Almost Back From Sickation & An historical note on plague for the Kid In The Attic

I’m almost, not quite, back to my regular schedule of working.

For weeks Ginny and I planned to take time off to set our house in order, rearrange furniture, work in the garden, and do things around the house.

We planned not to go off anywhere, a vacation, but to stay home and relax, what they now call a staycation.

Alas, that was not to be.

Turns out that Ginny got sick (not flu) the day before her time off work was to start and she’s been practically bedridden until yesterday when she was able to stay up for half the day.

She returned to work this morning.

So our time off turned out to be a sickacation.

My own plans for our time together got canceled and I’ve mostly played caregiver.

I’m a loving husband but I’m sick of her being sick.

This is not what I signed up for.

That “in sickness and in health” vow I though was just a pretty poetic phrase you say at a wedding before you can get on with the real business of marriage—which as all guys know is SEX!

Shows what I know about life.

Anyhow, remember back on April 7^th when I anticipated my plans for this time off work?

I said, “I intend to sit under my awning by the fig tree, watch the birds feed, listen to the fountain, look over work that needs doing, think, pray, and recharge my batteries”.

Ha!

Shows what I know.

Well, I did a little of praying and meditating; and I discovered a valuable spiritual lesson.

While dabbling alone in my garden I can pray and meditate and worship and praise and be a godly man—but the second I resume contact with other people, all that goes out the window and it’s back to Grouchville for me.

Solitary religion, I can handle; testing it by adding someone else to the mix, I blow it.

Shame there isn’t anyplace in the Bible recommending a religion of one.

A HISTORICAL NOTE ON PLAGUE FOR THE KID IN THE ATTIC:

Last Friday for the first time I heard the news mention an outbreak of flue in Mexico.

The World Health Organization monitored it as a danger of becoming a pandemic.

In a week’s time the disease has spread geometrically with the number of cases and deaths increasing daily. It moved from Mexico to Texas, California and New York. It jumped to New Zealand, Scotland, and Germany.

This morning the first death in the United States was confirmed by the Centers For Disease Control. More deaths are expected.

A CDC spokesman said he’d never seen this strain of flu virus before; it combines elements of swine, avian and human influenza viruses. (Make me wonder if it’s not manufactured as a weapon of biological warfare???)

Anyhow, the United States is preparing for mass casualties.

This phenomena interests me on several levels.

For one thing, I’ve written about epidemic disease here in Jacksonville.

In 1888, Yellow Jack decimated this city. Here’s a contemporary newspaper editorial cartoon of the Yellow Jack plague hovering over Jacksonville:

Also, I’ve been researching materials to someday write a book about the 1666 London Black Death plague. Just recently workers in a city church yard uncovered a mass burial plague pit:

So many people died so fast that they could not be buried individually but their bodies were quickly thrown into such pits every night.

Looks uncomfortable.

But of course, these people will not stay dead.

Remember Easter?

Jesus is declared to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the grave.

And He said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.

“For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of man.

“Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, And shall come forth—they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation”.

Won’t it be a hoot when all those people in the plague pit rise laughing and stretching and slapping each other on the back, dancing around, and catching up on the news?

Talk about a plague party!

Bet you’ve never seen such a happy crowd.

And it will happen all over.

Here in Jacksonville, such a mass burial plague pit from the Yellow Jack epidemic lies under the pavement beneath a Northside shopping center parking lot. No one knows for sure how many people ended up buried at that site.

When I worked at Evergreen Cemetery I noticed one section where headstones all bore the same family names. On closer observation, I saw that dozens of family members all died within a few days of each other during the 1918 Spanish Lady epidemic.

As I recall, the first plagues mentioned in the Bible, were the plagues brought on Egypt by Pharaoh not obeying God.

But Exodus also mentions plagues suffered by God’s people when they disobeyed.

Oddly enough, once when King David sinned, God gave him a choice between three punishments: famine, enemy invasion, or plague.

David could not make a choice; he said, “I am in a great strait: let me fall now into the hand of the LORD; for very great are his mercies”.

As the most merciful judgment and punishment under the circumstances, God sent a plague.

“And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders of Israel, who were clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces”.

A terrible, terrible thing!

Eventually “The Lord commanded the angel; and he put up his sword again into the sheath thereof”.

The punishment was over but things were never again the same:

“David could not go before the altar to inquire of God: for he was afraid because of the sword of the angel of the Lord”.

A strange, pathetic, situation.

But, I wonder, if plague can be seen as a punishment of God, then why don’t just wicked people die, why do babies, children good people die as well as the folks who prepare for epidemic by holding an orgy like a hurricane party?

Remember Boccaccio’s Decameron?

It’s the nature of disaster to sweep away the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. Fires burn bars and churches, floods flood hospitals and brothels. Earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, drunk drivers, plagues—none discriminate among victims.

Does that mean all hope is gone?

That God hates our guts.

That there is no mercy?

Certainly not.

When King David pondered the repercussions of the rape of his daughter, and one son’s murder by another of his sons, a wise woman comforted him saying:

“For we must all needs die, and we are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. Neither doth God respect any person—yet He doth devise means, that His banished be not expelled from Him”.

Yes, it all comes down to this—He doth devise means that we, His banished, are never expelled from Him no matter what—come hell or high water

So take prudent steps.

Wash your hands.

Buy groceries.

Avoid crowds.

Gas the car.

Do the same things you do to get ready for hurricane season every year.

Plagues come and go, waters rise and fall, winds rage and cease, the wicked flourish and are no more to be found—but the love of God endures no mater what.

Nothing has changed.

Live each day as though you will live for ever and as though You will die tonight. That’s what we should have been doing all along.

Now that Ginny is over her bout with illness (not flu) we are all set to live or die, to live on to retire or to meet earthly end in a mass burial plague pit.

Of course I have my preferences.

I hope to finish another book beforehand, and there’s some more work to be done in the garden, but I’m happy whatever.

Old Favorites

Bears hibernate in Winter; I choose to hibernate for a week or two now in the Springtime.

Yes, I plan to step away from making blog postings for a while.

I feel depleted and need to refresh my soul.

It occurs to me that readers might want to be aware of a few of my favorite postings from the past. So I browsed through my Dirty Old Man Goes Bad series of books and picked out some of my favorites. You can find them in my blog archives on the sidebar; just click on the month and year and scroll down to the right date and title.

Here are a few links to entries that I particularly like:

2005—A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad—2005

Everything I Know About Prayer, I Learned From My Dog—June 2, 2005

Up The Creek Without A String Trimmer—July 9, 2005

Tits, Tobacco: An Odd Occurrence—July 30, 2005

Is There Intelligent Life At The Smithsonian?—August 20. 2005

Chugging Along With Joy—November 21, 2005

2006—A Dirty Old Man Gets Worse—2006

I've Been Thinking About Scruffy--January 13, 2006

A Living Saint---January 25, 2006

The Lord God Almighty and His Duck Matilda—May 31, 2006

Medical Ping Pong—June 9, 2006

America’s Two Greatest Writers—June 30, 2006

Thinking Inside The Fox-- August 10, 2006

Brains In A Blender—August 30, 2006

Lost Treasure—September 6, 2006

The Funniest Blog I Ever Wrote—September 23, 2006

2007—A Dirty Old Man Stumbles On—2007

Wheels: Does God Like Me Better Than He Likes You?—April 21, 2007

The Bible Drove My Computer Crazy—May 30, 2007

Double Trouble With Samuel Ward—July 27, 2007

John Cowart, King Of The Geriatric Geeks—August 12, 2007

Why Am I Troubled?—September 20, 2007

2008—A Dirty Old Man Sinks Lower—2008

The Nails Were Too Short—April 2, 2008

Lord Of The Normal—April 28, 2008

I’m Up And…--June 24, 2008

Thoughts On Lost Files—June 26, 2008

Where The Worm Never Dies—July 16, 2008

Sex Photo—July 31, 2008

Buffalo Bill In Jacksonville—August 30, 2008

Disaster Psychology—September 10, 2008

Hit—October 1, 2008

Well, I’ve had fun looking over my sordid past; I’d forgotten that I wrote some of this stuff. It’s not terrible.

Anyhow, now I intend to take a week or two off from writing postings. I intend to sit under my awning by the fig tree, watch the birds feed, listen to the fountain, look over work that needs doing, think, pray, and recharge my batteries.

I want to step away for a bit.

While I step away for a while, try browsing in my archives on the sidebar—or better yet, check out my online book catalog at www.bluefishbooks.info and think about buying one of my books. I’d like that.

The Persistence Of Memory

Shaving yesterday afternoon triggered a memory.

Yes, I wait till just before Ginny gets home from work in the afternoon to shave. Who else do I want to look presentable for?

Anyhow, shaving triggered a memory.

As I approach 70, more and more things evoke memories of times past because I do so little memorable in the here and now. Real time events, working in our garden, transcribing handwritten texts, grocery shopping, reading—those things don’t call for entries in my diary, but any one of them may remind me of things past.

Trouble is, memories melt and blend and consolidate, as illustrated in Salvador Dali’s famous painting Persistence of Memory:

Memories turn to mush.

For instance, the other day when I wrote about handling a Guttenberg Bible, I could not recall whether it was in two volumes o three. And did I move the Giant Bible of Mainz the same day? And in my post “Under the Fig Leaf” on March 8^th, I not sure how many people watched me splash in the fountain.

Then, of course, there was that embarrassing incident with the chicken-headed pot holders on March 1^st. (see blog archives). A lot of people said that was hilarious.

Memory sucks!

Especially as we age.

Here’s a funny Bible verse—Joshua 13:1

Now Joshua was old and stricken in years. And the Lord said unto him, “Thou art old and stricken in years…”

Yes, sometimes God states the obvious.

He knows that our memories tend to melt, meld, elaborate, turn events into anecdotes, embellish and outright lie.

That’s one reason, the Lord transmitted His word in writing. “And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God…”

Yes, while God did want His people to memorize certain things, from the very start, He placed a great emphasis on writing things down:

“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him”….

“And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book”,…

“And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished”,

One of the reasons I started my own diary about 30 years ago, was so I would not have to rely solely on memory. You see, I have a tendency to recall bad things and to forget good things. Relying on memory alone I’d think God has abandoned me again and again, but reading over my old journals I see that I am a victim of mercy.

But, be that as it may, any little thing can trigger a memory—even a simple thing like shaving.

When my two older sons, Fred and John, were little, I took them camping for a week in the mountains of western Maryland.

Out in the woods roughing it like that I did not shave that whole week.

Final night in camp, I decided to teach the boys how to roast marshmallows.

I straightened out a couple of wire coat hangers, built a roaring fire, skewered several marshmallows on the long, flexible hangers, and gave them to the boys to roast.

Freddy’s marshmallows toasted, crusted over, melted inside—and caught fire.

“What do I do, Dad? What do I do?”

“I’ll blow it out for you,” I said.

I took the wire out of his hand and lifted the flaming marshmallow to blow it out.

The hot tip of the wire snagged on a flaming log.

SPRONG!

Flaming melted marshmallow slapped into my week-old stubble of a beard.

It stuck.

Kept on burning.

Singed my hair.

Burned off my eyebrows.

Scared my nose, cheeks, and chin.

I remember that when I returned to work at the Library of Congress that next week, people kept asking me, “John, what in the world happened to you”?

And I remember my reply—“Took the family out camping last week, and I got attacked by a wild marshmallow”.

Once In My Life

I’m ashamed to say I only did this once.

I felt too afraid to do it again.

I’m sorry.

One time, years ago, I went to a notorious biker bar after midnight and presented a message about Jesus Christ to a rough gang of people in the parking lot.

This gang attracted my attention because one night the week before I’d been working in the area for the mosquito control board and a bunch of them threw beer bottles at me. This outraged me and I thought, “Somebody ought to tell these hooligans about Jesus”.

In my experience, anytime I think “Somebody ought to…” that means the Holy Spirit is saying, “John Cowart, you ought to…”

Whoa!

That can’t be right—Can it?

You’d have to be crazy to go into a bunch of beer swizzling, knife fighting, chain swinging, bottle throwing, bike riding, leather wearing toughs and try to present the Gospel…

I consulted some other zealous, witnessing Christians recruiting them to go with me. They agreed to meet me at a nearby restaurant at midnight and we’d all go over the biker bar together.

Ha.

Come midnight, not a single Christian witness showed up at the restaurant.

I waited and waited.

Obviously, the Lord would not want me to venture out there by myself.

In the recesses of my mind, the Spirit said, “Who will go for Me”?

Doesn’t the Spirit ever notice that being a Christian might get you killed?

Now back in those days, I engaged in an unusual hobby. I worked most nights but on my days off, I’d go out in city parks with an easel and poster paints. I’d paint little stick-figure drawings which told Bible stories. I’d never say a word till some passersby would gather and someone would ask me I was doing. That gave me the opening to tell the Bible story and offer folks a chance to think about Jesus.

From about 1974, here’s a photo of me (notice the long proud red beard of my youth) one day when I was telling For Mature Adults, the story of David and Bathsheba (see her in the bathtub?), to a group of passersby in a St. Augustine park :

Well, the night I’m talking about I carried my easel to the biker bar parking lot, set up under a streetlamp in a far corner, and began to paint.

A skimpily-clad young lady strolled over and asked, “What the hell are you doing”?

“Painting a picture to tell a Bible story,” I replied.

The bar was closing and a bunch of guys and gals congregated at the entrance; the girl who’d asked me about the painting yelled, “Hey! Something’s going on. Come take a look at this”!

I cringed.

These bar people had thrown bottles at me the week before.

About 20 people gathered to watch and listen. One biker complained there was not enough light to see the painting, so three of them wheeled their motorcycles over and shown their headlights on my easel. I told the parable about the Lost Treasure, David & Bathsheba, the Frog Prince fairytale, and some other stuff.

One guy said, “You know, my grandmother used to talk like that”.

Another said he’d heard such stories before.

Another said he was into Zen.

Given that opening, I asked if we could go around the circle and each person tell about his or her own spiritual experience.

And they did!

We talked till dawn.

And they asked me to come back again the next Saturday night.

But I didn’t.

I felt too afraid.

Oh I kept practicing my hobby—but in safe places: among tourists on the Riverwalk, to kids in the park, to bikini girls on the beach, to drunks at the mission—but I never went back to that biker bar.

I remembered this incident while I worked in my garden yesterday because, as I raked, I was thinking about a mean-looking, tattooed biker I’d seen in a BBQ restaurant last week and I thought about spiritual hunger among such people.

King Solomon said that God has made everything beautiful in its time and He hath place a strong desire for Eternity in the hearts of men. Every person—biker and beauty queen, accountant and astronaut, executive and plumber—Every person feels a longing for Eternity, for something, for Someone beyond ourselves.

We can not feed on this land’s bread.

We know something’s missing.

We yearn for Home.

In our wildest—or most subtle—rebellion against God, we yet feel drawn.

Longing possesses our heart.

Desire for God.

Nothing less satisfies us.

Every one of us.

The person I think will not be interested. The person I fear. The sophisticate. The professor. The degenerate. The banker. The biker. The apathetic. The indifferent…

On some level, they await our witness.

Jesus said, “Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”.

Heavy laden with anxiety, laden with problems, with guilt, laden with ambition, laden with temptations, laden with worries, with troubles, with whatever.

Only He gives rest.

Only He gives peace.

He offers salvation to the undeserving.

And Jesus also said, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me”.

This he said, signifying what death he should die, but in another sense, lifting up Christ is one main job of a Christian.

I sometimes wish I’d gone back to that bar again.

But, I was afraid.

A Book About The Book

I have not seen it myself. When he treated me to breakfast last week, my friend Wes, a master printer, told me about a blood-stained Bible he himself once handled.

It was a printed English Bible from the 1500s, a time when owning a Bible could result in persecution. Wes said the owner of this Bible had held it to his chest when a persecutor slashed him with a sword. The Bible reader’s blood soaked the pages, gluing some together.

Such was the price some paid to make God’s Word available to us today.

The thing that sparked this conversation between Wes and me was my current reading of Donald L. Brake’s new book, A Visual History Of The English Bible (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan. C. 2008). Dr. Blake is a founder of Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and a past-president of Jerusalem University College in Israel. He owns an extensive collection of rare and ancient Bibles used to beautifully illustrate the text of his book.

I only own a meager shelf of modern-speech translations, hardly anything unusual except a two-volume, autographed Stringfellow New Testament—that obscure translation contains a single verse rendering sometimes cited by folks discussing the Trinity. My Bibles are just second-hand, not rare.

However, I’m proud of the fact that back in the late 1950s or early 1960s, I actually handled two of the rarest Bibles in the world.

Back then I worked as a peasant at the Library of Congress (along with 3,000 other government employees—see my March 8^th posting, “Under The Fig Leaf”).

Anyhow, one day at the Library I noticed bugs in the two display cases containing a Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz. I called this to the attention of library authorities and when they removed these precious documents to fumigate the display cases, they let me lift the Bibles and place them on a book cart.

So I got to actually touch the most valuable book in the world, the three-volume Guttenberg Bible, and the two-volume illuminated manuscript of the Giant Bible of Mainz.

Here’s a photo of the Gutenberg I touched:

The Gutenberg Bible was the first book ever to be printed on a press with movable type. It is printed on sheets of velum, and is considered to be the most valuable book in the world.

Here is a photo of the Giant Bible of Mainz:

This illuminated manuscript was hand-copied on velum by a scribe who recorded his progress by writing the specific date when he began and finished each particular section of the Bible. He began work on April 4, 1452, and finished on July 9, 1453.

Capital letters embellishing section headings are often gilded with gold leaf. The Library’s web site says that borders on many pages “are adorned with a branch, vine, and floral pattern that acts as a framework supporting artistic renderings of rabbits, hunters, stags, princesses, bears, and the like, all exquisitely designed and painted in bright primary colors”.

I once wrote a brief religious humor article for a newspaper about Bible transmission; if you’re interested it’s on-line here.

The main thing I remember about the Library of Congress’s exquisite Bibles is that each volume must weight more than a sack of cement!

Really heavy!

But memory of my brief touch with such historic Bibles whetted my interest, so I read Dr. Brake’s Visual History with enthusiasm.

He traces the transmission of God’s revelation to us from the original autographs in Hebrew or koine Greek through scroll and codex to illuminated manuscripts to the printed books we enjoy today.

Throughout his narrative Brake intersperses textboxes filled with information drawn from his own collection.

For instance, he pictures a copy of a Bible produced during the Civil War in Augusta, Georgia, by the Confederate States Bible Society; they printed this edition because yankees blockaded Southern ports cutting off our supply of Bibles.

Brake also pictures a Bible confiscated from the Confederate blockade-runner Minna, and resold for profit by the yankees.

And Brake shows how during the Revolutionary War, American minutemen once used pages of a Sauer Bible as gun wads to pack their muskets in order to fire at the British…

But, I’m getting off track—that’s all recent stuff—the heart of Brake’s book lies in his information about how the Bible came down to us from ancient times through the blood of martyrs—more valuable than the price of a Gutenberg.

“What Bible readers want today is a translation of God’s Word that is faithfully accurate to the original languages, artistically beautiful, genuinely dignified, easily readable, and crystal clear,” Brake said.

Another valuable feature of the book is that Dr. Brake provides several charts of variant readings—You’ve surely heard that because the Bible was copied by hand for so many years, then copyists’ mistakes must have crept into the text? Well, Dr. Brake details some of these variant readings in charts…

For instance:

Text.................... 1611 Version ...................1762 Version

Matt. 16:18……“Thou art Christ”…………”Thou art the Christ”

Luke 19:9……...”the son of Abraham”…….”a son of Abraham”

John 15:20……..”than the Lord”…………...”than his Lord”

Sort of shakes your faith in the reliability of Scripture, doesn’t it?

Dr. Brake supplies dozens of such comparisons between Bible versions in both English and Greek.

Most of these variant readings are just as startling as the ones in my excerpt, although Dr. Brake discusses more serious ones such as the Johann Comma in 1^st John 5:7. Dr. Brake would say I oversimplify such textual matters, but I imagine that he’d agree that we can be confident that the Bible on your hotel nightstand reveals God and guides men aright.

I found the biggest drawback to this book to be the very thing that makes it strong—Dr. Brake’s expertise.

For instance, in places he assumes his readers’ familiarity with the multitude of abbreviations used to designate modern translations—KJV, ASV, RSV, NASB, RNEB, KJ21, ESV, HCSB—I have no idea what most of those cryptic initials stand for. I can never keep them straight.

Dr. Brake assumes more knowledge on the part of his readers than I have.

I have only lifted a Gutenberg Bible— I’m not able to read the thing.

The writing’s all squiggly.