When Biblical Translation is Kinda Weird

Translation is an art. In the Catholic Church in America, we use the New American Bible (NAB) translation at Mass (other English speaking countries use different translations). I've never liked it because the language, phrasing, and flow is just weird. 

Today's reading (from the 11th chapter of Second Samuel) is a great example of why. The word מִשְׁכָּבוֹ֙ is translated as "his siesta". Perhaps it's a word that while making sense to an American audience, is still far more jarring from even the most literal translation of מִשְׁכָּבוֹ֙, which could be "his lying down". In the context of the rest of the sentence and episode it simply means that King David was lazily lying down while his generals fought his battles in his stead, something David would never had done up until this moment. This brief line sets up the rest of the episode: this simple shirking of his most most basic responsibilities as King will cascade into a series of events where laziness becomes a wandering eye that sees him as a voyeur to a married woman bathing from a rooftop, seducing her and committing adultery with her, getting her pregnant, trying to cover it up by trying to arrange for her husband (a most loyal soldier of his) to sleep with her, and then having him killed on the front line when that fails to happen. 

That little line is crucial to understanding the precondition to David's behavior. His whole identity up to this point has been about loyalty, responsibility, courage, and fidelity to God. He betrays his most basic principals and paves a path away from them in a series of choices where each is more catastrophic than the last. At the end of it he will repent but he will still pay dearly. We can never avoid our responsibilities for very long and we shouldn't expect that things will go back to the way things were. Still, David will pick up the pieces and try again and try to earn back his nobility, something he never completely achieves. 

But "siesta" is bizarre by making a lateral move to another language. Both Old and New Testaments will use loan words but not here. By conflating the concept of the rest, the approximate time of the arising from the rest (which in Hebrew is simply "evening"), and the context of the rest, I think it confuses clarity and simplicity for the sake of economical phrasing. If I were reading an American novel written in English, the presence of the word "siesta" would usually lead me to pay attention to the cultural situation in the scene (I remember reading a Barbara Kingsolver book that did that very well). In this translation of the passage from Second Samuel, instead of pointing ahead to the rest of the story it seems to me that it's pointing out of the text. That can be valid but that doesn't seem to be the aim of the NAB (and, interestingly enough the revised edition of the NAB - not currently used at Mass - translates this part as "rose from his bed", letting "one evening" suffice in providing the context of the time of rest). 

I really hate this translation and wish we had a different one for Mass. 

Praying in a Pretzel: The Difference Perspective Makes

Today is my youngest daughter's birthday and I was hit by an image of my wife during her delivery. The delivery process greatly hastened towards the end, past the point of an epidural, and I watched horrified as my wife's agony. My wife never really brings it up or over-dramatizes it: it happened and it was hard but parenting is nonstop and the pace of life only quickens from there.

As I walked towards my office at work, I also realized that parents never cease bringing their children into the world. The delivery is a moment but it's as much a symbol as it is an action. In this way it's even sacramental. But it's not like we ever stop bringing them into world. She came into the world four years ago in a very big way, but we also bring her into the world everyday. We bring her to school, back home, to get groceries, and to parks. We also bring her to encounters with her sister, to other family, to friends, and new encounters. Hopefully, we also bring her to a right way to live. The only thing that will change is that she increasingly participates in this process more and more throughout her life until she one day carries most of the responsibility herself. By that point, she may even accompany a life that she brings into this world.

Life might move along a linear path and we do experience time as a successive sequence of events but memory can allow us to weave in and out of past experiences in and out of order (even though, of course, that happens within the regular flow of time). My memory of the day she was born is strong enough to feel at least somewhat present to those moments even now. The significance of those days leading in and out of it was something I couldn't grasp at the time but time and perspective have shown us that what once felt like a lot of chaos is now ordered. Beautiful. Providential. Intentional.

