6th
 Epistle of the Elder of Omaha

 “To the elect lady and her children
  “whom I love in Truth, “2 John 2:1

       Tomorrow is the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist.  Perhaps you have, as the elder, heard or will hear a sermon on Matthew.  It is likely to have gone something like this: one day Jesus walks up to a man setting in a tax booth and tells the man to follow him.   The man gets up and follows him even though there was no pre-history to that call. This apparently illustrates the homiletic point that we ourselves should be ready to take such  risks on the unknown in the same way that this amazing man did.  To bear the cost of discipleship, as will likely be said.  This man in short order entertained Jesus in his home and followed him up to the cross.  Then he was sent out as apostle, authored a gospel and ultimately became a martyr, even through there is no history of him being a martyr!
       This ahistorical call makes the caller, Jesus, and the callee, Levi/Matthew, a myth, which seems not to trouble anyone anymore.   But if you are old enough to have been schooled in the 60's like the elder the result might have been dyspeptic.   We worked our way though the unsettling source analysis of the Five Books of Moses only to be faced with the “demythologizing” of the Gospel by Rudolf Bultmann and company.  In the end, we were better of for this historical criticism.  It was not that we believed less, but that we believed more.  It is a little unsettling to listen to a homiletic which seems to be unaware of the historical problems of material they rely on.
       In honor of Matthew, I share with you an original poem that deals with the historical tension of one called in third decade to the first century CE with the one writing a gospel in the eighth decade or so.   To the fragments of history that can be garnered out of the Gospels about Matthew, there is the early church document, The Didache which illustrates a fluid piece of church life in Syria - Galilee in the early post apostolic era, 50-70, roughly the same time as the church life portrayed by Paul in the Greco Asian diaspora.  

The Song of the Three Matthews

I should like to sing a song of three Matthews,
      of the apostle, of the prophet and of the scribe,
      divided by age, distinct in  function and separated by time,
      yet allegedly held to be one.

First, I would sing of the man who sat in the booth,
       collecting the imperial tax along the shore of the Galilee,
       the owner of a great house where he hosted the Nazarene
       famous for declaring the opening of the kingdom of Heaven.
       This the man who walked out of the booth
       and away from a gracious home
       to follow the Nazarene
       to the foot of the cross
       and then to be sent to the lost sheep of Israel and more,
       only to end in the schooling of a generation of prophets,
       learned in the testimonies of ancient prophets,
       rehearsed in the sayings of the Nazarene.
 .
Second, I would sing of the man called prophet
       who wandered the Galilee, visiting the households
       which had taken the Nazarene in as their Lord:
       comforting them with the explication of oracles
       made in the former times by the prophets of Israel;
       confirming them with the sayings of the Lord
       that had brought them into the kingdom of Heaven.
       He presided over their sacred meals,
       and ordered the heads of their homes
       where they waited for the kingdom to come on earth.
       And he marshaled an army of visiting prophets
       sending them out not only to the Galilee,
       but off in the lands of the Syrians.

Third, I would sing of the man who kept school
        in the heart of the Galilee
        shaping a text partly received and partly expanded
        with the testimonies in which he had been schooled,
        with the oral sayings which he had committed to memory,
        so that the overseers and elders of the merging households
        could keep church no longer dependent on itinerant prophets,
        which he himself once was, or better the student of one,
        who were declining in number and becoming less worthy of trust.

The Apostle saw the passing of his age,
       saw his replacement by the itinerant prophets
       some of whom he had schooled
       and some of whom he feared.

The Prophet saw the end of his days,
       saw himself over ruled by elders and overseers
       some of whom he had ordered
       and some of whose order he feared.

The Scribe saw the end of his task
       saw himself replaced by his text in the hand of elders and overseers
       saw that with it they could normalize and defend their life,
       but also could turn the text against life.

Who then could imagine that these three could be a single author?
       separated by method and time as they were?

 Quick the moderns insist as reason for their doubt
        that it is impossible for them to imagine
        such individuals, unique in person
        and separated by years, to be a single author.
 
And so I see that they who insist
        that they can be known by no one, but themselves,
       and who pretend to know no one else except for themselves,
       cannot imagine it.
       Out of such modern solecisms,
       no imagination can come
       as in the ancient hell
       no imagination could be born.

