A postscript

I finished reading Jim Mackey's book, cheering all the way, in both senses of that expression. It makes me want, among many other things, to correct my own impression of the High Priests as 'good men' or 'decent men', as I put it. The whole point lies in our account of what it is to be a good or decent person in the first place, the criteria that we use to make that judgment, and Mackey wants to say that the criteria offered by the Christian perspective are different, are constituted by the metanoia that consists in refusing to return evil for evil, a fundamental re-ordering of priorities ... that makes sense, of course, in the context of an individual's conduct but is ultimately to be expressed in the way in which a community organises itself. The fundamental temptation of self-aggrandisement, as Mackey puts it, and which is the closest he comes to talking of an original sin of the species, is constantly re-asserting itself, just as, to put it in quite different language, the state of nature is always before us as a possibility, and re-emerges in every street gang and every tyrant who wants to be a war-lord.

But 'to put it in quite different language' is perhaps the significant thing here. Once one reads the Bible as myth and metaphor, once one sees it as that, then there is no great need to return to its language, except as a source of metaphors that one draws on because one finds them still fruitful, and not all of them are that fruitful ... This is where I came in forty years ago ...

'This is where we came in' ... refers to the practice of turning up at the cinema without regard to the timing of the programme. We would all go in with Dad and sit down in the middle of the Western, making no sense of the action and then at the end wait until it all started again, only to be forced to leave, despite our hissed pleas of 'Dad!!', at the point where we came in, on the grounds, presumably, that we had everything we needed to fit the whole picture together in our minds. How frustrating was that as they say nowadays. He used to say, 'Come on, kiddos, this is where we came in'.

I've been reading Eileen's book, which is terrific fun. It would help to have a glossary for all the Yiddish, though. The Bris was great, about a man on his death bed insisting that he had to be circumcised ...