(2:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Lord's Mercy

Some anecdotes:

• The weather has been extremely rainy in Kankakee County lately, with the Kankakee River rising to very high levels. Last night there was a serious storm (during which my driver-side window was down). A co-worker told me, however, that they're saying the rain should get down to more reasonable levels fairly soon. I said, "Yes, maybe the LORD will relent." She laughed, because she had just read the story of Noah recently. This was her take: "I was pretty impressed. I had never really read the Bible before, so I just kind of knew the stories from going to church. I didn't realize how much it really rained back then."
  
  
• Never, ever get an account at First American Bank. I feel like I'm in a Kafka novel every time I walk in. Unless I bring the perfect paperwork with me every time, I have to go up to the tellers to ask for a deposit slip, and then they always want to direct me to the ATM to get money out, even though I am standing right in front of them! I think I maintain my account there because I feel like I deserve to be treated that way.
  
  
• The other day, while playing Washoos (a game that deserves a post all its own), I was talking with Kevin and Brett and the topic of my moral caliber as a person came up. Up to that point, I had been playing fairly well, but when they both concurred that I was actually a good person, accepting of others, never using my positive qualities as an occasion to put others down, etc., etc., my game completely fell apart. I'm not sure exactly what Freud would have to say about it, but such a complete turnaround suggests that it wasn't a coincidence. I guess I didn't want to hear it.
  
  
• Thinking about Robb's morbidly embarassing incidents: If Jesus is really what it means to be God, and if Jesus really was a broken, flawed, "normal" human being just like us, then it would seem that we are closest to God in those morbidly embarassing incidents where our small imperfections cause us to hate ourselves the most. I knew exactly what Robb was talking about, even if my examples can't rival his in number and quality, and I know that I am really, really hard on myself for those kinds of things. And if Jesus is God, then those moments are what God loves most about us. God saves us precisely in order to be broken, flawed human beings who need each other, not to make us into perfect, tranquil drones who have our acts together. That is really hard for me to take a lot of the time -- I don't think I truly believe it most of the time, in terms of actually acting on it.
  
  
• Craig Keen, who has taught me all I know about theology over the past two years, preached in College Church this past Sunday. His message was about bodies -- he said that from the point of view of the gospel, the idea of an immaterial soul as the "real you" trying to get out of the unclean body is a lie. He literally said it that strongly. Even though I agree with him 100% on an intellectual level, I still recoil from the body. When he talked about the materiality of the bread and wine, the real bodily presence of those who are serving us, the smell of people, all that kind of thing, I still couldn't convince myself that that's it, that that's the thing. Foucault says the soul is the prison of the body, and he's right: I'm still in that prison. I'm still trying to escape the body, when Jesus wants to make me more and more a body in contact with other bodies.
  
  
• Even the appreciation of physical beauty isn't necessarily a love of the body as much as an appreciation of the "form of beauty" that the beautiful body represents: symmetry, self-discipline, smoothness, perfect geometry. Just take a quick read through Plato's Symposium--love of "human beauty" is ultimately another way of trying to get away from the body. It's a denial of the human to demand perfection--if another person's body is only something to enjoy looking at, it's really something to enjoy looking through.
  
  
• A good, if strange, model of loving the body's imperfections is James Joyce's relationship to his wife, Nora. I learned from last weeks "Savage Love" (available in the Onion, as well as various "alternative" papers in big cities) that Joyce wrote at great length about enjoying Nora's farts. He felt he could pick her farts out of a lineup and that they were the best farts in the world. An English professor verified this account.

Just didn't want to end heavy.

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