Still I must say that I have imagined it,
        even as I am poorly known
        and poorly know
        and wait for the light
        in which I will be known
        and will fully know,
        a single author!

 5th
 Epistle of the Elder of Omaha

 “To the elect lady and her children
  “whom I love in Truth, “2 John 2:1

       The blog’s new look, which should not surprise anyone who knows that the elder is still feeling his way, seems to present the information a bit more efficiently than the original template and the side menu appears to provide a clearer means of accessing the various aspects of this blog.  While the concept of narrative is foundational to the four interest areas, it is likely that a reader will be more interested and/or more comfortable in one than in the others. 
       The addition this week is a post under the label “Romanticism,” perhaps the more academic of the areas.  It is the promised review of Michael Rectenwald’s paper, From Romantic Catastrophism to Victorian Gradualism: A Reading of Epistemes.  Words like “epistemes” are very likely to be scary, but the word simply means “how do we know what we know.”  That is a very good question to ask oneself.  Every time I set out to prepare a sermon, I ask myself, how do I know what I think I know?  It has saved me innumerable times from folly.  I would recommend it to politicians, to all kinds of so-called experts, and, well, to just about everyone.
        Rectenwald’s exploration was how people at the heart of the 19th Century England began thinking one thing about the physical world and changed their mind and thought something else.  In particular, his paper tries to identify how Darwin came to the conclusion that the physical world evolved, a conclusion that still stirs debates among us.  As the paper makes clear it did not come about easily.  The review challenges Rectenwald to refine his hypothesis with better understanding the Romanticism.   It was Romanticism, the review argues, that prepared the grounds for Darwin’s hypothesis.  In the aftermath of Darwin’s thesis, the review argues that a Faustian bargain was made between the cultured and religious elites on one side and scientific elites on the other.  Science was allowed to pursue an empirical science which was not questioned by morality.  The intellectual elite was allowed to define moral values which could not be questioned by experience.  It should not be too hard to see that it is this divorce that has been involved in the disasters of the 20ieth century and which still roils our present.  
      This week I am turning my attention to Jesus and intend to publish under the fourth label “Jesus and the Meta Narrative,” a poem from my new collection, On Giving My Word, the Collected Poems and Aphorism of a Priest in Retirement.   This poem attempts a narration of the baptism of Jesus and of the time he following spent in the wilderness.  The poem, “From Hasid to Son,” is now a few years old, but recently surfaced my thoughts due to a close reading Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Had been asked last year at this time, if I had any thought of rereading Paradise Lost, I am quite certain I should have said it was very unlikely.  The lengthy poem, 10,000+ lines, built around the Biblical account of the Fall of Adam and Eve filtered though a long question view of salvation, was published in 1667.  My first encounter with it was in my father’s eclectic library in the form of a folio edition illustrated by Gustav Dorė engravings.
      I suppose this was when I 10 or so, before I had any exposure to the church, so my first theology was rather black and white, lasting well into my early theological education.
 But I am addicted to edX, on-line education, and when Dartmouth announced a course on Milton’s Paradise Lost, I could resist.  It has been most interesting, but suddenly became quite challenging when I extended the read into Paradise Regained, its sequel.  I discovered to my shock that it is focused on a re-imagining of the baptism of Jesus and the temptation not on the Cross as the means of regaining Paradise!  Had Milton already done what I had set out to do in my poetic effort?  But the difference between Milton’s version and my own, however, is stunning.  In fact it rather vividly underlines the importance of the subject of this blog.  Milton understands the issue of salvation as question of reason.  
                                          Victory and triumph to the Son of God
                                           Now entering his great duel, not of arms,
                                           But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles. [ 175 ]

      Therefore he did not create a narrative, but a myth.  The sense of my poem, is that it is about history.  Salvation is not a question of getting the point or not, it is about how one participates in the history, how one becomes part of the story.  The post will be up before the weekend.
       I will close with the note that the 14th of September is approaching which is the Feast of the Holy Cross, some times called “the Invention of the Holy Cross.  It marks the day on which Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine is said to have found the true cross.  According to the legend, after everyone failed, the Empress saw some basil growing on the ground and bent to pick it as be fits a good Roman mother!  Lo, as she looked into a hollow next to it, there was the cross.  For those of us keeping Summer Lent with St. Francis of Assisi, we mark this day as the day on which the climax of Francis’s vision occurred, the moment in which he received the marks of the Holy Cross in his body.  How about that for participating in the history!

Faithfully,  Michael, The Elder of Omaha

 4th
 Epistle of the Elder of Omaha

 “To the elect lady and her children
  “whom I love in Truth, “2 John 2:1

       I have been thinking about the question of change.  It is hard not too as “one can say with some certainty that the world never looked so motley as now.” I should own up to fact that I am quote Friedrich H̀ölderlin, the German poet whom I have previously mentioned, writing to his friend, Johann Ebel, at the beginning of 1797.   “It is an immense multifariousness of contradictions and contrasts.  Old and new.  Civilized and barbarian.  Malice and passion.  Selfishness in sheep’s clothing, selfishness in wolf ‘s clothing.  Superstition and unbelief, Servitude and despotism, Unreasonable wisdom, unwise reason.  Feeling without thinking, thinking without feeling.  History, experience, tradition, without philosophy–philosophy without experience.  Energy without principles, principles without energy.  Discipline without humanity, humanity without discipline.  Feigned obligingness, shameless impertinence.  Precocious young boys--silly old men.  The litany could be continued from sunrise to midnight without having named more than a thousandth part of the chaos that is humanity.”  It does some how seem to fit our present.  Hölderlin then goes on to declare to his friend: “But that is how it should be!”
       Hölderlin’s friend experiences the prospect of change as catastrophic.  We are talking among other thing the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte! Hölderlin counsels that he should experience this as a process which he should embrace.  The crux of their difference is that Ebel is holding on to the view that universe is a static event, while Hölderlin, with his friends in the early romantic circle to which he belongs, has broken though to the view that the universe is itself a process.  In his poetry this will be expressed in the ubiquitous metaphor of a river, and in his letters and essays, he has by this time given this point of view a clear and repeated expression.  His work is among  the earliest expression of the romantic tradition that will blossom in the early decades of new century, particularly in Germany and in England.  
       This transformation of thinking about the universe does not only effect theology, philosophy, and literature, it also effects the natural sciences, especially geology and biology.  The certainty of a static universe blocked the way to an evolutionary science.  Michael Rectenwald’s paper From Romantic Catastrophism to Victorian Gradualism: A Reading of Epistemes, which I am currently studying and hope to review in this blog, is focused on the role these alternative understands played a role in birth pains of evolutionary sciences.  I am betting that a dialogue with this paper can clarify how a pivot in thought takes place, which now seems to have taken place again in our current cultural life.  Certainly, we seem again to experience change as catastrophic and is it because we have again concluded that our universe is a static?
       Many of us on both end of the political spectrum fear and/or wish for catastrophic change.  Few can see their way to hope in the measured steps of a process, of some particular narrative, since that hope seems to have been ill placed.  But I am sure that a catastrophic event will make nothing new.  How and with what kind of poetic, will we find the way to walk out of the conflict in which we have chosen to live, demands our attentions.

 Faithfully,  Michael, The Elder of Omaha

 3rd
 Epistle of the Elder of Omaha

                        “To the elect lady and her children “whom I love in Truth, “2 John 2:1

        This past week I have posted a discussion of Psalm 2 under the label, The Hebrew Psalms and Praying the Narrative.  Psalm 2 is a particularly interesting psalm because it is easy to imagine its performance in its original setting.  It took place in the royal court of Jerusalem where a kind of state dinner was being held.  The dignitaries are the kings and ambassadors of the nearby city states and the performance which began as entertaining suddenly takes on the form of a warning aim at the guest lest they should have any thoughts of conspiring among themselves against Jerusalem’s authority. God would laugh them to scorn should they have the nerve to try. 
        The Psalm is also interesting because it is the location of one of most heavily interpreted texts in the Hebrew Testament: “You are my Son, this day I have begotten you.”  Clearly, in the original performance this refers to the present king of Israel, but in subsequent interpretations it becomes a reference to a future messiah.  The study, under the label Hebrew Psalms and Praying the Narrative, has an extended discussion of these issues.  Suffice it here to say to the general reader that what is at stake in this discussion is how we experience a text.  If we look at text to discover truths, then it will be an either/or, and it will lead, as it has done in the past, to rather forced arguments with unpleasant consequences.  If the text means only the king at that time, then, the text is reduce to mere curiosity. Or if it means only this particular individual is the messiah, then the ancient performer is merely a tool.   If, as I think we should, read text for the purpose of finding relationships with others, then the multiplicity of levels each has something to offer us and it is no longer and either/or.
          My reaction to my study of Psalm 1 and 2 this past couple of weeks, set me to working on a poem in which I might express my own theory of how one should read the psalms.   This is, in part, an explanation of why I am running behind in my work.  I will share with you its beginning stanza which I think can help you understand the point I am making.  I should point out that the word hasidim which occurs in the poem is the Hebrew word for “pious ones,” “saints” who make up the congregation of the righteous.  It is to the hasidim that the author of Psalm 1 speaks.

                             When I pray the Book of Psalms,
                             I keep company with the hasidim.
                             Together we eat the bread of heaven,

                             with the Wisdom Editor who framed the psalms
                                      and taught us the law from the Aleph to the Tau
                                      and bid us in hearts to recite it day and night.
                             with the performer who sang above the lyre
                                      asking why, the nations did conspire,
                                      against God and God’s messiah.

More to follow.

        During the week, I have finished my read of  Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a narrative that begins in Gohyang Korea in 1910 and traces the journey of Korean family through their migration to Osaka, Japan in 1933 through the family’s stay in Toyko up to 1989.  I am glad to have done so for through its narrative I feel a bit more connect to what underlays the peace negotiation on the Korean peninsula.  It also help  to penetrate the issue of racial discrimination, in a form which seems so unlike our own, but whose destructive results are so much the same.
        My reading this coming week returns to the letters and essays of the early German romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin.  They are such a delight. In a letter to his sister in mid November of 1790, he tells of walking with his fellow seminary student, G. W.F. Hegel, to a Chapel built on a rise just outside of the village of Würmlingen, famous for its view of the Swabian countryside.  One can only imagine the animated conversation between the future poet who would come to be known as one of Germany’s finest and the future philosopher who would come to be known as one of Germany’s greatest.  How exciting it would to have been able to hear what they were saying!  I another letter, after their graduation has separated them, Hölderlin writes to Hegel.  It is warm and personal, expressing how much he misses Hegel’s company.  Then he says in a rather fierce testimony that they cannot really be separated because “we parted with the watch word ‘the Kingdom of God’ By that watch word we would, I believe, recognize each other after every possible metamorphosis.”  This is a stunning text and should cause Hölderlin scholars and Hegel scholars to reassess what they think they know about their about their principles!
        This coming week my assignment is to add a post to the label, Romanticism and the Recovery of the Narrative.  It will take a deeper look at the relationship between the poet and the philosopher as way to assess the argument of a paper by Michael Rectenwald entitled From Romantic Catastrophism to Victorian Gradualism: A Reading of Epistomologies” which has come my way.   It is a challenging paper by a prominent scholar of the State University of New York, recently embroiled in a controversy over political correctness, an issue on which one can be correct only if it is ignored, which is what I  intend to do.

