Spiritual Quote of the Day (Tom Holland, on the Bible)

“A history of the Bible…cannot just be a history of intellectuals. Its impact is immeasurable precisely because it was felt by soldiers as well as by scholars, and by down-and-outs as well as by dons. It is a book that has, over the millennia, inspired revolts and grandiose schemes of revolution and wars and pogroms and expeditions to different continents.” — English novelist, popular historian, and podcaster Tom Holland, “In the Beginning Was the Word,” The Financial Times, Apr. 13-14, 2019

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Helen Garner, on the Bible’s Repeated Water Imagery)

“Even now there are days, as I go about my business along certain streets, when my past cruelties, my foolishnesses, my harsh egotisms hang around me like a fog — or, rather, when they haunt me like a pack of cards which offer themselves to my consciousness one by one and with a clever appropriateness, as if a tormentor’s mind were actively choosing and shuffling them, so that their juxtapositions are forever fresh, always bright and with a honest, unbearable edge.  Because of this, I understand and treasure the Bible’s repeated imagery of water, of washing; and of the laying down or the handing over of burdens.  I like the story of the woman at the well.  First, she was a woman.  She belonged to the wrong race.  She had had five husbands and was living with a man she was not married to, but she was the one Jesus asked to draw water for him.  She bandied words with him, but he told her about the other kind of water — the sort that never runs out — the water that he was offering.”— Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist Helen Garner, “Sighs Too Deep for Words: On Being Bad at Reading the Bible,” originally published in Portland Magazine, Winter 2004, reprinted in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski (2005)

The image accompanying this post, Christ and the Samaritan Woman, depicting the “woman at the well” with Jesus, was created between 1520 and 1530 by the Italian painter Vincenzo Catena (1470-1531).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Marilynne Robinson, on the Bible’s ‘Interest in the Human’)

“The remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature. The Lord stands back, so to speak. The text does not blur the unlikeness of the mortal and the divine by giving us demigods.” —American novelist-essayist Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (2024)

The image accompanying this post, Abraham and Isaac (also known as The Sacrifice of Isaac), was created by the Venetian painter Titian (ca. 1488-1576).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Deuteronomy, on How God Led the Ancient Israelites Out of Affliction)

“My father was a wandering Aramean
who went down to Egypt with a small household
and lived there as an alien.
But there he became a nation
great, strong, and numerous.
When the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us,
imposing hard labor upon us,
we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers,
and he heard our cry
and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
He brought us out of Egypt
with his strong hand and outstretched arm,
with terrifying power, with signs and wonders;
and bringing us into this country,
he gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.”— Deuteronomy 26: 5-9
 
The image accompanying this post, “The Crossing of the Red Sea,” was painted from 1481 to 1482 by Italian Renaissance artist Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507), as a fresco for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. That miracle was one of the “signs and wonders” alluded to in the passage above.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Psalms as Poems)

“The psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, not even sermons. Those who talk of reading the Bible ‘as literature’ sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. But there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood . . . Otherwise we will miss what is in them and think we see what is not.”— English novelist, academic, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms (1958)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Elie Wiesel, on the ‘Great Melancholy’ of Moses’ Joshua)

“Joshua, the perfect disciple. Obedient and humble. The man whose devotion to his master can serve as an example to all. God’s chosen, just as Moses had been. The servant become leader, whom God and Moses do not cease to encourage—so much so that we wonder why he had such a need. Is it because, in his humility, Joshua felt so inferior to Moses that he believed himself inadequate, unqualified and even unworthy to complete a task that only his master was capable of completing satisfactorily? Joshua will inherit political and religious authority from Moses but not his prophetic style. God accomplished miracles for Joshua. He went so far as to upset the laws of nature by ordering the sun to stand still, but Joshua’s speech lacks the magic that emanates from the words of the prophets.

“A great melancholy emerges from his life story, a sadness that stays with him to the end of his days. Is it because his life unfolds in the midst of noise and fury?”—Jewish novelist, essayist, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), “Joshua: Silent at the Tent Door,” Bible Review, December 1998

The image accompanying this post is of Joshua, Israel’s leader after the death of Moses—played onscreen by John Derek in the 1956 blockbuster, The Ten Commandments.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Proper Place of the Bible)

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.” —British novelist, academic and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), letter to “Mrs. Johnson,” Nov. 8, 1952, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963 (2007)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (King David, on Calling Out to the Lord)

“The waves of death swirled about me;

    the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.

The cords of the grave coiled around me;

    the snares of death confronted me.

 “In my distress I called to the Lord;

    I called out to my God.

From his temple he heard my voice;

    my cry came to his ears.—2 Samuel 22:5-7

I saw a sign bearing verse 7 of this quote—the one about calling out to God— as I passed a local Baptist church yesterday morning, and it seemed perfectly chosen to reflect our nation’s—even our world’s—difficulties as we cope with the coronavirus crisis. 

The verses before what you read here describe this as the words to David’s song after God “delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. These are lyrics of thanksgiving and praise, to be sure, but in this passage, the focus is squarely on David’s desperate straits. Our dilemma, unlike David’s, is medical rather than military, but for all that, no less existential.

It has not been just the varying amounts of difficulties associated with this medical condition (from physical discomfort to death) on display these past several weeks, nor even the fear of the many unknowns associated with it, but also everything that divides us as a society—politics, media, race and ethnicity, (dis)belief in science, and class divisions. 

The virus cannot be the product of a just God’s plan. At the same time, it reveals, nearly 3,000 years after King David erupted in lamentation, that the march of civilization has immunized us against the eternal self-doubts of the human heart, or of the need for God to provide us with solace and courage to face these multiple trials.

(The image accompanying this post shows Gregory Peck in the 1951 Biblical epic David and Bathsheba.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Clive James, on the Scriptures as a Standard Against ‘The Language of Illusion’)

“For me, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics—all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion.”—Australian-born TV personality, critic and poet Clive James (1939-2019), “Czeslaw Milosz,” in Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Quote of the Day (Fr. Craig Morrison, on the Beguiled, Baffling and Ambiguous King David)

“As I embarked on this commentary on 2 Samuel, I assumed that my task was to interpret, or ‘exegete,’ the life of King David for my readers. But the more I tried to interpret him, the more elusive, complex, and distant he became. A king, a father, a warrior, a diplomat, a murderer, a manipulator, a tyrant, a beguiler who is often beguiled, David, as baffling as he is ambiguous, interprets and exposes the fictions of those who meet him.”—Fr. Craig Morrison, Berit Olam: 2 Samuel (2013)

The last week has seen public images of Judge Brett Kavanaugh so divergent—star student, family man and respected judge vs. youthful fratboy, booze hound and sexual assailant—that it has left viewers wondering how they could be considering the same man. 

The events in the life of King David to which Fr. Morrison refers, however, vividly convey that, since ancient times, the greatest heroes favored by God can also be all too human and sinful; that light and dark coexist in the human heart; and that private misdeeds not only can pollute the conduct of public life, but can have repercussions lasting far beyond the immediate event.

Having slain the feared Philistine giant Goliath and survived assassination attempts instigated by the prior Israeli king, Saul, David was at the height of his influence when he caught sight of Bathsheba, the wife of one of his generals, Uriah, bathing. The pregnancy resulting from the subsequent affair would have been sinful, but a private matter among the king, his friend and the latter's wife. 

But David compounded his transgression with an abuse of power: ordering Uriah into the front lines of a battle without adequate support, making certain he would be killed and unable to learn about and protest the betrayal of his friend and wife.

David’s sin could not remain secret, of course. He might have won the hand of Bathsheba, but he was confronted by the prophet Nathan as an adulterer and, in effect, a murderer. He ruled Israel for 40 years, but his reign was darkened by a revolt led by one of his children, Absalom. 

If the Devil can quote Scripture to their purpose, then so can politicians and political commentators. Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton quoted Psalm 51—widely regarded as David’s confession of his affair—in a more successful attempt to move the nation past his affair with Monica Lewinsky than his initial, angry televised attempt. In 2016, Sean Hannity attempted to explain away Donald Trump’s videotaped bragging about groping women by noting, “King David had five hundred concubines for crying out loud."

The actual story of King David resists any such shallow attempts at justifying the private misbehavior of the powerful  I do not profess to know anything about the truth or falsity of Christine Blasey Ford’s charges against Judge Kavanaugh. But for those who wonder what harm really occurred from events 35 years ago, it is well to remember that actions performed secretly long ago can indeed cry out to the world, far louder and later than we could ever imagine.

(The image accompanying this post is a still from the 1951 film David and Bathsheba, starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward as the lovers.)