Executive Mansion

            Back in 1973 the band Doctor Hook and the Medicine Show had a top ten hit with the Shel Silverstein song “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone.”  It was about how the group was increasingly successful, but they couldn’t seem to achieve that one symbol of success – getting a picture on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.  Of course subsequent to the song cracking the top ten, the band did get their picture on the cover – but not their photo, they were drawn by a graphic artist.  When I was an undergraduate at OVC, they sent out a newsletter called “Take Thought”, which we called “The Stepping Stone” because most of the articles seemed to feature that ladies organization.  When any of us made the cover (I made the cover in April, 1982) we had this song we would sing: “On the Cover of the Stepping Stone.”  I don’t remember the words, but we rather enjoyed singing it back in the day.

            I felt something of that thrill a few weeks ago when I read about myself in John T. Smithson’s “Smithsonian Sayings.”  John T was preacher here back in the 70’s and began writing his “Sayings” here.  He continued writing them at Starkville, Mississippi, and still publishes them now he is at the St. Elmo Church of Christ in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Smithsonian Sayings” are brief, pithy, humorous, insightful – I’ve been an avid reader for nearly 30 years – and so when I read about “the always-desperate-for-a-bulletin-article-idea preacher” of the Manassas Church of Christ (Deb also made the piece as the “ever-alert, sometimes-witty, always-delightful secretary”), it was like being singled out for mention by the President in the State of the Union Address.  My old friend Fred Callicoat (now gone) was told “happy birthday” on the air by Paul Harvey once.  We were playing dominoes and listening to the radio at the time, and were both ecstatic.  But this was even better.

            It was certainly better than reading my name in Dante’s Paradiso as someone condemned to hell.  I wrote about that years ago in a bulletin article entitled “Is My Name Written There?”  It turned out Dante was writing about the Greek mathematician, “Bruson”, and that often when Greek is turned into English a “u” becomes a “y” – thus “Bryson” in the Modern Library edition.

Read more: THE COVER OF THE ROLLING STONE

            When the girl behind the register rang me up the total came to $16.13.  I thought I had a dime and three pennies, but I had four pennies.  I didn’t want any more pennies, so I gave her $22.03.  She looked confused. I expected that. Kids today (now that I’m 50 I find I start lots of sentences with those two words) don’t seem to know how to make change.  Back in my day (I start quite a few with those four, too), teenaged girls who didn’t know Julian Bonds from Gary U.S. Bonds, or a numerator from a denominator would hang the tray on your windshield, take your cash and say things like: “You got another nickel – that way you get three quarters back.”  Nowadays kids headed to prestigious universities, kids with 4.8 averages because of their loaded courses look at you like  lobotomized Labrador Retrievers when you explain how adding three pennies makes it come out right.  Usually though they will acquiesce. I’ll say “Just trust me,” and they say “Okay.”  Then they usually say “Wow!”, or sometimes “Dude!”  One guy at Barnes&Noble said, “Dude, that’s great!  I always need quarters.  Show me again.”  I did, and said, “Yep.  Math facts.  I try to use one every day.”

            But this girl wouldn’t acquiesce.  She refused to take $22.03 for a $16.13 bill.  She would only take $22.  “It’s too much,” she insisted.  I explained that I didn’t want any more pennies, and that this way it was less change.  “It’s not less change – your way you get 90 cents back and my way you get 87 cents back.”  “Yes,” I insisted, “It is more money, but less change.  87 cents is six coins, 90 cents is five coins, and besides, I don’t want any more pennies.”  “More money is more money,” she said emphatically and rang me up for $22 paid, giving me a five dollar bill, 87 cents in change,  and my three pennies back -  which, of course is $5.90.  I could have had my denouement by asking her to change five pennies for a nickel, but my wife was waiting to eat and would not have found my story amusing, so I pocketed the change and took my tray to the table.

Read more: MAKING CHANGE

            I have just finished rereading Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”  I picked it up again because Shakespeare was 50 when he wrote it – his last play – and I only have only two more months to be 50 myself.  I love this play because it is about a father and a daughter.  I love it because it is about a duke deposed for his books “were dukedom enough.”  It is my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays because it is about forgiveness.  Really, it is about undeserved forgiveness, and so I guess it would be more accurate to say “The Tempest” is about grace.

            “The Tempest” has always reminded me of the book of Ecclesiastes in that it proves even without reward, doing things God’s way is best.  In Ecclesiastes the question is asked, “What is profitable for a man to do under the sun?” (1.3).  The sphere of exploration is confined to human experience “under the sun.”  Of course we know the conclusion of the whole matter – “Fear God and keep his commandments – this applies to everyone.”  Only then are we reminded that in the end there will be punishment and reward (12.13-14).

            In “The Tempest” Prospero, Duke of Milan is deposed by his brother Antonio in a coup not unlike the one Absalom engineers against David in II Samuel.  Prospero and his daughter Miranda are set adrift in a leaky boat, and survive only because a kindly courtier, Gonzalo, gives supplies to them.  They reach an island and Prospero subdues those living on it.  Years later His brother and his brother’s allies end up on the same island, shipwrecked, and in Prospero’s hands.  No one has changed.  Antonio is unrepentant – so much so that he plots further betrayals.  But in the end Prospero forgives everyone anyway, even though they don’t deserve it.  He forgives them not based upon any Godly reasons, but for a variety of very human ones.  He cannot secure his daughter’s future and, at the same time, devote himself to revenge.  He cannot maintain the energy it takes to even every score.  In the end he understands that revenge is ultimately self-destructive, and not worth the effort.

Read more: PIERCING PRAYER

            Yoshida Kenko was a courtier in 14^th century Japan, who retired from the palace, became a Buddhist monk and started writing his observations about life.  They are brief – some take a page or two, some are only a few sentences long – but they are pithy.  His collection, Essays in Idleness,* has been a favorite of mine for years.  He says as much in 100 pages as Montaigne says in 1000, and more than the entire self-help section at Barnes&Noble says at all.  Some of what he writes is unintelligible to those not familiar with court manners in 14^th century Japan (that would include me), but most of his little essays are, to borrow a phrase from Hopkins, “counter, original, and spare.”

            In #52 he tells the story of an old priest who had longed, his entire life, to make a pilgrimage to a certain shrine.  Finally, in old age, he sets out on foot to visit the shrine.  He arrives at the site and worships at two buildings at the foot of a hill.  What he doesn’t know is that the main shrine is at the top of the hill.  He goes home thinking that the holy site was “more sublime than he had heard.”  But he wonders why everyone there kept going up the hill.  Kenko’s moral is: “A guide is desirable, even in small matters.”

            That is not the moral I take from this humorous story.  Maybe the moral should be – “Do your homework before setting out on a pilgrimage of a lifetime.”  Maybe it should be “People really are dense.”  Maybe it should be, “Don’t leave home until you know where you are going.”  But the part about the guide would never have occurred to me.  I grew up being told to think for myself, to “work out my own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2.12 – which is taking this verse out of context, mind you), to be responsible for my own course.  “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley, you’ve got to walk it by yourself,” the old song goes.

            I always admired the self-taught, self-made man: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison.  Perhaps it’s just the individualism that seems to be indelibly printed upon the American fabric having its effect (all the men I mentioned above are Americans), but the notion that you have to carve out your own path through the forest seems obvious to me.  If the priest in the story above had done a little research, asked a few questions, shown a little curiosity he would have known what was at the top of the hill, and he could have climbed it alone.

            Yet a disciple is, by definition, one who follows.  When Jesus called someone didn’t he say “follow me”?  Didn’t Jesus also promise to be with us “all the way, even to the end of the age,” (Matthew 28.20).  Has he intended for any of us to be an autodidact, a knight errant, a lone wolf?  Was it Jesus’ notion that he would provide us with redemption, then push us out of the nest to fly solo?  Do any of us really believe we are up for a solitary journey home?

            So I guess Yoshida Kenko was right.  Even in small things, a guide is desirable – actually, He is necessary. 

* Essays in Idleness, by Yoshida Kenko. Cosimo Classics, 2009.