Unilateral or Interactive?
He died of diabetes late winter 2006 after being hospitalized since summer 2005. It seemed at first the problem was vasculitis, a strange infla-mation of blood vessels around his ankles leaving a reddish band looking like a bad bruise. He had been grossly obese since childhood because of a glandular disorder. In his last few years he used a small children’s bicycle as a walker of sorts, until his hospitalization. Then he was bedridden. He had a raging sweet tooth until the end, craving soda pop and candy bars, those without nuts, since his teeth were gone. His typical load of groceries before hospitalization included 24 can cases of generic cola. He denied to his uncle not long before the end that he had diabetes. The last time yours truly saw him, another uncle and an aunt tried to get him to take an insulin shot. He complained piteously about being hospitalized, but was not phased by the retort that he was not in jail; he could get dressed and walk out anytime he was well enough to do so. He refused to eat pork, citing British-Israel notions about Europeans being the ten lost tribes of Israel, thus the real Jews, and spouting something about pork having the wrong electrolytes. Sugar, somehow, did not have that problem. He and his father once had a nice six-flat building. They had their troubles with the neighbors and city inspectors after renting to a prostitute. The building did need some work, but not that much. Taking a truculent, defiant attitude toward everyone and everything, they lost the building altogether before long. Over a decade later, not long before his hospi-talization, the matter came up in conversation. He blamed the whole fiasco on the prostitute even at that late date. He was not amenable to the sugges-tion that landlords often rent to objectionable tenants without losing their buildings, nor to any suggestion he might have handed the situation differently. He also complained about his humble apartment and that he was just not "living," which could be taken more than one way. Of course he got into other pointless arguments too. He often spouted super-alienated, off-the-wall legal theories as if anyone else should take them seriously. He would occasionally mutter about corporations and one day cited an early U.S. Supreme Court decision about them. After yours truly copied it up for him, he finally realized it was merely about artificial persons, without which no legal system can function. His objection to "corporations" stemmed merely from the City styling itself "a municipal corporation" in the caption of legal papers in housing court. Figure he could easily be still alive had he controlled his sugar craving and that he could be living in one of the flats and living comfortably off the other five, had the complaints been handled is a more normal manner. Quite a unilateral approach to life, wasn’t it? Why even bother with such an eccentric, isolated, ineffectual hermit? Because his idiosyncracies show up so often in much more normal and socially acceptable form, creating so much trouble. At least he accepted correction about corporations. Consider his public, left-wing counterpart, former WLS host Mike Malloy, subbing for Jerry Springer, Air America, 10/19/06. A caller asked if he were aware he was hurting the Democratic cause. Malloy asked if anything he said about the Republican thugs ruining the country was untrue. The caller stammered something and Malloy repeated his query, asking how that hurt the Democrats and there is no point going back and forth with Republican thugs. After more stammer-ing from the caller and proclaiming his espousal of the truth, Malloy cut him off. The next day he proclaimed it is not a matter of Democratic truth or Republican truth or liberal truth but THE TRUTH. His last caller mentioned troops resorting to homosexuality in cramped circumstances and maybe this would be a way to get to the right-wingers. Malloy said we are all on a sliding scale between heterosexuality and homosexuality and homosexuality under extreme circumstances does not bother him, without mentioning right-wingers. This sort of thing goes on all the time, in mat-ters public and private, political and personal. Figure it keeps the divorce courts busy, workplaces acrimonious, and public discussion in chaos. If any-thing it is more common and more virulent among high minded, public spirited, if self-righteous, people pushing a cause. At least the deliberate con artists know enough to tell the sucker what he wants to hear. As the Gospel says, the children of this world are more diligent than those of the next. What to do about it? If nothing, then why go through another pitiful monologue, more howling at the moon? But, dear reader, perhaps you recog-nize a bit of yourself in these two examples, extreme as they are. We all do this to some extent. If so, you have taken the crucial first step. But you cannot stop there. It takes some follow-up. The next task is to slow down a bit. You are not going to have everything wrapped up tight. Get used to loose ends. You cannot do it all at once in this world, whatever it is, including this. It is like walking in the dark after being in bright light. In this case the "bright light" is an illusion, your illusion. But get used to something else. Have you ever purged yourself of unrealistic expectations? Or even tried to? No one does completely, but figure so much of the troubles in this world are caused by unrealistic expectations, including yours, at least in your world. In partic-ular, that things can ever be wrapped up tight. Figure the two approaches to interpreting Scripture apply to life itself, our fellow human beings in particular. One is eisegesis (ice-e-gee-sis), or reading one’s preconceived, no, pre-absor-bed, notions into the text. Ever doeisegesis on your fellow human beings? Sure you have. It is just a fancy word for prejudice, or prejudging, and we all do it one way or another. It does not have to be racial, religious, sexual, or whatever. The other is exegesis, or trying to discern what the writer intends to say. That requires putting yourself in the writer’s place, as best you can, in other words, understanding the writer’s context. Two outstanding examples of recent scriptural exegesis are Nahum Sarna, "Understanding Creation in Genesis," Roland Mushat Frye, ed., Is God a Creationist?; Sarna, Understanding Genesis, and Bruce McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Every-thing. By Sarna, Genesis is not a rebuttal to Dar-win but to pagan creation myths of its time. By McLaren, mainstream Christianity is easily seen as faith taken out of its original Jewish context. Eisegesis is necessarily a unilateral affair; one need only be a legend in one’s own mind. And it is quick; it does not take any fumbling around in the dark, at least what the eisegete takes as dark. Exegesis is necessarily an interactive affair. It requires a constant going back and forth, even with "Republican thugs," as unilateral as their foreign policy is, or whoever else the bad guys might be. And it is forever nuanced, forever unfinished, a perpetual feeling one’s way in dim light. "Let me not judge a man until I have walked a mile in his moccasins," goes the American Indian proverb. The flip side is from Robert Burns, "O, would the giftie gie us/To see ourselves as others see us." Not that anyone ever completely under-stands another’s point of view. There are always loose ends. It is never wrapped up tight. Inevitable limitations aside, appreciation of others’ views is simply part of growing up, of establishing a healthy individual identity. Otherwise one is trapped in egocentricity and narcissism and wish fulfillment. One great misfortune in this world, however, is the sheer quantity of chronological adults going through life oblivious to others’ perceptions. There is a standard test in child psychology, in which a two or three year old sees a puppet show. The first puppet hides something under one of three covers. Another puppet takes it from that cover and hides it under another. Then the first puppet returns and the child is asked where he will look for it. Two year olds generally answer where the second puppet hid it, not being aware of another’s perceptions. Three year olds generally answer where the first puppet hid it, being that aware of a separate perception. The political activists are legion, spouting some self-referential, inbred correctness. Precious few try to establish credibility with opposing camps, to show at least an awareness of their con-cerns. Then they take each other as loose cannons and perpetually wonder why this perverse, mis-guided world is going to hell in a handbasket. What the world desperately needs is that supreme act of exegesis, one described by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate`, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers: "... A student has to know how to distill a body of material to the essence or to put the pieces together into a harmonious whole. Anything more than concrete thinking requires an integrative mind. Just as depth perception requires two eyes, depth learning requires the ability to see things from at least two points of view...." (p166) The navy had a video at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry about projecting American power anywhere in the world, well before the Iraq controversy. If life, public or private, is merely a matter of projecting power, no wonder we have so much chaos and so many drop-outs. Only a very precious few can ever win in such a game. We can all be winners, however, if we go back and forth with each other. Not that everyone’s view will prevail, but the better views will have a much better chance, not merely of winning but of convincing the other side. The prevailing notions today are like a bratty little kid whose parents are not talking to each other and he is playing one against the other, getting away with murder. The unilateral approach is easy as falling off a log, but its consequences can be very hard to live with, even hard to trace. The interactive ap-proach is much more difficult at first. It requires climbing out of infantile wish fulfillment and cop-ing a world beyond one’s wishes and perceptions. Its consequences are much easier to live with. Let’s not have a requiem when someone dies as an eisegete and rises again as an exegete. And let’s start with Number One.
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