NCNYUMC.ORG | Shakespeare

Below please find another letter to my friends in The Coven. While you may not agree with any or all of such musings, I pray that you will understand that all of this group are committed Christians and well-seasoned by long ministries in many, many difficult and impossible life situations, including war, race riots, suicide efforts, and almost any other breakdown of the graces of God one can imagine.

Greetings in the New Year! I note, for openers, that the Iraq War shortly will be a four year exercise. That is precisely how long it took us to win WWII, with 6 millions of military folks. But we still haven't won this one.

Reading recently in an antique book called "The Twelve Caesars", by one Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, the following leaped out of the page:

As an aside here, it strikes me as odd that so many villages and cities in CNY take their names from the days of the Roman Empire: Apulia, Pompey, Manlius, Cicero, Utica, Carthage, Syracuse, Ithaca, and so on. But none bear the two greatest names of that Empire: Julius Caesar, and Augustus. Their names are reserved for two months of our year: July, and August.

Then, the following leaped off the page of a new publication, "Will And The World", by Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University. This book is about William Shakespeare, and the section I want to share with you compares Christopher Marlowe's writing (he was contemporary and rival with Shakespeare) with Shakespeare's writing about portraying history:

A little later on that same page, another Shakespearian version of a "petty" Tamburlaine, Talbot, is judged severely by the Countess of Auvergne, who has lured him to her castle:

These last two lines brought immediate laughter to the surface concerning our own times and wars, quickly quenched by the depths of sorrow concerning thousands and thousands of civilian peoples dead, wounded, frightened, and starving to this very moment in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of our own soldiers, or theirs. Over two thousand American soldiers, and over 100,00 Iraqi civilians - women, children and oldsters. This is to say nothing of the wounded, the insane, the permanently crippled.

They also brought quickly to mind my own continuing judgement about the inner circle in Washington, D.C., although they seem to be somewhat more tempered in their expressions of themselves lately. I continue to see them as schoolyard thugs and bullies, plain and simple. They haven’t even cared what people thought about them. This was made so very evident during the last election campaign when Bush was accosted, on TV coverage, by a young man who wished to share his opinions on something with him.

Bush snarled at him in that repulsive way he has, "I don't care what you think," and stormed away. He is such a posturing scold.

To The Coven: I very much would like your opinion of the following. Is it worth putting in the column? Thank you.

The May 30 th, 2004 edition of the Sunday St. Petersburg Times of Florida carried a long screed concerning the impact of such recent books as Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code", and Elaine Pagel's "Beyond Belief." Both books are focused on the increasingly obvious shortcomings of what is known loosely as Christian Orthodoxy.

Brown's book rambles around the issue of whether Jesus Christ was married and sired children, with descendants alive to this day. Both matters were a firm part of being a young Jew in His day. In Pagels' book, one finds an examination of the almost incredible, yet understandable (given the time and circumstances) sellout of the early Christian Church by its own fathers.

This point has seldom seen the light of day. Basically, it amounted to the Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire, in 325 A.D., calling a meeting of the bishops of the newly prominent Christian Church to sit together and forge an agreement about their understanding of the essentials of the faith. That is, the bishops who dominated the faith probably made a move to the Emperor to do just that, and he was pleased to do so because of what he apparently was seeing as religious anarchy happening all over the empire.

This was the end of the thousand-year-old-Roman Empire religion, which depended on the credulity of the aristocrats and public alike, since the aristocrats had lost their aura in the system. Killing each other all the time has a way of diminishing one's stature in the scheme of things. The gods of the Lares (household gods) and the gods of the Penates (agricultural gods) lost their hold on the minds and spirits of both populations.

Constantine's reasoning was that he did not need religious warfare in the Empire. If the bishops succeeded, then Constantine would name the Christian church as the official religion of the Empire, and open the state coffers to the church to build their buildings, and whatever else was needed.

So the bishops did just that, the result of their efforts being known as the Nicean Creed (named after the site where the bishops met), which is still in use to this day. What was ignored by most historians concerning the procedure of constructing such a creed was that the New Testament was also being forged at the same time. The present version we have of the Four Canonical Gospels, a variety of surviving letters (some of questionable origin) from the early church, plus the kooky Book of Revelations, was put together at the expense of something like 30 - 40 some odd other versions of the Gospel. Quite a few, in any case. That is, ones that we know anything about. Who knows how many Gospels are buried in a landslide somewhere, or some safe deposit box somewhere?

Apparently, those church fathers were fierce about excluding anything that did not suit their rise to power purposes in the Empire. They demanded that any church or monastery or convent which held Gospels unapproved by them must destroy these versions of the Gospel on pain of excommunication and/or death.

In a place called Nag Hammadi, south of Alexandria, Egypt, the monks in a monastery there took their copies of non-Canonical Gospels, including a Gospel of Thomas, and a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and placed them in a large clay jar, and buried them at the foot of a sand cliff near their site. 16 centuries later, an Arab Muslim found them there, and they have been in the hands of the academics ever since, until recent years, when some of the fruits of their labors have begun to surface in print.

Pagel's book, "Beyond Belief", speaks mainly to the Gospel of Thomas, which, according to the findings of the academics, was discredited by the writers of the Gospel of John. Instead of focusing on the sayings of Jesus in the tired old practice of "pray, pay, and obey", (also known in Doestoevskian terms as "miracle, mystery and authority"), Thomas was an adamant individualist who saw in the teachings of Jesus the freedom of spirit and mind that was basic to Jesus' ministries, and was very straightforward about saying so.

The last thing any Emperor wants is a population who thinks. So we wind up with a New Testament that has as its basic purpose being the official support of the Roman Empire, just a breath or so away from conflating God with the Emperor. Not at all unlike our current President, who openly says that he and God talk to each other regularly. Or Pat Robertson, for that matter, who claims the same thing.

So where are we? The feminist movement has reason to be grateful to Dan Brown in that by affirming Mary Magdalene (more properly, Mary of Migda - a well-off, mature matron from a prosperous village of that name on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and not a prostitute, as the Orthos declare) as the wife of Jesus, the role of women in the early days of the Christian movement start to become clear.

That role from its beginnings is celebrated in Thomas' Gospel in ways that the official Ortho version refuses. The Vatican, to this day, is furious with the feminist movement, and still tries everything within its power to quash it, to make abortion illegal, and to place women in the secondary role they were placed in ever since the church left Jerusalem. Their faintly-Protestant counterparts, the fundies and the evvies, are doing the same thing. The Vatican cheers. The current Cardinal of New York City recently praised the fundies and the evvies for their efforts.

The Gospel of Thomas drops bombs all over the Orthos in that it insists that Jesus taught that one can be in an intimate and personal spiritual relationship with God, as was Jesus: "I and the Father are One." This is anathema to the Orthos, because they have placed Jesus beyond human reach: the Son of God, and all that.

Out of those intimate and spiritual relationships with God emerges the matters that Jesus focuses on as portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew: the Beatitudes, the Sermon(s) On The Mount. (Note the plural reference). It's long been amusing to me that the Ortho Gospels carry within themselves the seeds of the rest of the unapproved Gospels, and they don't even know it. Or, at least, they refuse to acknowledge those seeds openly. Those seeds are affirmations of the products of one's spiritual life: one's spiritual discipline, the results being inner peace, inner joy of Being, inner strength that endures no matter what the circumstances, committed witness to the love of God, and concimitant practices, and persecution via an infinite number of tactics by one's opponents.

Both inheritances always go together - witness and persecution. The one without the other eviscerates what Jesus was trying to teach. Or, as our oldest daughter put it recently, "We were served social concerns with the cottage cheese in our family."

So the whole argument surfaced in the St. Petersburg Times in Florida recently in a column entitled "Do-It-Yourself Doctrine", which turns out to be yet another example of the infinite weaponry of the old philosophical way of maiming one's opponents - "argumentum ad hominem." (That means, roughly, that one should call the opponent dirty names and attempt to smear his or her integrity, a practice much used by the current crop of politicians in Washington, D.C., and their outriders on radio and TV in election campaigns, and for a brand new twist in American history, the actual arts of governing). Actually, the author claims to be a feminist, which surprises me in that she doesn't seem to have the faintest grasp of the relationship between authentic spiritual pilgrimage and the feminist movement. So I scratch my balding pate.

"So the consumer mentality rules in the world of Christianity Lite (as the author dubs it). The notion that no one has the right to tell anyone how to practice his or her faith, or indeed what that faith should consist of. Individual choice (can't you just hear the whispers of the Jesuits in these words?), not the tradition handed down by parents or grandparents, increasingly governs belief, practice, and denominational affiliation." (Tell that to the Founding Mothers of Women's Movement). (Parentheses supplied).

Exactly. What these people are doing is what Thomas is claiming Jesus taught: one's intimate personal and spiritual relationship with God. The under point here is that Orthodoxy has lost a lot of its clout, and that increasingly, people are ready and able to strike out on their own to try to discover their own significance in life…if the Orthos neglect their responsibility to teach its members how to pray, how to relate to God, how to make of their lives a lifelong witness to the love of God for everyone in the world.

In my own United Methodist communion, its sense of its own Ortho recently had added to it, by a vote of its General Conference (which meets every four years to decide policies for the next four years), the forbidding of gay people from being ordained as clergy. A recent decision from the Judicial Counsel even went so far as to strip a woman from the Germantown United Methodist church in Pennsylvania of her ordination as an United Methodist Traveling Elder because she openly declared herself as gay. After the Methodist supreme court ruled that she was OK.

Which, out of my 50 years of experience as a pastor, simply means that gay people who want to be ordained as clergy in our church will choose (if they stay in the church) to stay in the "closet." That's known as "back to hypocrisy." Or even, "back to back hypocrisy."

Anyway, my United Methodist Church has decided that it will violate one of the seminal teachings of Jesus: to embrace the outcast, the ill, the hated, the different, especially those who had no choices about their condition. For that matter, the Vatican earlier had said the same thing, so we Methodists are now following the Vatican's instructions. To my mind, in this regard, my church has lost its right to be a witness to the love of God for the world.

This is but one example of the Orthos losing their clout, literally driving people out of the pews, or forbidding them entrance in the first place, and knowingly or not, assisting them in an unconscious irony to engage themselves in original spiritual pilgrimage issues. On their own.

To me, this is exciting; to stodgy old Orthos who are losing their clout, original spiritual pilgrimage (the personal trek to the awareness of the Presence of God in life) is seen as nothing but a danger…to them. Isn't that odd? The keepers of the original sense of awareness of the Presence of God by virtue of the pilgrimage of Jesus of Nazareth in life discouraging personal adventures of the spirit to encounter God in the name of institutional preservation? Yuck. Pray, pay, and obey. (Parentheses supplied).

It does not escape notice that our General Conference also bowed to the wishes of the most recent American emperor in the matter of gay people. George Bush (originally a United Methodist layman in Texas) pushed the issue as a re-election matter and had southern representatives of our church push the matter in our last General Conference. As far as gay clergy go in our church, he succeeded in telling us what to do.

So the reader may see how well emperors and Orthos get along with each other. As I write, George Bush and the current leadership of the Republican Party are also flagrantly violating the Constitutional provision that church and state should be separate. Wherever is to be found that flaming conservative outrage at violating the Constitution? Bush is doing so by pushing federal moneys into the coffers of the cooperating religious institutions, the Orthos - millions and millions of dollars - just as Emperor Constantine did in 325 A.D.

No one seems to be protesting that the Constitution is thus being broken. Which in turn brings up a wry turn of events that is unexpected: back in the Red Scare days of our nation, the infamous Cold War with Communism, the political and religious right wingers quoted a line right out of Shakespeare to try to drum up support for their programs. The line reads, "If it prospers, none dare call it treason." They even published a book, the title of which was, "None Dare Call it Treason."

If the Democrats had tried to break the Constitution thus, one can imagine the hooraw in which the Republicans would place their energies. But we're not hearing a peep from the Republicans in this matter. Since it is prospering for them (so far), none of them dare call it "unconstitutional", or "treason." Which says all that needs to be said about their religious and political integrity as far as this writer is concerned.

Alas, as far as the current political/religious crop of Orthos are concerned, it is more than obvious that they will do anything for (federal) moneys. There is a word to describe this attitude, but in the interests of decency in print, I will let the reader figure it out.