"There'll be days/When I'll stray"

The connections my mind makes when I pay attention kind of astound me. I mean "astound" both in the sense of thinking "That's weird" and in the sense of being amazed at gaining some insight.

Last Sunday, as I drove home from church listening to the radio, Depeche Mode's "Strangelove" came across the airwaves. It was struck by the song's opening verse:

There'll be times
When my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life livable

"I give in to sin because you have to make this life livable." I sort of meditated on this the rest of the day. When it comes to sin, it almost goes without saying that there are sins and then there are sins. This at the heart of the mortal/venial distinction. I like the distinction Dietrich Bonhöffer made: "It is not the sins of weakness, but the sins of strength that matter." I take "matter" in this context to mean those sins about which one should be concerned, contrite, and strive, with God's help, not to commit again, very grave failure to love one's neighbor.

In my extended lectio on this short sentence from "Strangelove," I was thinking about sins of weakness. It is perhaps through certain sins of weakness one might seek some solace and comfort, even as one recognizes that the comfort and solace will be short-lived.

Depiction of the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple

On Monday I read this excerpt from Pope Francis's Sunday Angelus:

Each one of us has our own story and it is not always a clean story…Many times it is a difficult story, with a lot of pain, many misfortunes and many sins. What do I do with my story? Do I hide it? No! We must bring it before the Lord

And, again, on Monday in a book of essays that look at the Jewish Bible through the lens psychoanalysis, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in an essay on Abraham, "The Vale of Soul-Making," I read something about the rabbinic commentators' insistence that Abraham, during his years of inquiry and movement toward the one, true, God while living in Ur of Chaldees, participated in pagan worship, that is, the worship of idols.

Commenting on God's disposition towards Abraham's early idolatry, Gottlieb Zornberg summarizes it nicely:

So God reassures Abraham: "Yours is the dew of youth: your youthful sins acted like dew- they roused you to search for God. They spoke to you through promise and frustration, they suggested love and beauty. Having done this work they vanished (165)

This caused me to realize that those youthful sins may not have yet done their work in rousing me to search for God.

Later in the same essay, Gottlieb Zornberg discusses what it might mean for Abraham to be a blessing to God, something God asks of him (Gen 12:2). She makes the observation, which I think wholly accurate- something I addressed in great detail in my doctoral dissertation- "God, it seems, needs human blessing" (167). But what does it mean to bless God?

"...to realize the godly in the world is to bless God" (italics mine- 167). What is it to realize the godly in the world? "The blessing of God," Gottlieb Zornberg continues "is that God should rejoice in his work (ibid). She then turns to a passage of the Talmud she calls "haunting," in which God asks the high priest Ishmael, one of the last high priests of the Second Temple period, to bless him. Ishmael replies: "May it be Your will that Your compassion prevail over Your other attributes" (167). She then concludes" "To be a source of blessing to God comes to mean to help God achieve His compassionate self" (167).

To say that Jews are older siblings to us Christians is more than just a throw-away line uttered at a time of violent antisemitism.

As you might guess, this week's traditio is Depeche Mode's "Strangelove."