“Well, you can certainly say this for Jesus,” I tell Lady,
“he absolutely stirs around. No grass grows under his feet, I can assure you.
Because two weeks ago, he was curing the man miraculously of dropsy—which I had
always thought was epilepsy, but which turns out to be merely edema. Well,
‘merely’ unless you’re like the drug addict I passed on the way to the drug
store. At least, I presume he’s a drug addict, otherwise how did his leg swell
up to such gargantuan proportions?”
“Oh, that’s Robert,” said Lady, “though come to think of it,
I think Robert’s lost both of his legs. But then, maybe not. He’s in a wheel
chair, anyway.”
Lady tends to knows these things, and if not, Elizabeth from
the gift shop does. She’s the one who told me that the old man who instantly
sniffed me out for a sucker had gotten in trouble with the law. What had he
done? Run drugs, either knowingly or unwittingly. Anyway, he’s not around,
which is nice, since he posed a moral problem: was I sinning by begrudging him
for asking me—after he had put in his order for bread, orange juice, and
ham—for an extra five dollars so that he could buy a hamburger at Burger King?
Full confession: I sometimes eat hamburgers too.
“Anyway, it does seem that Jesus would find plenty to do,
here in Old San Juan. I mean, we’re living an almost Biblical existence here.
The poor are everywhere, diving into dumpsters, begging money, displaying their
running sores. And then of course we have the Philistines—re, the tourists, who
are completely oblivious to it all. And the locals, most of whom—like me—have
settled on two or three people to whom we give money; I keep hoping that
somehow there are enough of us, and that we’ve all chosen different people….”
“Well, I always give money to the lady dressed as a medieval
nun, complete with the rope tied around her waist.”
“Oh, so that’s how she buys the bottle of El Canario Cooking
wine,” I told her.
“Oh, dear—didn’t know that.”
“Well, I give a dollar to the guy raising money for his
sister in Barranquitas, since it’s for a liver transplant, and who more than I
should be sympathetic to that cause? Oh, and to Gale, since she’s from
the Bronx, and she’s always making these little collages out of seashells and
corals and anything else she can find. So it’s a salute to tribal unity and
entrepreneurism both….”
“Right—but why all this interest in the poor and needy?”
“I think the cantatas are getting to me, and that—if true—is
totally bad news. Because today’s reading is particularly glum. Yup, Jesus
sails through again, this time curing the man with palsy; he also, by the way,
reads the thoughts of the skeptical scribes, and upbraids them for their lack
of belief. And once again, the multitudes go off amazed—wait, it’s good enough
for the actual quote:”
But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and
glorified God, which had given such power unto men.
“Mathew 9:8, King James Version. Oh, and once again we know
nothing about the man with palsy—it’s one more four-verse miracle, which leads
me to believe that Jesus has invented the equivalent of a drive-through miracle
station. Good American efficiency—wait, better than that, German
efficiency!”
“You know,” said Lady speculatively, “the absolute dearth of
information on these miracle recipients—and shouldn’t there be a better word
for that? Maybe a miraclee, as
opposed to the miracleer, if not miraclist. Anyway, the point is that if
we knew anything about the miraclee, then the assumption would be that he or
she—and his or her individual circumstances—had somehow earned the miracle.
That the widow of Nain was pious and poor, or that the man with palsy had given
alms to the poor, before the palsy struck. But having them utterly faceless, as
it were, means that the miracle was granted wholly independent of circumstances…..”
Damn, she’s good!
“I strongly suspect sheer laziness, though your theology may
be correct. Anyway, however grim the official readings for the 19th
week after Trinity may be, the texts Bach chose are just awful. What do you do
with a text that reads—roughly—‘Oh, destroy this Sodom of sinful inhabitants,
but spare the soul and make it pure, so that it can be a Holy Zion for You!’”
“Ouch—is that for real?”
“Very much for real, and that’s just a snippet. In fact,
most of BWV 48—one of the cantatas for the week—runs on exactly that rail
through twenty minutes or so of self-flagellation. If ever a piece of music
were a hair shirt, this is it.”
“I begin to fear,” said Lady, “that all of this
religion-making is unbalancing you mentally. Have you checked in on what
deleterious effects plagued the creators of the most recent religions?”
“Hmm—excellent point. Are you suggesting I get a
psychological workup before plunging any further into this.”
“Nah, but it would be an idea, perhaps, just to find out
what happened to those who trod down the same path…”
Right—Google time!
“OK—it’s not starting so well. I mean, I knew that the
Mormons were wackoo, but I hadn’t realized how much. I mean, I thought old Joe
Smith had died peacefully in his bed, but it turns out that a couple of his
followers had had Smith thrown into jail on charges of perjury and polygamy.
And they should have known, since Smith had proposed to both of their wives!”
“Hmm—we may have to rethink this project…”
“Right, now moving on to Mary Baker Eddy, of Christian
Science fame. And here the news is substantially better: Eddy died of bacterial
pneumonia in a very well-heeled suburb of Boston—if indeed suburbs can be
well-heeled. Anyway, there’s nothing particularly lurid about her life, except
that she may have been a drug addict, she was definitely a spiritualist, and
she believed in something called reverse animal magnetism—the power of negative
thoughts to harm others, which she felt her former students were using against
her. So she had her current students stand outside her door, guarding her as
she slept. See?”
“Well, yes, an improvement. Though there’s not much of
anywhere you can go, compared with jail and murder. Who’s up next?”
“Well, it’s our old friend Charles Taze Russell, who founded
what would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And he certainly wasn’t without
critics, who accused him of publishing all those tracts, just to make money.
Then there was his wife, who stated that Russell had called himself a floating
amorous jellyfish, happy to engage with all he encountered. Oh, and then there
was the thing about the miracle wheat, which one accuser said Russell was
selling at 60 dollars a bushel. By the way, I went onto quotewheat.com—wonderful what we have
nowadays—and bush is going for just over five bucks a bushel today.”
“Well, those miracles don’t come cheap,” said Lady.
“And then we come to L. Ron Hubbard….”
“What? The scientology guy?”
“Absolutely, and if you can find a crazier dude, I’ll bow my
head to you. Full disclosure—I couldn’t even read the full Wikipedia article on
him. But did I need to? He started as a pulp fiction writer, and then verged
into religion, and at one point he took to the seas, on his private yachts with
his holiest of holies. And they were all so nutso that…well, here’s Wikipedia
on the subject.
Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Venezuela all
closed their ports to his fleet.
“Anyway, he certainly
didn’t do badly for himself, though he ended his life in a motorhome, although
admittedly on his private ranch in California. Oh, and he had a reported 600
million bucks at the time of his death….”
“Hmmm—there is some serious money here. But really, Marc, is
it worth it? Do you really want to found a church that attracts wackos like Tom
Cruise?”
“Doubt if Cruise would get into the sacred works of Johann
Sebastian Bach. But you may have a point.”
“Beethoven,” said Lady. “The perfect antidote to the at
times excessive cerebrality—another
much-needed word—of Bach. Beethoven is just what you need.”
And so I turned to a work that had saturated and informed a
part of my past, as I struggled to get my mother’s last days and death not out
of my life, but rather in its proper place. For she would have been the first
to want it: the dead must be left behind, which is perfectly as they wish it,
and the living? We all have to move on.
Heiliger Dankgesang, here I come!