The multi-dimensionality of life can't be discounted. I think we tend towards myopia and seeing things in terms of perspective or breadth or depth is a matter of contemplation. It's hard enough sometimes to describe "what" is happening, never mind "why". But seeing our experiences as multi-layered can betray a sense of Providence and the interconnectedness of things. To realize that I am who I am because of key moments in my life is really a bit much to take in. To further realize that those moments were composed of factors beyond simple measurement or control all the more overwhelming. The truth is that each of us our profound mysteries in all of our parts, in each moment of our biographies, in each decision that we make and in each impulse that passes through our brains. That there is any order at all is mysterious but compounded with the tension that exists between what is ordered in me with what is disordered with me, what is a matter of will and what is a matter of what exists beyond my control, and to even understand these things as facts of the matter in no way diminishes the mystery.

I can be impatient with the idea that the question of God or faith can be reduced simplistically but only because I do not find the concept of mystery at all diminished by a better understanding of mechanisms. We understand the world around us and we will one day understand so much more, but the simple question of it's existence ("why is there something rather than nothing?") remains a profound mystery. Knowledge of the mechanism cannot erase the mystery if appreciation abounds. 

God is the greatest of mysteries. There aren't consciousness exercises that can put into a box the mystery of Being in its fullness, of pure act, of reality much realer than I will ever comprehend. That God would say something to to His Creation, to make Himself known, to use human concepts and language to arrive at a mystery is still a far greater mystery. That I engage the ground of my own being in prayer requires an infinitely greater gulf in understanding. 

I'm regularly in touch with Mystery and that Mystery manifests in the multiple dimensions, in layers of understanding, of practiced and spontaneous contemplation. It's also an art and it also takes practice. To weave in and out of the many, many moments that led to the presence of my daughter in this world through memory lets me see things that I miss in the regular unfolding of time. It's even more so with God. In Catholic theology, the concept of "revelation" is God's initiative. God makes Himself known to His creation and accommodates Himself to their understanding. He makes Himself known and He makes Himself knowable. For us, revelation happens exclusively within the realm of time. History is the medium God uses, be it world history or personal history. 

To see His work (especially in your own life) for what it is, walk around it a few times. See it from a few different angles. Understand that there are things that you bring into that viewing, coloring your perspective. Examine the contours and the lines, the depth and dimension. Comment, criticize, appreciate, and engage. See His fingerprints mingle with yours, where you chose to take things and where He responded. Let your fingers retrace old lines and pathways or imagine new points of departure. The work, it seems, isn't rigid but living and always renewing but you can't appreciate it for what it is unless you take the time to do it properly.

A couple notes about a friend who died yesterday...

A couple things about a friend of mine who died yesterday:

- We went to school together up through high school. He was one of the coolest kids I've ever known. He got in trouble in ways that I wouldn't. I've always been timid and I admired his fearlessness. I was never cool but he was and those things stay with you.

- Looking at a picture of our 8th grade class is a startling reminder that we really were just kids. At the time it didn't feel that way. We all tried on adult ideas, adult language, and adult behaviors and from our vantage point it was appropriate. Our faces tell a different story. In my head, the 8th grade versions of ourselves aren't radically different than the version we currently occupy.

- Like I said, he was really cool and I tried to copy him in the ways that I could actually muster. In the 7th grade, he liked Metallica and that meant I had to as well. That was fall/winter of 1993 and anyone who knew me in the years since then knows the obnoxious degrees I took that love for that band to (he once let me know that my obsessive talking and thinking about, drawing logos and band members of, and relating everything to Metallica ruined it for him).

That little influence made the rest of my life, had he not communicated his love for the band (and other metal bands), really unthinkable because so many later friendships and countless interactions with people came from that. I got into playing guitar because of that and that created whole worlds for me. That's not an understatement either. Even the way I found myself obsessing on music after that transferred into how I obsessively picked up learning about religion and in biblical studies. I see that trajectory very clearly. He later got really into hip hop when we were in high school but, gratefully, the damage was done. 

- Our birthdays were exactly 2 days apart and I think we later found out that we were born in the same hospital. In 7th and 8th grade we got each other birthday presents. I forgot what I got him but he gave me a copy of Nirvana Unplugged that I still listen to today. 

It's weird to think that tomorrow I'll have been the same age when he died (2 days ago) and that the day after that I'll be older than him because it always seemed appropriate that he was older than me. 

- Middle school was so weird for me for a million reasons but he was one of a handful of people from that time that helped me find myself. It's weird how little things from then can resonate. I hung out with an old friend from that time recently who single handedly got me into film by making me see a bunch of higher profile movies. Having worked with middle school kids for a very long time now (including in the same school we all went to) reminds me how much that time in your life really matters and not to dismiss what a middle school kid can offer the world. 

