Scattered Thoughts from A Quiet Summer

I started reviewing the events planned for the next few months in my head this afternoon.

There's the big meeting of my current project in mid-September followed by the day dedicated to planning for the future of a certain program of planetary exploration.

There's another meeting about atmospheric modeling of that certain planet up in the Silicon Valley at the end of September.

I have to give a talk in these parts at the end of October.

And it's a good thing I'm in town, because I agreed to help with baptismal preparation that month, too, and there's a very nice young adult Bible study planned during the same time. One thing has changed at ILEOS during my time: the membership between 18-39 has grown by leaps and bounds to at least 1200!

Then I have a big sub-sub-field conference in November and the big field conference in December before I head home for Christmas.

And since a presidential election will intervene (and Kunstler is claiming the second Great Depression will start about Halloween), my life may just hit the mean for excitement.

And September draws near and with it, the start of yet another academic year, the first year in which I will not be a student in the same way I've been one for twenty years. There'll be papers and oral presentations and hours and days spent in computer programming and library research. But no homework, tests, exams, and grades. The first day of classes will not be a day of new beginnings, but merely another day at work and its own occasional excitements, those days in which as Susan Stewart writes in "The Owl" in her new collection, Red Rover , "...the circuit of the world/ belies the chaos of its forms--(the kind/of thing astronomers/look down to write/in books)." (Stewart is an acquaintance...and possibly her editor, too, but it's a good collection...about how children's games presage adult foolishness).

I wish I had something edifying to say, but the common company I share with many of you is the rhythm of the Office: a daily look at a quirky book. What are we to make of Israel's obsession with worshipping ephods? Could early Israelite religion have considered the ephod to be the manifestation of the Divine Presence? And what are we to make of the priest-stealing Danites? Whatever the significance of these incidents, I am looking forward to Job: the book that more than any other in the Old Testament takes us outside the particular obsessions of Israel to the general condition of both Jew and Gentile. Indeed, it is the book Tom Paine attributed to some unknown goy. But I think it's instead a work of the Diaspora, a meditation on the exilic misfortune as part of general misfortune: a minority report on both the uniqueness of Israel and the significance of her sin and a reproach to the reforms of Ezra. And when God and Job's author finished the work surely He said, "soon comes the time for me to be incarnate within the circles of the world. Now is the time for the Messiah." Oh, and I always do appreciate Saul living the death and resurrection of Jesus in his blindness. Thomas just had to see, but Saul was so pig-headed, he had to experience.