much about sump pumps, and I’ll show you someone whose basement never flooded, and who doesn’t have a hole in her or his basement floor isn’t filling up with ominously murky-looking water.

Our hard-working emergency maintenance guy put in a new sump pump for us yesterday, and let me tell you, I am intensely interested by sump pumps, and delighted that ours is working fine.

I’ve heard newscasters refer to the Italian premier as a “tycoon” or “media tycoon” so often that it usually just wafts by me — but this morning, I wondered how audiences would react if our news sources typically referred to the U.S. president as “oil tycoon George Bush” (or more precisely, “heir to oil wealth”). Maybe he doesn’t have enough money to qualify as a tycoon (how much?), or doesn’t have a sufficiently extensive array of holdings. What makes Berlusconi a “tycoon,” while Bush is simply an extraordinarily wealthy just-plain-American guy?

Several weeks ago, I chafed at some folks’ tendency to make an idol of “justice”; this morning, Margaret sent a quotation from officially-important theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who spoke about “emancipation” in similar terms: “

“There is a real danger of ideologizing. Hardly any other word seems so excessively used, so hyper-legitimate, and so emotionally charged in present discussions.”
Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, Johann Baptist Metz (transl. David Smith) (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980).

That’s the kind of point I was trying to make.