Storm edition

OK, this is the 2016 Snowpocalypse edition. Of, if it's a really bad winter a Snopocalypse edition. I'm anticipating losing most things any time now so this'll be brief. I know I've used this King Lear quote more than one time before but it really fits now, with the WV legislature's currently leadership engaged in trying to beat down unions and poor people:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

AND ALSO MUCH CATTLE

Goat Rope is all about the biblical Book of Jonah lately. Check earlier posts for more.

Here's a little weekend thought. If you like critters, you should love Jonah. Two of its main actors were animals (the great fish and the worm that killed the gourd vine). Without the first, there would be a good bit less artwork and folklore. And without the second, the whole point of the story couldn't have been made

But it is also a part of the Bible where God uses his speaking role on behalf of animals. In explaining to Jonah why he didn't want to wipe out Nineveh, he says

And should I not want to spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

El Cabrero wonders how Nineveh would have fared if they had more goats than cattle. The little ones are pretty cute though.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WE NEED MORE JONAHS

Sistine Chapel version of Jonah, courtesy of wikipedia.

The Jonah jag continues at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

If the biblical character Jonah happened to compete in a beauty pageant, he would probably not win the Miss Congeniality award. He's grumpy, quarrelsome and disobedient. He tries (unsuccessfully) to escape to the ends of the earth to avoid the prophetic call. He gets all bent out of shape because God didn't wipe out the city of Nineveh, yet he throws a hissy fit after his beloved gourd vine dies.

I love him. And I think we need more people like him.

Allow El Cabrero to explain. Our world is all too full of people who think they have a message from God to deliver. And you know what? Most of the time, they don't. Maybe we should make a new rule: if we think the universe wants us to deliver a message, we should try to resist it as long as possible. If we try to escape to the ends of the earth to avoid it and still can't (with some kind of great fish adventure in between), then maybe, just maybe, we really have something to say. Otherwise, it was probably just us.

STILL TRAVELING...regular publication to resume June 30.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FATHER MAPPLE'S SERMON

It'a all Jonah all the time lately at Goat Rope. And no discussion of that little gem of a story would be complete without at least a glance at that right whale of a book, Moby-Dick.

If ever a book ran away from its author, that would be the one. After making a name for himself writing travelogues, Melville masterpiece, unappreciated in his time, is vast and almost cosmic in scope. And of course he couldn't get by without a number of references to Jonah.

Prior to taking off on the Pequod, Ishmael visits a chapel at New Bedford to hear a sermon by the former whaler Father Mapple. And the topic was...you guessed it.

According to Father Mapple,

Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters- four yarns- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us!

You can find the whole sermon here. But it's way better to read the whole book.

NOTE: El Cabrero is still traveling. Links will resume the week of June 30th.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JONAH AND THE WORM

Gustave Dore's version of the fish with the eating disorder. How come nobody painted the worm that killed Jonah's gourd vine?

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the biblical story of Jonah, possibly history's first short story and one of its best. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier links.

Everybody remembers Jonah and the whale, but what about Jonah, the gourd vine and the worm? That's like the coolest part.

After the whale episode and successfully preaching repentance to the Ninevites, Jonah gets mad at God and pouts because the latter did not destroy the city. He even wants to die. Specifically, he's mad at God precisely because

thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness...

God, sounding a bit like a psychologist, asks

Dost thou well to be angry?

As Dr. Phil might say, "How's that working for you?"

Jonah eventually made a shelter for himself outside the city and rested beneath the shade of a gourd vine. However, God wasn't quite finished with him. He prepared a worm to kill the vine (kind of the same way he prepared the great fish). That was the last straw for the ever-grumpy prophet. He REALLY wants to die this time.

But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?" "I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

At which point, God delivers the punch line:

But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

I think the best way to read the story is to see the whole thing as a practical joke played on Jonah in order to teach him a lesson about compassion, although I'd be surprised if he saw the humor in it.