                                           Faithfully,  Michael The Elder of Omaha

 2nd
 Epistle of the Elder of Omaha

 “To the elect lady and her children “whom I love in Truth,”2 John 1:1

       This past week I have posted a review of a book by Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth, and launched a fourth label: Jesus and the Meta Narrative.  As I mentioned last week, I keep a summer lent and in do so keep company with Francis of Assisi who famously kept this summer lent in the year 1224.  There on Mt. Alverno, toward the end of his fast, he received the stigmata.  In his isolated solitary cell, he claimed that a falcon regularly awakened him for Matin, which begins “O Lord, open thou our lips.”  So at my Morning Prayer when I speak those words, I like to think myself as having been stirred to my duty  by Brother Falcon.
       The reading at Morning Prayer this week begins with the long speech of Stephen from the Book of Acts.  Whenever I have encountered it in the past, I admit to being  puzzled.  How in the world could a defendant suppose that such an incredibly long closing argument could win the day.  “Let me tell you the history of our people.”  Was he stalling for time?  If you go to critical commentaries on the Book of Acts, they will, for the most part, give you a wink and say well it was not Stephen, but the author of the Book of Acts who created such a lengthy speech.  But it occurred to me for the first time, perhaps because of this blog! that it was a particularly apt defense.  What Steven is charged with, much like Jesus at this trial, was a violation of the law.  The law says you cannot speak of God in a familiar sense, making yourself or anyone God’s partner, son.  Behind this charge is the concept that revelation is given in ideas, precepts and/or laws.   Stephen’s argument rests on the claim that the revelation, which is called Torah, is actually a narrative, a story that begins with the call of Abraham out of Ur of Chaldees.  Followers of this blog while recognize that Stephen’s interpretation of revelation coincides with the theme of this blog.
       This is particularly appropriate to the publication of the label, “Jesus and the Meta Narrative” this week, for it sets out the proposal that Jesus must be liberated from being the object of doctrine and/or myth by means of making him again the subject a narrative.  This recognizes that a tradition that was strangling from its own self codification, suddenly was broke open by its confrontation with Jesus, launching a vast and varied narrative effort, which, I should think, includes not only Gospel writers and the epistlists, but early Rabbinists as well.  More by ways of re-imagining Jesus will follow under this label and hopefully some strenuous debate as well!    
       My reading this week has centered on Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.  It is a narrative that begins in Gohyang Korea in 1910 and traces the journey of Korean family through their migration to Osaka, Japan in 1933 to joining the Korean minority which continues in to live in Japan to this day.  We see through the eyes of these characters the history of depression and war which we think we know, but, in fact, know in part, through a glass darkly.  As Min Jin Lee says at the beginning of her book “History has failed ordinary people.”  Her narrative is giving ordinary people a selfhood that history must reckon with or not continue to be history, but myth.
      I find it especially interesting to step out of western narratives, into these innovative eastern narratives, where the novel tradition is rather young.  Min Jin Lee’s novel is preceded in my reading list by Madeleine Thien, Do Not say We have Nothing, Xue Yiwei, Dr Bethuhen’s Children, Mo Yan, Red Sorghum and China’s foundational novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber.  In these narrative threads, we find an individuals moving though space and time defying fate and determinism in the quest of a free future.  This strikes me as the romantic invention of the lyric and novel narrative, hence the label in this blog “Romanticism and the Recovery of Narrative.”   Perhaps it would be better to call this their re-discovery, because they seem to fit into the Meta Narrative, began a long time ago with the words: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country. . .’”
       In this coming week there should be a post in the label on Romanticism on the poetics of the German poet, Hölderlin and the promised discussion of Psalm 2.

Faithfully,  Michael The Elder of Omaha

Jesus and the Meta  Narrative

 Introduction

     My hope with this label is to open up ways in which Jesus can be restored to being the subject of a narrative rather than being  the object of doctrine, or of myth, ancient or modern.  To my mind much of the inability of Christianity to commend itself and/or deal with its internal problems comes from allowing Jesus to be detached from the narrative.  So too, I would claim, is the inability of secular humanism to find its meta-narrative.  Most of what will follow under this label will be offering and discussing my own attempt to use a lyric poetic to reestablish the narrative Jesus, as well as inviting you to share your own.  What follows immediately in this post is a theoretic ground work for my claim and which can serve as a guide to how the effort might proceed.

Rationale
  

     There is some kind of dynamic in human experience which embraces narrative, only find itself rejecting it or marginalizing it .  The narrative energy of the Hebrew experience, first in an oral tradition and then somewhere in 10th century B.C.E. as written text is exceptional from any frame of reference.  It continued down to the 5th century B.C.E., past the traumatic loss of its must prized possessions, the Temple and Court of Jerusalem, after which it progressively codified itself and looks for an alternative to the narrative.  In the first century, its narrative instinct is barely alive, only to be resuscitated by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.  Beginning with a renewed oral tradition and a burst of epistolary activity, it matured into a Gospel tradition, which in turned spread out in a wide, if uneven, hagiography.

      It might seem that the claim that the Hebrew experience lost it genius for the narrative tradition after its return from the Babylonian exile, is an anti-Jewish bias seeking to commend Christianity at the expense of Jews, making the Tanach into the Old Testament and the Christian literature into a replacement, a New Testament.  But as the reader will soon see, the same critic will be applied to Christianity, which has in successive moments loses its narrative genius, a genius not unrelated to the narrative genius of the Hebrew-Jewish community.  As early as Marcion, circa 235,  there was an attempt to extricate Christianity from the entire Hebrew narrative.   It was widely understood that the amputation of the Hebrew narrative would be fatal to Christianity’s own narrative genius as well.
      Among the succession of crises which attempt to terminate or marginalize Christianity’s narrative foundation, one that always interests me is the crisis of the high medieval church of the West in which the western church was transforming itself into a monarchy found on a newly defined body of canonical law.  How else could it compete with the rising medieval monarchies?  What halts its triumph is the “little poor one” Francis of Assisi, who builds outdoor creches to point to the narrative and in general acts out the life of Jesus.  It is an example of the reassertion of narrative, a reassertion that rescued the Western Church for a fatal transformation of itself into a monarchy, competing with other monarchies.
      There are many other example of this dynamic before and after Francis: for example  Arianism, Catholic and Protestant Dogmatic, Evangelical Fundamentalism.  My argument is that the present crisis of the church is caused by the transformation of the church into ideas which internally divide it and externally make it irrelevant, and what is required is a concerted effort to repossess its narrative core.   A Franciscan style movement to re-evangelize the church is called for.  By this the church would not only find unity within its self, but relevance to the world whose on dysfunction lies in the absence of a narrative.     
     Under the Label Jesus and the Meta-Narrative this blog hopefully will explore ways to repossess the Jesus Narrative and to place it in the context of an overarching enabling narrative, or what is generally called a meta-narrative.

                                             1st Epistle of the Elder of Omaha
                         “To the elect lady and her children “whom I love in Truth,”
     So St. John, who styled himself as an elder, long ago greeted the community and its members in communion with him.  From his epistolary example, I am borrowing a feature for this blog.  Once a week, on Thursdays, a letter will be posted.  It will report on what is on my mind, what I am reading and/or what is new in the various discussion tracks on this blog. 
 Today finds me beginning the Lent of the Feast of St. Michael, or “summer lent” as I have come to call it.  Once widely observed in the Western Church of the Middle Ages, it is largely forgotten and unobserved.  It became anchored  in my spirituality some 25 years ago when I learned that St. Francis of Assisi kept this lent on Mt. Alverno in 1225.  It was in the course of this lent that he received the marks of the cross on his body, the so-called stigmata.  The account of his lent that year can be read in “The Little Flower’s of St. Francis,” something that I  have done annually as part of keeping this lent.
     This is relevant to this blog because of the sobriety that it brings to my affairs, not least of which is taking on the disorder of this blog!  Hence my resolve is to post weekly  a letter addressed to all readers to share with them things that they might have in common and to direct them to things in the blog which might be of particular interest to them. 
 The overall theme which unifies this blog is the concept of narrative, which is alternative to ideas and facts that generally are assumed to either singularly (idealist or empiricist) or together (eclecticist) contain the truth.  Our motto is that the truth is in the narrative.    That theme will appear under four labels: Romanticism and the Recovery of Narrative:  Americana in Search of a Narrative;  Hebrew Psalms:  Praying the Narrative; and Jesus and the Meta-narrative.  The fourth label has not yet made an appearance, but will before much longer, trusting in the sobriety of this lent.  Other wise each of the other labels has an initial post and some added comment.  Your comments a much desired as I hope that this blog can be dialogical.
      Presently, I have been laboring on a review of a book by Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth.  It is a very well written alarm sounded against trends in Western government, particularly, the Trump administration, drawing parallel with the fascism of the past century.  Part of Kakutani’s thesis argues that the cause of these trends lies in the loss of a meta-narrative.  This is, of course, the thesis of our discussion under the label Americana in Search of a Narrative.  It does not, however, intend to be alarmist as it does to call you “to come labor on.”  The review should be posted within the next couple of days.
      One of the thing Kakutani notes in her book is that since 2016 Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” has more citations than it has had in the past 30 years!  Our friend Shelley Joye as an author has recently posted the poems opening lines on this blog and in the comments I have added a couple of remarks, one of which is a new poem I have written  questioning Yeats’ poem, called “2019 A Second Coming to the Master’s Arm.”
     There also will soon be a new posting in the Hebrew Poetry label, a study of Psalm 2 and of Psalm 10.  This morning, I have returned to Psalm 16, whose Hebrew is humbling.  It’s now the fifth or sixth visitation to this psalm’s  Hebrew text and it is still a struggle to make it read.  It is a prime example of how much each Psalm in a linguistic universe of its own and how much it relied on the performers who carried them in their heads.
     Much depends on this lent helping me avoid distractions!
                                   Faithfully,  Michael The Elder of Omaha