- He once dared me to tell the DJ of our fall 8th grade dance that he sucked and I did. I got in SO much trouble for that. 

- I'm very sad for not only his absolutely tragic loss (and for the children and loved ones who are left behind), but for how we lose touch with the people who mattered most in our lives. Life

Is short and it's worth at least a seasonal text, phone call, or online message. 

Thanks Keith. Love and prayers. 

Jesus, the Crowd, and the Scroll in the Synagogue

Yesterday's reading is probably my favorite in the New Testament.

The setting is a synagogue in Nazareth during the first half of the first century of the common era. The setting is important and it's helpful to have a little perspective on the various social factors converging into this moment. 

Synagogues were a relatively new development in Jewish worship. At the time, the worship of the Jews centered on the Temple in Jerusalem and it was based on the various sacrifices offered to God. A Jewish person would enter the Temple to stand in God's presence (as it was believed that God resided in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple) and offer up sacrifices that would express thanksgiving, purge the guilt incurred by sin, or to offer a little from the gifts God had already given. The Temple was grand to behold after recent expansion and beautification projects initiated by Herod, King of Judea. Herod was a vassal king who paid tribute to Rome and its empire, ultimately receiving his authority from them. It was a place of regular pilgrimage and its centrality was expressed in the practice of praying towards the Temple (as remembered in later traditions).

Several centuries prior, communities would have their own shrines and altars that allowed them to partake in the sacrifices locally. These shrines were later outlawed as sacrificial worship centralized in Jerusalem. But approaching the first century, synagogues became another way for the Jewish people to relate to God through the Torah. The Torah, or instruction, referred specifically to the first five books of the Bible that tradition held came from God through Moses after God had sent Moses to proclaim the liberation of the Israelites from slavery under Egypt. In the process of the writing of the various books of the Bible, two things happened. On one hand, the Jewish people were intimately connected to the people of the biblical narrative so that later generations saw themselves in continuity with the earlier ones. On the other hand, as time went on the immediate circumstances recounted in the Bible became remote and needed to be applied to new circumstances guided on the same principals. As the various books of what we now know as the Bible were more widely circulated and codified through regular use in recitation and prayer, it became necessary to offer commentary within both the wider community and local communities. It was in this area that the synagogues proved useful. They were a natural place for the community to gather, to listen to the Torah (and by this time the term "Torah" was more widely applied to wisdom literature and the prophetic writings that proliferated in subsequent centuries), and to hear commentary and discuss the meaning of the Torah.

After the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD, it was the Judaism of the synagogues that allowed the Jewish people to continue as a corporate entity. Judaism as it is practiced today in all of its varieties stems from them. 

I like to imagine the scene just moments before Jesus stood up to read from the scroll of the prophet of Isaiah and offered his short (though scandalous) commentary. The main image I muster is from Franco Zeffirelli's teleplay "Jesus of Nazareth". Scripted by Anthony Burgess (author of the controversial "A Clockwork Orange") and others, the filmmakers sought to present a more human version of Jesus. With the exception of perhaps one scene (Peter's confession of Jesus being the Messiah), I can't think of any special effect used throughout the film. Instead of desacralizing Jesus, the reliance on the basic narrative and the words of Jesus in the Gospels only heightens the mystery of Jesus in a way that more pious accounts (King of Kings, the Greatest Story Ever Told) do not. Sometimes, it is best to simply let the Gospels speak for themselves.

The scene of Jesus reading the Isaiah scroll seems typical and mundane. A fictionalized rabbi is the mark of continuity between the Nazareth of Jesus' childhood and and the day he reveals himself to his community in Nazareth. In a way, it is just as remarkable as the transfiguration account where Jesus appears luminous and flanked by the long-dead Moses and Elijah to three of his followers as God the Father pronounces divine approval on his son. Instead of ethereal visions and theophonies, it is merely Jesus, synagogue attendees, and a scroll.

This is Zeffirelli's version of the scene:

Since the dawn of reproducible audio and video, we're used to seeing revolutions sparked with words, crowds, and immediate movement. I've seen so many clips of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech and I've watched interviews with Mother Teresa. I've seen how much you can motivate a crowd with Queen's Live Aid set at Wembley Stadium and watched videos of soldiers surprise their spouses and children after spending a long time abroad. We all intuitively understand how group dynamics work, even at a basic level. We've all probably sat or stood in crowds as they experience a shift in their thinking. It can be exhilarating, it can be horrifying, or it can be a little bit of both. 

Great numbers don't necessarily correlate with the significance of an event. In the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, a slightly fictionalized Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) illustrates the illusion of numbers: "The smaller the attendance the bigger the history. There were 12 people at the last supper. Half a dozen at Kitty Hawk. Archimedes was on his own in the bath." Our scene with Jesus, the crowd, and the scroll in the synagogue is explosive without the benefit of a stadium or packed theater. It starts out subdued, even awkward. He catches the community off-guard in what was routine and simply says something - a little something - that interrupts the flow of things:

He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah.He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:  

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.  

Rolling up the scroll,he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.He said to them,“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

At first blush, "today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing" may not sound very revolutionary, but it doesn't take saying much to upend an entire system. I was re-watching Richard Attenborough's film version of the life of Mahatma Gandhi and he captures this very beautifully. Gandhi is put on trial for upsetting the laws of the British Empire. They threaten him with prison to make an example out of him, setting bail at a low enough amount to make a statement. Gandhi simply refuses to pay it because he doesn't recognize the law as a fair law:

MAGISTRATE

You have been ordered out of the

province on the grounds of disturbing the peace.

GANDHI 

(defiantly) 

With respect, I refuse to go. 

MAGISTRATE 

(sternly) 

Do you want to go to jail? 

GANDHI 

(not giving him an inch) 

As you wish. 

 MAGISTRATE 

(as much sternness as he can muster) 

All right. I will release you on 

bail of one hundred rupees until I 

reach a sentence. 

GANDHI 

I refuse to pay one hundred rupees. 

 MAGISTRATE

Then I -- I will grant release without bail -- until I reach a decision.

Jesus' words "today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing" are loaded with hundreds of years of expectation and anticipation. The passage from Isaiah is believed to refer to a coming Messiah that God would send just as he had sent judges, kings, and prophets to guide and govern his people as well as to blot out injustice. In Jesus' own centuries, false messiahs would claim the role and fail.

The expectation of the Messiah figured greatly into the popular imagination of the Jewish people as well. Of all the important issues we can deal with as people, it's not abnormal to see things primarily through the lens of our own pressing problems. During an election year we see things through our own problems as well as those issues that are dear to us. It was no different at Jesus' time and the Jewish people saw things through the lens of Roman occupation, the loss of self-governance, and the fragmentation in religious leadership. That the Messiah was believed to have been long promised by God would have moved people to wonder how bad things could possibly get before God noticed. In the book of Exodus, it takes 400 years before God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt. It took 40 years to take them through the wilderness. It took several generations before they had a king and several more for religious reform. All the while things were getting worse and good people would experience their faith in God as an extended ordeal.He keeps his promises and provides for the daily needs of those who are faithful to him, but within the Hebrew Bible the systemic problems tend to play out over a longer span of time.

Imagine sitting in the crowd in the synagogue the day Jesus spoke up: The day is a Sabbath so there had been 6 days of work preceding that moment. In that week you would have seen Roman soldiers and how they treated your fellow countrymen. You would have recited daily the Shema Yisrael that had been given to the people of Israel through Moses at the cusp of their receiving the fullness of God's promise of deliverance in the form of a homeland that would belong to them, purging the land of those who had usurped that land for themselves. You would have had to calculate how much of your income would have to go to the Romans in the form of taxes, benefiting them far more than they would benefit you. In Nazareth, you would've still been aware of Roman intrusion into the governance and even the worship of your people. God's promise and deliverance would've been welcomed and hoped for, but it was certainly not something to joke about.

And certainly it was not up to a peasant carpenter whose parents were well known to you (as Nazareth was far from a prominent town in size or stature) and whose capabilities had already been long measured up so that to claim that God's ultimate promise of deliverance was coming through him would've been unthinkable.

"Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." In a moment, Jesus announces the coming of God and proclaiming God's immanent deliverance with a relative whisper. It happens with hardly anything changing between the immediate moments before or after his speaking other than the strangeness and discomfort that the words produced precisely because of their audacity. Perhaps it should've been a grander entrance...but it is not.
And as Jesus is wont to do, he does not settle for addressing pious expectations but also provides the divine discomfort that God had created throughout the biblical narrative. God is not merely coming...his arrival changes everything. He is defying expectations as much as he is meeting them. God is coming not only to His own people but also to those who have antagonized and oppressed them as well. He comes to the wise and the ignorant and it will be those who already feel righteous that will feel passed over. He makes things uncomfortable for everyone, risking violent disapproval for knowing nods. 
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Miscellaneous: Long Distance Friendship and Dumb Bible Jokes

I no longer live near two of my best friends. We were all volunteers in my parish's youth ministry program. Two of us came out of that program as teenagers. I ended up working there several years later. 

It sucks not having people you care about around. Social media makes it easier and you still pick up when you see each other. When you have a shared history with some folks, new friends can't get all the jokes and references and stylistic flourishes that have to be shelved while you build new meaningful relationships in your life. 

Still, there's always the Internet. 

My buddy Shawn said:

"We should make a fake social media site for ancient theologians and philosophers. "Paul has checked in with Silas - at Eastern Macedonian Correctional Facility.""

After that we all posted a bunch of jokes we all thought would make each other laugh. Theirs were funny (at least to us) and clever and I don't want to co op that so here is just mine. They're all bible references and I thought they were funny. Given that either side of the great religion divide often has a certain sensitivity and seriousness with those issues, please take these the best possible way. 

Full-disclosure: I spent up through graduate school making dumb drawings and metal band logos in my notebooks during heady lectures so that's how I'm calibrated. 

(EDIT: I deleted one because after giving it some thought...and with some added reading...it was a little too far)

HAND-WRINGING OVER MEMES: On Brainwashing and Baptism

I hate memes. They're snarky nonsense substituting as a meaningful conversation and their inherently passive aggressive and passive aggression always makes me feel anxious. So, instead of just leaving it at that, I'm just going to talk about them instead.

Better that than a four paragraph Facebook post that no one reads.

Today is a big feast day in the Catholic calendar: the Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary. The dogma wasn't formally defined until Pope Pius XII's encyclical letter Munificentissimus Deus in 1950. The belief is a very early tradition and it's elevation in status marks one of the two times that a Pope has invoked a charism known to most as "papal infallibility". This was to settle the issue and this special charism only holds if the belief is rooted in the ancient tradition of the Church, is theologically sound, and pertains to the traditional domain of the Church's authority: faith and morals. A pope can't declare that the earth is flat or seek to formally combat gravity. When someone flippantly says that Catholics believe their Pope is infallible no matter what, they just need to read a little more. It's about a leader speaking in the context of a tradition that's firmly rooted in the conviction that God has shown himself definitively in the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth. 

5 years ago today, on this feast of the Assumption of Mary, my wife and I arranged to have our first daughter baptized. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. Though my life is not chock full of overtly religious experiences outside of the faith I carry with me everyday, that day was different. There was a whole convergence of family traditions, my own identifying with the sacrament, the beauty of the ritual, and something that simply felt otherworldly that made that day very special to me.

So it was fitting that this was the first meme I picked out for my weekly hand-wringing.

I don't really need much time to pick it apart. It's an absurd argument, bracketing religious affiliation within the context of brainwashing. It doesn't jibe with the experience of so many people of differently races, religious, ethnicities, cultures, and so on who convert to this tradition themselves every year. In some places these conversions happen en masse. In my experience of people within my own tradition, they are thoughtful and intelligent adults. The earliest Church was made up of primarily adult converts. It's believed that infant baptism occurred in the earliest years of Christianity, and was not the primary model of baptism. Even today, the baptism of adults is still considered normative within the Catholic tradition even though the baptism of infants is still the most widely practiced way of celebrating the Sacrament.

I also don't understand who the author of the meme is trying to blame. Is the the Church? I don't think the author sees how this really plays out in the life of a parish, where baptisms are requested for a myriad of reasons and under a myriad of circumstances. The comment doesn't really respect the reality of it all. So are they placing the blame elsewhere? 

The author seems to overestimate the number of baptized infants who end up as regularly practicing Christians. I suppose it has to start someplace and I certainly believe that baptism matters for a number of reasons. But if the Church was good at translating baptized infants to practicing Catholics than it would look more like magic than the Catholic idea of both the sacraments and the grace conferred in the Sacrament. In short, using classical Thomism as a guide, grace perfects nature. Nature is the raw stuff of our daily existence that emanates out of our shared humanity, including it's weaknesses. It's what we reckon with when we try to better ourselves and it's also what we fight when that process comes up lacking. Grace, which is God's help and God's gift of himself, works within that system. But it won't "take" if it's forced and it's rendered meaningless and hollow if coerced. 

In other words, if statistics are to be believed, Coca-Cola seems to have a better way to building brand loyalty than the practice of baptizing children in America or Western Europe.

So is it the parent's fault? Richard Dawkins once likened the religious upbringing of small children to child abuse. Is it wrong for parents to "force" a religion on their kids?

Again, this is a stupid and hollow argument. Parents force everything on their kids. Almost all of the biggest movies and shows of the last decade have capitalized on the fact that parents force their experience of pop culture on their children: Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, Marvel Comics, Full House, and dozens upon dozens of other old media have been re-purposed for small children. There might be another word for it: a shared experience. By virtue of the elements of narrative storytelling, every film and every television show is a value system communicated in a format that is designed to be convicting and alluring. Is that any different than raising your child in a tradition that goes back countless generations? Is it really more offensive that what bound generations of families together over two millennia of all that life can throw at you is communicated to children than, say, the new Fantastic Four movie?

That's not the only way I force things on my kids. Besides bedtimes and the boundaries of personal space, I can also force dietary choices on my child. I do that under the auspices of their own well-being as well as the common good. If anything, I try to have them do better with their food choices than I did in my life and hopefully I've made some better choices than other generations. It's funny how diets have a weird relationship with history: Organic fruit/vegetable pouches are a newer, better snack than Twinkies were. Our diet sucks because of relatively recent developments in factory farming. Organic diets recapture what our diet should be after decades of hyper-processing. Paleo is good because it goes way, way back. Somehow this applies to diets but not familial traditions.

If anything, the argument is self-defeating. The meme was likely authored to shame or humiliate Christians into thinking differently (without actually talking to them) or to embolden the like-minded in a shared experience of mockery. While the former approach is a bully tactic, the latter shares a goal with baptism: group identity and community building. All cultures gravitate towards initiation rituals and will assume vapid practices in the absence of meaningful ones. Which is more meaningful: a "walkabout" or your first R-rated movie? Communion or the first time you got drunk? A traditional Bar Mitzvah or a Sweet Sixteen? Certainly individuals will define their own, but how many modern experiences lack any kind of rootedness outside of vague sentiment?

Writing a meme to shame or humiliate Christians is one way to feel righteous or, even worse, to articulate a half-baked argument so that others won't have to bother in thinking one up themselves. I guess it's a sort of community builder. Baptizing your children is another. The ritual of baptism for infants sees the family as a unit, as the mode in which traditions are passed on and values or communicated. It honors what is best in a family rather than treating a baby as a creature void of context who awaits exercising their autonomy until they can choose something wholly other than their families, whether it's from their parents or from centuries of practice.

Thankfully, the writer of the meme gets to the heart of the harm inflected on religion towards their young: religion as myth. I'm not sure which myth they are referring to. Authors, comedians, musicians and film directors reckon with people who have so strongly identified with their art that it became a manifesto to them. The best know to keep a healthy distance from that kind of deification while others are only too happy to hold court.

The term "myth" is so loaded as to be meaningless. Does it refer to nuanced historical arguments regarding the historicity of the Bible? A field full of specialists in linguistics, history, theology, form and source criticism, and so on? Does it refer to any religion that holds a metaphysical worldview? Arguments that have not been settled even after Aquinas, Scotus, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, until now? Is this heady philosophy or posturing? Are they part of any conversation or is it better to pull up an app, a Getty Image, and the Impact font so most of the work is done for you before unleashing phony intellectualism?

It's hard to know because it is neither conversation or encounter. This isn't dialogue, it's somewhere between writing an ex-girlfriend's phone number in a service area bathroom and the poetry written a few inches above it. 

Leonard Cohen and His Coat of Muted Colors

The other night I was with some friends and the topic of Leonard Cohen up. It was enough for me to reach into the back of my car and grab my copy of his Live At The Isle of Wight (I still listen to CDs in the car). The earliest years of me being into music were all about metal. Occasionally non-metal would register and Leonard Cohen was one of the acts to pop through that filter.

I wish it was because someone gave me a copy of Field Commander Cohen or something, but it was just his two songs that were on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack (both songs came from 1992's the Future...Natural Born Killers came out 1994). It wasn't a great introduction but, not too long after, I saw Leonard Cohen's episode of Austin City Limits and the idea of the guy stuck with me.

By the time I was in college I ended up with a copy of 1971's Songs Of Love And Hate and that was that. It's pretty remarkable given the time it came out. It was still another four years before Bob Dylan put out Blood On The Tracks but, while not achieving that albums stark confessional tone, it was a far more confident and realized, unpretentious album...no small feat for a career poet who decided to start writing folk songs in his 30's and wouldn't put out his first album until he was 33.

His music is hard to classify. Spotify lists a fairly obvious set of "related artists". Of course Bob Dylan and Neil Young are mentioned even though there's no real similarity. I don't know how they connected Joni Mitchell to him and Joan Baez is only listed because Bob Dylan. Nick Cave wants to be Leonard Cohen but that's hardly a relation. The rest make no sense and I wonder how these results are aggregated.

And of course Jeff Buckley is listed as a related artist. His cover of Hallelujah has been the soundtrack to tragic video montages and American Idol semi-finals for several years. The irony is that his cover is based not on Cohen but on John Cale's cover of the song (both covers omit the same verse). Despite this, John Cale is not listed as a related artist but Lou Reed is. It's like they skipped a step.

All of his "peers" (it's hard to say that when someone is responsible for much peerless music) lack the fundamental darkness and earned world weariness that Leonard Cohen possesses. My friend pointed out how Godflesh fleeced a lot of their ideas off of Leonard Cohen (and they're brilliant too...translation is an art form in itself). Sisters of Mercy obviously took their name from the track on Cohen's first album (which I'm not that huge of a fan of). I think the only act that was as dark and real as Leonard Cohen was Black Sabbath. Wicked World was far more real and honest than anything Bob Dylan did that wasn't about himself. Early Sabbath were direct in their emotions and economical in verse construction. Cohen is direct in his emotions and paints frescoes with his words.

His later albums are great too and his backing band on the last batch of live albums (released in rapid succession to compensate for the financial excesses of bad management) sound like live Sade playing in front of a cathedral. By the 80's his vocal chords filled up with gravel and his voice dropped at least two octaves. He also felt like he earned the right to adapt adult contemporary conventions at a time when "contemporary" included sleazy keyboards and synthesized bass guitar. It was totally different save his words and those two female backing vocalists who seemed to accompany every album.

Lou Reed had a comparable midlife crisis at approximately the same time though he was 8 years Cohen's junior (perhaps appropriate because he's been dead two years...midlife means "mid-life". Maybe there is some relation between them.

Finally, Leonard Cohen is Jewish and the Jewish and Christian traditions figure heavy in his work. It's almost always subversive but somehow respectful. It's as if he finds in those traditions a language for communicating love and heartbreak that cannot be replicated in more modern forms, and that would include Shakespeare. Hallelujah is a lurid re-telling of the story of David and Bathsheba (though it didn't really require that much creativity to read between those lines). Joan of Arc yearns to recover the beating heart of the French Saint. Story of Isaac reads the story of the binding of Isaac that would've resonated with Kierkegaard.

And of course I find it all insufficient but it's because we speak different languages. Related, yes, but different. I feel kinship in the music because it's as if we know the same people and visited some of the same places. He walked out a Zen Buddhist. I, a Catholic.

But it is beautiful and I return to it often. It shouldn't seem so effortless and I know it isn't but a mark of great art involves hiding the seams.