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JMJ
The Readings for the Memorial of Saint Benedict, Abbot
Thursday in the 13th week Tempus Per Annum (C1)
Pro salute enim vestra misit me Deus ante vos in Aegyptum.
It was for your salvation that God sent me before you into Egypt.
Yesterday’s writing may have seemed a bit out of character for me. I’m a placid, poetical sort of writer usually. Nu? I have dark corners too.
So I will wonder again: is this statement of Joseph’s absolution or just a statement of fact? To a mystic, a statement of fact is rare and Joseph, the dreamer of dreams and the reader of omens, is certainly a mystic.
Dylan’s lyrics, continuing from yesterday. It’s the refrain:
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
I was walking home from a bar late one night – oh, actually it was about 5 am – with my housemate Rick. It was one of those snowy nights in the middle of winter in New York City when, with the snow falling, there is absolute silence. It’s one of the few things I miss about New York City. This weather. This silence. Anyway, walking. Rick was trying to figure out this song phrase that was running through my head. Rick was very good with Broadway musicals but this one was escaping him. We found out later it was actually a TV Musical that had been on once when we were kids in the late 60s. One word of one song was stuck in my head still in 1995. I could even sing it. “Imm-poss-ible.” I was certain it must mean something, if only we could figure out why it was stuck there.
Rick said, “There must be something in your life that doesn’t mean something else.”
“Why?” I asked.
Joseph could see his light come shining. He knew that sooner or later he would be released. Yet, he never was. To the end of his days, he was this Hebrew captive in the house of Pharaoh. He was even given a slave name meaning the “The God Speaks so He Lives.” You can read it to mean that Joseph could hear meanings in things… which Pharaoh understood to mean that some deity was speaking to Joseph… or did it mean that Pharaoh (the God) had decided this slave could live? It seems highly likely it was the latter. Joseph was in prison about orto die… and the god-king spoke and let him live.
If you read the story of Joseph in Genesis close enough, it sounds as if this Hebrew slave is the beginning of the idea that Pharaoh owned the entire land of Egypt. The Egyptians sold their goods and their property to Pharaoh through Joseph in exchange for food during the seven year famine. And thus Pharaoh – not Joseph – became very rich. Joseph was still Pharaoh’s slave. And through Joseph, all of Egypt, too. And Israel.
I see my light come shining
from the west down to the east.
Dylan was on to something: he was a good mystic too. We all journey from the west to the east in search of more light. Jews and Christians face east to pray: that is the proper orientation – get it? – of synagogues and churches. But everything means something else. Who will help the widow’s son?
When Joseph says that God sent him there, is he stating fact, or mystery? Why do they have to be separate? Joseph’s claim on us is that he is so broken. Joseph is a victim trapped in his victimhood. There is literally nothing Joseph does after he is sold into slavery where he is not a Slave. To highlight: Joseph made his brothers promise that even if he died he would they would take his bones with them back to the promised land. Take his bones. He chained them by their promise to his corpse. I am still a slave who can do nothing. You must take me out of here.
Is it not possible in the sacramental world that fact and mystery are the same thing?
Have you ever looked at recursive formulae in mathematics? After the cth failed attempt, resend the frame after k · 51.2 μs, where k is a random integer between 0 and 2c − 1. It’s like a magic box filled with mirrors, an onion in reverse, where each layer in is bigger than the one outside.
You can get lost in there, meditating on it. Why does a fact have to rule out a mystery? Recursion says they are the same thing, more and more as you go deeper and deeper.
Joseph is both slave and Liberator. Joseph is both Egyptian and Hebrew. Joseph is at one time Jacob’s son and Pharaoh’s son. Then, by a chiasmus in the text, Moses is those things as well: slave and Egyptian, Hebrew and Liberator, son of Pharaoh’s daughter and son of Israel’s daughter too.
I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east.
Fact and mystery become the same thing in a sacramental universe; because by a glorious chiasmus in the text Jesus is these things as well: slave and Liberator, human and divine. Then in the Gospel Jesus becomes the chiasmus, and we become those things for those around us.
Any day now. Any day now.
I shall be released.
Doxos 