August 29, 2013

The spring plague of stinkbugs is evidently to be balanced by an autumn.

Typically a string of students stay after Humanities class to chit-chat. Today the last one was literally trembling. The topic had been Egypt, and I mentioned, in response to a question about bible movies, that there was no independent or Egyptian confirmation of Moses or anybody else in the Old Testament, nor was the slave culture depicted in The Ten Commandments either verifiable or likely. She is a Southern Baptist, had been taken to Creationist Museums, had been told the world was a couple of thousand ears old and dinosaurs and humans coexisted and the like, and the heft of the conflicting testimonies was weighing her down. It’s hard keeping one’s patience at such a moment, for the weight of evidence, reason, and aesthetics is all on one side and only cussedness on the other, but I gathered myself and gave the Galilean explanation that the bible is really not for science, nor is it for history, and those who go looking there for those things are going to be needlessly frustrated. We’ll get soon enough to the contradictions in the Genesis creation stories, so I didn’t even open that door. I shared my personal means of avoiding the spiritual conflict, which, basically, is the conviction that God created and maintains the universe, and does so in the ways described by science. It’s so satisfying to me that I forget that to some it must seem like the sinful serving of two masters. What struck me, though, was her state of fright. I’d never given her cause to be afraid of me. She kept apologizing for being nervous, and I couldn’t fathom quite what she was nervous about, unless somewhere inside she knew what she had been told was wrong, and in a few moments she would have to begin a journey that would take her away from the stories of her cradle.

I had no stories in my cradle. Perhaps I should take time to give thanks for that.

Forgot that the cleaning ladies were to come today, so I’d left them a mess. Was reminded by the smell of pine sol and all the plugs being knocked out of the wall.