Homo Erectus

My long-running obsession with justice and judgment (fed by the current dissertation chapter) has made the words pop out everywhere; Scripture, of course, is full of the ideas.  And in mulling over the Hosea reading mentioned in my last post, it occurred to me that the obsession may appear a little grisly to anyone not writing an academic chapter focused on the topic.  “Justice” brings to mind such disturbing phrases as “the justice system” or “Justice Kavanaugh”; our ear catches at a word and surrounds it with the auras of other words with which we are used to hearing it matched.  Nor is it of any help if our mind interposes the more apropos phrase “a just God,” for it is generally uttered these days in doubt or mockery or, at best, when trying to lay doubt and mockery to rest.  Justice sounds like a sham; and if it dares enter our heads to think of real justice, most of us (we tell ourselves rightly) tremble.

I think it need not and ought not to be that way.  The Hosea reading suggests that there is a sort of incipient “justice” we human beings should cultivate in our lives on earth; if we do that, we need not fear when Divine Justice rains down.  But I think one can go farther than the cryptic metaphors of the Old testament prophet.  His image of our justice springing up to meet Another’s coming down, with its insistence on the perpendicularity of the arrangement, calls to mind another common translation of whatever biblical word is being rendered in English as “just”: upright.

Just, upright, erect.  The former two are synonyms, as are the latter two, although the first and the third do not share a common meaning.  But with good reason Hosea calls up the image of grain growing erect towards the sky: there is a coordination between standing erect and being just, an inherent symbolism that is not a merely human invention.  The etymology tells the story: the thing that we call just is also called being upright; to be just is our birthright as human beings, and what distinguishes us from other animals; it is no terrifying external imposition; it is as natural to us (in one sense) spiritually as walking erect is physically.  We stand erect because that is an image of how we ought to stand internally: upright.  To be upright, that is, pointing up at the sun, is natural for flowers that draw from its rays their strength.  In an upright human being who does the same, we say briefly and without comprehension that he is “just.”  What we really mean is that, like the sunflower, he stretches naturally towards the Sun of Justice from which all the rectitude of his nature comes.

Justice Up and Justice Down

I have been thinking a bit about the odd ending to the reading from Hosea earlier this week.

Sow for yourselves justice,

reap the fruit of piety;

break up for yourselves a new field,

for it is time to seek the LORD,

till he come and rain down justice upon you.

The first line, taken by itself, sounds semi-Pelagian: as if we can somehow make justice happen by ourselves.  The last line, taken in similar isolation, sounds quietist, as if God will do all the work making justice take place.  It is also, depending upon one’s spiritual temperament, a trifle terrifying; for the scrupulous, “justice” can be a frightening word.

The point, as with any quasi-paradoxical lines from Scripture, seems to be that there is an essential both-and going on.  We ought to plant justice in the same way that we plant seeds: not as if we can make corn grow, but knowing that (weather providing) corn will come of our planting.  What we do may not be just in any perfect sense—certainly we are not justified by our own efforts—but it is necessary for justice to come about, just as the kernel is not the ear of corn, but is (assuming a natural order of things into which God has not chosen to intervene with a miracle) a prerequisite.

And of course, the fact that justice rains down could be terrifying or splendid, depending upon what is there in the field to meet it.  If our little “justice” is poking its head up, the Justice that comes will be refreshing and life- and abundance-giving.  But if we haven’t planted any seeds at all, then we shall at best be like those ladies who forgot their oil.  In any case, the story told here is, like so many of the ones in Scripture, one of cooperation: justice up and Justice down.  One hopes to be congruent in the end.

The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

Color me still naïve, but when I first saw the headline for this piece (from which I have more or less stolen this post’s title), I assumed it was an entertaining spoof, dealing with the absurdity of the gourmet decorative pumpkin explosion.  Since it was something a tad more serious, I offer here my own assessment of our current state of emergency.  If anyone has further thoughts about how to saw through this gourdian knot, by all means leave them below.

It has come to my attention that in recent years, we have descended as a nation from our previous greatness, the greatness established by our foremothers in the kitchen—and our forefathers in the field—in their ceaseless efforts to perfect the perfect pumpkin for the hallway, the table, and the pie.  Having reached Peak Pumpkin sometime around 1950 or so, we now find ourselves in a strange, psychedelic world in which you have only to imagine any kind of pumpkin you like in order for it to appear.

Pumpkins are no longer orange; they are white; green; brown (brown?! the rainbow’s most boring color); even on occasion a hideous, sickly yellow.  No longer smooth, but bewarted.  No longer round, but distorted, tortured, even squashed—and they were already squash.  Once invariably large, they now come (like heroes) in all shapes and sizes.  The used to be respectable vegetables, and now their attitude can only be described as punkin’.

If you saw a produce product at any other time of the year that looked like this …

… would you ask it out? take it home?  I thought not.  You would shudder, avert your eyes, and wheel the grocery cart on.  If this turned up in the back of your fridge, you would shriek and call for your husband to remove it, stat, even though it was probably your fault that it got that way.  If teenagers left this in your driveway, you would call the police.  If its white cousin …

… apparated anywhere within a block of your house, you would dive for the holy water, in sure and certain fear of having seen a ghost.  Ghosts, respectable ghosts, anyway, used to buddy-buddy with pumpkins; they certainly did not impersonate them.  But to such depths we have fallen.

This, my friends, is what has gone wrong with our democracy.  Not education, not the lack of any virtue in particular, but our inability to distinguish proper vegetables from the escapees or a horror film has brought us to this pass.

It may already be too late to salvage your Halloween, but may I proffer an humble suggestion?  Find the nearest sledgehammer, walk outside to your front porch, and smash those pumpkins now. I promise, the kids on the block will be impressed.  Think of the example you will have set for future generations.

As for Thanksgiving: please keep those winter wonders in the appropriate sizes, shapes, and dimensions.  You don’t want to serendipitously poison the pie.

Don’t even get me started on Indian corn.

Gravidum

Have you ever seen a fruit tree actually full or fruit?  They don’t look like the spheroids we think of as being perfectly pruned (even if, in fact, they have been pruned and otherwise cared for diligently).  Actually, they look droop this:

But they aren’t stuck in this shape: by winter or spring, when the fruit has dropped or (hopefully!) plucked, their appearance is lighter, if still a tad gnarly:

It’s a nice reminder that not just the animals but other parts of nature have a natural cycle of fruitfulness that changes over time—that includes periods of gravidum and less gravidum—and that allows for some bouncing back, even if never a return to “the way things used to be.”

And it helps to explain some seemingly anthropomorphic lines in Ben Jonson’s wonderful praise of Penshurst:

And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish,

Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,

Fat aged carps that run into thy net,

And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,

As loath the second draught or cast to stay,

Officiously at first themselves betray;

Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land

Before the fisher, or into his hand.

Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,

Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.

The early cherry, with the later plum,

Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;

The blushing apricot and woolly peach

Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

The fish description might be strained, but it could be aptly transferred to the fruit.