WRESTLING with GOD: Ecclesiastes

     Welcome, new believer!  Now that you’ve come to Christ, your first step as a newcomer should be to read the book of Ecclesiastes!

                                                            ~ Said no preacher ever.

      Martin Luther considered Ecclesiastes to be one of Scripture’s most difficult books, “one which no one has ever completely mastered.”  If you’ve ever spent time in it, you probably agree with Luther.  It’s depressing.  It’s swaddled in despair over the futility of all human action.  It’s downright nihilistic to a depth no atheist has ever been able to plumb.

     Worse still: It’s not the words of an atheist. Its speaker, Qoheleth, is without doubt a believer in the God of Israel.

     As my boxed quip above says, it’s probably not the first place in scripture I’d send a new believer.  Here’s why.

 

CULTURE OF THE QUOTABLES

     We live in a world where context-free quotations are given a special place of honor as being wise and informative.  Got a great, witty saying?  Post it as your Facebook status.  A profound zinger?  Tweet that sucker!  A poignant bon mot?  Put it in italics and box it at the start of your next blog post!

     I suppose micro-wisdom is nothing new.  In fact, Qoheleth assures us there’s not really anything new under the sun (1:9).  Before there were digital venues, there were bumper stickers, and before that there were probably horseless carriage stickers and chariot graffiti.  As believers, even we … and to personalize, I, me, myself … really love brief, power-packing quotes that capture so much wisdom in so few words:

If God be for us, who can be against? (Rom. 8:31)

The joy of the Lord is your strength. (Neh. 8:10)

He will wipe away every tear. (Rev. 21:4)

 

     Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with finding inspiration in one-liners from scripture; the Gospel and epistle writers do it throughout the New Testament.  However, as Peter warns in his second letter, some writings are difficult to understand and easy to misuse.  Imagine applying a “culture of the quotables” mentality to Ecclesiastes:

The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same. (3:19)

A stillborn is better off than [the father of a hundred]. (6:3)

The dead know nothing; they have no more reward. (9:5)

      Yes, we all love Bible quotes.  But I’m pretty sure those aren’t the kinds of quotes you’ll see as memes set in a flowery field awash in sunshine, posted prominently on your Aunt Lucinda’s home page.  They just lack a certain something.

 

BEYOND THE QUOTABLES

      Back in my teens and early twenties, the old show West Wing had a great episode in which White House aide Josh Lyman laments the anti-intellectualism of some presidential candidates.  When his own president faces complex crises, says Lyman, “I don’t know if he’s thinking about Immanuel Kant or not.  I doubt it.  But if he does, I am comforted at least in my certainty that he is doing his best to reach for all of it and not just the McNuggets.”

       Scripture’s take on that same idea is to tell us there are times we need to move beyond the milk of faith (1 Cor. 3:2) to take in solid food, since “solid food is for the mature” (Heb. 5:14).  There are places in Scripture where we're going to have to go for a full-course meal, chewing thoughtfully.

     Milk and McNuggets metaphors aside, my point is that Ecclesiastes strikes me as far more of a book for the mature Christian than for those new to the faith.  I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading any part of scripture, but when it comes to some books, I’d certainly recommend taking a friend along, preferably an older one who can provide the fuller context of the faith.  Otherwise, what should be stepping stones may become stumbling blocks.  In Ecclesiastes, we’ll encounter twists and turns, contradictions and challenges galore, like discovering:

• Despite all health and wealth granted by God, we’ll never be satisfied (1:8)
• Giving our best effort amounts to nothing (2:11)
• Wisdom is better than folly (2:13), but wisdom only gives us sorrow (1:18)
• We should hate life since, no matter what we achieve, we can’t take it with us (2:18)
• What we eat and drink and enjoy working at is from God’s hand (2:24), but it’s meaningless anyway (1:26)

 

THERE’S CONTEXT, AND THEN THERE’S CONTEXT

     We’re told early in our faith journey that Bible verses are best understood in context.  Sometimes that’s at an elementary level.  Sure, the Bible says, “There is no God,” but the full context of that verse is, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”  Going beyond the rudimentary to the context of the entire Psalm 14 where that line's found, we see that not only atheism but also oppression of the poor (v. 6) and oppression of God’s people (v. 4) are traits of evil fools.  Most disturbing of all is that the foolish evildoers are each and every one of us (v. 3), not some distant enemy.  We’ve all gone astray, and we can only hope for deliverance (v. 7) at some future date, in some still-unknown way.

     Context continues to gets bigger, though.  This song is in a collection of Psalms, written in early Israel from the time of King David up through a time of Israel’s exile to the foreign land of Babylon.  Those Psalms tell a story of vast, disparate emotions ranging from despair resulting from the need for God’s deliverance, to rejoicing in the realization that the hope of that deliverance always remains.  This is a national collection of longing for God that is today read by peoples of all nations, those still in anguish but still reaching out in hope toward something bigger and seemingly unknowable.

     And one step up from that, we find the still-larger context in which it’s best to appreciate the Book of Ecclesiastes: the fullness of salvation history, from the creation of the world through the ascension of the resurrected Christ and beyond.  Ecclesiastes is a slice of life – the mental life of the wisest of men who is trapped in the idea that there must be something more to life, more to God, than eating, drinking, making merry, and dying.  There must be something else.  But there isn’t.  Nothing lasting.  There’s nothing new.

 

QUESTING UNDER THE SUN

     “Vanity” is the word Qoheleth uses dozens of times throughout Ecclesiastes, literally from the text's first word to its last.  The word's early-English meaning isn’t what we think of today as vanity – egoism, excessive pride, and self-admiration.  In fact, the Hebrew word being translated here, habel, doesn’t mean “vanity” in any literal sense, old or modern English.  It means “vapor” or “breath,” a puff of smoke that really gets the message across about how meaningless vanity is.  Ancient Hebrew’s more common word for breath, ruach, is much more positive and can also mean “spirit,” either as a human spirit or the very Spirit of God.  Habel, on the other hand, trends negative, a fleeting breath not much more meaningful than a scoff.  In fact, in some passages of scripture, the word is also translated “idol,” a false, meaningless spirit.

     Qoheleth’s writing – or, his speaking, actually, since the book is in a framed format introduced and then concluded by a scribe presenting Qoheleth’s words – is a despondent struggle with the fallen state of man, life “under the sun.”  What’s under the sun is, of course, the world, and Qoheleth tackles every angle imaginable to find something more than scoffing breaths, vapor, vanity.  Old Testament scholar Christopher J. H. Wright sees the book as a “quest,” a perspective I very much like.  Qoheleth’s struggle with the meaning of anything in this world is a futile quest not unlike the legends of Arthur’s knights hunting fruitlessly for the Holy Grail.  The quest is impossible as long as one keeps searching “under the sun.”

     But I also like Bible teacher Mike Mazzalongo’s perspective of Ecclesiastes as Qoheleth’s “journal,” an in-process diary of Qoheleth’s struggles to understand why life has so little meaning for one who has belief in God, one who, in fact, rules over the very people of God.  “Journal,” for me, captures more of the feeling of how the text presents itself.  It can jump quickly from topic to topic, abruptly changing its tone as if Qoheleth had set aside the scroll for a day and then returned to it later in a different state of mind.

     I don’t have to decide between Mazzalongo and Wright, of course.  “Qoheleth’s Journal of His Quest” works fine for me and helps navigate the ups, downs, twists, and turns of the writing.  Qoheleth is depressed, then suddenly hopeful, then resigned.  And that’s okay.  I’m sure my own journals read like that when I’m being an honest journaler.  Qoheleth bemoans all his failed efforts; then he suddenly gives advice on how to serve God well in the temple; then he gripes about a few other quests; and then for no reason he gives advice on how to behave in front of a king.  None of that is a problem to read when you understand you’re peeking into the diary of a man whose quest for meaning is frustrating him no end.

 

WHAT DO YOU GIVE THE MAN WHO …?

     Qoheleth has everything.  Riches?  Check.  Wisdom and knowledge?  Indubitably.  Fulfilling work?  Roger that.  Food aplenty?  Bon appétit.  Slaves and concubines for sensual pleasures?  Um, yeah, that, too.

     For this reason, I like to think of Qoheleth as the anti-Job.  A few books away in the Old Testament, Job loses everything.  He loses his health, his wealth, his family, his confidence in the God he serves, and he struggles to find meaning in all that suffering.  At first glance, Qoheleth is the stark opposite: all privileges attained, smartest guy in any room, more concubines than he can shake a scepter at, yet still a broken man, miserable, suffering just as much as Job.  Job’s suffering was external, true; Qoheleth’s was entirely internal.  Anyone who’s struggled with depression knows, though, that suffering is suffering, whether inside or out.  In situations a full spectrum apart, Job and Qoheleth still both suffer.

     From our standpoint as believers, we can see a difficulty shared by the biblical texts of Job and Ecclesiastes – namely, that we modern folks can't just pull out many one-liners for awesome quotation, especially not from Job's friends.  The two books are examples of what Bible scholars in dimly lit offices call “dikē Scripture” (pronounced DEE-KAY), a genre of Bible writing in which the author struggles to understand the justice of God.  When we read dikē passages in the Bible, we get to glimpse the inspired writer’s mental efforts to reconcile what’s going on in daily life with what should be going on, given God’s just nature.  To go back to an earlier metaphor: dikē passages are solid food for us to chew on, not milk meant to nourish us with a quick swallow.

     Both Job and Qoheleth keep their eyes on God.  Neither loses faith that God is just.  But what they don’t have access to is the full context.  By that I mean the big context: the fullness of salvation history, something completely unavailable to them because of where they’re locked in time.

 

BREATHING RIGHT

     Qoheleth and Job sought evidence of God’s justice and love.  They stayed true to their faith in God, but to my mind, they were looking for the wrong evidence.  Recall those two words that mean “breath” in Hebrew, ruach and habel, true breath vs. a vapor, spirit vs. idols.  Both men, Qoheleth especially, were looking for evidence of God’s justice in the fleeting things of this world, the habel.  In their situations, the external trappings of the world were all they could appreciate as proof God loved them.  They needed their evidence to be “under the sun.”

     As Christians, we see the rest of the story.  The justice and love of God come from what’s far beyond a mere sun.  We can never reach it, not through the riches or pleasures or knowledge or wisdom or works of this world.  And since we couldn’t reach it, it reached us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  In that moment of salvation history, justice and mercy kissed, and what was impossible for us became possible by God.  We couldn’t earn the eternal, because we couldn’t pay the price of entry.  Job and Qoheleth were judging eternity from their pre-Jesus vantage point; in fairness, they could only judge according to what their limited, world-weary knowledge could offer.

     “Sorrow is knowledge,” wrote Lord Byron, echoing Qoheleth and then adding a hint to the answer Qoheleth sought: “Those who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life.”

     To hazard quoting once again from a nonbiblical source (Paul and others did it, so I feel secure in superior company), I find Ecclesiastes-resolving wisdom in a 16^th century poem by Teresa de Jesús, Sólo Dios Basta (my translation):

    Let nothing stir you, nor make you frightened

    Everything passes; God never changes.

    Only your patience shall overcome this

    One who has God is lacking in nothing.

    God alone matters.

     Teresa lived in an age when the history of salvation had finally revealed heaven's remedy to Qoheleth’s many frustrations.  Christ was her answer.  Born to a wealthy family, she didn’t seek riches like Qoheleth; she sought God through salvation in Jesus.  Her wealth and health didn’t leave her in some Job-like manner; rather, she surrendered them.  She embraced the spirit of the ruach wind, and it blew the habel vapors right out of her life.

 

THE MEAT OF ECCLESIASTES

     We’re Christians.  We know the fuller version of the salvation story.  So why do we … why do I, since I want to be vulnerable here with the hope that some reader, somewhere, needs to see it as an example … why do I find myself slipping back into judging God’s love for me according to the habel rather than according to the ruach, that holiest of Spirits sent to comfort me?

Why, when I had three miscarriages in a row early in my marriage, did I fall into the darkest of despairs, convinced I was abandoned by the God I’d accepted and loved since my teens?