STILL ROAMING. Back with links and such Monday.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JONAH OUT OF THE BELLY

Gustave Dore's version of Jonah preaching repentance in Nineveh.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the biblical book of Jonah, a little gem of a short story. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

Yesterday's post summarized the plot of Jonah up to the point where he got vomited out of the fish's belly. Today, we resume the story.

I highly recommend you give the original a look. It's well worth the time, even if you ain't got no religion. It's that good a story. Here's one online version.

After rejecting the first call of God and doing the whole fish thing, Jonah once again gets the call to go to Nineveh and deliver the message of repentance. This time he does.

At least he can take a hint, even if it has to be a pretty major one.

Jonah goes to Nineveh to deliver his cargo, warning that God will destroy the place in 40 days unless they got their act together. They actually listen, fast, and dress in sackcloth and ashes. The local king sends out the word for everyone to do the same, including the animals.

If that was the case, there probably weren't any goats around.

Any ordinary prophet would have been happy about this, put "Mission Accomplished" on his aircraft carrier, and headed home. But not our boy. The Bible says

it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

He throws his first temper tantrum of the story, complaining that the reason he didn't want to go there in the first place was that he knew God would go soft and spare the Ninevites. He asks God to take his life.

I think he may have had issues.

STILL GONE. Regular features should resume next Monday. Well may the US go when I'm gone.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JONAH IN THE BELLY

Carving of Jonah from the Worms Cathedral in Germany, courtesy of wikipedia.

Herman Melville said it best in Moby-Dick:

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.”

The little biblical book of Jonah is a whale of a tale even if it is flea sized. I highly recommend checking it out. It would only take a few minutes and you don't have to be religiously inclined to enjoy it. (For more by way of background, check out earlier posts in this series.)

Here's the Goat Rope condensed version. God tells Jonah son of Amittai to go and prophecy to the people of Nineveh and urge them to repent of their sins. If Jonah was a good prophet or even a nice guy, he would have said, "Here I am, Lord, send me."

But he wasn't.

Instead, he gets the hell out of Dodge and hops on a ship bound for Tarshish, which was in Spain. In biblical times, that was the ends of the earth. It would be like El Cabrero fleeing to Siberia to avoid having to prophecy to the flatlanders of Ohio (some of whom are cousins).

God is not amused and sends a storm that threatens to sink the ship. The sailors assume that some god is offended and cast lots to find the guilty party. Jonah fesses up and says they ought to throw him overboard to save themselves. Reluctantly, they do so. The storm stops.

Everyone knows the next part. The Bible says

Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Notice it says fish, not whale. From the line above, this may have been a special model, but let's not ruin a good story with literalism.

In the belly of the whale, Jonah prays and God relents. As the King James Version puts it,

And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

That's what most people remember, but there's a lot more to the tiny story.

About which more tomorrow...

STILL GONE. About another week to go. Y'all hold down the fort, OK?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FORTHTELLING VS FORETELLING

Benjamin West's Isaiah's Lips Anointed with Fire, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is traveling at the moment but the blog goes on. The theme is one of the world's first short stories, the biblical book of Jonah, which sits among the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament.

The terms prophet, prophetic, and prophecy are badly abused these days. Some folks consider themselves prophetic any time they rant. And other folks of the fundamentalist persuasion are under the impression that ancient Hebrews had nothing better to talk about than things that would happen 2,500 years later. These folks torture the Bible until it confesses that the end of the world is at hand.

In reality, the term is applied to a large number of people in the Hebrew Bible over centuries, so it's hard to come up with a single definition. According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible,

In general, it may be said that prophets were men or women believed to be recipients through audition, vision, or dream of divine messages that they passed on to others by means of speech or symbolic actions.

The major Hebrew prophets aimed most of their thunder at the rulers and powerful people of their day, calling them back to the Covenant and to God's demand of justice for the poor. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it,

Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.

For a really good introduction to and overview of the topic, check out Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination.

Most of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible contain teachings attributed by the prophets with some accompanying narrative. The book of Jonah is unique in that it is all story. And it's a good one.

More on that tomorrow.

STILL TRAVELING. Regular posts with links and snarky comments about current events should resume June 30.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BIBLICAL ANATOMY

Innards courtesy of wikipedia.

The book of Jonah is a nugget of a short story within the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament. But before diving into that whale of a tale, a little biblical anatomy may be in order.

The Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament share the same books in the case of Protestants, although the order is a little different. Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians include other books.

Probably just because I'm used to it, the way the Protestant Old Testament is organized makes sense to me. It can be divided into the Torah, historical writings, wisdom books, and prophets.

The Torah or Pentateuch is the name commonly given to the first five books. They deal with the creation, the story of the family of Abraham, slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, the covenant on Sinai, wanderings in the desert, and various laws.

The historical writings come next, starting with Joshua and ending with Esther. Note: these represent the historical stories told by and about the Hebrew people from the time of Moses' death to the resettlement of Judah after the Babylonian exile. It's theological rather than "objective" history (whether any kind of history can be objective is another subject) and some versions disagree with each other.

Then comes an interesting collection of songs, stories and wisdom writings that include Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (which totally rocks), and the Song of Solomon, an earthy love poem that people have tried to twist into a spiritual allegory for centuries.

The rest of the books, 17 in all, are the writings of and about the Hebrew prophets and it's here we'll find our fishing buddy Jonah.

The terms prophet, prophetic, and prophecy are pretty spattered in modern discourse and need a little cleaning off. More on that tomorrow.

STILL GONE. El Cabrero should be in Mexico by the time you read this. The link/current event feature will resume around June 30.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BIBLICAL PARADOX

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has noticed a strange paradox about people's attitudes towards the Bible. On one side, quite a few people seem to be pretty biblically illiterate and, on the other, quite a few people seem to worship it as some kind of textual deity. The weird thing is, there's quite a bit of overlap between two groups.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church, where the Bible is taken seriously but not necessarily literally. Every service consisted of several readings from it, including a psalm, a reading from another part of the Hebrew Bible, and selections from the gospels and epistles. Many of the other words in the liturgy were derived from the Bible.

I couldn't help soaking up a lot of it just by being there, even though I wasn't raised to regard it as a science book or infallible oracle. I had plenty of pals who did, but they often had only the vaguest ideas of what it actually said.

If I had my druthers, there would be way more biblical literacy and way less literalism. It really is a great book or collection of books and, like many BIG STORIES, the themes therein influence our lives and culture whether we're aware of them or not. To miss all that is to miss out on or be misinformed about something that has shaped us all...kind of like Shakespeare only more so.

Reading or hearing it has been pretty much a constant in my life, even while my moment to moment religious (or non-religious) opinions bounced all over the map. I would encourage you, Gentle Reader, whatever your theology or lack thereof may be, to crack it open every so often and give it a non-sectarian look.

That's going to happen over the next stretch at Goat Rope, with a special focus on the little gem that tells the story of Jonah. Stay tuned.

NOTE: El Cabrero is on the road, so the current event/link feature is down.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MAYBE DOWN IN MEXICO OR A PICTURE UPON SOMEBODY'S SHELF

Coptic icon of Jonah, courtesy of wikipedia. Looks more like a carp than a whale to me. And I've seen some almost big enough to swallow a person.

El Cabrero is about to head south of the border for the next several days, but fear not--your daily dose of Goat Rope will continue, minus the links and comments about current events.

Since I'll have limited internet access, allow me to say in advance that I extend my condolences if anything really bad happens and congratulations if anything really good happens.

Otherwise, the theme for this stretch of time is the Goat Rope Vacation Bible School. I've been thinking a lot about the short but charming book of Jonah lately, which is rich in story, associations, and humor, and I'd like to explore it in a non-sectarian manner.

