Joshua 4:19 - 5:12 (links validated 3/4/25a)

Some years ago I read an anecdote about actor Anthony Hopkins, who played a chief butler in the fine film The Remains of the Day. Wealthy people have servants around them precisely because they expect the goodies of life to appear on cue. But the truly arrogant among the rich want to believe they are entitled to such pampered care and so don’t want to feel beholden to anyone for it, including to the servants who do the caretaking. Hopkins says that the rich man at dinner expects his wine glass to be full each time he reaches for it, expects his plate to disappear the moment he lays his knife and fork down. The rich man just wants this to happen because he deserves it and so doesn’t want to have to thank anyone for doing for him what he deems is only fitting to begin with. So the trick to being a good butler is complete obsequiousness–an ability to blend into the woodwork and be no more noticeable on the fringes of the dining room than a floor lamp or the andirons at the fireplace. In fact, in researching his role, Hopkins interviewed a real-life butler who summed up a good butler this way: the room seems emptier when he’s in it...

Desert suggests an inhospitable place, a place where survival is not a sure thing. Certainly the Israelites felt that way about the desert through which they wandered. They remembered Egyptian food with longing: fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic (Numbers 11:5) And yet they were provided food - quail and manna - for all the years between Egypt and the Promised Land. But there came a time when the manna ended...

In his memoir of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls how the prisoners were periodically pared down. Those too ill to work were sent to their deaths. It was a capricious culling. The prisoners were forced to run out one barrack door and into another. Here, in front of the two doors stand the arbiter of our fate, an SS officer. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the barrack. Each of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, in front of the three men, give the card to the SS officer, and go back through the dormitory door.

Are you a fan of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings? I know I am. There’s a substance in those fantasy novels that functions very much like manna, in the Bible. Tolkien, of course — a professor of ancient literature at Oxford — was a deeply Christian man, a committed Roman Catholic. When faced with the problem of explaining what food Frodo and Sam would find to eat, as they crossed the scorched, volcanic hellscape of the land of Mordor, Tolkien invented a kind of manna that they carried with them — a gift of the elves. It’s called lembas, a magical bread. It’s durable as hardtack, but tastes far better. Lembas cakes would keep for many months, as long as they stayed wrapped in a certain magical leaf. Even a bite or two was enough to sustain you for a whole day...

In 1996, while working at Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, Dr. Taylor awoke with a sharp pain behind her left eye. Her speech and motor functions failed. “She melted into what she called a euphoric stupor and lost all sense of where ‘Dr. Jill’ ended and the rest of the universe began.” It was the rupturing of a congenitally deformed vein-artery connection deep in her brain – the first stage of a potentially killer stroke. As befits her situation (all of our life situations??) Koehler says nothing unfolds in her book as we might expect. The surest sign of the Spirit is to lead us where we never (or only!) dreamed of going! The bottom line, says Koehler, is “amazement” – “Ph.D.-level clarity and awareness of detail combined with childlike exuberance!” – “the shattering of the self-created box we live in that we call ‘life’!” Here is what Taylor finds in the “right-brain/little brother” part of herself – Wow, what a strange and amazing thing I am. What a bizarre being I am. Life! I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch. Here, in this form, I am a conscious mind and this body is the vehicle through which I am ALIVE! I am trillions of cells sharing a common mind. I am here, now, thriving as life. Wow! What an unfathomable concept! I am cellular life, no – I am molecular life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind!” Taylor goes on to recount orchestrating her own rescue that morning, then her brain surgery, her eight years’ slow recovery of left-brain functions (such as preschool-level reading!). Her book “bursts with hope” for all brain-injured persons – so many of whom now are victims of this war! As well as with vital guidance to medical practice. But Bob Koehler calls the book as well “a gift to every spiritual seeker and peace activist” – “what I would describe as Taylor’s fearless mapping of the physiology of compassion, the physiology of Nirvana.”...