Why, when I left behind my U.S. birth family to relocate with my husband’s family to Switzerland (the least Mexican-American country on Earth 😊) did I believe God was punishing me for some reason I didn’t yet understand and which I fretted over for months?

     Why, when I saw my young son go off to elementary school to be taught German, not my native Spanish, did I feel so angry … when in truth, Spanish is habel, German is habel, and eternity will have me and all mine speaking other tongues, even the tongues of angels?

     Answer: It’s because I’m living in the Age of Christ, but I’m still tricked by the Age of Qoheleth.  Paul would call that the flesh bidding him to do what he does not want to do.

     Ecclesiastes is far more to the Christian than a chronicle of the Bad Ol’ Days before the salvation of the cross.  It’s an active, living word from God.  It’s a reminder that I, like Qoheleth, like Job, live in a set point in the full history of salvation.  Even in my salvation, the flesh will keep trying to trick me.  Internal insecurities will keep coming back to fool me.  External circumstances will conjure specters of doubt.  Qoheleth's despondency still looms.

     But here’s my lifeboat in the tempest of a world that is not yet part of a New Heaven and a New Earth: the ruach of God moves over my waters, active in Me-The-New-Creation, just as it moved over the waters of the first creation.  And it continuously whispers to me with an assurance: Sólo Dios basta.  Sólo Dios basta.  Sólo Dios basta.

     "God alone suffices."

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez

ONE-SHOT DOGMAS: Beliefs based on single Bible verses

 

 

     Imagine you got to launch your own church and – clever marketer that you are – you realized you needed to differentiate your new denomination by basing a prominent doctrine on a single Bible verse.  Which verse would you choose?

     Don’t scoff.  We all know it happens.  Plenty of denominations both within and at the fringes of Christianity have whipped up doctrines based on less.  If you’re a sect-watcher like me, you’re probably already thinking about the Latter-Day-Saint practice of baptism for the dead, a ritual based on one small, enigmatic declaration in 1 Corinthians 15:29.

     Those silly Mormons, someone may think, basing so much on so little.  But the Mormons aren’t alone.  This month I’m stepping back from my usual linguistics deep dives to make a quick survey of some one-shot dogmas, practices, and beliefs that have sprung from single verses of scripture.  It’ll get a little episodic, but it’s a quick read.

 

ONE VERSE: BAPTISM IN THE NAME OF THE TRINITY

     Nearly every Christian denomination, large or small, baptizes believers “in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  This practice is mentioned only once in the entirety of Scripture, a single verse (Matthew 28:19) out of the nearly eight thousand verses in our New Testament.  Elsewhere (Acts 2:38), believers aren’t told to baptize in the name of the full Trinity.  The apostle Peter teaches that believers are to be baptized “in the name of Jesus,” and two Bible chapters later it’s declared that there is “no other name under heaven” by which we can be saved.  That latter combination of verses is recognized by the Oneness Movement as having more weight than the Matthew 28 declaration of baptism in the names of the Trinity.

     To my mind, the two directives aren’t mutually exclusive.  To baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Spirit does, in fact, include baptizing in the name of Jesus.  The fact remains, however, that the formula for our most common approach to baptism appears once, and only once, in all of the New Testament.  It is, in short, a doctrinal practice based on a single verse.

 

ONE VERSE: TATTOOS

     On a less weighty note: On the back of my left shoulder, I have a tiny tattoo of a koi fish.  Honest, I got it long before I ever read the book of Leviticus, in which a single verse prohibits the marking of one’s body with tattoos:

“Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.”  (Lev. 19:28)

     While it’s tough to find a single denomination that bans tattooing outright, it’s pretty easy to bounce around the Web enjoying essays by individual Christians who condemn tattoos based on (1) this verse and (2) their sense of personal outrage.  On the other hand, it’s just as common to find rationales from Christians who justify tattoos by explaining the cultural context of that prohibition in Leviticus.  Least common was one little image gem I found online: Gorgeously rendered script on skin, elegantly announcing the citation “Leviticus 19:28” as a tattoo.  Inky irony in action.

     Whatever you conclude about the literal reading or the cultural considerations behind that verse, it’s probably good to keep in mind that the same chapter of Leviticus also bans:

• Failing to pay an employee on the same day they’ve done work for you
• Trimming your beard (hey, I never trim mine)
• Wearing mixed fabrics (check your poly-cotton blend socks right now!)
• Sitting down when an elder is in the same room as you

 

ONE VERSE: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

     I should probably point out that the term “Immaculate Conception” is often confused with the idea of Jesus’ virgin birth.  This dogma isn’t about Jesus’ conception.  It’s the idea that Mary His mother was conceived without the stain of original sin.  It’s a fully Roman Catholic dogma based on a vague one-liner in scripture.

     The Catholic justification for this belief is a single word in the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:24. The angel calls her kecharitōmenē, “one filled with charis, grace.”  Because she was already filled with grace, the Catholic reasoning goes, then she herself must have been created by a special act of God without the burden of original sin, thereby becoming a worthy vessel to bear the messiah.

     It’s not a particularly compelling rationale, especially considering Mary herself immediately rejoices and calls God her savior (saved from what, if she were already created sinless?)  Historically, Catholics weren’t universally keen on it, either.  Thomas Aquinas, most prominent of all Catholic theologians, found the idea unworthy of the faith.  Dominican priests accepted it wholeheartedly, but Franciscans fought against the idea.  (Franciscans were pretty peaceful, so I’m using the word “fought” loosely here.  They probably just arched their eyebrows and tsk-ed audibly.)

     The matter was settled for Catholics in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the matter to be a dogma of the church.

 

ONE VERSE: THE 144,000

     Revelation is one of the most symbolic books of the Bible.  That doesn’t stop people from taking parts of it literally when it suits their doctrines or eschatology.  Thus, the one hundred and forty-four thousand “sealed servants of God” in chapter 7 of the Revelation became a favorite of new catastrophist sects of Christianity.

• Seventh Day Adventist founders felt it was the number of Adventists selected by God to be saved in the end times … until their own numbers surpassed 144,000.
• Mormons had a similar take and abandoned it for the same reason, upgrading the 144,000 to “high priests” who would forever minister to the eternal gospel.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, managed to hang on to the number as a literal part of their eschatology by making the ethnicity of the “sealed” believers non-literal – 144,000 non-Jewish believers from throughout history who are anointed and get to go to heaven bodily for eternity, while the rest of the believing population remains on Earth in an eternal paradise overseen by heaven.

     Contemporary evangelicals don’t do much better with their literal interpretation of this single verse.  Those with a Futurist bent toward interpreting John’s Revelation tend to see it as a literal number of actual Jews being saved during the horrors of an end-times tribulation, this belief thanks to the influence of the Gospel According to Left Behind.  Their focus on the Jewish ethnicity of the “sealed” believers is slightly more literal than that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  However, the literalism falls apart when you realize that Revelation 7 calculates the sealed as literally having 12,000 representatives from each of the twelves tribes of Israel … ten of which no longer even existed when the Revelation was written.

     Should we maybe start appreciating a symbolic book as being, you know, symbolic?

 

ONE VERSE: SMOKING

      Denominations that doctrinally forbid smoking have even less than one verse on which to hang their dogma.  What they use seems to be a selective application of a much vaguer verse.  Do a hunt for “Should Christians smoke?” in your search engine of choice.  The articles you find will almost invariably reference 1 Corinthians 6:19 –

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, that is from God?  You are not your own.”

     You can certainly argue that this verse applies to avoiding smoking as a way of shunning the “immorality” mentioned in the previous verse (18) so that you can “glorify God with your body” as pointed out in the verse that follows (20).  But if the verse applies to avoiding smoking, wouldn’t it equally apply to avoiding saturated fats?  Wouldn’t we also need to have doctrinal prohibitions against processed sugars in our sodas?  Shouldn’t our church doctrines also require believers to use seatbelts at all times?  Shouldn’t our credos include statements about honoring our bodies as temples by requiring followers to get all recommended vaccines, especially during pandemics?  If smoking is unholy treatment of our bodily temples, aren’t all those other areas as well?

 

ONE VERSE: GAMBLING

     There was a United Methodist Church up the road from my childhood home that had dozens of pamphlets in its foyer explaining why gambling was the worst of sins since humans ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  Okay, I exaggerate.  One thing I noticed, though, was the recurrence of a single verse justifying United Methodist loathing of games of chance: 

“For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

     The United Methodist Book of Resolutions devotes numerous paragraphs to the evils of gambling, calling it a “menace to personal and social morality” and citing the verse above as the main, direct scriptural condemnation of all iterations of gambling and profit by chance.

     I won’t pick on Methodists.  Some of my best friends are Methodists.  But I do wonder how they feel about risk-sensitive investments in 401(k) and 403(b) retirement accounts.  And aren’t hedge fund investments a form of gambling, betting a company will fail for one’s own profit?  In fact, I wonder how they feel about all capital gains under the aegis of capitalism – profit accrued when money earns money, rather than income being earned by actual work.  How do they feel about how low taxes are on capital gains versus how high they are for income earned through real work?  And how do they feel about any fellow Methodists who work at banks and for credit card companies, where profits are earned through forbidden interest rates, aka “usury” (Leviticus 25:36-37)?

     Sometimes a single Bible verse can lead you down a long, long path.

 

ONE VERSE: THE CLOSING OF THE CANON

     This one might arch your eyebrows as high as the Franciscans arched theirs over Mary’s immaculate conception.  Modern Christians tend to cite one verse repeatedly to indicate nothing else can be added to the Bible:

“I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book.  If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life” (Revelation 22:18-19)

     Church after church and Christian after Christian have wielded this verse as evidence that the Bible is now closed and no new information can be added to the revealed canon of scripture.  This interpretation might have more weight if the verses above weren’t a reiteration of Deuteronomy 4:2, likewise prohibiting further adding to or subtracting from the writings and thus (according to the Sadducees of Jesus’ day) closing the canon some three thousand years earlier.

     When read closely, the words in the verse above are clearly referring to the book John of Patmos is writing, what we now call the Revelation.  It isn’t referring to the whole Bible.  In John’s day, there was no “whole Bible” compilation and there wouldn’t be for several more centuries.

     That leaves us (by which I mean Protestants who embrace the Bible rather than human traditions as the source of our beliefs) with a ponderous issue: If the Bible doesn’t declare a closing of the canon prohibiting any more additions, then on what do we base our faith that the canon is closed?  Is our faith in the traditions of men … in this case, specifically in the traditions of Catholic Councils in the 300s?  Is it founded on the authority of the Catholic named St. Augustine of Hippo, who oversaw those councils that decreed the canon?

     Is the closing of the canon an extrabiblical tradition?

 IN CONCLUSION

     I purposely included in these examples some single-verse beliefs that I do accept and others that I don’t.  It was a useful exercise for me.  It made me ask, “Why do I so quickly condemn some ideas, yet so quickly accept other ideas when the evidence is just as scripturally scant?”

     I can’t answer that question.  I can just share that I ask it, ponder it, and pray.

     But on a lighter note, I will answer the question I asked at the top of this blog post!  If I were going to forge a new doctrine for a new denomination based on a single Bible verse, I’ve decided I’ll go with Deuteronomy 23:13, which commands that each of us always carry a shovel, so that if we have to relieve ourselves out in the wild, we can dig a hole to cover it up.

     That won’t make my congregation any holier.  But carrying around those shovels will certainly teach us that basing high-impact doctrines on single Bible verses might lead to some pretty strange places.

 

Maranatha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx

 

 

Gender and the Bible

 

     The word “wife” appears nowhere in the text of the Bible.  Neither does the word “husband.”

     You may disagree, and that’s understandable.  Our English translations of the scriptures are filled with occurrences of the words “wife” and “husband.”  You can’t get past Genesis chapter 2 without every major English translation referring to Adam and his “wife,” a term applied to her even before she receives the formal name “Eve.”  The English of Genesis chapter 3 follows up by introducing the word “husband.”

     What our translations conceal, however, is that there is no Hebrew word for “wife.”  Neither is there one for “husband.”  Hebrew has a single word, ishshah and its various forms, which simply means “woman” but in English passages is sometimes presented as “wife.”  The same is done with ish, a Hebrew word for “man” that is often rendered “husband” in Bible texts.

     For those who are already a step ahead of me, the same is true for the Greek New Testament.  Gyné is translated sometimes as “woman,” sometimes as “wife,” and andrós pops up as both man and husband, depending on which way the translation team decided to go.

     More news: When you read “the brothers” in Scripture, it may include sisters.

     When you read “the sons,” it may mean sons and daughters.

     And sometimes, when you read the word “man,” there’s actually no word at all, male or female, in the original text.

     What gives?

 

INCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     Let me state upfront that I’m not a fan of gender-inclusive versions of the Bible that artificially impose gender-neutral pronouns on my God or my fellow humans.  I see it as destruction of the original text.

     My position on that isn’t theological.  It’s linguistic and literary.  I’m just as put off by modern printings of Huckleberry Finn that omit the N-word from the very name of one of its main characters … an ironic adaptation in what’s arguably the most anti-racist book of its era.  The text of the Bible assigns God a male identity throughout, just as it assigns God female attributes in other places (see Isaiah 49:15 for God breastfeeding; Psalm 22:9-10 for God being a midwife; Deuteronomy 32:11 & 18 for God being a protective mother and giving birth; and Hosea 11:3-4 for God fulfilling a whole host of child-raising Mom roles).

     I’m grown up enough to know that God has no chromosomes, X or Y.  God has no genitalia, male or female.  God is spirit (John 4:24), and I don’t want the original versions of scripture neutered to adapt to anyone’s cultural agenda.  I want to know what it says, literally.  I’ll do my theology on the other side of my text analysis.

     That said … it isn’t just liberal-leaning translators of Scripture I take issue with.

 

EXCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     New Testament Greek has two distinct words we translate as “man” – andrós, mentioned above, which specifically means “a male human,” and anthrópos, “a human being.”  There’s a tradition among translators to render both as “man,” but anthrópos has a limited male slant to it.  Indeed, it can be used in the singular to refer to a single male, as it is in Matthew 19:5 & 10 and 1 Cor. 7:1.  However, the Greek writers Isocrates, Aristotle, and Antiphon all occasionally used it in reference to groups of women, as did the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures used by Jesus and the Apostles) in Numbers 13:35.  So, anthrópos isn’t strictly gender-neutral, but it also doesn’t have a purely masculine meaning.  Anthrópos is flexible, and is usually best translated as “people” or “humans.”

     One interesting note: In Greek Scripture, the term “the Son of Man” is always written with a form of anthrópos.  Jesus is the Son of Humanity, a satisfying moniker for one born of a virgin with minmal male involvement.

     Back to English.  Sometimes when you’re reading “man” or “men” in Scripture, it’s referring to males.  Other times, it’s referring to people in general.  How are you supposed to know the difference if you don’t read ancient Greek?

     [From this point on, I’ll limit myself to commenting on the Greek parts of Scripture.  Kione Greek I can juggle, thanks to formal training; I’ve had no academic education in ancient Hebrew, so I’m no better with that than any other amateur flipping through a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.)

     One answer to solving the translation hurdle without taking five years of ancient Greek classes is to read multiple translations of the same passages. 

 

Matthew 6:14

• “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.” KJV
• “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” NASB 1977
• “For if you forgive people their wrongdoing, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well.” Holman
• “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” New Living Translation
• “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”  English Standard Version.

 

     Comparing these, I not only learn to appreciate the fuller meaning of the word “trespasses,” but I also get a sweeping view of how translators have dealt with the word for “men” in this passage.  Men, people, those who, and others make it clear to me that there’s a troublesome, gender-flexible word in there – and, in fact, it’s one we’ve already seen, anthrópois.  Therefore, I don’t get my heavenly Father’s forgiveness just by pardoning my husband, his brothers, and his male friends.  I have to forgive everybody.

      Reading multiple versions is a lot of work, I’ll admit.  As a people who hold the Scriptures as the very source of our faith, however, it strikes me that checking a few might be a worthy pursuit.  Besides, we live in an age where any number of Web sites do the work for us by assembling the versions.

     Still, I just annoyed some people.  Progressives who insist on inclusion in all cases are irritated at the first two examples I gave, the 1611 King James and the 1977 New American Standard Bible.  Both of those target the gender in the verse as male, a mortal sin in the progressive realm.  On the flipside, there are those of a more conservative bent who are furious that anyone would need to see the word "men" changed in early translations; shouldn’t we stop kowtowing to the feminists out there who are spoiling everything?

     Both sides have a political agenda.  Neither side sways me much.  My bias is a linguist’s bias: I’d like to see translations that are inclusive when the original language is inclusive, gendered when the original language is gendered, and vague when the original is vague about what sex is being addressed.

 

NOT AS EASY AS I THINK, THOUGH

     Let’s start with the easy stuff.

     As I mentioned above, Greek has no terms for the English words “husband” and “wife.” When you see those words in your Bible, you’re definitely seeing translations of the Greek words “male” (andrós) and “female (gyné).”  The way Bible translators know to render those words as the English terms "husband" and "wife" is context.  Most often, that context is what’s called the genitive case of a declined noun – or, for those not schooled in grammar, the “of” form of a word.  Greek has no word for “of,” so it builds that meaning into the end of a noun, adjusting “man” to mean “the man [of her],” which is to say, “her man,” her husband.  “The woman [of him]” becomes “wife.”

     But sometimes a translation runs into issues beyond the simple words.  We have cultural biases built into our way of thinking, and that affects our ways of reading (and our translators’ ways of translating).  Thus, there’s a built-in conservative assumption about verses like 1 Timothy 5:8: That it’s about a father’s requirement to be the breadwinner for his family.  Let’s read it in the English Standard Version, a version whose translators claim is gender-neutral when such language will "render literally what is in the original":

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

     Here’s our issue with the literalism-claiming ESV: Despite there being three decidedly male pronouns in that translation – his, his, and he – the Greek text written by Paul doesn’t have a single gendered pronoun in it.  All the verbs refer back to the Greek tis, the word “anyone,” an indefinite pronoun.    The Timothy sentence refers, literally in the text, to anyone’s household.  We recall that “households” in the New Testament sometimes belonged to women (Acts 16:14; 1 Cor. 1:11).  Frankly, though, I’m not the one willing to tell conservative preachers that the Bible isn’t talking here about dads being breadwinners.  I’ll leave that to braver souls.

 

THE BRETHREN AND, UM, SISTREN?

     The Greek word adelphoí is the plural of the word “brother.”  It seems it would be an easy translation.  One is a brother, more than one are a bunch of male brothers.

     But it’s language, so you know there’s a twist.  Let me tell you about my family.

     When my mother informed me that mis tíos were coming over for dinner, I at no point thought that all my uncles were the ones on their way to my house.  Tíos meant my aunt and uncle.  Yes, it’s a masculine word, and yes, it could have meant only my male uncles, but the context made it pretty clear I was seeing my Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto.  One Spanish word became three English words, tíos turning into "aunt and uncle" when migrated across the language border.

     The same held true for my mother’s hijos. We were her son and daughter, not two sons.

     The count got higher with my abuelos, my two grandmothers and two grandfathers.

     Make a masculine human into a plural form in Spanish, in French, in numerous Romance languages that evolved from Latin, and you often have a mixed group of males and females.  Or maybe all males (remember, context counts).  And it turns out non-Latin languages like ancient Greek have the same bundling property for plural males.

     So, should the word adelphoí be translated as “brothers and sisters” in most New Testament occurrences?  Some argue that doing so is ridiculous, since Greek already has the word adelphé, which means sister.  If sister isn’t in the text, why put it in?

     Remember the bundling, though.  I’d actually be misinforming you if I translated my arriving tíos as “my uncles.”  I have to add words by saying “my aunt and uncle.”  An accurate translation will sometimes have to add words.  For example, the first verse of the Gospel of Matthew has 16 words in the King James Version.  This is translated from 8 original Greek words.  Adding to the word count is not adding to the word of God – here, the KJV translation is 100% accurate.

     So, to my mind, translating adelphoí as “brothers and sisters” isn’t just allowable, it’s often the responsible thing to do … when the context allows.  I repeat: when the context allows.  One example: In Acts 16, when Paul and Silas address the "brothers" in the church meeting at the house of the merchantwoman Lydia, the term probably includes women since, you know, Lydia is standing right there being addressed in her own church.  But is that situation in Scripture common?

     Commentator Michael D. Marlowe sees these occurrences as exceptions to the majority of times the term “brethren” is used in Scripture.  However, the minister Dr. Jerry Jones gives example after example after example of Scriptures that prove Marlowe’s opinion just can’t be correct, providing citations where women are clearly mixed in with groups referred to as adelphoí.  I’ll conclude this name dropping with a reference to the opinions of the co-pastors called the Bayly brothers, who seem to argue that “brothers and sisters” should never be used in Bible translations because we all already know that “brothers” means “brothers and sisters,” just like it did in Greek.  We all just know it.

     That makes as much sense to me as my pointing at Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto while saying, “Have you met my uncles?”

 

THE VISIBLE MAN IN INVISIBLE GREEK

     I thought I’d end these reflections with a tip for those who use Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, a book that, although dated and containing some textual errors, is still truly a blessing for those who are beginning to study scripture.  If you don’t own one, they’re pretty reasonably priced at the link above, although you’ll want to buy a magnifying glass at the same time for its tiny print.  (I don’t get a kickback from that link, FYI.  I include it because my studies as a young Christian were immensely enriched by both Strong’s and the text Gospel Parallels, a book chronologically laying out the synoptic gospels side-by-side on the same pages for instant story comparisons.)

     But book purchases weren’t my tip.  If you have Strong’s, you know that it’s laid out word-by-word, capturing every term in the Authorized and Revised English versions of the Bible.  To the right of the verses that use each word is a number referencing either the Hebrew or the Greek dictionary term the original Bible texts use.

     Should you have one, open it to the entry for MAN.  Scan the numbers to the right.  And now, start noticing the blank spaces, the times “man” is used in English without any word correlating with it in Hebrew or Greek.  Each of those is a judgment call on the part of the translator, a decision to insert the word “man” when it doesn’t appear in the original text.  Sometimes that works well, as when 1 Cor. 7:2 advises each [man] to have his own wife.  The context makes it pretty clear that “man” works better there than other options like “squid” or “microwave oven.”

     But some of those blanks, some of the insertions of “man” into the text where no man had gone before, reveal a clear gender bias in the translators.  And sometimes, that inclusion makes the text pointedly exclusionary:

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” ~ Matthew 16:24, KJV

     Any man.  Let him.  Himself.  His cross.  And yet the Greek has no “man” in it, not in the nouns or the pronouns.  It’s another case of the indeterminate pronoun tis, meaning “anyone” or “whoever.”

     As a woman, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been robbed of the true spirit of that verse by some long-dead translator.  I’m not "any man," as the KJV requires, but I am an "anyone," whom the Lord Himself invited.  And I confess it makes me soften to those who would like to have some inclusivity in the translation.  I can handle that, as long as it’s in service to the original text.

     Yes, yes, I can hear the Bayly brothers protesting, “’Man’ means men and women, we all know that!  We don’t have to add a ‘whoever’ to this verse!  Everybody knows it mean everybody.’”

     To which I offer one reply:

     “Have you met my uncles?”

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, aka YoYo Rez.

God, Race, Scripture, and the Churches

 Preamble note: This month I was feeling a bit more topical than expository, so forgive the free-form flow of my chat.  To clarify, an “expository” discussion focuses on a specific Bible text and extracts ideas, principles, and thoughts from that text, as I did with my posts examining the Epistle of Jude and the “cast your bread upon the waters” verse.  A “topical” discussion, on the other hand, adopts a theme up front and hunts down a variety of Bible verses to bolster that theme, an ad hoc approach.

Each is a valid way to address an idea biblically, although I confess a preference for the expository.  I also confess I feel disappointed when a speaker/writer claims to be taking an expository approach but is really only doing topical verse-fetching.  That’s why I’m advising about this month’s approach up front.

***

      Do a Google search for “What the Bible says about race” and you’ll get dozens of links to sites proclaiming that God shows no favor to any particular races or ethnic groups.  You’ll find citations showing we’re all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), that in Christ there is no difference between Jews, Greeks, or anyone else (Gal. 3:28), that God made from one blueprint of man every nation of the Earth (Acts 17:26), and that God shows zero partiality among humans (Deut. 10:17).

     Therefore, slavery is wrong, interracial relationships are fine, mixed-race children are a blessing, and everyone should have equal civil rights regardless of color or culture.  God is a 21^st-century gentleman.

     This is an example of what I call “revisionist exegesis” – Bible interpretations that have changed so dramatically over time that they’re nearly the opposite of what many of our churches used to believe.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I’m totally down with 21^st-century gentleman God and equal protection under any law for any human.  I’m mixed-ethnicity myself and in a marriage my extended family would consider mixed, so I’m pleased most churches have moved on.  Should we forget our churches’ pasts, though?  Is there something to be gained by remembering that each and every one of the above egalitarian positions were at one time staunchly considered by many Christians to be unbiblical?

 

REMEMBERING THE PAST

     I once upset a local prayer-meeting leader by mentioning over coffee that many U.S. churches previously claimed a Bible-based justification for enslaving Blacks.  She insisted that couldn’t be true since the Bible is very anti-slavery, so I made matters worse by pointing out that, technically, the Bible never specifically condemns slavery as an institution.  The discussion got heated – not loud, since we’re both users of American Sign Language, but I’m sure it caused other diners at the café to wonder what all the soundless, histrionic signing and arm waving was about.

     It was not my finest hour.  I’d yet to learn that I should be explaining my beliefs and reasoning in a less sarcastic, more humble and charitable manner (1 Pet. 3:15-16).  I don’t like recalling how wry and caustic I got in my argument with the woman.  I can be in the wrong, it turns out, even when my facts are right.

     It was one of the sins of my youth, the kind David prays that the Lord not remember (Psalm 25:7).  I could smooth it over for myself by claiming it wasn’t as bad as I thought, or that the woman needed firm correction and guidance, or that she was probably happy to be given better information from a superior intellect.  After all, I had the Bible on my side.

     Handy rationales – and exactly the type that 17^th century Christian slaveholders used in order to justify their treatment of the enslaved:

• Slavery wasn’t so bad; many of the enslaved benefitted from skills they learned.
• As a lesser race, the enslaved needed regular correction and guidance from superiors.
• Many slaves were very happy with their regular work and reliable meals.
• And the Bible says they should obey.  It’s the Curse of Ham.

     I’ll be picking on those preachers of the past.  But I’ll also be remembering the cautionary verse of Rom. 2:1 – “Passing judgement on another, you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”  Et tu, Yoli, I’ll be telling myself.

 

SIDENOTE ON PSALM 25

     One very short language observation before I move on:

     I just cited Psalm 25, in which David asks the Lord to forget his youthful sins.  One feature of the psalm which we as English readers don’t notice is that it’s an alphabetic acrostic.  Each word at the beginning of its twenty-two verses starts with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet – aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth, and so on through the end of the psalm.  Only five other psalms have that playful acrostic pattern (9, 10, 24, 37, and 145).

     Plus, one fascinating point from the Bible’s document history:

     Together, Psalms 9 and 10 make up a single acrostic poem, which led some Bible editors to conclude they were the same psalm.  The Septuagint combines them.  It also combines Psalms 144 and 145, but it still ends up with 150 psalms by splitting both Psalm 116 and Psalm 147.  All this splitting and recombining leads to a psalm citation oddity you may have noticed, the occasional use of multiple numbers (e.g., “Psalm 22 (23).”  That’s the history behind that unexpected notation.

     This is a geek point, not some deep Bible truth.  As my first pastor liked to remind me, Bible verse numbers, chapter breaks, and titles are all later inventions, not part of the original, inspired text.

 

BACK TO CONSIDERATION OF THE RACES

     We’re a tribal species.  If tomorrow we found a way to equalize everyone’s skin tones, eye shapes, hair qualities, and body types, we’d still find ways to throw up tribal boundaries (“Oh, you’re one of those BlueEyesies.  My GreenEyesies parents would never let me date a BlueEyesies boy.”)  Group unity certainly helps humans coordinate our civic structures, our farming, and our towers-of-Babel building, but unity comes at a cost.  To be “Us,” there must be a “not-Us.”   We must identify a “Them.”

     Was I wrong to marry one of the Thems?  My mom had no issue with it, but a 1950s preacher may have taken me to task for violating Deut. 7:3-4, when the Israelites found themselves among the Hittites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Amorites, and a bunch of Other-ites:

“Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons and taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following Me.”

 

     Our modern eyes immediately twitch over to the “turn away from Me” part of that prohibition, deciding that the ban on intermarriage was about escaping the false religion of outsiders, not about Israelites sidestepping the barely distinguishable genetics of fellow Middle Easterners.  A mere sixty years ago, however, any number of U.S. Christians would have insisted that the whole verse applied, every letter, not just the spirit of the edict.

     Sixteen states still had laws against interracial marriages (down from a high of thirty-eight in the late 1800s) before Loving v. Virginia declared bans on such marriages unconstitutional in 1967.  It took until the year 2000 for Alabama to officially rescind its interracial marriage ban from the law books, and until 2009 for at least one Louisiana Justice of the Peace to let it go.  These weren't simply cultural tenets of the time.  They were butressed by Christian doctrines.  Fifteenth Circuit Judge Leon Bazile, who adjudicated the Loving case before it went to the Supreme Court, directly ruled: "Almighty God created the races ... and but for interference with His arrangements there would be no need for such marriages."

     In addition to Deuteronomy 7, other passages of Scripture are similarly re-envisioned by modern eyes, departing from an era of more provocative, racialized interpretations:

• The “Curse of Ham” I referenced above is an Antebellum belief that Blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, whose own son was cursed by granddaddy after Ham saw Noah drunk, passed out, and naked.  Canaan, Ham’s son, was cursed to forever be the servant to the descendants of Shem and Japheth (Gen. 9:20-27).  Canaan’s offspring were imagined to be dark-skinned after that point, a belief never fully explained or even appearing in the Bible text.  The idea did, however, work well within the social conventions of the day.
  
  
• The Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1-9) is another favorite of Antebellum exegetes who promoted a proslavery, anti-intermarriage Bible view.  God clearly didn’t want humans unified.  He confused their languages and scattered them.  For us to bring them back together and to intermingle them would be an act of treason against the Almighty (said some of our Christian forebears), which is why interracial and interethnic marriages should be banned.  We, like our languages, are meant to stay separate.
  
  
• Acts 17 records Paul’s speech in the Areopagus of Athens, revealing to listeners the nature of “the unknown god” for whom they'd built an altar: “From one [ancestor] He made all peoples to inhabit the whole Earth, and He allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live” (v. 26).  God made the people; God made the boundaries.  Early American preachers used this verse to oppose immigration by the Chinese, Italians, Irish, and others deemed too unamerican at the time.

      Those are just three examples of passages used in days past to promote race-separation ideologies within parts of U.S. Christianity – one example based on people’s skin color, one based on their languages, and one based on their culture of origin.  As tribal creatures, we’re predisposed to find any way possible to draw and redraw the lines to exclude the Them from the Us.

 

DENOMINATIONAL BREAKDOWN

     Not all our Christian forebears agreed with this particular method of interpreting Scripture.  And where there’s disagreement, there’s opportunity for schism.

     Methodists were founded by profoundly anti-slavery proponents like John Wesley.  In time, however, the denomination split into pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, north vs. south.

     Also splitting over slavery, Southern Baptists broke from their northern American Baptist brethren in order to maintain the rights of slaveholders to be appointed as missionaries.

     Presbyterians, already dividing over Old School and New School theologies, suffered a final blow on the slavery issue, splitting like the others along north/south boundaries.

     These three (and subsequently six) denominations represented the bulk of Christians in the continental U.S.  All were evangelical.  All were Bible-based denominations.  All embraced the concept of salvation by faith rather than by works.  Yet they were rent asunder over the concept of whether a human can own another human … biblically.

     Their split widened over the concept of whether schools should allow the educational intermingling of children from different races.

     They continued to preach against each other’s stances regarding interracial marriage and dating.  (Yes, I’m looking at you, Bob Jones University.)

     They solidified their divide arguing whether their country should adopt civil rights legislation and voter equality acts in Congress.

     Only one group, the Presbyterians, managed to overcome their rift, reuniting in 1983 at an Atlanta, GA conference to form the current Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  The others remain split – not over doctrine, but over cultural interpretations of Scripture and the inertial drag of history.

     Speaking of Scripture … I haven’t referenced it for a dozen or so paragraphs, so let’s bring it all home there.

 

SCRIPTURE AND THE RACES

     I’ve only danced around the edges of what Scripture has to say about slavery.  I’ll leave it at that, since this is just a blog post and not an academic text.  But I will revisit interethnic and interracial marriage, a theme dear to my heart.

MOSES WAS IN AN INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE.  Ancient Egyptian records detail that Cush was a land south of Egypt, now a part of what's known as Ethiopia.  Moses married a native Cushite woman, much to the consternation of his co-leaders, older brother Aaron and sister Mariam (Num. 12).  God stepped in and put the siblings in their place, affirming that marriage outside the color lines of the Hebrews was absolutely fine with Him.

RUTH WAS IN AN INTERETHNIC MARRIAGE.  The whole gist of the Book of Ruth is the story of her accepting her dead husband’s mother as her own kin, pledging that Naomi’s people would now be her people and Naomi’s God would be her God.  A Moabite outsider, she marries into the Hebrew tribes thanks to her late husband’s distant tribal relation to her new husband, Boaz.  This works out well for Israel, since Ruth is King David’s great-grandmother.

RAHAB OF JERICHO MARRIED A HEBREW: Only four women are mentioned in the genealogies of Jesus.  Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who helped two Israelite spies escape detection in the enemy city of Jericho (Josh. 2:9-13), is one of those four.  At the conquest of her Canaanite city, Rahab and all her family were spared.  Good thing, too.  Praised for her faith in Hebrews 11 and for her works in James 2, Rahab’s first Hebrew son was named Boaz, that dude up in the last paragraph who married the immigrant Ruth, great-grandmatriarch to King David, all of whom contributed to that mixed-ethnicity ancestor named Jesus.

     There are more examples, but …rule of three, enough said.

     Here are the reflections I take away from this month's reading and writing experience:

Large groups of people can make massive mistakes when interpreting Scripture.  Do I do that?  Are there areas where I let my pre-existing biases color my experience of the Scriptures?  Do I read to validate what I already think, or do I let the words change my thinking?

We’re thoroughly afflicted by our Us v. Them perceptions.  Do I carve out niches in my church, my community, my life, instinctively cutting off those who might benefit most from seeing the light of Christ in me?  Have I “Other-ed” the very ones I’m meant to serve?

I’m wrong about things.  There are firm assurances in my faith – that Jesus is my Lord, come in the flesh to ensure that I was saved (Titus 3:5), that I am being saved (1 Cor. 1:18), and that I will be saved (Rom. 5:9-10).  But I am wrong about some nonessentials I imagine are so important.  Which ones, specifically?  I don’t know.  I just know I’d be a fool to think they’re not there.

I should listen to, not break with, Christians with different ideas.  I shouldn’t live in fear of being sullied by wrong thoughts.  As one of His sheep, I know His voice.  As one of His listeners, I hear His word and read it, studying it to learn what’s true.  But do I listen carefully to what other Christians think, how they interpret?  Will I find flecks of gold in the sands they shift?  Are there pearls where I thought there was only mud?  Most important, am I showing love to build them up instead of being contentious when I decide I disagree?

     Here ends this month’s topical free-walk.  I think I’ll go hug my gringo husband now and let him know that his different ethnicity is all right by me.

 

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx