Living on

 Living on

By Bobby Neal Winters

So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David.

--1 Kings 2:10

The Bible says very little about what happens to us after we die.  What it does say, it says in metaphor:  “In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”

We communicate in metaphor, when either we don’t have the words or our audience doesn’t have the words.  Death is a wall between us and something else.  Fools ignore it; the Wise prepare; Jesus explained, but he knew we just didn’t have the words.

I’m not going to improve on Jesus, so I will leave that aspect of the Afterlife to faith.  Let me now explain what I know for sure the best I can.

Here on earth, each of us is connected to a lot of other people: Fathers and mothers; sisters and brothers; daughters and sons; friends and neighbors; co-workers; people we pass on the street.

Each one of those people is an opportunity. Every single one of them has a soul that is a part of the breath of God.  When we interface with them, we leave a little of ourselves with them--and they leave a little of themselves with us.

In this way, over the course of our lives, we build something in the world of humans that has our shape.  This Thing we have built will live on after we have died.  

Here I will resort to metaphor.  Life is like a soup.  The world is the water; some people are salt or spice and will mix in and not be noticed; some are like chunks of meat and potato.  While you might not know the name of the grain of salt or the fleck of spice, their presence makes life more palatable for everyone. 

My father was not a perfect man, but he did have a respect for women, and that lives in me. I believe that Dad’s gone to be in one of the many mansions Jesus promised, but I know that part of him lives in me.

My mother was not a perfect woman, but she did have the ability to love and be loved by people no one else loved.  I hope that this still exists in me.

I had teachers who taught me skills that I’ve had the privilege to pass on to my students.  My teachers exist in me and I in my students.

There are huge men who’ve helped fallen children, and tiny women who’ve wiped away their tears. They will live on in those they’ve helped.

And there are those who live on in us in the form of scars, but life is too short to dwell there.

When one of us passes, we cry for ourselves.  There is a Thing shaped like them left in the world.  It is not a hole, not a vacancy.  They are still among us, but we’ve lost a certain eminent aspect of them.

We’ve lost people; we are losing people.  The pain we feel about this is evidence they exist still.  Our pain is a measure of how much they’ve given of themselves.  As much as it hurts, we wouldn’t want any less.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Mother Abigail and Wisdom

 Mother Abigail and Wisdom

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been watching The Stand on CBSAllAccess. While I think it was an interesting choice to air a work centered on a devastating plague during a time of pandemic, I have been enjoying it.  I especially like Whoopie Goldburg as Mother Abigail.

For those of you who are not familiar with The Stand, it was originally a book by Steven King.  It was made into a miniseries back in 1994. I’d enjoyed that at the time, so I’ve been looking for it on streaming media since that became a thing.  I hadn’t found it until this new version appeared.  The Stand is an apocalypse.  The world is destroyed by a plague.  Those few who survive gather themselves into two separate locations: The good in Boulder, Colorado and the evil in--where else--Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mother Abigail personifies wisdom and is the spiritual leader of the Boulder group.  Having an elderly black woman as a symbol of wisdom is a trope in American literature.  There are truths that we can hear from this archetype that would simply sound out of place anywhere else.  I don’t know whether that is racist, sexist, ageist, or all three.  All I know is that it is something I’ve seen.  

But Wisdom being personified as feminine goes back farther; it goes back thousands of years.  Biblically, in both Hebrew and Greek, the words for wisdom are feminine in gender.  This doesn’t necessarily mean much, but when hymns to Wisdom are written in those languages, it is quite natural to use the feminine personal pronoun.

But in Proverbs Chapter 31, verses 10 through 31, there is a word portrait of a virtuous woman.  Those of you who haven’t read it, should.  Those of you who have, know it to be a litany of the activities of a virtuous woman and the benefits accrued to her family because of them.  It gets pretty dense at certain points.  I remember as a youth listening to it and inserting “She spot-weldeth.”

There are women who react negatively to this with: “You men think women are only good for what they can do for you.”  I am not going to argue with that.  I will say that--in my family at least--there aren’t too many men who would fit the person described, but there are a number of women.

It has also been pointed out to me recently that the virtues described for a virtuous woman in these verses describe a personification of Wisdom.  Wisdom in the feminine. 

Here those of us who seek to be wise--whether we are male or female--are given this feminine archetype to emulate.

The qualities included are planning ahead, not wasting time, handling responsibility, and looking to the needs of others while still taking care of oneself.  This is a text that will preach and reach the listener in a practical way.

One can get off on a tangent arguing about whether this image is natural or cultural or whether those two words can even be separated in this context.  Many hours and many pages could be filled with this discussion, some it possibly fruitful.

But, regardless, there it is.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Difficult and left untried

 Difficult and left untried

By Bobby Neal Winters

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.-- Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is an ancient Christian text called the Didake (did-ahk-ay) that begins with these words: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death; but a great difference between the two ways.”  

The document then goes on to describe the Way of Life.  To say that the Way of Life is not an easy way might be something of an understatement.  I was going along reading it sentence by sentence saying, Preach it, Brother, Preach it, but it didn’t take too many sentences before I read one that made me say, Ouch!  

The thing is, there is nothing there that is not in the New Testament or in the Gospels.  The Didake just condenses it down to the essentials.  It’s like chewing salt from a block rather than just eating it dusted on your popcorn.  It’s the same stuff, but maybe a gallon of soda pop would help it go down.

The New Testament itself, Jesus tells the rich young ruler:”If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

To this we reply, the whole perfection thing sounds really great, but I have so very nice things.

We fall short.

I’ve come up with a solution to this that makes me feel more comfortable.  I should become a self-help guru and sell it to you, but I will give it to you for free. Here goes.  Jesus knew we were going to fail, but he set up the teachings to point us in the right direction.  If we fall short of these very high ideals while striving toward them, then at least we’ve made progress.

I think that last paragraph has some truth to it, but there is a tiny voice in the back of my mind that is trying to say something else.  The voice is calm and insistent but there is a chorus of other voices that are trying to shout it down. 

My head can sometimes be very noisy.

A good question to ask would be, why would I care?  The Didake is just a dusty old scroll; the Bible is just a dusty old book.  Jesus didn’t even have a car, much less a computer. What do they know anyway?

I was raised being taught these things were right.  I’ve grown up, looked around the world, and I’ve not found anything better. It doesn’t teach pursuing money; it doesn’t teach pursuing power.  It teaches that our pursuit should be in helping our fellow human beings whether they suffer from a lack of food on their tables or love in their hearts.  It teaches a way of ordering your personal life that is in harmony with these aims.

Jesus tells us his yoke is easy and his burden is light, but maybe we have to put down some other things first. Maybe Bob Dylan was right, “If you ain’t got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.” 

I don’t have a sweet answer.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

An Early Ash Wednesday

An Early Ash Wednesday

By Bobby Neal Winters

A Facebook Friend of mine asked in her status for people to share their favorite verse from the Bible.  I don’t think I have one.  I am not sure why, but I will think about it.  I did have a verse that popped to my mind: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

It’s there in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis.  I am far from the first to suggest this, but it does seem to capture Man in two parts that are held in Cruciform tension as they say:

You are made of dirt;

You’ve been filled with the spirit of God.

I need to be reminded of both of these from time to time.  To be reminded of the first, I go with some friends of mine to Ash Wednesday Services at Our Lady of Lourdes.  They meet at Oh dark thirty, and that is a time when you are very receptive to the dirt message.

There are times, however, when I need to be reminded of the second.  This comes from two different directions.  I need to know that I have been filled with the spirit of God, and I need to be reminded that you have been filled with the spirit of God.  This is all part of the deal.

I am supposed to love you.  Regardless.

“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

Here Jesus was quoting ancient Jewish teaching.  In the Sermon on the Mount he pushes it further: “ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[i] and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”

In my youth, I used to think this was a way He was telling us not to have enemies.

No, that is not the case.

You are going to have enemies.  This is beyond your control.  There will be people who will hold your existence in contempt. You are to love them.

At some point, I heard the voice of Inigo Montoya, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

Love is not a feeling.  It is accompanied by many feelings, but it is not a feeling.  It is something beyond.  It is something we can do.  It is something we may choose to do, but it is like math or chess or pushups or whatever, you have to work at it.

That person in front of them. The one you disagree with; the one who is working against everything you believe in; the one who challenges you: You are to love him.

As inhumanly difficult as that may be, that is the easy part.  The hard part is how that love is to be manifested.  

Giving them their way is not necessarily the answer.  And quite frankly, it can’t be roadmapped out. But remembering that your love for them must be the center of it.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

An abacus, reading, laying concrete, and tossing pebbles

 An abacus, reading, laying concrete, and tossing pebbles

By Bobby Neal Winters

I got my grandsons an abacus for Christmas.

Well, that’s not true, actually.  I bought myself an abacus for Christmas, and I used my grandsons as an excuse to do this.  For those of you who know about such things, it is a Soroban, that is to say, a Japanese-style abacus as opposed to a Chinese style one.

I’ve gotten to be almost sixty years old and a math teacher no less without ever having learned how to use an abacus.

And there is something to know. It is not magic; it is a piece of technology.  Technological devices are fine things, but there is a two stage process involved with them.  First they are invented, and then you have to learn how to use them.  And the second part of this is the most important: Learning how to use it.

Think about the lever.  In some sense, it didn’t even have to be invented.  A level consists of a rock and a stick.  Rocks have been lying around literally since the Earth cooled.  Sticks have been around as long as there have been trees.  But we had to figure out how to use the lever.  We did. We refined it and invented the wheel from it; then gears and pulleys.  Now every toy monster truck that my grandsons go vroom, vroom, vroom with while smashing them against the living room floor in my how has wheels.

The children are exposed to them from before they can even speak.  They become an intuitive part of their lives.

This would be an example of a dissemination of technology that has worked.  We get the wheel; we get the lever.

I would like to think that reading is on its way to being this fully integrated.  It’s not quite, but we are working on it.  We are still having to teach that you need to read to your children.  All of the people in my circles do, but I recognize I am strange.  I get the feeling that reading books is not as ubiquitous as monster trucks, but I could be wrong.

Cultures that know about levers and wheels have possibilities open to them that those who don’t know do not. Cultures that know about reading have possibilities open to them do not.  If one or two people know how to read, they may have an advantage over others.  If everyone knows how to read it raises the baseline for everyone.

What happens in a child’s home has an out-sized effect on everything that follows in the child’s life.  My dad hauled bulk cement and helped build the interstates going though Oklahoma City and Dallas, and as a result I can’t walk past a pad of freshly poured concrete without thinking of him. A big slab of nicely worked concrete is a thing of beauty even though I’ve not been personally able to put this to use.

As a little boy, there were a lot of Chickasaws in my school.  They had a lot of throwing games where they threw small rocks and sticks.  They turned out to be the best at basketball and baseball, and I have to think it was because the technology of throwing was taught early.

A lot of what we do just comes to us as an accident of our history, but we do have the power to choose.  We can choose to make homes where learning skills is valued.  We can take the attitude that learning is a joy whether it is monster trucks, reading, laying concrete, throwing pebbles, or using an abacus.  It is a mixture of joy and discipline, and it pays off.

I’m done now.  I’ve got to go play with my abacus.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )