Rodak's Writings: a Protestant Poem

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Consent: a Brief History



Idolized as consenting; much depends

on that notion. But what earthly woman

could say no to an angel? The lithe olive-toned

form of the maiden soon swollen, shaped

from within by the prodigy growing.

Consent, was it then, to the flesh-rending

pain? To blood, urine and feces?

To birthing the type of material creation?

Flesh formed of the Word and man’s fated future:

my mortal career. So, serpent or fish?

The loaf or the stone? The one without sin,

or the first one to throw? Rocky soil, shallow root,

barren branch, blasted tree. Second mile,

dusted shoe. The chaff and the wheat.

The eye of the needle. The dog eating scraps

down under the table. Gaudy lily, willful blindness,

dying seed, burning vine. The prodigal son and the

Gadarene swine. One taken up and one left behind.

Bushel and light; foolish lack of lamp oil.

The mustard seed sown. The better part taken.

The sheep and the goats. A foundation on sand.

The shirt after the coat. The imperial coin,

the last pfennig she had. The pearl of great price,

the house scoured for a shekel. The shepherd,

the wolf, the one pulled from the pit. The infinite

regression tracking back to the Garden and

the immaculate conception of Eve, who consented.

You horn-sounding viper! You whitewashed sepulcher!

My mother, a woman, not some pagan crop goddess!

Consent! Few are chosen! You know not the hour!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX~ Rob Dakin, 12/9/11
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Reflections: Weblog Commentary

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I have been meaning to launch this blog post for some days now, but I’ve kept putting it off because I couldn’t decide how to frame it. Rather than continue not to get the words online that I wanted to share, therefore, I’m just going to go ahead and post them unframed and let them stand (or fall) for themselves.
This material consists of a comment made by Ron King, a valued sometime visitor to this blog, followed by several comments made by me, elsewhere. I asked Ron’s permission to share this comment because it will be made available to my Facebook friends, as well as to readers of this blog. Ron made the comment in response to this post. I will edit Ron’s comment only to the extent that his very first sentence has been moved to the end of the comment. I do this in order that it may segué into the rest of the material, all of which consists of comments I made on a couple of different strings, to a couple of different people, following posts on one of my favorite blogs, Vox Nova. These I will simply clean up to stand alone, if any such polishing is necessary. I will offer them without comment, while inviting comment on them here. Without further ado, Ron King:

The problem for introverts is the early emotional conditioning of fear and rage due to the pain of being aware of not being validated by the primary caretakers and then the educational system. Consequently, the introvert is constantly under the intrusion of forces trying to make her/him into something she/he is not. This will cause a further retreat into self along with an ever increasing suffering.

Once the introvert has an awareness that being created in this way has a distinct spiritual purpose of exploring the dynamics of human suffering and the loss of love as the cause of suffering, then introverts can begin healing the false identity that has formed in reaction to a world that does not know how to love.

Loneliness begins to fade when the introvert begins to educate others about what it means to be an introvert. They can begin to teach extroverts what it means to be more sensitive. Every introvert I have known in my life has a passionate desire to be free to express their truth. The freedom is to be found internally and not externally. It is to be found face to face with extroverts, regardless of what they may say or do.

xxxxx[and now the sentence I've moved]

Jesus is an introvert.

Vox Nova: excerpt 1

Another commenter said of Jesus,

“…if he were conversant in Greek philosophy to any extent why did he not lay things out ever in a similar style.”

I replied,

Jesus perhaps did just that, when speaking to learned Pharisees; or, perhaps, to learned Romans. It is unfortunate that in the Gospels we are usually only given the punch-lines of his dialogues with his intellectual opposition. But, in most of what we are given, he is preaching to peasants and fishermen and shopkeepers, etc. There is nothing to be gained by speaking over the heads of one’s audience.

Any time I am arguing with a Catholic and I quote a Bible verse in support of my central thesis, and that Catholic then visibly pales, frantically starts making the sign of the cross and backs away from me screaming “Sola scriptura! Sola scriptura!” I am reminded that this once had some validity. Pre-Gutenberg, people didn’t own Bibles. Most people weren’t literate. What they knew about the Bible had to be spoon-fed to them by clerics. The priests don’t want to relinquish that power, so they preach still today against the “proof-text,” as though the text shouldn’t be a source of proof. I have to either spit on the floor, or chuckle. Hopefully, I usually choose the latter course of action. Luther, to his credit, not only translated the Bible into German, but preached that people had a duty to read it, and to interpret its meaning (with a little help from above), each according to his special spiritual need at any given time. This is not to use the Book as an oracle, but rather to use it as a learning tool; as a workbook for the student of the spiritual connection between heaven and earth.

To sum up: Jesus knew what he was doing.


Vox Nova: excerpt 2

I don’t know what “go to heaven” means, because I can’t conceive of heaven as a place. I can only understand heaven as a state of being. The upshot of that would be that only saints would “go to heaven.” One would need to be in a state of being compatible with heaven, i.e. “heavenly.” And by “saint” I don’t mean what the Church routinely means. What the Church means, in most cases, is something like “Employee of Decade” or “Distinguished Professor” or “Father of the Year.” So, what happens to the rest of us, I don’t know. That sad alternative may be what’s happening to us now. Being Christ-like does not mean being a really big fan of Jesus. It doesn’t mean liking Jesus, it means imitating Him.

Vox Nova: excerpt 3

I’m not so interested in the theories such as that Jesus went to India during “the lost years,” or that Jesus was the iniate of a Greek mystery cult, etc. I think it enough to speculate that Jesus was very probably literate; that he grew up in a Hellenistic milieu; and that he may very well have had some acquaintance with, and instruction in, both Greek (Platonic) and Roman (Stoic) ideas and used some of those, tailored to the levels of sophistication of his audiences, in his teaching.

I also think it very telling that Jesus was apparently not a Jewish nationalist. Reading the New Testament, one would get the idea that Jesus and his followers were wandering about in tranquil, almost sleepy countryside. In fact, of course, the area was crawling with insurgents and a constant thorn in the side of Rome. Jesus seems to have been totally aloof from all of this, which makes him somewhat less than ultra-Jewish in his thinking.

Moreover, if he had been nothing more than an unusually witty freelancing Jewish rabbi, I doubt that we would be talking about him today.

Finally, Socrates had Plato, and Jesus had Saul of Tarsus: the rest is history.

Vox Nova: excerpt 4

The difference, of course, is that Socrates and Jesus had visionary interpreters of real genius, both of whom offered a set of ideas too grand to ever be exhausted by subsequent speculation, or completely co-opted by "the world," and which, therefore, endlessly spark the imaginations of intelligent and creative persons who come in contact with them.


This is to take nothing away from the mediation of Socrates or Jesus. In both cases, their teachings were worthy of such interpreters. I assume that this was a necessary condition for the production of those interpretative bodies of thought.


I see the institutions--the Church, the Academy--to be like globs of semen; millions of sperm sent forth to produce one fertilized egg; millions of the "faithful" assembled to produce one true saint. And only the saint transcends.

Vox Nova: excerpt 5

The very last thing that a saint would want to be, I should think, is innovative or original. A saint is simple. There is nothing novel in the truth. The saint is proof that the truth can be received from its source and that life can be lived in accordance to it–not merely read about and acquired by rote for recitation on command. Man would get redemptive brownie points for the latter only if Kafka is G-d and the path to “heaven” really does lead one through the corridors and the various official stages and offices of some vast bureaucracy, beginning in the kindergarten of the parochial school and ending before the throne of judgment.
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Your comments are welcome.
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Readings: Remembering the Artist as a Relatively Young Man

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Photocopied from a seventy-year-old newspaper clipping discovered in the archives, this interview with poet and painter, e.e. cummings:

The poet's thoughts in war-time.
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Rodak's Writings: Some Advice

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The Queensberry Rules

Sound your trumpet at the crossroads
if you don’t want to be t-boned by a fiddler.

Blink your flashlight in the basement
where maybe something hairy lurks.

Carry flowers on your power walk,
you may be merging with a funeral.

Drape a black cloth on your mirror
lest it open on eternity.

Don’t take a neutral corner ‘til
you’re sure you’ve got that bad-boy beat.

Never be prepared
to shower with a scoutmaster,

or sit your son the on the lap
of a priest playing Santa Claus.

Don’t allow your daughter to shop
for mattresses with a pimp.

Remember that a whistle on a lanyard
is no guarantor of gonads.

Above all bite your lying tongue before you aim
‘I love you’ anywhere below the waist.
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Reflections: Only the Lonely Know

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The edition of Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life that I borrowed from the library includes a rather long prefatory introduction entitled “Unamuno Re-Read” by Salvador de Madariaga. This piece is definitely not hagiographic. It seems to be quite objective in its assessment of Unamuno’s beliefs, works, character, and personality. Of the latter, Madariaga has this to say:


The chief paradox of Unamuno’s life…may well be that this apostle of life, this eloquent advocate of irrationality and experience versus reason and intellectualism, lived mostly in the mind, gathered but little outward experience, and often mistook his thoughts on life for life itself.

I photocopied two pages of this introduction and brought them home. I did this because, for good or ill, I was recognizing myself in what I was reading.

Madariaga goes on to say:

His life was all within. His experience was inner experience. Not for him those excursions to foreign lands, those adventures in the realms of danger, passion, the strange, the unfamiliar, the irregular, the shocking, the crags, peaks, and abysses which surround, fascinate, attract, and repel other men, and out of which they form their thoughts fed with the sap of reality. Unamuno spoke and wrote about life far more than most, but he lived far less than most.

*sigh* It gets worse:

Could it be that this formidable man, the uncompromising stand, the proud uplifted head, the glaring eye, and the stubborn mouth, could it be that this challenger was deep down a shy man? Yes. It could be. In fact he was. The forbidding mask hid untold shyness and even tenderness within. His search for retreat, solitude, the quiet of the countryside, the reflective and inward looking contemplation, possibly even that negation of outer life and that wish to unamunize it… He will roam in the vast spaces of his inner self, whose dangers he knows well and he can face, rather than risk adventures in that outer reality he does not actually know and he prefers to deny. …In Unamuno’s works, details of time and place are seldom given. Everything happens in people’s minds rather than in their fields, backyards, rooms, or kitchens.

What Madariaga has done here is take his critical scalpel to the psychic anatomy of an extreme introvert. In the process of chopping up Unamuno, he has cut me to the quick. If you’ve ever wondered why nobody seems to be able to get it on with me for long, now you know: people grow resistant to being dakinized.

Yes, now you know…
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Reflections: To Be, Or...

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Give  a bit of thought to this passage from Unamuno's magnum opus, The Tragic Sense of Life:

It has often been said that every man who has suffered still prefers to be himself, with all his misfortunes, than someone else, even without those misfortunes. For the fact is that unfortunate men, as long as they keep their sanity in the midst of their misfortune, that is, as long as they still strive to persist in themselves, prefer misfortune to non-being. Of myself I can say that when I was a young man, even when I was a boy, I was not to be moved by the pathetic pictures of Hell that were drawn for me, for even at the time nothing seemed as terrible as Nothingness. I was already possessed of a furious hunger to be, “an apprentice for divinity,” as one of our ascetics put it.  ~ Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life

What Unamuno is saying here may, on the one hand, seem to some to be patently true. On the other hand, those persons who share with me what might be called "suicidal tendencies" may consider the idea that suffering is worse than oblivion to be utter nonsense.

I guess that it is the ferocity of Unamuno's desire for "divinity"--that is, for immortality--that makes him so willing to risk what Prince Hamlet called "the rub."  It was surely oblivion--dreamless sleep--that appealed to Hamlet as he found himself inextricably caught up in afflications for which he could find no remedy other than death.

Whatever your immediate take concerning Unamuno's thought on the matter, until you have contemplated death as the ultimate antidote, you can't really know where you stand.
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Rants: Picture-Booked by Whom?

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I am unable to understand how any Christian—conservative or liberal--can look at the world today (or at any time in the past) and decide that “free market capitalism” is pretty much the best way for a morally-sound society to conduct business .

Even the giddiest of optimists can--at best--only say, “Things could be worse.”

Capitalism is a game of winners and losers; that’s how it works. The “trickle-down” inevitably dries up before it reaches the bottom. And then the “winners” bitch and moan about being asked to fund emergency waterboys out of their surplus, in order to keep the losers alive at subsistence level.

Can any of you show me one verse in which Jesus Christ says anything that would support capitalism as a way of life? Can any of you deny that the very first Christians–the men and women who actually walked with Christ and presumably lived as He taught them to live–set up a communal system?

I have to ask, along with Dylan, “You’ve been picture-booked, by whom?”
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