Here's part of the reason for the timing. A good friend of mine who is a regular reader of this blog breaks out in hives anytime I discuss the Bible or religion. But, since this person is going on the same trip, I should be able to get away with it.

Stay tuned.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

VANITY OF VANITIES, THE MOTHER OF ALL FISH TALES, AND MORE

Caption: Something's not kosher about these guys.


The guiding thread of this week's Goat Rope is a series of reflections on the Bible, although you are liable to find most anything else here too.

El Cabrero was lucky to have a good Bible teacher when I went to (we are) Marshall U.

He was a rabbi from a local synagogue (Reformed I think) who really made the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) an open book and also taught about later Jewish writings.

It helped to learn about exactly what was there and to get a sense of scholarly opinion about when and why various parts of it were written and how the religion of Judaism developed over time.

It would be tough to pick out favorite parts, but El Cabrero's selection for Greatest Hits, Vol. I would have to include:

*Genesis, which is pretty cool as long as you don't use it as a science book. The family saga might make you feel pretty good about your own...

*Ecclestiastes, which gave us the title of today's post. Who said tragic existentialism was a 20th century thing?;

*The Hebrew prophets, who contrary to currently popular opinion were not obsessed with "end times" events but rather with social justice. The latter parts of the book of Isaiah top would top my list; and a special shout out to...

*Jonah, which appears in the books of the prophets but is really a short story and can even be read as a kind of practical joke played on the unwilling prophet by God to teach him a lesson about compassion. There is something lovable about this most unlovable of characters.

When God tells him to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, he gets the hell out of Dodge, hopping a ship bound for Tarshish, the ends of the earth for Jonah. When a storm arises, the sailors toss him overboard to appease some angry god. Everybody knows the fish story.

When he gets vomited up by the fish at Nineveh, he reluctantly tells the people to repent lest they be destroyed. And--to his great disappointment--they do. Instead of being glad, he's angry with God for his mercy and asks to be put to death. God, in therapist mode, asked, "Are you right to be angry?"

Then he goes and pouts, sitting under the shade of a gourd vine. The vine is about the only thing in the world Jonah seems to like. But then...

God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day and it smote the gourd that it withered.

And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.

Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night;

And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

The story ends there. If Jonah had anything else to say we don't know what it might have been.

I think one reason I like Jonah is his reluctance. There are way too many people in the world today who like to think of themselves as God's mouthpiece. I wish they'd take a ship for Tarshish...

THE WAL-MART TAX. There's been a lot of stuff about Tax Day lately. Here's something from Wake-Up Wal-Mart about how that corporation and others not only avoid fair taxation but also pass on the public costs of low wages and benefits to the rest of us.

THE COMMON GOOD. One aspect of Roman Catholic social teaching that I particularly admire is the ancient idea that the role of government and social institutions is to promote the common good. In his new book, Pope Benedict XVI criticizes both totalitarian collectivism and cut throat capitalism:

"After the experiences of totalitarian regimes, after the brutal way in which they trampled on men, mocked, enslaved and beat the weak, we understand anew those who hunger and thirst for justice," Benedict writes.

"Confronted with the abuse of economic power, with the cruelty of capitalism that degrades man into merchandise, we have begun to see more clearly the dangers of wealth and we understand in a new way what Jesus intended in warning us about wealth."

WHILE PRESIDENT NERO FIDDLES, at least some businesses are taking global climate change seriously. This from Business Week:

Remember the arguments for not taking action against global warming? Just a few years ago the claim was: "There's no evidence that the climate is changing." Then it became: "Well, maybe it is, but humans aren't to blame." That morphed into: "Warmer could be better, and we can easily adapt." And all along, we heard that cutting emissions would cripple the economy--and wouldn't make much difference because China and India weren't on board.

Forget all that. For most companies, the science debate is ancient history. The current argument, which could turn ugly, is about how the government should act to curb carbon emissions...

ROAD BLOCK. It looks like efforts to fix the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit hit a brick wall in the Senate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED.