A Time to Believe and a Time to Doubt

First, they told me that God created the heavens and the earth. And I believed. Then they told me the Bible was God's word. And I believed. And the Bible said that God was Good. And I believed. Then I learned about the stars as old as the hills, and the hills as old as the stars. I learned about stars so old and so far away, that though they shine on us every night, they're dark where they began. They're so far away, they're already dead, and they sure are taking their time to get to us. I learned about the rocks of ages through carbon dating. I examined the chart of the pleistocene and mezocene and all the cenes and era after era after era - a gadjillion eras a gadjillion years ago.

Then someone told me that the Bible says the heavens and the earth were made 6,000 years ago - not so long ago. Well, it seemed plain to anyone who could count that a gadjillion years was a bit more than 6,000. Where did the Bible say that? Well, Bishop Usher, in the time before TV, calculated the time by working backwards from the geneologies of the people listed in the Bible. I didn't know what to believe.

Then someone told me that the Bible did not say that the heavens and the earth were made 6,000 years ago. Bishop Usher may not have understood everything there was to understand about genealogies in the 1600's BTV. For example, sometimes entire generations were not listed because the authors of the genealogies, had their purpose, and their purpose was to highlight the important family members, the achievers, the one's we'd recognize as helping to move the story forward. All right then, I could live and breath again if it was Usher vs. Science. Let them battle it out and may the best mind win. No need to pit God against Science. God who was Good and had all knowledge, and Science who was Smart. They could be friends again.

And then someone asked me if Adam had a belly button. I imagine God forming Adam from the dust of the ground, breathing life into him. An umbilical cord? A placenta? Lots of goop like in Terminator?  I'm just not seeing it. They suggested that God could make the heavens and the earth with clues for scientists to find to make them think that the earth was a gadjillion years old. Is that Good? Did God do that? Did he embellish Adam with a belly button?

And then, just last night, I read more about Bishop Usher's work in When God Spoke English THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE  by Adam Nicolson - Now a Major BBC Television Programme.  Bishop Usher "calculated that God created the earth on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, at nine o'clock in the morning, London time, or midnight in the Garden of Eden." Midnight in the Garden of Eden. Now why don't we celebrate the birth of earth every October 23rd at midnight? How could this extraordinary bit of information have escaped me for the fifty years that I have believed that God created the heavens and the earth. Another thing I believe is that no one knows the day or the hour when time's up. I doubt that anyone knows the day or the hour when time began....and ever will.  And since I have one, I can put that in my bellybutton and contemplate it.

Cherish is the Word

Since death did part me from my mom, I have been sifting through her time in a box. I found the wedding vows of my mother's mother and father, part of a beautiful booklet published by The Methodist Book Concern in 1916. .

The vows went like this: I Russell, take thee, Carrie, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my faith. And then she said the same to him, except he became the wedded husband. Then Russell gave Carrie a ring and said: With this ring I thee wed, and with my worldly goods I thee endow, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Meanwhile, my Botswana book friend, Mma Romatswe*, was ruminating on the wedding vows:

"She was not sure that it was ever right to read somebody else's letters or private papers unless you were certain that it was the only way of averting some very serious consequence. Or... and there were other exceptions. Errant husbands, for instance, could hardly complain if a wife, or somebody acting for the wife, read the letters they might write to their mistresses. That was because a wife has a right to read her husband's letters, in Mma Ramotwe's view, because he agreed to that in the marriage ceremony; not that those exact words were used, but they were surely implied. Perhaps it might be better to spell it out in the wedding service, where it might be put tactfully, along with the general promise to share. I promise to share all my worldly goods - including letters, parcels, and other items of correspondence, opened or unopened. Perhaps that sounded a bit too formal, but no doubt there were ways of saying the same thing in a warmer, more romantic way."

Which brought me to my own wedding vows of 1974. The conventional vows of the day had the woman promise to love, honor, and obey. How did we get from the egalitarian love and cherish of 1916 to the hierarchical love, honor and obey of 1974. Was it just my own denomination? I didn't think so. I thought it was in all the wedding scenes in movies and real life that I had ever witnessed. To suggest leaving out the "obey" part left me vulnerable to raised eyebrows and  accusations of "feminist."   Nevertheless "obey" was for kids, and I wasn't marrying my father. I thought to push against "obey" was pushing against patriarchal time immemorial. I just found out I was wrong. Something happened after 1916. I wonder what.


*Mma Ramotswe is from the The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith

Better Late Than Never

In  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith, Mma Ramotswe, the wise detective of Botswana, and her husband, J.L.B. Matekoni, meet a grieving detective from America. He is visiting a friend who is very busy and must leave him alone in this unfamiliar place when she leaves on business.  Mma Ramotswe and J.L.B. Matekoni contemplate their new acquaintance's pain, the way of memory, and lateness.

"...All I know is that he is sad in his heart." She touched her chest. "That is the place where his sadness is. Right here. And I do not think that it is ever very easy to deal with sadness in that part of the body....three weeks...is a long time when you have nothing to do." She paused. "Except to be sad. Three weeks of sadness is a long time, I think."

 It was, reflected Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni. Three weeks of sadness was a long time, by any standards, but it would be particularly long when one was far from home in a strange country, when everybody else would have their friends and family about them and would seem so occupied with their own lives. In such circumstances you might easily forget who you were, and how you once were happy...."

Mma Ramotswe's own father is late, but she still talks to him of this and that as if he is beside her. "She did not think that he had altogether ceased to exist, but of where exactly he was, where that place to which he had gone was located, she had no idea, other than it was somewhere above Botswana  or on the same level as Botswana but around some corner that one day we all must turn. Beyond that, she could not be certain. All she knew was that it would be a place of cattle bells and gentle, life-giving rain; a place in which all our tears would be wiped tenderly away....."

Later, during a stake-out,  Mma remembers a woman who had already turned that corner. 

"Mma Ramotswe felt that shame still that she had not done anything for that girl, and now she had heard that she was late, having died giving birth to her first child, and there had been no husband. There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing....

     It was strange that the girl should come into her mind, the memory triggered by no more than looking up at the sky. But that, she told herself, was how memory worked; one would see something and then it would make one think of one thing and then of another; snatches of conversation would come back, images of things one had seen, memories that one thought one had forgotten, but that had been filed away in the back of the head, in those recesses where such things are tucked away."

Beyond these meditations, there were mysteries to solve, justice to be done, and injustice to be undone in Botswana. The mournful detective teams up with Mma Ramotswe to solve the cases. As their sleuthing adventures bond them in friendship, Mma Ramotswe counsels him:

"....Your late wife will still know that you love her Rra, She will know that...

 ....It is good to talk about late people, Rra ... It is what they want us to do. Late people would be happy if they knew we were talking about them...

....And the late person doesn't want you to be miserable. A late person doesn't want you to think that your work is no use. A late person wants you to get on with life, to do things, to make good use of your time. That is well known Rra... It is very well known."

Maybe you don't want to read this book, because I have just plucked out the late parts.  But this is another engaging tale told by a Scotsman who has the ability to think like a woman of Botswana and put the fear of lions in us. Death the mystery, is a recurring theme, but no more so in this book than in life, and the title of the book is a clue to the solution to living with those who are habitually late.